conference

My colleague Sasha texts me as I sit on Parliament Station’s number 4 platform on my way home from two days at my other colleague Viv’s profession development workshop on students whose mental health is a major concern.

The message enjoins me to be at the Positive Schools Conference at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre at eight the following morning. MM is one of the conference sponsors. I’ve no idea about the conference theme or my part in its proceedings.

I figure I’ll be up before six and on the 6:57 out of Croydon. And I am. From Southern Cross I stride down Spencer Street and over the Yarra. This part of the city is a mystery but I’m pretty sure Jeff’s Shed is down here somewhere. Once inside I have a half kilometre hike to the other end.

So this is what became of South Wharf where I came as a kid to meet my grandparents returning from the Orient. I enter a cavernous glass foyer, the Polly Woodside looking in the window. I front a reception desk, register for the conference, depart with a dinky red carry-bag to fill with conference goodies. A nameplate dangles from a lanyard around my neck.

Our MM and KM banners and stand are down the far end, books and pamphlets and KM’s ‘bling’—wristbands, pens, more lanyards—arrayed on our tables. I sit behind the MM table. About 20 past eight Sasha and KM’s Rob and Paul come out of the theatre where they’ve been setting up the stage since six thirty.

Delegates start milling at coffee dispensers and some make their way to our table. Sasha spontaneously breaks into an MM spiel. I do my utmost to discombobulate her with one-liners, cheap laughs for the ‘customers’. I initiate no conversations but await questions. I have no patter, no sales pitch, but I’m comfortable with stand-up comedy.

We talk with delegates before the show, at intermission and through lunch. Our goodies march off, mostly in the hands of South Australians. After each break a bell summons the delegates who siphon themselves through the theatre doors for the speechifying.

The theme is Eyes wide open; it’s about the pornification of our kids, as Melinda Tankard Reist calls it. Her feisty presentation is 200 slides of young people being exploited by advertisers, clothing labels, anyone with an eye to the youth market. Carr-Gregg exhorts us to engage the media, to hold politicians and self-regulatory bodies to account.

Self-regulation, as always, is a euphemism for open slather. Advertisers have no scruples, capitalism no ethical boundaries. I don’t care too much about the sexualisation, sexification, pornification, raunchifaction, whatever. Lust is the least of the deadly sins: it’s greed I hate.

We talk to the punters, scoff the conference tucker. Praise be that I don’t have to come back tomorrow for Day Two.

Rock on.