Since that fateful day in January, 22-year-old Cadet Joel Cabides has been confined at the ICU of Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick, NSW. He is unable to breathe without a respirator and has been declared paralyzed from the neck down. When finally discharged from the hospital, he is doomed to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

He was reportedly bumped during a “supervised” game of basketball inside the Royal Military College in Duntroon, Canberra. The accident caused irreversible damage to his spine.

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by Jaime K. Pimentel

Guess what: I just discovered that I’m a ‘hybrid.’ Australia’s Federal Treasurer Peter Costello said so. No, the Treasurer didn’t mean to call me a ‘mestizo.’ I knew that a long time ago, being reminded all too often by my kababayans (countrymen) when I was still in short pants.

Delivering his second “Intergenerational Report” recently, Mr Costello said his government was looking for what he described as an army of ‘hybrid workers’ to keep the Australian economy going for the next 40 years. He described ‘hybrid workers’ as those elders like me who lived partly on their superannuation and partly on part-time work. The Daily Telegraph newspaper’s headline read: “Work until you drop.”

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Let’s take a second look at what happened during the past Philippine Community Council – NSW AGM and elections. Does everyone concede that the presentation of candidates who aligned themselves to whichever party they organized really enhanced their candidacy? In the Philippines, is it not the common norm that the candidate who spends the most, wins? So the cycle of vote buying, election of officers who really represent themselves, rather than the community whom they are supposed to serve, wins. Hopefully, that situation exists only in our home country and not here in NSW. There were reports, however, that certain personalities offered to pay for the membership dues of some associations. Isn’t that tantamount to vote-buying?

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