Icam, You Can, We Can ... Look At Will Good And Bad, Games And Games, Sports Stars And Spuds

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday August 30, 2001

Doug Anderson

ICAM

7.30pm, SBS: Back for its 11th season, the Indigenous Cultural Affairs Magazine has a new host Karla Grant taking over from Frances Rings and a new mini-doc segment to augment the feature stories. Subjects in the conduit include a profile of Pat O'Shane and an examination of the often bitter victories won by Aboriginal boxers in the fight game. The colourful and highly decorated Anthony Mundine will doubtless contribute another optimistic assessment of his capability. There is a lot of money where his mouth is. Tonight's lead story focuses on another fighter Rosemary Wanganeen, a woman who has survived degrading experiences and become a mentor to others laid low by the vicissitudes of life.

The Goodwill Games

7.30pm and 11.30pm, 9: The swimming warrants prime-time screening, with instant jingoism added to chlorinated water as Australian and US ``superfish" vie for something approximating honour. Highlights at 11pm include gymnastics, beach bloody volleyball and trampoline. How will it rate? Woefully, I'd say. It simply doesn't mean anything despite the good intentions of Mr Turner and the cash incentives. Still, you never know. They manage to wring something approaching interest out of the endless and repetitious tennis cavalcade. The US Open continues at 1am for those who enjoy the obscenity of big-money tournaments. Let's face it, it's no longer sport. It's just another vicious industry based on laughably old-fashioned sporting concepts and quaint notions like fair play, national pride ... the personal best. And in place of character, repetitious press conferences, weary cliches, hectoring displays of McEnroe-ism, a burst of the Dokics and shock horror remarks by Pat Rafter that the whole thing has become ordure. ``Is it just another Open to you?" Yep! ... it's a tennis match.

Insight

8.30pm, SBS: We've seen how deregulation has buggered the dairy industry ... sorry, made it super-efficient ... and given the whip hand to supermarkets enabling them to ratchet up prices and squeeze producers. The same situation is in train behind the gorgeous cornucopias of fruit and vegetable in the aisles of mega-markets. Research advanced by Insight suggests retail prices for fresh vegies have risen by 23 per cent since 1995 while the price paid to growers has fallen by 9 per cent. Fruit has risen by 17 per cent but the farmers' take has increased by just 3.6 per cent as retailers and middlemen apply the squirrel grip.

Producers are looking at ways of bypassing the big grocery conglomerates and selling direct. This has happened with startling success in Europe where, by opting to pay a little more for bananas, consumers have scuppered giant cartels. It's big news in America, too. In Tasmania, spud farmers have had a gutful of the rip-off tactics employed by food processing companies. They're jacking up on the bulk buyers, mounting protests, bypassing multinationals and trying to create a more realistic food chain through farmers' markets and old-fashioned co-ops. Economic rationalists and global marketers promote effective arguments on paper but in the soil and on your table is where the reality lies. You are what you eat ... but as the song says, ``It aint what you eat, it's the way that you chew it" ... yes?

Australian Story

8pm, ABC: Gang rape has been a front-page issue lately. A woman who suffered it many times is the subject of tonight's extraordinary story. Dignity, spirit and strength attend Jan Ruff-O'Herne while sinister denial by perpetrators attends euphemisms like ``comfort women". The scarifying indignities of sexual slavery cannot be ameliorated by non-confrontational terms any more than the use of ``collateral damage" can hide the sanitising intent of those tainted by guilt.