By Trevor Haskell PASA Vice President

The wood for the trees

An extended holiday in Tasmania brought me into a reflective mood. The need for the holiday became clear both before and after I took it.

The “before” warning was simple. I went to get in the work car but could not remember where I had parked it. I knew we usually parked close to Flinders Central (not the Melbourne railway station). But I walked the street for five minutes before it struck me: I was looking for our old car rather than the current one, which we had had for some months.

I was further bemused to see that the car – which I had walked past several times – was first on the rank in Gawler Place. I immediately put in a PD45 for extra leave.

My wife and I had purchased a new digital camera for the journey and, once in Tassie, I experimented with all the tricks of which it was capable. It provided a daily overview of what we had done. I deleted the obviously bad photos and the others I kept to edit after the trip.

When I began to edit the 300 photos on the camera, I noticed something. I had worked from the obvious macro vistas that a scenic location such as Tassie offers to more specific single items. The range was from wide panoramas, to a single sculpture or bridge, a tree, or down further to a cluster of leaves and then a single flower and a single piece of fungus or tiny fern.

As I edited the photos, I marked some to be enlarged for placement on my functional office walls and earmarked others for my desk. My final list of potential enlargements came down to some wide vistas, massed autumn leaves with a spray of colour, a single toadstool and a couple of my wife and me as part of it all.

Here I saw balance: the individual leaf as part of a multicoloured tree, and as part of a magnificent whole that became a glorious view. All were part of the magic. The woods and the trees were in focus and existed in and of each other.

We need to be part of it all and keep in touch with the balance. Too much wide-screen and it can be too daunting; too much of the minutiae and we lose the context of the whole. And always the people with whom we find peace or happiness to link us to our purpose.

Alcohol and drugs

When is an alcohol-and-drugs policy not an alcohol-and-drugs policy? When it is a workplace instruction, is one possible answer – apparently. The sad history of the failure to have a consultatively developed alcohol-and-drug policy is about to be revisited. All the literature (including the Australian and New Zealand Guidelines for Police Workplace Substance Use Policy) identifies the need for a shared approach to this issue. The literature recommends joint working parties and such like.

We are, apparently, back to the imposed model via workplace instructions. The model is about discipline and control. It assists neither employees at any level (other than disciplinary investigators) to deal with their own usage, nor others in the workplace (colleagues or supervisors) to minimize the potential harm.

This health issue will likely end up back in the industrial arena, which is not an appropriate place for it to be, but the debate will be on the lack of consultation. The lack of capacity for the SAPOL controllers to work with unions and others in a consultative manner continues. For that, the workplace is a sadder environment.