Just out of curiosity, why are so many questions yet to be asked, let alone answered?
Just because it’s a time for rest and reflection doesn’t stop us being curious over the festive break, writes David Fagan.
Curiosity is an underrated quality, one we should reward for the temperature test it provides when things have the risk of going wrong.
I’m curious, for instance, about how a cricket team can be all out for 15 in a game called the Big Bash. Neither big, nor a bash, this is less than the Warwick East under 10s achieved in 1967. I’m even more curious about how South Africa, the second best Test team in the world can lose a five-day Test in just two days? What does this mean for our summer?
But, like the batters in both aforementioned teams, my curiosity knows no boundaries.
I’m curious about the origins of the Queensland DNA debacle and what possessed the much and justifiably criticised Cathie Allen to devise a system which quickly processed results by determining a high proportion of DNA collections were insufficient to test. Was it a desire to mislead, was it a desire to meet some implied performance target or was it just plain incompetence? Unfortunately, we don’t know because the inquiry commissioner, Walter Sofronoff, KC, didn’t ask: “I don’t know what the motive was. I didn’t ask. I didn’t care.”
Equally I’m curious about why no one in authority noticed and, now, what the projected impact will be on the already stretched police and courts systems of re-evaluating the rejected tests. But no one seems to know that either.
I’m really curious about why the directors of Star Entertainment never seemed to ask about their business’s risk in dealing with the criminal types washing billions of dollars through their casinos. Didn’t they read the media warnings, did they just blindly believe they were above the poor behaviour evident in their industry? And what about the regulators? Why didn’t they ask sooner?
I’m curious about robodebt. How come, I wonder, no one asked why the matching of welfare payments and the tax system had never happened before, given they believed it perfectly legal. Did they think their predecessors were stupid or were deliberately complicit in welfare fraud? And did the robots actually collect any money?
I’m curious about the education system – not just about the refusal of Queensland to provide school-level data on Year 12 outcomes. I’m curious about how we are measuring the benefits of the extra year of schooling that the last three years of high school graduates have enjoyed. Are they academically better or did we just introduce an expensive year of childcare and picture opportunities in 2007 when compulsory prep replaced Year One?
I’m really curious about America. How can the second greatest nation on Earth and the party of Lincoln not have learnt its lesson about what happens when it puts a dishonest narcissist in the White House? Why is Donald Trump even in contention?
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There are so many more things to be curious about:
- Whether we can really install 22,000 solar panels every day and 40 turbines the height of the Sydney Harbour Bridge every month for the next seven years to meet our carbon emissions targets. And where will the welders, fitters and turners and electricians – let alone the materials – to do that come from?
- Why the Queensland Parliament is so exercised over standards that it’s relying on an 80-year-old unused law to prosecute protesters who dared chant and take pictures from its public gallery? Surely, their behaviour is no worse than the average question time or sausage-making legislative process it subjects us to?
- I’m curious about how what should be a unifying referendum to establish a First Nations voice to parliament has so quickly become a point of division. And I’m curious (but hopeful) about how our political leaders will use the summer break to contemplate how they can get their shared aspiration to advance racial reconciliation back on track.
Sure, they say that curiosity killed the cat. Or did the cat die because it didn’t react to what it saw? Let’s stay curious and react to what we see and try to learn from it?
Have a safe, happy (and curious) holiday.
