Ali Sanaei’s Personal Blog

Today is my last day in Melbourne, Australia. I am in Swinburne uni library right now studying Marketing Planning which I have its exam in three hours. The exam will finish at 4pm and I will rush straight to the airport to fly to Tehran at 7pm. I’m going to be in Tehran for a week and then will go back to London.

While living here, ten months, I got the chance to visit Sydney few times, Perth, Tasmania (Hobart, Bruny Island, Port Arthur, Norfilk, etc), Geelong and Great Ocean Road. I also wanted to go to Queensland and see the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park as it has apparently the largest and best coral reef in the world, but didn’t.

One of the aspects of the image I had before coming to Australia was that I’m going to see kangaroos, wombats, koalas and other local animals in the city roads and every where, which was wrong. If you want to see those animals and you live in Melboure, Sydney, etc, you have to go to the zoo! But when we went to Tasmania few weeks ago, I finally touched the image I had of here over there. Really great nature and outlooks, lots of wild animals in the cities’ surounding roads, beautiful sheeps, kangs, wombats and all I thought of here. I actually ran over a Kangaroo myself while driving in Hobart one night! If someone comes to Australia and doesn’t go to Tassie, they effectively haven’t seen Australia!

Lots of good things happend here for me; baby, new friends and colleagues, different experiences, good job, lots of fun, extremely busy life, etc and etc. I’m taking back mostly good memories of Australia and am hoping to visit her again some time in the near future.

I’ve always been grumbling to myself about the lack of free wireless internet access in Australia.

Thanks to the Company I’m working for; these days I use my 3G network from my laptop to access Internet wherever I am within Australia. Coverage and speeds are sufficient, and my mobile carrier offers 1 GB per month for the price of 10 coffees.

I’m in Sydney right now, I’m not carrying my 3G, and my hotel charges 2 coffees per 30 mins! So I had to do a bit of lookup to see if I can find any free connections around. I’m pleased to see that Unwired are setting up free wireless hotspots in a number of cafes in Sydney and Melbourne. The service is branded as uConnect. Keep an eye out for it. The map on the UnWired website shows a number of locations, but not all. see the map here and enjoy.

Those Australian readers out there will probably be more familiar with this story than the rest of the world, but the election concerning the country’s Prime Minister John Howard has caused quite a frenzy in recent weeks.

The easiest way for me to describe the current political situation in Australia regarding Howard is to liken the current elections to a potential overturning of the (everlasting) Bush Administration that’s hung around the White House since the 80s. The possibility of Prime Minister Howard losing his cushy seat that he’s held for 11.5 years now is a big deal, as the race between him and Kevin Rudd of the Labor Party is a very close one. Sounds a lot like the 2000 elections between George Bush and Al Gore.

But I am quite confident that tomorrow’s election will end to a change of government here. The only question might the magnitude of the victory for the Labor party.

The economy is going well, there have been years of growth, the unemployment is low so why would voters vote against a proven economic manager? Well, it is partly the time factor that Howard has been the PM over a decade here and also the fact that people’s priorities are shifting from the economy. When the economy is running well, people perhaps take less notice of it in political terms, it is assumed to be part of the landscape so they turn their attention to other issues such as the environment, climate change, the war in Iraq, education and so on. These are the exact issues Labor has an advantage on in terms of public opinion.

Iraq is one of the important factors. It was initially a popular move by the government going in to the war in Iraq with the US and the other members of the coalition, but over time that has became a less popular policy and Labor has played that fairly and carefully by saying that they would shift the emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan, in other words they can not be accused of being soft on terrorism and not contributing to eradicate the cause of terrorism. At the same time they have made a clear point of difference between themselves and the government on what is now relatively an unpopular war.

The other important factor is Climate change which is quite important here in the Australian culture. The younger generation asks the government on the issues related to this subject and also the fact that Australia has not signed the Kyoto protocol, even though that it might be just a symbolic protocol.

Besides; Kevin Rudd is good-looking, young and he also knows Chinese!

It’s a funny political game going around the world. UK’s Labour party went to Iraq and now the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats parties will exactly use this against them in the UK general election 2009. I can say from now: the Conservatives will win that election!

However, tomorrow, Saturday 24th November 2007 is the election day and we shall probably know the definite poll outcome by Sunday.

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Update 26 Nov 07: Labor has won the election. See live results.

Bush had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day at the Sydney Opera House!

He’d only reached the third sentence of this Friday’s speech to business leaders, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, when he committed his first gaffe: “Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit,” Bush said to Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Oops… That would be APEC, the annual meeting of leaders from 21 Pacific Rim nations, not OPEC, the cartel of 12 major oil producers.

Bush quickly corrected himself. “APEC summit,” he said forcefully, joking that Howard had invited him to the OPEC summit next year; which is an impossibility, since neither Australia nor the US are OPEC members!!

The president’s next goof went uncorrected (by him anyway). Talking about Howard’s visit to Iraq last year to thank his country’s soldiers serving there, Bush called them “Austrian troops.” That one was fixed for him. Though tapes of the speech clearly show Bush saying “Austrian,” the official text released by the White House switched it to “Australian.”

Then, speech done, Bush confidently headed out — the wrong way. He strode away from the lectern on a path that would have sent him over a steep drop. Howard and others redirected the president to centre stage, where there were steps leading down to the floor of the theatre.

The event had inauspicious beginnings. Bush started 10 minutes late, so that APEC workers could hustle people out of the theatre’s balcony seating to fill the many empty portions of the main orchestra section below — which is most visible on camera.

Here is the news by Times.

A week ago when Bush arrived in Sydney I was watching Australia’s channel ten news. When Bush was getting off the plane the reporter stated: “Here comes the world’s most powerful man”, after hearing this; I just suddenly laughed.

I finally got my Australia visa granted, but with 2 - 3 weeks delay. At least it didn’t take 90 days!
It’s 3:21am and I’m in Imam Khomeini International Airport at the moment using their new free Internet kiosks. The airport has got much better comparing to 2 -3 months ago. The duty free shops are now open, few coffee shops, Boof, an most importantly Free wireless internet and internet kiosks. I tried to use the internet with my laptop, but it seems the WLAN is not compatible with Windows Vista.

Anyways, I’ll first fly to Dubai connecting to a 13:50 hour flight to Melbourne arriving on 12th August 5 in the morning.

The airport is announcing for Emirates EK976 passengers to Dubai …..

Previous related posts (10/07/07): 90 days required by australia embassy to issue a student visa for iranians

It’s a disaster for me to not being able to blog anything in my weblog almost since my return to Tehran. It’s not like me to start something and leave it after a short while.

I’ve been very busy with some personal issues, few classes, my Australia visa request, my ex-business, etc and etc.

The Australia visa story is that I’ve received an offer from “Swinburne University of Technology” in Melbourne to study my course (BSc in “Entrepreneurship in Technology, IT and Business”) for a year as a guest student as part of the “Student Exchange Programme” between them and my current university -University of Surrey in Guildford, UK. The programme’s aim is to give students a chance of challenging themselves and gaining more experience abroad. The interesting point is that this programme is dedicated to British home-students and I’m the first International student of our university who has been accepted for it.

I lodged my visa request application to the Australian embassy at 12th June 07 and my classes starts at 23rd July 07 in Melbourne. The problem is that Iran is a level 3 country in Australia’s visa policy, so it takes 90 days to issue a student visa; while 12 June to 23 July is only 51 days!! I’m trying hard to shorten this period.

In the other hand, if I succeed on going to Melbourne, I’ll receive a 75% discount on my second annual tuition fee which means I shall pay only £2,525 instead of £10,500. And if I don’t go to Australia; there will be no discounts!

The Aussie university has let me to show up in my classes maximum until 10th August which is 17 days more time. I’m very optimistic, let’s see what happens …

It’s interesting to know that this process takes 14 to 21 days for level 1 and 2 countries. More interesting than that is that Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Qatar, Oman and Egypt are in level 2 and UAE and Bahrain are in level 1; I guess it means Iranians are more dangerous than them in Australia’s point of view!

Update 1 (11/08/07): I got the visa!