‘Shanghaied’ to Sydney

SYDNEY, Down Under – In the old days, they used to speak of rushing around the world in Seven League Boots. They’re even issuing a Hollywood remake of Around the World in 80 Days.

Nowadays, around the world in 80 hours is more like it. Friday night, I was in Manila. Got here to Sydney, Australia, thousands of miles "Down Under", in time for breakfast. Philippine Airlines flies here via Melbourne, ground-stop there one hour. Qantas flies direct. Take your pick.

I took PAL here, then on Monday I’m off to Adelaide on Qantas. I have to meet with an old friend, Professor George Smolicz at the University, where my wife, Precious, did her doctoral dissertation. George used to invite this writer to lecture in his classes at University of Adelaide, and then in his class in Warsaw University, Poland. (He’s a professor in both institutions).

What am I doing in the Land of Oz when so many things are happening back home in Manila? I took off because whatever is happening during the slow canvass in Congress is happening without you or me. By the time I get back to Manila from Melbourne, my last stop in Australia, do you think the presidential and vice presidential "canvass" will be over – at the outrageously turtle-paced nature of the proceedings? We’re already disgraced internationally.

Everybody’s praising India, and, in particular, the selflessness and admirable character of Madam Sonia Gandhi, who spurned "taking over" the Prime Ministership since, she felt, her accepting it, being Italian-born, might provoke controversy and disunity. India has become the flavor-of-the-year. The Philippines, sad to say, has dropped "out of flavor". (If the editors change that term "flavor" to "favor", I’ll kill them!)

The Economist of London, for instance, has Sonia’s nominated Prime Minister, the first Sikh to head the government, Manmohan Singh, on its cover, his cellphone to his ear (very symbolic of our texting times), turban on head, exclaiming, "Who Me?" The subhead said: "India’s Unexpected New Leader."

If you ask me, the same international newsmagazine could put GMA on its next cover, with a less-than-surprised expression on her presidential face, beside the cover title: "Who But Me?"

While other magazine seem to have conceded GMA’s inevitable victory, we’re still running those two conflicting PEOPLE ASIA covers, one of La Emperadora Vincit, and the other of Da King Enthroned. Whatever happens in the end, the other issue will make a great souvenir. (We’ve already received thousands of orders – but don’t think our Stargate editors did it for mercenary purposes. Between being a prophet and making a profit, after all, isn’t too much of a difference, if you consider how certain religious groups behaved in this election.)

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One of the greatest disasters in this flawed election has been the Philippines’ reputation as one of the most trustworthy in the "date-retrieval" business. Never heard of "data-retrieval"? This has been one of our country’s biggest successes, that our over-touted call centers, with worldwide firms participating in the business and finance sectors.

In short, we’ve been one of the centers of data-basing and Information Technology – well, perhaps, until the Commission on Elections was seen to have "lost" their data on perhaps one million previously "registered" voters.

I’ve received phone calls from Paris, Brussels, London and other European capitals inquiring how the country’s election commission could have flunked in "data retrieval". This loss of faith in our data credibility may mean hundreds of millions of dollars lost in the form of cancelled "data" projects now that European businesses and U-based companies have discovered our data fidelity is no longer to be trusted.

I couldn’t even try to explain that, possibly (probably?), the Comelec’s "disenfranchising" of about a million voters might have been deliberate, not a mistake – but then, if I did that, it would have been tantamount to alleging that the Comelec "cheated"? What do you think?

We’d get another yell of protest from Chairman Ben Abalos, not to mention the very famous Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano.

In any event, I guess: Que sera, sera. The GMA Government is already gearing up to go into action for the "second" term – this time, six years. Can FPJ still pull off the old Indian Rope Trick of levitating himself and his KNP partner, Loren Legarda, to victory? That prospect, lately, has been growing dimmer and dimmer. In India, they’ve already done it – without the magic rope.

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When you walk down Castlereagh street, or Market street, or George street, here in Sydney, one might think he is still in Shanghai. There are so many Chinese-Australians, kind of recent immigrants, or Chinese tourists, mixed in with the usual gweilos (white foreign barbarians), that one imagines himself on The Bund in Shanghai, or, across the Huangpo river, in the "New Bund" of Pudong.

Asian (including Filipino) immigrants have so capsized the old "White Australia" policy, which went extinct during the era of Immigration Commissioner Alan Grassby and former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (who ended up a UNESCO executive board member in Paris). In the keep-Australia-white years before that landmark turn-around, it was reputed that the slogan on the masthead of the leading Australian Bulletin declared in print: "Two Wongs Do Not Make a White."

Well, the Wongs have come, and are here to stay.

Just to illustrate the poly-ethnic character of today’s Sydney, the limo driver from our hostelry, "Sheraton on the Park", was Eduardo. It turned out that Eduardo had immigrated from Argentina – not just from that South American country famed for its Tango, Evita, its splendid capital Buenos Aires on the River Plate, and its less admirable notoriety as the synonym for economic collapse, but specifically from Mendoza, up in the mountains, well-known to have been the base of the Revolutionary hero, the Liberator General San Martin, as well as renowned as Gaucho country, for winter sports, and its famous wine, rivalling those of next-door Chile’s.

At the front desk, Davon’s family had immigrated from Vientiane, Laos.

The bellman who brought my bags up to the 19th floor was Justine, whose father came from Germany and whose mother hailed from Myanmar (Burma).

You’ll have to look long and hard these days to find a Pure Merino. Indeed, Australian cuisine has transmogrified from that old reliable, "pie and sauce", meat pies, barbecued lamp chops, burned sausages and potato salad, and, of course, the ubiquitous vegemite, into international-gone-mad – with Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian, Italian, Greek, and Lebanese eateries elbowing each other aside on many streets. The Aussies still love to picture themselves as a sunburnt breed working in vast cattle stations or sheep stations in the Outback, but the truth is 90 percent of Australians live in modern cities, love the luxuries, belly up to the bars in posh taverns (and I mean belly up), and prefer to be couch potatoes, if they’re not off to sun on the beach.

Sure, they put on tattered Akubra hats, affect the typical raincoats herders sport in the "bush", but they’re mostly executives and bureaucrats, pushing pens and punching computers in air-conditioned offices, rather than hard men gun-shearing 150 sheep a day. (I used to attend those good old sheep-shearing competitions in the "bush", and by golly the fleece would fly. But no more: there are only about 147,000 farmers left, though these few earn more than US $10 billion a year – a far cry from McCullough’s Thorn Birds of 1979.

There was a time when this journeyman journalist, flying with Bush pilots, landed in such Outback destinations, where it rains only once every five years, as Tippabarra, Cooper’s Creek, and the Birdsville Track not far from Alice, but no longer. In those days, most of the cafés were named Omonia and run by Greeks who couldn’t cook anything better than burnt steak and overdone potatoes.

True enough, there are only 18 million Australians in that immense continent at the Antipodes, co-habiting with 160 million sheep and 25 million cattle – but what the heck. The Ocker and the Larrikin live on only in romantic legend. They hate to admit it, but those Aussies have grown – almost urbane.

Even David Jones, the department store chain, long the king of the roost, has had to meet fierce small-shop competition with what it calls the "Price Promise". The department chain pledges that if a customer can find an identical item displayed in David Jones selling cheaper in any other store or shop, all one had to do was point out the cheaper price, and once authenticated, David Jones would sell the item at "less" than the competitor.

I come from a land, of course, where promises are not always kept, so pardon this jaundiced hack for being skeptical.

Anyway, it’s great to escape to "Down Under" in the Southern Hemisphere, from our fevered political society.

Of course, here, Prime Minister John Howard is also pushing for his own "re-election" when election day comes – either August, or in September. He’s facing rivals Mark Latham and Peter Costello, and telling them, he’s got a 10-year plan. Susmariosep. Ten more years of Howard may be longer than six more years of La Gloria. But, being an alien here, I won’t comment any further on this 10-year "vision" thing.

Can’t look beyond the next six years when even the next six months already seem daunting.