Exciting announcement

The contemplation of my terrestrial appearance disrupts my internal accordion

You know many clever words and them you frequently use. Those surrounding consider you philosopher and they relate to you with the respect.

Who you in the Mumi- portion?

Easter Recipe

Where's Spiny Norman when you need him?

Brendan, Brendan, Brendan. He's a funny lad, isn't he?

Dr NELSON—So a family in Green Valley writes to the Leader of the Opposition—and has two children. The first wants to do economics at Sydney University and the family is concerned about the possibility that the student might pay back $20,000 through the tax system once they have had their university education and in the first year will earn at least $37,000—and the Leader of the Opposition says, ‘Get the member for Jagajaga out there. We have to campaign against this. There’s no way we want people training to be lawyers and doctors and economists paying any more for their education whilst the taxpayer is paying for three-quarters of it.’ For the brother of the student from Green Valley though who wants to go to the South West Institute of TAFE to do electrical engineering, a 188 per cent increase in fees that have to be paid up-front with a family credit card and an interest rate of 16 per cent—and what does the Leader of the Opposition do? Not a word. He says, ‘Go and see the member for Macarthur if you want something done about that.’ The situation is so desperate for these families— Mr McMullan interjecting— The SPEAKER—I warn the member for McMillan. Dr NELSON—that the president of the TAFE teachers’ federation and the president of the Australian Education Union has come to see me to say, ‘No-one will support us.’ They are getting no support whatsoever from the Labor Party to stand up for poor struggling families who cannot get their kids into TAFE throughout Australia. There is a 300 per cent increase in TAFE fees in New South Wales, 25 per cent in Victoria— and what do I hear from the Labor Party on that? Nothing—50 per cent in the state of South Australia, and the Labor Party has nothing to say. You might think you are driving a social justice truck—

Dr Nelson—Mr Speaker, to make it perfectly clear to the House, and to be fair to the Leader of the Opposition: this is the situation that would currently exist if a family in Green Valley were trying to get assistance from the Leader of the Opposition. (My bold)

...and what does the Leader of the Opposition do? Not a word. He says, ‘Go and see the member for Macarthur if you want something done about that.’

Who’s this leftie?

"..." was the epitome of an era in which politics seemed more enlightened and gentlemanly. His interests were the arts, gardens and fountains rather than the crass art of scoring political points. "..." single-handedly transformed the political landscape in Victoria. He reinvented politics… and shifted the political goalposts into more modern and progressive times. …He once said … "We will be less materialistic and more interested in things of the spirit. All other development and growth is negated if we destroy the surroundings in which we live." Some of his attitudes were shaped by the protests and student uprisings of the unsettled 1960s… He was one of the first politicians to understand and promote feminism and environmentalism. "There was a definite surge and I was able to share that...," he recalled in an interview. "...." is best remembered for founding the Environment Protection Authority and establishing a commission that led to an increase in the number of national parks and forest reserves. …he was also treasurer and minister for the arts, a portfolio he established. He more than once indicated his dislike for the divisive nature of today's politics. …He proved that governments can reform and advance community life without the need for adversarial politics or what he called "personal vilification and guttersniping".

…the community's respect for him grew because of the public stands he took on issues such as support for the ABC against budget cuts, decriminalising marijuana, together with increasing drug and rehabilitation programs, supporting heroin injecting rooms, and campaigning against the dropping of tariff barriers. He was the first …. to speak in favour of republicanism.

He was a classics scholar and read Homer, Virgil and Greek and Roman history, finding them useful later in life.

Former Labor premier Joan Kirner once commented: "He was a “…” with integrity and is a “…” with integrity." Last year he joined Mrs Kirner in calling on the federal and state governments to stop bickering and proclaim Point Nepean a national park. Former federal Labor minister Barry Jones said “…” was compassionate, courageous and deeply intelligent.

He fought as a "Rat of Tobruk", survived the battle for El Alamein, fought in the jungles of New Guinea and took part in the Normandy landings. He accumulated 66 months of wartime service and was mentioned in dispatches from New Guinea.

Politicians from both sides last night paid tribute to one of Victoria's longest serving [Liberal] premiers, Sir Rupert "Dick" Hamer, who died yesterday, aged 87. Sir Rupert, a progressive Liberal credited with modernising his party and Victorian politics during nine years as premier, died in his sleep at his Kew home. A former Rat of Tobruk who fought in some of the great battles of World War II, Sir Rupert entered Parliament in 1958, became a minister in 1962 and succeeded Sir Henry Bolte as premier in 1972. He never lost an election before retiring in 1981.

Stories from the end of the tether

Families "forced to lie" for disabled aid John Elder Services for the disabled are on the point of disintegration, with more than 3000 Victorian families waiting for supported residential accommodation for their children, according to disability advocacy groups. ...The register has become a joke because exhausted families, on the point of breaking down, need to 'sell' their situation as one of crisis - which often means portraying their relationship with their disabled children as abusive or at risk of turning abusive - just to get an "urgent" ranking on the list. "You have to humiliate yourself to get heard," says Jenni Sewell of PINARC, a Ballarat disability service with 500 people on its books. ...We have parents in their 60s and 70s caring for children in their 40s and early 50s. You're talking about grown children who need their nappies changed..."

I feel sick.

Since woodchip export quotas were abolished in November 1997 by the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement, with a resulting huge increase in the volume harvested, employment in forestry has fallen from 6558 to 3440, or 47%, with only about 700 people now reported to be employed in the main activity of native forest logging. Wages and conditions in the industry have also fallen sharply with the concentration of corporate control. A number of economic studies, such as that released recently by economists Marsden Jacobs Associates, and earlier ones by KPMG and the Victorian Auditor-General, have concluded that Australian native forest logging, when properly costed, is economically indefensible from the public perspective. Amazingly, no cost/benefit analysis has ever been conducted on Tasmanian forestry, by orders of magnitude the most intensive and wasteful in the country…” (5/01/2003)

…(L)ogging old-growth brings little wealth and few jobs to struggling, impoverished rural communities. According to Graham Green, of Timber Workers for Forests, in 1980 there were 205 registered sawmills employing 3000 Tasmanians – today there are less than 40 sawmills employing 1350 people. Under Gunns' tendering system, many contractors are squeezed hard, and a large proportion of their income goes on servicing debt for the heavy machinery necessary for their work. While the industry boasts of its wealth creation, such wealth is concentrated in one company, Gunns, and while it makes its profits primarily in Tasmania, the great majority of Gunns' shares are owned by mainland institutions. It has been estimated that less than 15% of Gunns' profits remain in the island, where the largest individual shareholder is John Gay himself. Tasmania itself remains the poorest state, with the highest levels of unemployment, and 36% of its population dependent on government welfare. You're unlikely to see Mercedes in Maydena, or Saabs in Geeveston. Perhaps, predictably, one of the last defences seized on by politicians on six-figure salaries is that they stand solidly with the working class in this battle. Paul Lennon's routine claim that 10,000 jobs are at stake if old-growth logging is ended exaggerates figures by including the great majority of forestry workers employed not in old-growth logging, but in softwood logging and milling, in plantation maintenance and regrowth logging, and in making paper out of imported pulp. Such assertions avoid the truth: jobs are disappearing in old-growth logging not because of conservationists, but because of mechanisation. The Hampshire woodchip mill near Burnie – the biggest in the southern hemisphere – employs just 12 people. A recent report in The Australian Financial Review revealed the Tasmanian industry in its entirety had shed more than 1200 jobs since 1997. Like Lennon's previously expansive claims – of, for example, eco-vandalism in the southern forests in 2002 (no proof ever produced); or that ending old-growth logging in Western Australia had left more than 4000 people unemployed (categorically refuted by the West Australian government) – I have seen no evidence for the figure of 10,000 jobs. It is double the number (5430 people) that even allies such as the head of the National Association of Forest Industries, Kate Carnell, claim for the entire Tasmanian industry, and triple the general industry figure (3200) given in the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics data. Old-growth logging – as separate from the rest of the much larger forestry industry – is estimated by Timber Workers for Forests to employ only 320 people.

The AA Word

"The feminisation of education continues to be a major hindrance to boys' advancement, despite the best intentions of teachers, male and female." "...treating them the same in feminised education systems favours girls and frustrates boys..." "In some places, 20% of all boys are medicated to suppress their maleness with which a feminised education system has little patience." "...feminise education to the point where boys have to choose between succeeding in school or succeeding as a male..." (My bold)

Ah, the Zeitgeist! Everywhere you look the rules change before your eyes as new patterns seem to emerge then mutate. I'm still getting my head around John Howard ditching a long and entrenched Liberal tradition against affirmative action - quotas if you will - to allow discrimination in favour of men to go to teachers college. Opposition to quotas - reverse discrimination - is embedded in the US Republican and Australian Liberal-Conservative core principles. Equal rights, it's called. When I get a chance I'll have a look at the affirmative action debates at the time the Sex Discrimination act was introduced to STOP discrimination in the workplace, in education, and in the provision of services on the basis of gender. Howard's planned overthrow of the Act also flies in the face of the One Nation catchcry so gleefully appropriated by Howard - treat everyone the same, no special benefits. In effect, the government is allowing the Church to pay men more than women for the same job, instead of lifting pay for everyone or improving conditions for all.

Although Mr Eaton believes male teachers offer balance, positive values to younger boys and an important way for them to connect with learning, he considers the quality of the teacher, regardless of gender, and the health of the education system to be more significant issues. And when it comes to the mooted men-only scholarships, Mr Eaton said a passion for children and their education should motivate prospective teachers, not money. "If you're conscripted into teaching because of the money, you'll probably end up baling out in five years rather than being there 20 years down the track," he said. For Josephine Ryan, primary teaching co-ordinator at the university, the debate about a need for more male teachers is part of a wider dialogue about how society values men. "Historically teaching hasn't been seen as a high-prestige job for a man," she said. "It hasn't been seen as a sign of male success and teaching has been seen as a suitable job for a woman because of their perceived nurturing role."

-Low pay and absence of a proper career path unless you leave the classroom for administration -A pathological nationwide obsession with male sport -Near deification of male sportsmen, while our top scientists, artists and writers are virtually unknown -The concept of the "University of Hard Knocks" -The rise and rise of computer games, movies and TV shows pitched at boys, focussing on meaningless violence or X-treme this or that, coupled with an image of reading as Girly -The portrayal of "brainy boys" in kids' cartoons and movies -- the skinny little thing with big, round glasses. -A pervasive sexism left over from the last century which dictates that if something is Girly it's less worthwhile -Our economic rationalist society which pays socially useful jobs at a pittance while over-rewarding corporate CEOs, share traders and property developers. -The pervasive underfunding of public education, creating a situation where Superman would probably have a problem teaching a class.

The Gourds must be Crazy

Axing RN

Plan to axe ABC Radio National Peter Wilmoth, 7 March 20041 The axing of ABC Radio National has been considered by management to save money according to a senior ABC executive. The manager told the Sunday AGE the idea was first floated last year and is "almost certain" to be revisited by management in budget talks in the next two months. The option of axing the network, [Yes, the whole network!] was floated last year by Sue Howard, the director of ABC radio, and was part of a draft options paper which went as far as the ABC's director of business services, David Pendleton. ........The next few monthly meetings of the ABC executive will be dominated by budget discussions. "It will almost certainly be looked at again" said the manager, who declined to be named. "Sue never liked it, she has very little regard for it." Ms Howard is known to hold the view that the service is dull. "If you want boring as bat shit, go listen to Radio National," she is known to have told colleagues in her division.

Webdiary's back and so are the hacks

Pond scum, sorry, Pond Fish

Nelson has been talking lately about the life cycle of the salmon. It is the transcendent moment that interests him - when the fish swims upstream and leaps waterfalls. Some young people, he says, are like salmon. They want to struggle and excel. Others just want to find a quiet pond. He has been using the salmon image to try to quell one of the remaining hot issues in his education portfolio - the fact that demand for university places outstrips supply. People who are pond fish, he says, should not expect or be pressured to go to university. "We shouldn't try to make young people into what they are not." Nelson himself is a salmon.

when he came to public life Nelson was a member of the Labor Party, like his strongly unionist father before him. But according to what he says now, he was voting Liberal at the same time. He says he has voted Liberal in every election since 1987, although he joined the Labor Party in 1988 and did not leave it until early 1992.

Oh goody, the new Tampa

Mr Howard said the riot arose from a combination of factors including a "total breakdown in family authority within Aboriginal communities". "I think they sometimes arise from a policy perhaps of treating different groups in the community differently," he told 3AW. "The solution very much lies in treating everybody equally and as part of the mainstream as far as law enforcement is concerned."

We got special treatment, special treatment We got very special treatment.

The Cook, the Feministe, the Blogger, and her baby

Corn! Our objective is to eat sufficient corn on the cob that we are actually able to contemplate eating it some other way. Later in the season. when we have had this meal enough times, we will have corn pudding and succotash and corn fritters and corn chowder. When I was in Italy, I was given pizza with fresh corn and arugula, and it was shockingly good. But for now, we are happy to eat the same meal over and over again: corn on the cob, tomato salad, bread, and raita. The raita is a component introduced to me by my dear friend A., and now we never go without. Raita is simple to make. Our version goes like this: Get some yogurt (full fat, ideally) and some cucumbers, if you feel like cucumbers would be nice today. Put some yogurt in a bowl, chop up the cucumbers and add them to the yogurt. Pull out a ladle with a metal bowl. Into the bottom of the ladle put a dollop of olive oil or ghee, and a big fat pinch of mustard seeds, coriander seeds, and cumin, plus a smaller pinch of tumeric. Turn on a front burner, and hold the ladle above the burner, swirling the oil around. When the mustard seeds start to pop. pour the oil and spices into your yogurt. Stir it all up and add salt to taste. It is cooling and savory, and best when a little runs into everything else.

Barbeque stopper

Next month my partner returns to full-time paid work after four years looking after our two small boys. ...We certainly weren't trying to be different. My husband is no SNAG. He likes his cricket frequent, his supermodels scantily clad and his meat rare. We just didn't think it mattered which one of us stayed at home. If we were to take present debates about child care personally, though, we'd have to conclude we are freaks of nature. In article after article, experts, politicians and commentators all assume that it's only women who are faced with the Hobson's choice of caring for children or following their career instincts. .....If both men and women saw staying at home with young children as a legitimate part of working life, you can bet your organic cotton socks that corporate culture would change overnight. The stuff women struggle to justify - part-time work, flexible working hours and career gaps - would be seen as mainstream issues.

Sadly, my feelings on Mark Latham are not much more positive. Despite being happy that under his leadership, the Labor Party has a greater chance of winning than under his predecessors, at a personal level I find him cold and similarly blokey--the main difference is, if I bumped into him in the street, he would probably make a convincing show of pretending to listen, consistent with Labor's image as being more 'caring-sharing' than the Liberal party.

"Indeed there exists a hostility to womens' interests in sections of the ALP that is best articulated by the outspoken MHR from New South Wales, Mark Latham. Latham was promoted to shadow Treasurer and leader of opposition business in the House in the July 2003 reshuffle and is now a force to be reckoned with in the parliamentary party. This makes his views even more disturbing. He claims: "Feminists identify primarily with the gender politics of affirmative action, while most people - male and female - want a society based on merit and equal opportunity'. Latham provides no evidence for this claim and it is one that in my view is utterly spurious. Feminism is about equality for women and men. On Latham's argument that should make 'most people' feminists. ....Latham also insists the reason Keating lost the 1996 election was 'a feeling in the electorate that we were addressing social issues more through identity politics than socio-economic need.' By this he means that the so-called feminists who supposedly imposed quotas and lack of diversity onto the Labor party were responsible for the electoral loss. As I argued in chapter 6 precisely the opposite was the case: in 1996 Labor received only 34 per cent of women's votes, not because Labor promised affirmative action - it didn't - but because women were totally and utterly ignored by the party in government. Many Labor women are very distressed by the fact that the party that once championed womens' rights now sees these policies as sectional and unnecessary."

Tough Dove

Whining lefty tree-hugger is going to bring you down once more

What not to wear

Get out the Bullshit detector

(Snip glowing account of Bjorn Lomborg's environmental theories): That this proposition was greeted with hostility and outrage by many high-profile environmentalists is illustrative of the extent to which they - while claiming concern about various problems - are in fact committed to the continued existence of the problems.

Societies that tolerate the unencumbered pursuit of knowledge are rare. Often religion and ideology dictate the cultural and political landscape, thus constraining scientific research and its reporting.

Dr Jennifer Marohasy joined the IPA on 1 July 2003 as Director of the newly formed Environment Unit. The Unit has been established to provide market-based, science-driven solutions to environmental problems.

Gary heads the IPA's Non-Government Organisation Project. This project will focus on the need for greater transparency and accountability of the NGOs sector. The IPA's position is that, like any market, there should be open competition among interest groups, and open discussion about the role of these often private organisations which play a public role, sometimes with public funds, usually with corporate and private donations.

...(W)e ensure that our funding base is wide and diverse. Unlike some other institutions, we do not accept government funding, nor are we beholden to, or the mouthpiece for, any particular section of the community or any particular economic activity or group. Our annual budget---of about $1 million---is obtained from more than 2,000 individuals, corporations and foundations. No single source accounts for more than 7 per cent and no sector accounts for more than 15 per cent of total funds.

FTA again

DFAT website: The Government has protected our right to ensure local content on Australian media, and retains the capacity to regulate new and emerging media, including digital and interactive TV. The agreement ensures that there can be Australian voices and stories on audiovisual and broadcasting services, now and in the future.

Both countries have reaffirmed that decisions on matters affecting quarantine and food safety will be based on science. The agreement preserves the rights of both countries to protect animal, plant and human health and life in their respective territories. Australia's regulatory systems, risk assessment and policy development processes are not affected, and the AUSFTA does not compromise Australia's quarantine regime.

* The Parties have agreed not to fail to enforce their own environmental and labour laws in a manner affecting trade between the Parties. * Both Parties retain the right to establish their own domestic environmental and labour standards, and to adapt or modify their own laws. Under US trade promotion authority, environment and labour are considered non-commercial issues. The obligations of the Parties therefore differ in significant respects to other issues treated in the agreed text of the AUSFTA. The key obligation of each of the Parties is to not fail to enforce effectively its own environmental and labour laws, through a sustained or recurring course of action, in a manner affecting trade between the Parties. These are the only provisions of the environment and labour chapters to which dispute settlement provisions in the FTA will apply. The Parties recognise that each Party retains the right to exercise discretion with respect to investigatory, prosecutorial, regulatory and compliance matters, and to make decisions regarding the allocation of resources to enforcement with respect to other environmental matters determined to have higher priorities. The agreed text recognises the importance and value of cooperation and consultation on environmental and labour issues. No changes to Australian environment or labour laws or regulations will be required.

Read this if you live in Perth

Bloody ferals

November 19, 2003 The million dollar question answered Now, lots of people have been asking the all-important question about how one goes to the toilet 65 metres up a tree. Iím sure everyone can imagine. Let's just say it involves a chest harness, two points of contact, a bucket, and preferably no wind. It isn't as big a deal as everyone seems to make out. - Felicity Posted at 02:45 PM

Logging is presently taking place in five of Melbourne's water catchments, which provide Melbourne with up to 40% of its drinking water. Logging leads to a drastic decline in water yield and it takes 150 years for water yields to reach pre-logged status. Escaped regeneration burns result in further reductions in water yield. Post logging burns are resulting in forests becoming dryer over time. Damp understorey species are being lost and the dry exposed soil is favouring the regeneration of drier species. Logging roads contribute to large sediment loads in Catchment Rivers. For every hectare of roading 90 tonnes of sediment enters Catchment Rivers on an annual basis. (Wilderness Society, 7 October 2003)

Blogroll update

Goodbye, Janet

Memo to Steve Irwin.

More grumbling about education

Personal economic advancement at all costs? The activities of our wealthier class seem to amply demonstrate that the foot on the neck of the competitor is not only perfectly OK but shows you are possessed of the right stuff. The 4WDs at the school gate, while not the sole preserve of private school parents, symbolise the "positional good": In the highway accident that is Federal education policy, our children will be protected, and yours will die. Lurks, perks and rorts? Buggering fellow students with wooden implements (made at school, in woodwork class)? Telling lies really, really well? Avoiding the consequences of your actions? Heroin chic? As a bit player in the wonderful world of Melbourne's 80s music scene, I noticed many of the injecting drug users were from the best schools. Some very well known, others not. (A friend was heard to mention a comment he'd heard from a Malvern matron in a bank queue about some friends of his. "the xxx girls -- hopeless junkies, the lot of them.") These days we have party drugs and Chapel street instead, but I imagine things haven't changed much. Which brings us to Binge drinking and vandalism? Corporal punishment? Spying on your own family?

This is a test

Don't get me started

PETA DONALD: Seventeen-year-old Gabby Czarnuta from Melbourne was offered law at Deakin university and while she's happy, it wasn't her first choice. That was Arts Law at Melbourne University, and she would have qualified for a full-fee paying position. GABBY CZARNUTA: It's just a bit annoying because I know that people that have the money to pay the full fees have gotten a lower enter than me and I've worked every single day of my VC and school life as well, like, so hard.

"People are looking increasingly to send their kids to independent schools for a combination of reasons. For some of them, it's to do with the values-driven thing; they feel that government schools have become too politically correct and too values-neutral."

Phat

Fat people are mainly to blame for their own weight, and to the extent that they are not it is usually their parent's fault. Parents should be criticised for making their kids fat, just as they should be criticised for neglecting their children's health in other ways. Doctors have been the leading figures 'bullying' and 'demonising' over smoking and passive smoking, the latter at least being less risky for kids than obesity. How many parents who think Steve Irwin is a disgrace for taking his kid in with a croc are putting their kids at greater risk than baby Bob by letting them bloat? Social stigma certainly should not be the only strategy for dealing with obesity. But as the smoking example suggests, as part of an overall package it can get results.

Like a huge black windsock, Mr McGuinness turned, mouth open, towards the refreshing winds of the new political conservatism...

Thank you / Comments

How to get the answer you want

the thought of trying to be the perfect mother, while also being the perfect wife, a perfect friend and a perfect professional is too daunting for many women. "In the future, a more realistic view of what having it all really means will emerge – not doing everything 100 per cent, but just aiming for what is achievable." The New York Times recently tagged it the "opt out revolution" citing examples of Ivy League graduates quitting their high-powered jobs in favour of staying home with their new children. "Look at Harvard Business School. A survey of women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 found that only 38 per cent were working full time," the newspaper said. "Look at how all these numbers compare with those of men. "Of white men with MBAs 95 per cent are working full time, but for white women with MBAs that number drops to 67 per cent." There have been several examples of British women high-flyers who have found it difficult to combine full-time careers and a family. British Superwoman "icon" Nicola Horlick, the 42-year-old millionaire investment fund manager and mother of five, stunned the City last year when she quit SG Asset Management, a company she helped to set up....

......The discourse of “choice.” Despite the headlines, what we learn inside the article is that the first two women we meet, one an attorney, the other a television reporter, were confronted with speed-up at work—55- to 75-hour weeks—at the same time they were having children. Both asked for shorter and more flexible hours and were turned down. Their “choice” was to maintain their punishing schedules or to quit. I am sorry, but this is not a choice. As one of these women admits, “I wish it had been possible to be the kind of parent I want to be and continue with my legal career.” The cover headline [Q: Why Don't More Women Get to the Top? A: They Choose Not To," subtitled, "Abandoning the Climb and Heading Home"] totally misrepresents this woman’s dilemma. ...Buried lead. The real story here is not about mothers “choosing” not to work. It’s about the ongoing inhumanity of many workplaces whose workaholic cultures are hostile to men and women. Americans work anywhere from six to nine weeks a year longer than most Europeans. And many “high powered” jobs like corporate attorney are lethally boring and stressful to both genders. But, you know, when the real story is about capitalism run amok, it’s commonplace to turn it into a story about a human failing, in this case the failure of feminists. So let’s be clear about who has really failed mothers, including the privileged ones in this article. First, Congress and successive presidential administrations. For decades, the federal government has refused to provide a quality national daycare system, decent maternity and paternity leaves, or after-school programs. Second, much, though not all, of corporate America and the preposterous workaholic culture it fosters.

Happy new year!

Change of URL

Conan the Librarian

Putting Christ back into Christmas...

Apparently, Gibson is a devout Catholic who thinks the Church took a wrong turn in 1962 when "the Pope issued what is known as Vatican II, a series of proclamations that did away with the notion that Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus."

Of particular note was the bizarre conspiracy-mongering of Hutton Gibson, accompanied by a full dose of Holocaust denial: The actor's father, Hutton Gibson, told The New York Times he flatly rejected that the terrorist group led by Usama bin Laden had any role in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon Sept. 11. "Anybody can put out a passenger list," the elder Gibson told The Times. "So what happened? They were crashed by remote control." He and the actor's mother, Joye Gibson, also told The Times that the Holocaust was a fabrication manufactured to hide an arrangement between Adolf Hitler and "financiers" to move Jews out of Germany to the Middle East to fight Arabs. "Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body," Hutton Gibson told The Times. "It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now six million?" Said Joye Gibson: "That weren't even that many Jews in all of Europe."

PLAYBOY: We take it that you're not particularly broad-minded when it comes to issues such as celibacy, abortion, birth control -- GIBSON: People always focus on stuff like that. Those aren't issues. Those are unquestionable. You don't even argue those points. PLAYBOY: You don't? GIBSON: No. PLAYBOY: What about allowing women to be priests? GIBSON: No. PLAYBOY: Why not? GIBSON: I'll get kicked around for saying it, but men and women are just different. They're not equal. The same way that you and I are not equal. PLAYBOY: That's true. You have more money. GIBSON: You might be more intelligent, or you might have a bigger dick. Whatever it is, nobody's equal. And men and women are not equal. I have tremendous respect for women. I love them. I don't know why they want to step down. Women in my family are the center of things. An good things emanate from them. The guys usually mess up. PLAYBOY: That's quite a generalization. GIBSON: Women are just different. Their sensibilities are different. PLAYBOY: Any examples? GIBSON: I had a female business partner once. Didn't work. PLAYBOY: Why not? GIBSON: She was a cunt. PLAYBOY: And the feminists dare to put you down! GIBSON: Feminists don't like me, and I don't like them. I don't get their point. I don't know why feminists have it out for me, but that's their problem, not mine.

(Sheehan): "Gibson returned to his faith with the zeal of a reformed backslider, and the faith he returned to was the faith he had known as a boy, the faith of his father. 'Believe me,' he says of the rigours of traditionalist worship, 'every other brand of everything is easier than what I do.'

Gibson, of course, is entitled to his beliefs, as is any extremist. But it is troubling when they are given such a powerful forum as the national distribution the film no doubt will receive. And it is even more troubling when they are given the imprimatur of high-profile mainstream conservatives. It is another clear sign of the increasing tolerance for radicalism among the ranks of conservatives. I'd take the kiddies to Peter Pan.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 7:50 PM ----- BODY:

I scream, You scream

Welllll.....My jaw's been on the floor three times in almost as many days. I'd really like to blog about the first two, but it would probably be a sackable one. So let me share the third with you... I was following a link from Crooked Timber, which, for my sins, took me here. While trying to follow J R Morse's turgid prose, I couldn't help but be attracted by the hilarious ads down the right hand side. "Give the gift of conservative Ice Cream"!? Oh, come on! Well, it appears to be real... Thanks, but I think I'll stick to my liberal-lefty Paddle Pops.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 7:39 PM ----- BODY:

Post feminist swill

It's like a cheap horror movie... I'm tiptoeing through the misty moonlit landscape of the AGE opinion page, when, from the dank and foetid grave, up she sits...BOING!! BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH! It's Babette Francis of the Endeavour Forum! I hadn't seen Babette in the Opinion page for quite a while and my mind had consigned her to the obscurity to which she rightfully belongs. She used to be a think-piece regular in the 80s; Now she's back, the Undead, dedicated to rolling back the gains of feminism while proclaiming that it's "failed". Whatever Babette's being doing all these years, besides not learning any new tunes, she certainly hasn't been spending much time on research or even getting out much. As always, her thinkpiece is a farrago of inaccuracies, so let me just pick on two of her "points" , because they are cliches that get repeated ad nauseum until they are becoming embedded in the collective consciousness-- and they're completely dishonest.

Why aren't feminists negotiating with the fathers of their children (dare I say "husbands"?) about caring for these children instead of dumping them in creches where they will be cared for by strangers with all the associated problems?

First point - "Feminists"(who, of course, are a homogenous and undifferentiated mass) don't take any notice of the issue at hand, ie. fathers caring for children. This is similar to Nicholas Kristof's claim that "feminists" don't care about women with obstetric fistula in Africa. Bloggers such as Jeanne D'arc, Ampersand and Trish Wilson pointed out in Kristof's case that this was a simple untruth. However, people like Francis and Kristof can just drop such clangers in these articles and most people don't have the time and inclination to fact-check. If Babette had been awake lately, instead of lying in her coffin in the Undead state, she would have seen the fathers and childcare issued covered extensively lately, notably by the Equal Opportunity commissioner Pru Goward, but also by numerous people on both sides of the feminist fence. (See this article by Polly Bush for a rundown of some recent discussions.) Similarly maddening and dishonest is the throwaway line "dumping (children) in creches where they will be cared for by strangers". You get this "strangers" line from all anti-childcare polemicists. Why? "Strangers" is a powerful word, it conjures up all kinds of misery, desolation and neglect in two simple syllables. Drop it into the debate and you can make us working mums look bad. My daughter will end up a useless old lush, slobbing about in a G-string and negligee, slurring "Ah have always depended on the kahndness of strangers." But you know what? It's just that - a magic word, a mantra. If you just think about it for a single minute, it vanishes in a puff of rather stinky smoke. My son and daughter both attended a community run childcare centre. When they met the carers there for the first time, yes, they were strangers. Same as meeting an aunt or cousin for the first time. However, as days and weeks turned into months and years, Babette, what do you think happened? Do you think my children still thought of them as strangers? Of course not. They formed affectionate and quite close relationships with these women. Not as close as with their mum and dad, but in a society where extended families are scattered all over the world, my children were given what children have in "traditional" village societies that Babette dreams about-- a network of "Aunty" figures, trusted adults who figure along with parents in their lives. They also had what "traditional" children have-- daily play with a large number of other children, and the opportunity to form friendships themselves. Their friends are their own, not chosen by Mum or Dad. As for "associated problems" - Well, that's another easy, cheap slur to drop in without any evidence. Babette should visit our former child care centre and apologise to Thalia, Julie, Tam, Nancy and Deborah for insulting them. Some recommended reading on this subject (Babs, please take note): Post-feminist swill redux, by Susan J. Douglas (Via Ampersand) and In the Family's Way by Katha Pollit.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 6:50 PM ----- BODY:

I say,

There's a jolly beano going on over in the dorm at St Huey's. Save me a buttered muffin, there's good chaps! -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 7:11 PM ----- BODY:

Why I talk to myself

I want to include a Comments facility. I really, really do! I know it's not blogiquette to carry on as if you're talking to yourself in a crowded room. It's just that last time I tried one of the freebie comments things it did something to my template... and deleted all my archives! (Unearthly howl) All, all my pretties, All..... I'll do it eventually. Until then, thanks to Barista and Bush Carpenter for their comments. Meanwhile, over at Werrong Lane, Nick Possum has a different take on the Willie Brigitte affair. It's totally unproven, but heaps more fun than the usual media reports.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 4:23 PM ----- BODY:

Oh, god, no. It’s Latham

Who could vote for this guy as a Labor opposition candidate? He would make a great Liberal. The fact that he used to speak and write for that right-wing think tank, the Centre for Independent Studies, should ring major alarm bells for anyone who still thinks Labor should be the party for social justice and against neoliberalism-if indeed anyone still does think that. Centre for Independent Studies is a misnomer, as they are funded by corporations including tobacco and fast food companies (not influenced by them, of course, they reckon). The Centre has published articles in the press with monotonous regularity in the last couple of years with studies "proving" the rightness of market capitalism and social conservatism. Well, you might say, Latham is no longer associated with the CIS. True. But it appears he didn’t leave them because he realised they were way too far to the right. It appears he left them because of personal clashes – which brings me to the second reason I don’t want this guy in government. I’m so, so sick of this macho boy style of governance, of people still trying to make out that what we need is a bovver boy type of person. I’m sick of "head kicker" being used as a compliment. What kind of society are we? When the wonderful Bruce Petty did his cartoon on the paucity of talent in the labor candidacy yesterday, why was there not one woman in the picture? Government is not a boxing ring. It is not a fist fight. For god’s sake, we need someone able to tap our human intelligence so that we can overcome problems like salinity, water, housing and a humane response to asylum seekers. We don’t need more of the same moose-roaring, testicle-swinging, taxi driver-attacking, musclebound politics. And we don’t need any more of these Liberals in Labor clothing with half-baked Thatcherite ideas like giving shares to the poor instead of welfare. I'm an ex-labor-voting Greens voter, and likely to stay that way while this Sydney - Right-wing-bloke-fest continues.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 6:54 AM ----- BODY:

Why I am a traitor to my country

Yes, you read correctly, I am a traitor to my country. I am here to tell you why I was barracking for the Poms to win the Rugby last Saturday night. (Note to readers from the US: Here in Austraya, we barrack, we do not root. Rooting has a completely different meaning altogether here, and it would be completely out of the question during such a crucial sporting contest where all male eyes will be firmly directed towards the oblong men on the telly.) I had just had a gutful of our PM and his bloody Vodafone tracksuit. I have had it up to here with the way he sucks up to sporting "heroes" (just a close second to the heads of more powerful nations) at every possible photo opportunity, and follows them around absorbing their reflected mana. I have had it with the Liberals trying to introduce legislation to make young people pay more for a University education, while the golden boys and girls at the Australian Institute of Sport get millions in Government funding (97 million in 2001-02). I was also convinced, at a gut level, an Australian win would only have bolstered Howard's popularity as we head towards the next election. I know that no-one would consciously believe that winning the Rugby or the Tennis would have anything to do with the Howard government. But I felt some subliminal connection (All's well with the world, steady as she goes) would be made at some deep level. So I've been spared the sight of his oleaginous grin and lairish trackie on the pages of the paper for the last week, and the country is spared the subtle spin of the PM associating with "winners". In fact, he behaved like a sore loser and, I hope, did more damage to his carefully crafted image among people who aren't that interested in, or informed on, his political agenda. Mind you, my support or lack of it for any rugby contest is not going to affect the outcome. As for any major sporting contest, I left the remote control to the significant Other and happily took to bed with a trashy novel. But I was in bed with a trashy novel for England.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 8:53 PM ----- BODY:

What is a Blogger (again)

I was reading Salam Pax's article in the Guardian about his debut as a video journalist (funny, as always), and came across a lovely quotation which I think sums up how I feel about blogging. Salam says,

I think I can tell after this experience what, for me, the difference between a journalist and a blogger is. A journalist has to actively run after things, a blogger just watches and takes things as they come.

Yes. That's what it's like.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 8:25 PM ----- BODY:

They're as mad as hell and they're not going to take it any more

She rang last Saturday evening. "I'm ringing you because I'm worried - really worried." She is an Older Person and a grandmother- not my mother's generation, but just pre-Baby boomer. She was already married with children in the Summer of Love, and living in married quarters. Her husband was in the military. Now she's a widow of more than twenty years, living in genteel seclusion in the eastern subs, enjoying her life with family and grandchildren and few old Army mates. The mother of my Liberal voting, conservative brother in law, and a conservative too, I assumed. Christmas plans? Brother-in-law's health? Grandchild problem? I wasn't prepared for what she said next. "I'm just getting more and more upset about John Howard (Huh?!??) ....and what this government is doing to this country...." Pause while I do a bit of a paradigm shift and Q. gets her breath to deliver a fresh serve about the Government and Howard in particular, and what a serve it is. "...And I'm just getting more and more frustrated, and angry, and wondering, you know, what I can do..." Q. isn't on the net, so no bloggers and no Webdiary to point her to a community where people are asking the same questions from many different standpoints. My mum, who is eighty-two, has recently joined both the Quakers and the Labor party. She's another one who is as mad as hell and doesn't want to take it any more. She has even done workshops in civil disobedience. I told her the Labor party were still pretty much as bad as the other lot, but she said her intention was to fight for change from within. I asked Q. if she would like to speak to her. No, that's not what she wanted. She wanted to speak to people who could write letters. She wanted people to write letters to the papers on her behalf, without using her name, because she's afraid to speak out. Now that she's getting older she doesn't want to lose the Army friends who supported her when her husband died. She is positive that those friends will shun her if she's seen to be coming out against Howard, his blank-cheque support of the United States and the remaking of Australia in a new and less human image. So she wrote to me. Here is what she said.

I would like to make an address to the PM. Would this be permissible? Oh Great one, Prime Minister and Lord of All, With trembling hand we dare to petition you upon your return, you who have sojourned with the great and noble of the world. Please forgive our temerity, please pause briefly, slow your flying footsteps, to listen to our prayers. In all humility we abase ourselves and beg that you extend to us some small portion of that talent and goodness which other, powerful communities demand and receive from you. Supremo, we crave that, as the sun shines briefly through the clouds, you extend to us, the lowly and undeserving Australians, your compassion and understanding. Let the light of your visage shine upon us, your meek and lowly taxpayers. Oh your High and Mightiness, we view with dazzled eyes the demands being made upon you by Presidents and Prime Ministers, your stern and timely reproofs to the European Union, we are secretly proud, oh honourable one, of the constant cry for your counsel, the demands for your advice and support from the powerful leader of the United States of America, but Master, the hills are blue around us! A great plague of weed has descended on your people. The drought has weakened us, our feet tread upon salt! Our rivers and streams dry up. The prophets warn of seven years of heat and drought and pestilence to come. Our mountains shimmer in the heat. Toads poison the Northern forests ... We fear the destruction of our land. Our young people struggle to build the great houses you have commanded of them, but great one, there are no children to gladden our hearts...We the unworthy make obeisance. We fear lest you are roused to terrible anger by these words, but Oh great one,we beg of you to consider. Who will serve your childrens' children in the years to come? Name and address withheld (for fear of retaliation).

Yes, it's a grab bag, but it comes through loud and clear: This sweet little old lady is fightin' mad. It's really John Howard who should be frightened, because she is his heartland. An elderly, respectable war widow who has recently retired from farming the western district, and lives a quiet life in a leafy suburb. The Liberals are losing their old heartland.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 9:03 PM ----- BODY:

Random readings

Crrrrrikey! I seem to have left John Quiggin off the blogroll. This dreadful mistake has just been rectified. Jeanne D’Arc of Body and Soul has an interesting post mentioning the Wackenhut corporation, via this Observer article about Wackenhut-run prisons in New Mexico. Now that’d be the Wackenhut corporation that runs our concentration camps, sorry, Asylum seeker detention centres. After a rundown of the breathtakingly cruel, incompetent and dehumanising practices in place in Wackenhut run prisons, the article says:

Did the Prison Service contact US authorities? No. Did they even inquire of Wackenhut an explanation of the deaths, riots, criminal indictments and contract terminations in the States? "Uh, we have no reason to contact Wackenhut." This eyes-wide-shut indifference supports the Home Secretary's born-again faith in prison privatization.

This article was written in 1999. Since they came to Australia, it seems, Wackenhut haven’t changed. This ABC radio doco describes the relationship between ACM (Wackenhut subsidiary) management and DIMIA (Government authority) as a Danse Macabre, where DIMIA don’t ask too many hard questions about how ACM run their prisons. Sorry, there I go again, detention centres. To be fair, the ABC program was in 2002, so it is possible that Wackenhut management practices have undergone a complete turnaround. Well, it's possible, in the sense that Bronwyn Bishop getting a Mohawk hairdo is possible. A new posting from Nick Possum is always a treat (Whispers from the Mean Streets is updated on the first of every month). In November 1 2003 edition, Nick and Joadja go for a walk with Old Possum in the National Park, and together, come up with a solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict. Ah, if possums ruled the world…
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 11:07 AM ----- BODY:

Free Trade Agreement with the US

I was such a hypochondriac as a child. I took after my Dad, who would gleefully entertain me with horrible stories of disease and death. I’m not ungrateful, really; as a serial pet owner I’ve been aware of the life cycle of the Hydatid tapeworm long before my peers were. According to Dad, they would plant their nasty cysts absolutely anywhere in the body, where it would grow like a cancer – too bad if it happened to lodge in your (dramatic pause) BRAIN. Dad’s other fave disease was Rabies, which is very, very scary. Even reading about it, for instance, the rabid dog scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, elevated my pulse and temperature. For a minute there I’d be checking myself for excessive salivation and nervous tremors, which of course I had in abundance. Being a hypochondriac. One great happiness as a child was being told that, living in Australia, we didn’t have to worry about pets and wild animals because there was no rabies. (We travelled overseas quite a bit, but I didn’t pat very many dogs. If I did so, it was a cue for a good Rabies story from my Dad, and a sleepless night for me.) As I grew older, I learned that there were many other diseases – like TB and smallpox- which were still raging in the third world but which were treated like a quaint Victorian parlour story here. The main reason for this, we were taught, was our high standard of quarantine (helped by the fact that we were, of course, an island). People of my generation all remember the daggy Customs men in their knee length socks and shorts, wielding two cans of horribly poisonous insect spray, walking up and down the aisles of incoming planes before you were allowed to step off. So, Australia’s system of quarantine – which of course is mainly there to keep out nasty Agpests like Foot and Mouth and fire blight, as well as human bugs – is very dear to me. In those days, we would never have dreamed of using the Free Market as a mechanism for keeping bugs out and regulation wasn’t a dirty word. Sometimes, introduced species have got in under the radar or have been deliberately introduced by foolish people. Every schoolchild in Australia knows the damage inflicted by introduced pests like lantana, willows, exotic grasses, blackberries, feral cats, rabbits, European Carp and so on. But the system is still hanging in there. We still don’t have any rabies. We don’t have any BSE… yet. Another thing my Dad is responsible for is taking me bushwalking, and turning me into the pinko leftie tree hugger I am today. Our native forests, and particularly the tall, wet, cool temperate rain forests of my South Eastern Australia, are very dear to me. So too is the remnants of the society I grew up in – the fact that telephone and post corporations cross subsidise the bush, where people depend on communications for their very lives, but could never pay a "market" rate, Medicare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits scheme, and publicly subsidised tertiary education. What remains of them since the Howard government started chipping away. (Goodness me, I seem to be pining for lost Decades, just as Howard does himself. It just seems we remember different bits of that society.) So what, you despairingly cry, has this got to bloody well do with the free trade agreement now under negotiation? It’s like this. Take the giant Mountain ash of the cool temperate rainforest I’ve been talking about, Eucalyptus Regnans. If you’re in the US you’ll know about the Giant Sequoia. That’s the kind of tree I’m talking about. Suppose an American version of Harris Daishowa wants to clearfell and woodchip some of the bits they haven’t got to already, and the Australian government tells them to get stuffed because it’s been decided to keep it as a national park. Under the legislation being discussed, which has been described as similar to "the infamous chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)".

An Australian-US FTA incorporating a NAFTA-style investment chapter will provide US corporations with unprecedented rights to seek millions, or possibly billions, of dollars in compensation should Australian laws breach FTA rules protecting their investments. Ordinarily, only government parties to an international agreement have the right to enforce the agreement, but US corporations may soon have the right to sue Australian governments directly. US corporations are not afraid of using these new rights to protect their investments, particularly from laws designed to protect the environment and public health.

As well as affecting our right to control what happens here – and it extends to every aspect of our lives, including the cost of prescription drugs and the viability of locally made drama on our cinema and TV screens – the new agreement can affect our right to control what bugs and nasties come in by way of animals, plants and foodstuffs. We have already had this fight with New Zealand and Canada about Tasmanian salmon and apples and pears. Up against the US, with a FTA signed, we would lose every time. It’s scary that the Federal government is not consulting with anyone but Big Business and politicians in this matter that affects us all so deeply and gives US corporations so much control over our lives. It’s also scary that with all the hooha John Howard creates about terrorist invasion – to the point of locking little children up in detention centres for the full term of their formative years – he seems blissfully relaxed about the potential for invasion by tiny terrorists – microbes and fungi which will affect our entire food chain, and ourselves. And he seems quite happy for us to be invaded and held to ransom by that other pest, the American lawyer. Now I have a better reason to lie awake at nights.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 2:26 PM ----- BODY:

Messing with our minds

I’m confused. Pissed off, yes, but mostly confused. Let me get this straight. Have I missed some important meeting? The leader of the Free World comes to address Parliament, and John Howard bans the Australian press from the press gallery. They ban invited guests from the Press gallery when Hu Jintao addressed parliament. They ban Australians from the vicinity of Parliament house and reduce both visits to a minutely choreographed, scripted government PR event. In the middle of all this, during Bush’s visit to Parliament, Bob Brown gets up and attempts to protest by asking POTUS for the release of the two Australians held in Guantanamo Bay. As fellow Greens party senator Kerry Nettle He and Nettle are jostled roughly by Liberal politicians as they are ejected from the house, and one Liberal senator is heard to say Kerry Nettle should "die". Australian cameras are forbidden, but CNN film the incident. As Bush is witnessing the mayhem around Brown and Nettles' parliamentary interjections, he leans back with a certain oleaginous leer, as if he's really getting off on this putting down of the common heckler, and drawls "I love free speech". Is he being sarcastic? And then a few days later, another Liberal senator gets up and claims that Bob Brown and the rest of the Greens Party are Nazis. Bob Brown, who wants children let out of detention centres and campaigns to save wild rivers, is "using "parliamentary institutions to achieve anti-democratic ends". Actually, it's funny Senator Brandis should say that, considering some of Bush's connections. (If that link doesn't work, click on Orcinus's blog and it's the post dated October 23.2003). OK, now I have really lost the plot. I no longer understand the Australian language. War is peace, freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength. I love Big Brother. I love Big Brother...
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 11:49 AM ----- BODY:

We need childcare.

If Australian workers become more and more "competitive" (lower paid, that is), and a Federal government "free market" policies continue to reduce the availability of quality, reasonably priced child care, what will we end up with? This is what we might end up with. (Via Ampersand) Or this. Because - as at any other time in human history - many people just don't have the "choice" whether or not to work outside the home.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 11:02 AM ----- BODY:

Anniversary of SIEV-X

Yesterday was the anniversary of the sinking of the SIEV-X - the 18th of October. After the mawkish treatment of the Bali anniversary by the commercial media, at least the few survivors and their Australian families didn't have John Williamson inflicted on them. Sweet nothing is what they actually got, except for the few media outlets like Margo Kingston's Webdiary. The acronyms that our Defence department bother me. At the time of the SIEV-X sinking in 2001, I couldn't help but feel they were designed deliberately to belittle and mock. I had visions of Administrative types in the higher echelons sitting around in some public service office somewhere, slapping their suited thighs and guffawing as they came up with..

Hey, Guys, if you make these boats Suspected Illegal Entry Boats...No wait! Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels! That gives ya SIEV.... Geddit? Leaky and full of holes! Hahahahahah.... Wait, I've got another one! Suspected unauthorised.... Non citizen.... SUNCs! How good is that? Makes 'em sound really evil and worthless, but at the same time, SUNK... Geddit? Hahahahahahahaha...... (Clink of Friday arvo Boutique Beer bottles)

SIEV-X is a shameful episode in our history and if we must compare tragedies, at least on a par with Bali. We mustn't forget it. The history books won't. Here is a poem I wrote for Margo Kingston's Webdiary, published back in 2002... now in the archives. I'll dust it off and republish it here. The Jumblies (from Edward Lear, 1812 - 1888) They went to sea in a SIEV, they did, In a SIEV they went to sea: In spite of all their friends could say, On a winter's morn, on a stormy day, In a SIEV they went to sea! And when the SIEV turned round and round, And every one cried, 'You'll all be drowned!' They called aloud, 'Our SIEV ain't great, But back where we came from we'd meet a worse fate! In a SIEV we'll go to sea!' Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a SIEV. The water it soon came in, it did, The water it soon came in; And each of them said, "We're going to die! (What's that mystery boat that just passed by?)" And Ruddock and Howard in Question Time Said "Stay in that non existent line! For your heads are green, and your hands are blue, So we really don't want to have people like you, We're rich but we've nothing to give!" Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a SIEV.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 10:52 AM ----- BODY:

Gove(r)nator

Ah, the illiterate young Aspirational right. How I love them. You know, the kind of people who call other people "loosers" on internet discussion boards. I got a piece of spam in my inbox today: Heading: Governor Schwarzenegger: show your support! Well, I knew I would just LOVE that, so I had a look at it. It's a promo for a T shirt with a pic of Arnold, of course, with the logo: ARNOLD's Total Recall 2003. The Govenator! Production values, as usual, very high. They've paid much attention to graphic design, layout and yoof appeal. What they have failed to do, as you can see, is to spell Governator. Now it is true that it might be the essence of nitpicking to criticise the spelling of a word which is really two words mashed together, but it does look silly. I suppose you have to be a reader, though (huh!)
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 9:14 PM ----- BODY:

Bulletin from an Enemy of the State

Spring is here, so it must be workplace bargaining time again. A week ago, we took industrial action. We work on the periphery of an industry dominated by some of Australia's most powerful unions, but for most of us it was the first time in our lives we had downed tools. From management's reaction, you would think we had set up a barricade of burning 44 gallon drums and hurled Molotov cocktails. Well, we did have a red flag. The CPSU. You know - teachers, office workers, radicals like that. In fact, all we did was walk off for one hour. We all signed off the office attendance books and signed back on again when we came back, as management hinted darkly that the action would be legally Unprotected and therefore Consequences would follow if we were absent for five minutes longer. (Non-union staff smoking in the carpark routinely rack up considerable absences, but hey, we're overthrowing Capitalism here.) We went to the local park with the birds, sun and flowers, where the Union Rep and Karen Batt were waiting for us. Karen supplied OJ, cake and moral support. We could see our office from the park, with some people dourly watching from the balcony. We waved. Some waved back. I can't praise some of the strikers too much, partly because they're very much not the people you would expect. There are people from middle management. There are conservative, middle aged men and women who are unfailingly courteous and helpful in their daily lives. There is a 30something person with a family who has only just started work with the company, and could quite understandably have decided to keep a low profile until the next round. I'm not sure how long this will last and what will happen. A minor escalation (out for two hours - wow!) is scheduled for next week. Besides stonewalling (the reason for the stoppage) Management's reaction has been typical: A staff meeting is called, and who is at the meeting? Why, a (nother) expensive HR consultant, who steps up to the plate and starts talking buzzwords! ("What are the Hot Button issues here, guys?") He seems to be primarily here to reassure us all that we don't need the nasty union. !!@#$%! The dynamics between Management, Union and non union staff bother me at these times. Management would like to keep things paternalistic. The behaviour of the non-union women is pretty sick-making. There’s a lot of glaring, whispering and flouncing going on - and, I'm sad to say, this includes the HR manager, a late-20something aspirational girl. It would be more in keeping with the playground at the local school. But there is submissive, giggly behaviour of the "I'm one of the good kids, Daddy" kind, too. It’s annoying to see in adult people. It's clear Management's best card is Divide and Rule, and they're quite good at it; the idea is, the Union members get the blame. However, I haven't seen the playground behaviour from Union members, only a quiet refusal to take a miniscule 3-year percentage increase that will turn into a wage decrease in real terms. Will report back from the barricades next time there is a development, comrades. From the Enemy of the State who sorts the washing before she starts typing.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 9:13 PM ----- BODY:

Can't think of a snappy title for this

Oh, the irony!

Canberra Times public service specialist Verona Burgess reported yesterday that Ms [Jane] Halton [Secretary, Department of Health and Ageing] recently appeared at an institute of Public Administration debate on the topic "that public service is an outmoded concept" equipped with a pair of platform shoes. During her speech, and it is hard to picture how this might have been achieved, Ms Halton is reported to have whipped off her pin-striped business suit to reveal a red vinyl snakeskin pants suit. (Annabel Crabb, House on the Hill column, The Age 8/10/2003. Sorry, no web version that I can locate.)

Crabb's short piece doesn't say whether Halton was for the affirmative or not. That would be my guess, since Jane Halton's name - along with Max "the Axe" Moore-Wilton and Miles Jordana - crops up as one of the major players behind both the Tampa, Children Overboard and SIEV-X scandals. She was the public servant who fudged or withheld information on the Unthrown Children and the location of the sinking of SIEV-X to save her employers' political skin. Gerard Henderson, hardly a leftwing loony, cites her as an example of the politicisation of Australia's public service - People who once had a brief to provide "frank and fearless" advice to the politicians they serve. You wouldn't get away being "frank and fearless" today. No, the role of today's politicised PS is to maintain the firewall between your employer and any uncomfortable facts which they would like to keep plausibly deniable. Oh, you don't have to lie exactly. Just hang onto any documents you might have which might prove embarassing in the public domain. The whole performance would have been a mishmash of metaphor. The platform shoes - well, "Party Political" platforms, geddit?... And removing her clothes to reveal a snakeskin pants suit; Take your pick, but the image of the snake shedding its skin - as today's bureaucrats have to shed theirs and take on new, protective colouring-is pretty compelling. And snakes themselves of course have a long career as metaphors. Was this a political Coming Out for Halton, or a sartorial cry for help? Public service an outmoded concept? Unfortunately, yes, it does seem to be at the moment.

Women’s incomes

Ampersand of Alas, a Blog has been busy publishing his analyses of wage and gender. It’s a good read – I have come across many antifeminists on the internet and I do wonder where they get their strange figures and stranger conclusions from. Ampersand has studied this stuff and reminds us, in case anyone has forgotten, how to lie with statistics. (has anyone read the book of that title?) Recommended reading – Here’s a link to parts 1-7. Amp says not many people are interested in the series – I’m in the middle of an industrial dispute, and I’m certainly interested! A quote from part 1:

There are a literally unlimited number of ways one could go about measuring the pay gap between men and women. Here's six ways, for example.

1. Compare wages among young workers only, excluding mothers. (98%) 2. Compare hourly wages among all workers. 3. Compare weekly wages among all full-time workers. (76% - pdf file) 4. Compare annual wages among all full-time, year round (FTYR) workers. (73% - pdf file) 5. Compare total annual income (wages plus benefits, pension, perks and bonuses) among FTYR workers. 6. Compare total income over the course of an entire work life.

I've arranged this list in order of how big the wage gap is. So if you measure by method number 1, you'll find a relatively small wage gap - which is why conservatives so often use this method. Measuring with method number 2 will find a larger pay gap than method 1, number 3 will be larger still, and so on until method number 6 - which will find the largest pay gap of all.

This article from the SMH gives some local colour to Ampersand's views.


-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 12:14 PM ----- BODY:

Blogroll update

I've added Trish Wilson, Gummo Trotsky and Riverbend to my blogroll. If you haven't yet seen any of these blogs, I recommend them highly. Well, der. Plenty of good topics offering themselves, but so little time to blog - and I see I'm not alone. Quite a few of my favourite bloggers are caught up in busy lives. Back soon.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 4:48 PM ----- BODY:

Are you thinking what I'm thinking, B1?

Today's Background Briefing (ABC Radio National) mentioned that we share about half our genes with bananas, which I've confirmed with a quick Google.. Professor Bunyip and other anti-ABC writers will, I'm sure, quickly pick up on this shameless piece of cross promotion.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 5:33 PM ----- BODY:

Melbourne Royal Show

The little boy and I went to the show. I was suffering sensory overload from the fairground and rides so we wandered through the Horse pavilion. This is an old building left over from the old ones built in the 50s, a run down, lofty shed. The loose boxes occupy about four rows in the space and at the end of every row there is a little tea room area, with an electric jug and some ratty old chairs and a table. This is where the people from the country hang out in between competitions and beauty treatments (for the beasts, not themselves). We tiptoed along one row which was full of heavy draught horses. It seemed as if the owners had ordered the horses by size, so that every one we looked at was huger than the last. The very last one had a head, I swear, the size of a man's torso. Or at least a teenager's. I'm not sure but I think I saw cloud around the withers. That was a BIG horse. He looked at me the way I look at Maltese terriers. Next door was the little tea room - rest area thing. There, slumped on a director's chair, was a grazier type, in his 60s I think. He had the checked tweed jacket and the moleskins, and he had three or maybe four championship ribbons and sashes swathed around his shoulders like an evening wrap. He was fast asleep. Sometimes, you just miss the photograph of a lifetime.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 5:06 PM ----- BODY:

What Men Want

I came across two articles by Andrew Bock and Miranda Devine a few weeks ago, both on the topic of "the male identity in a post (sic) feminist world". Let's look at the Andrew Bock article first, because Andrew at least is a man, unlike Miranda, so his piece of writing is a bit more pertinent. However, I found a great, yawning absence in it which I need to jump into. He builds his argument around one undeniable truth, which is, if feminists think it's a bad thing to portray women as helpless bimbos /housewives / secretaries / airheads in advertising or programming, then it's a bad thing to portray men as helpless bumblers / hygenically challenged / Homer Simpson. To which, 99% of feminists like me would reply with a resounding "Yes!" A worthy aim, indeed! However. I would have preferred it if Mr Bock had made even the most token gesture towards two important points. For one, I waited in vain for Bock to mention the fact that this is what women have been putting up with for years - something along the lines of, "I recognise what our mob has been doing to your mob for many many years, and now that I perceive that it's being done to our mob, I don't like it. It has really woken me up to what patriarchy is about and I sympathise with women much more, even as I set about trying to eradicate the portrayal of my mob as stupid bumblers. No, scrub that, I'll try to eradicate the portrayal of both genders as stupid bumblers." Welcome to our world, in other words. But just another thing which gets me going. For so many years it was fun to attack feminists, or anyone complaining about such media portrayal, as humourless. Remember the humourless feminists? Oh, lighten up, girls! Get a sense of humour! or, Get a Life! Now, I'm not going to do that to you, Mr Bock. I'd like to be consistent here and give you the benefit of fair play. I'd just have appreciated it if you had given a bit of a nod to that social phenomenon. However, Bock's having way too much fun maintaining his rage to admit these things, or to admit that the advertising industry - along with every other bloody industry - is still dominated by men, therefore, it is not fair to blame some shadowy committee of feminists for the images you see in the media. Homer Simpson, after all, is a man's creation, not a woman's. Further, in a world where the most gung ho of female role models, Lara Croft, still has to have her tits digitally enhanced before she can be shown to the public, and the Windsor Smith shoe ads suggest that women will be ever ready to offer oral sex to men with the right shoes, why is there this perception that there's been a Great Reversal, with women on top everywhere and men with no place any more but in the dirt? I'm sorry, but I must have missed the one and a half minutes where the "pendulum swung too far", if it ever happened. Now Miranda. Still confused, as usual. Starts out with a long reference to humility as a dying masculine virtue, and continues on to rant about the death of masculinity as a whole, with liberal use of words like "castrate" and "gelding". Now again, the ideal of a mature man who is humble and self effacing is nothing that any of us would argue against, but what has the rise of brashness got to do with anything if you're trying to show that maleness itself is on the ropes? I'd have thought that the rise of brash and vulgar celebs like Sam Newman, Wayne Carey and various radio Shock Jocks were a sign that testosterone was on the rise - and the current media love affair with Mark Latham, the "head kicker", is another. Yes, readers in other places, in Australia "head kicker" is considered a compliment in Australian politics. Society overly feminised? I think not! However, Miranda needs to sort this out in her head more. At the top of the article, there is a heartbreaking graphic, showing a mighty musclebound warrior at home trying to juggle a child, a frying pan and a laptop. The subtext is clearly that having to be at home wanting to look after kids is a woeful thing for a manly man, kind of like a racing thoroughbred harnessed to a milk cart. As opposed to, for instance, women, who are kind of like cart horses and more suited to mundane tasks. I think these people who claim to speak for men need to examine this kind of attitude very carefully. After all, we're just in the middle of a debate about child custody and the old myth of men being somehow less suited to looking after children. (I've blogged this subject occasionally.) Now I would certainly argue that Dads are just as suited. Therefore, female "mens advocates" moaning about the death of masculinity due to overexposure to the domestic are actually wanting us to go back to "traditional" roles (that is, the Post-World War II British-American model). I think that is really what Miranda wants. But I don't think it's really what men want. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 3:37 PM ----- BODY:

What is it really like in Iraq?

Sit down and read Salam Pax and Riverbend's blogs for the last few weeks. Read this Guardian article by Salam Pax, too. I don't care how busy you are. Read it all. But because I know we're all too busy here in the Western world, (we have such hard lives, oh yes), here are a few choice quotes.

...getting into these press bashes is an event in itself. You have to be there an hour early, you get searched a thousand times and, of course, as an Iraqi I get treated like shit. I have no idea why the American soldiers at the entrance to the convention centre [where the CPA press operation is] are so offensive towards Iraqis while they can be so nice to anyone with a foreign passport. I have to be the Zen master when the soldier at the gate gets condescending. The reporters of Iraq Today were not allowed to get to the press conference and they went ballistic. "This is my friggin' government, what do you mean I can't get in?" My sentiments exactly. Keep this image in your head: an American officer stopping you, an Iraqi, from attending the press conference your government is holding. Earlier in the day I got frisked and the car I was in searched because the colonel or something who has just passed by thought that he didn't like the people who are standing by the car (me) and that I was giving him dirty looks. Habibi, you have no idea how dirty my looks can get, you didn't get one. What you saw was the I-have-been-standing-for-a-whole-hour-in-the-sun. But because you have the power to decide what a look means I got searched. You really should have looked more carefully before you shot the nine-year-old kid in Ramadi only to find out later that it was a water gun he had in his hands. -Salam Pax, The Guardian, 13 August No running water all day today. Horrible. Usually there are at least a few hours of running water, today there’s none. E. went out and asked if there was perhaps a pipe broken? The neighbors have no idea. Everyone is annoyed beyond reason. A word of advice: never take water for granted. Every time you wash your hands in cold, clean, clear water- say a prayer of thanks to whatever deity you revere. Every time you drink fresh, odorless water- say the same prayer. Never throw out the clean water remaining in your glass- water a plant, give it to the cat, throw it out into the garden… whatever. Never take it for granted. Luckily, yesterday I filled all the water bottles. We have dozens of water bottles, both glass and plastic. Every time there’s even a semblance of running water, we put something under the faucet to catch the precious drops. We fill bottles, pots, thermoses, buckets- anything that will hold water. Some days are better than others. Riverbend, 6 September ...What I’m trying to say is that no matter *what* anyone heard, females in Iraq were a lot better off than females in other parts of the Arab world (and some parts of the Western world- we had equal salaries!). We made up over 50% of the working force. We were doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, professors, deans, architects, programmers, and more. We came and went as we pleased. We wore what we wanted (within the boundaries of the social restrictions of a conservative society). During the first week of June, I heard my company was back in business. It took several hours, seemingly thousands of family meetings, but I finally convinced everyone that it was necessary for my sanity to go back to work. They agreed that I would visit the company (with my two male bodyguards) and ask them if they had any work I could possibly take home and submit later on, or through the internet. ..... ....I stood staring at the mess for a few moments longer, trying to sort out the mess in my head, my heart being torn to pieces. My cousin and E. were downstairs waiting for me- there was nothing more to do, except ask how I could maybe help? A. and I left the room and started making our way downstairs. We paused on the second floor and stopped to talk to one of the former department directors. I asked him when they thought things would be functioning, he wouldn’t look at me. His eyes stayed glued to A.’s face as he told him that females weren’t welcome right now- especially females who ‘couldn’t be protected’. He finally turned to me and told me, in so many words, to go home because ‘they’ refused to be responsible for what might happen to me. Ok. Fine. Your loss. I turned my back, walked down the stairs and went to find E. and my cousin. Suddenly, the faces didn’t look strange- they were the same faces of before, mostly, but there was a hostility I couldn’t believe. What was I doing here? E. and the cousin were looking grim, I must have been looking broken, because they rushed me out of the first place I had ever worked and to the car. I cried bitterly all the way home- cried for my job, cried for my future and cried for the torn streets, damaged buildings and crumbling people. I’m one of the lucky ones… I’m not important. I’m not vital. Over a month ago, a prominent electrical engineer (one of the smartest females in the country) named Henna Aziz was assassinated in front of her family- two daughters and her husband. She was threatened by some fundamentalists from Badir’s Army and told to stay at home because she was a woman, she shouldn’t be in charge. She refused- the country needed her expertise to get things functioning- she was brilliant. She would not and could not stay at home. They came to her house one evening: men with machine-guns, broke in and opened fire. She lost her life- she wasn’t the first, she won’t be the last. Riverbend, 24 August Our house was searched by the Americans. That happened almost ten days ago. I wasn’t home, but my mother called the next day a bit freaked out. They came at around 12 midnight they were apparently supposed to do a silent entrance and surprise the criminal Ba’athi cell that was in my parents house, unfortunately for them our front gate does a fair amount of rattling so my brother heard that and opened the door and saw a couple of soldiers climbing on our high black front gate. When the silent entrance tactic failed they resorted to shouty entrance mode. So they shouted at him telling him that he should get down on his knees, which he did. He actually was trying to help them open the door, but whatever. Seconds later around 25 soldiers are in the house my brother, father and mother are outside sitting on the ground and in their asshole-ish ways refused to answer any questions about what was happening. My father was asking them what they were looking so that he can help but as usual since you are an Iraqi addressing an American is no use since he doesn’t even acknowledge you as a human being standing in front of him. They (the Americans) have a medic with them and he seems to be the only sane person amongst them, my brother tells me they were kids all of them. Anyway so my brother and father start talking to the medic and he tells them what this is about. They have been “informed” that there are daily meetings the last five days, Sudanese people come into our house at 9am and stay till 3pm, we are a probable Ansar cell. My father is totally baffled, my brother gets it. These are not Sudanese men they are from Basra the “informer” is stupid enough to forget that there is a sizeable population in Basra who are of African origin. And it is not meetings these 2 (yes only two) guys have here, they are carpenters and they were repairing my mom’s kitchen. Way. To. Go. You have great informers. While my family is waiting outside something strange happens, one of the soldiers comes out, empties his flask in the garden and start telling the medic to give him his, the medic shoos him away. They all think that the soldier is filling his flask with cold water from the cooler. Later it turns out that he emptied my father’s bottle of Johnny Walker’s into his flask and was probably trying to convince the medic to give him his to empty another bottle. Weird shit. Salam Pax, Friday, August 29

-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 1:48 PM ----- BODY:

Late Light Live last night

Just for interest, in case anyblogger doesn't know already, Salaam Pax was on the Philip Adams program on the ABC last night (that hotbed of commie influence!) and the program will be repeated at 4 PM EST tonight. If you missed it, there is an Audio version available for a while on Philip Adams' Late Night Live website.
Update - I got the date wrong, proving beyond a doubt I don't know what day it is. Anyway, the program is available on the website. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 7:45 PM ----- BODY:

Hello, Farid Abdullah

Finally, Some of the Tampa refugees have been allowed to land in Australia. I saw your face in the Age News section the other day, and for someone who had come through so much, you were looking great. (It was a much better photo than the pensive one on the link above, but it wasn't on the Net.) You smiled out at us so genuinely, a smile that went all the way to your eyes. Your gawky-handsome face would look at home on any country footy oval. There is no trace of sulkiness, no bitterness towards the Australians who locked you up and robbed you of years of your life, who said "we don't want people like that in this country". Still, it has left its mark, though. You're only 20, but I thought you were a youthful thirty. Don't let any One Nation type tell you that you don't belong here. For one thing, our country helped the US to bomb yours (and our rulers, the British, earlier on.) Now Afghanistan is still unsafe. For that, we have a duty to give you asylum. But quite apart from that. Do you know that Afghans have been in Australia pretty much since European settlement? William Gosse, the first non-aboriginal to travel to Uluru, had an Afghan camel driver with him. Perhaps in future years you'll travel to Marree (if you can get shot of the Temporary Protection Visa), where about a third of the population are descendants of Afghans who settled in the nineteenth century. There's a nineteenth century mud brick mosque there, too. Maybe you'll travel the "Ghan" railway, which is named after - you guessed it - Afghans, and their camel teams, which explored this dry country. While the majority of "white" australians gravitated to the coastal cities, Farid, your countrymen were living the life of the Outback australian - more so than 99 percent of Australians ever have. (Your camels turned into an export industry, too-we even export them to Saudi Arabia! and the camel races are a regular tourist attraction up North.) We even have a biscuit called an Afghan. I heard a woman on the radio from Broome describing herself as a "Ghan" - they're just a part of the outback mosaic. So, Farid, if anyone tells you you don't belong here, you'll know they are just one of those many Australians who are a bit historically challenged. There are Afghans here who have been here longer than their families have. Farid, welcome!
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 8:55 PM ----- BODY:

Not that Abbott

In a previous post, dated june 21 (what? you expect a link? don't make me laugh! This is Blogger, after all) I noted that the shadowy lobby group, the Richard Hillman foundation, along with One Nation senator Len Harris and Liberal Christopher Pyne, were lobbying John Howard for rebuttable joint custody to become law in Australia. I was interested to know whether this was the same John Abbott that founded the Blackshirts, a crypto-fascist organisation in Melbourne. Yuri Joakimidis of the Joint Parenting Association (SA) has replied to say that no, he is not. We can all breathe a sigh of relief on that one. To his credit, Yuri put out a press release in July 2002, unambiguously condemning Abbott's organisation, which he called Urban terrorism (and it is). Most of the men's groups loosely coalesced around the Joint Parenting Association seem to be guilty of nothing worse than bad web design and backlash hyperbole.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 11:08 AM ----- BODY:

Is that ringing in your head?

My better half pointed out an AGE article to me yesterday outlining some of the cuts the ABC will need to make because of funding cuts of 26 million. The article (News, page 6) isn't on Age online version, so I can't link to it, but note that figure of 26 mill. Some of the programs to be cut include Four Corners, the 7:30 report and Foreign Correspondent, all programs which have had an irritating tendency to report things which the Liberals and their US allies would rather they wouldn't. With steam coming out of his ears, B.H. then showed me another article three pages away on News 9.

Ring tone revenue sounds alarm Sue Lowe Teens and twenty-somethings are expected to spend about $20 million (my bold) downloading ring tones to their mobile phones this year......

OK, right. $26 mill is too much to spend on some of our most respected current affairs programs, but mobile ring tones, on the other hand.... Dear, oh dear, oh dear. Beam me up somebody. In a related piece of news, that idiot Richard Alston has sunnily suggested thatthe ABC raise funds by registering as a charity. O Kayyyyyyyyyy... There's a fruitcake in the mail, Richard. However, perhaps he isn't that much on an idiot, because if the ABC were to register as a charity, of course, and the Government's proposed bill that could cut off funding for charities that pursue "advocacy" as more than a sideline, gets up-- bingo. Got'em. Game, set and match. Of course, we, the public, would never be stupid enough to allow such a bill to get up, unless we spend nearly as much downloading RING TONES as we do on current affairs programming...
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 11:13 PM ----- BODY:

Tampa day

It's the day after Tampa day. I went down to the small riot organised outside the State Library, listened to some speeches, walked round the streets, got photographed by some weirdo in a darkened upstairs room with an inordinately powerful flash, then went home. Much has been written about the Tampa affair, I blogged it a few days ago and I don't want to compose a 10,000 word essay (which is about the least you could do to do it justice.) Let me just draw your attention to one little gem, a little nugget which summed up (to me) the miserable spin-doctored callousness of our government. And that is that Ross Hampton, media adviser to Peter Reith, gave an order to Brian Humphreys of the ADF that no photographs were to be taken of refugee boats which could in any way humanise or personalise asylum seekers. Have a happy father's day, if you're a Dad, and don't let the above put you off your bacon and eggs.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 10:06 PM ----- BODY:

Oky Pinoky Karaoke... Oh, ***$#@

Why is it, why is it, that Macs have this reputation for being so much sounder than PCs? OK, OK, so they aren't so affected by viruses. But I had a good blog all written for tonight on Simple Text and hadn't saved it (I know, I know). About the weird priorities our tabloids show in the news they choose to bring us. And, following from that, the story of Oky Pinoky and his liberation from the south Melbourne adventure playground, only to become a kind of notorious, child eating, equine Chopper Read... How Harry M. Miller offered to become his manager... and how, in a kind of culmination of Herald Sun silliness, they published a News Poll: Oky Pinoky has bitten someone again. should he get the Death Penalty? (To their credit, about 80% voted no, as I remember. I worry about the other 20%.) But the Mac did its thing where it suddenly and inexplicably refuses to move any more, so the only option is to turn off and restart and lose all your work. Mac OS, bah. Like me, it's probably tired. I'm going to bed instead. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 8:12 PM ----- BODY:

Our Gulags, 2

There's this boy, see. An intelligent boy, good at school. He's only fourteen years old. Back in 2001, his eyes started to feel sore. He was living in a hot, dusty place. His mum and dad took him for eye tests, of course. They were worried about him. The tests showed he was nearly blind in both eyes. Nearly legally blind. And in pain every day. Four weeks later an optometrist (not an opthalmologist) tested the boy and claimed he must have always had very poor vision. The parents knew that wasn't the case. Something very serious was going on. They have been out of their minds with worry. What would you do? You'd go round all the specialists you could. You'd hassle the specialists, the hospital, everyone. You'd get your kid treated in the best way you could. Except that the boy's parents had no say in the matter. They were incarcerated behind razor wire at the Curtin Detention centre, at the mercy of ACM, a subsidiary of the US Wackenhut corporation which keeps prisoners for profit. Curtin is in a remote area of WA. The boy needed specialist treatment on a weekly basis, but that would have meant a move to the capital city. ACM and the Australian department of immigration (DIMIA) delayed and denied treatment to the boy until he had completely lost his sight in one eye, and the other was severely compromised. You'd be beside yourself. It's bad enough to know that your child is losing his sight. It's worse to know that if you had access to treatment, it could be prevented. It's worse still to know that that treatment is available in the country you are in, but a muddle of incompetence, misdiagnosis, bureaucratic sadism and politics are preventing him from getting it. It's such a waste, such a wicked waste. This is what happened next.

Shahin was finally admitted to Princess Margaret Hospital in Perth as an emergency on April 1 - four months too late. Despite a delicate operation, he lost the sight in his right eye. DOCTOR WILLIAM WARD: The right retina was pulled off and pulled up into the middle of the cavity in the back of the eye and the left retina was in the process of being pulled off also. So the outcome in the right eye, even though the retina had to be put back on surgically, was very compromised. The left eye was better because it was caught before that happened but it was on the verge of happening in his left eye also. Although treatment stabilised Shahin's condition, it could flare up at any moment, threatening the sight he has left. He also has cataracts and glaucoma and requires further surgery. Against the advice of doctors, when the Curtin camp closed, the family was sent to Port Hedland. Shahin's mother, Fakhonda, is desperate to move. FAKHONDA AGDAR, SHAHIN'S MOTHER (Translation): I would love it because he has lost one of his eyes. Now he only has one eye and even that one is in danger because it is so infected and inflamed. (In early July 2003) in Port Hedland, Shahin's eyes showed signs of secondary infection. (SBS, Blind Justice)

Unable to bear the thought of his talented son losing his sight, his father attempted suicide. At least, after adverse publicity from SBS and the ABC, the boy and his family were moved the the Maribyrnong Detention centre in Melbourne. At last, he is able to get the treatment he needs. If the ACM guards will let him. On the 30th of July in an ABC interview, Philip Ruddock showed his deep compassion and understanding thusly:

TONY JONES: Now you say that there is no problem with the way he was treated inside detention, but the specialist ophthalmologist Dr Ward says he was treated four months too late and, as a result, his right retina was pulled off, the left was in the process of being pulled off, before he had a proper operation and that there was a misdiagnosis initially by optometrist, not a specialist, and this resulted in him going blind in one eye. PHILIP RUDDOCK: Well, I simply make this point, Tony -- I suspect in relation to people who receive care and attention in detention where they have a higher level of specialist access and general service access while they are in detention that they get better service than many Australians.

(My bold. Pause, while we digest the full meaning of that bloody egregious statement above.)

And I suspect in relation to the places that they have left and the places they have transited, the attention that they receive here would be not just many times but hundreds of times better than might have otherwise been available. TONY JONES: If a boy can go blind while in detention, what does that say, in the end, about your duty of care? PHILIP RUDDOCK: Well, first of all, I understand he has one damaged eye and he is continuing to receive treatment for the other. So, I mean, he hasn't been made blind in detention. TONY JONES: When you say he has one damaged eye, he's blind in that eye, isn't he? PHILIP RUDDOCK: Well, I mean, that's not the point you made before. I don't want to get into semantics. TONY JONES: Well he wasn't blind in that eye when he came to Australia and, according to Dr Ward, the 4-month delay while he was detention in a remote camp, he went blind in one eye. PHILIP RUDDOCK: I am not an ophthalmologist, I'm not an optometrist.

No, Phil. You're not an optometrist. You're just a bastard.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 1:39 PM ----- BODY:

Tampa and other disasters

Tampa Day is coming up, and it's been making me relive the events of August and September 2001. Like Jeanne D'Arc and Gil Smart(no relation), I've been in despair over the things our government has been doing. So if those bloggers are considering fleeing the US and moving to the antipodes, my advice is- don't bother. Because masochism runs in my family (I think)in the last week or two I tortured myself further by borrowing Dark Victory from the library. Dark Victory is David Marr and Marian Wilkinson's account of the so-called Tampa "crisis" -the threat to our national security posed by 438 miserable, unarmed civilians- the brutal, inhumane response of our government and many of its citizens and the role of that brutality in the Liberal party's win in the 2001 federal election. "In 20 years, historians and ordinary Australians will most likely look back aghast at the months that ended the year 2001." Hell, many of us are already aghast and have been in a state of aghastness ever since 2001. As an ordinary punter I missed many of the minute details of those days when the Tampa was standing off the Australian coast with its human cargo, including pregnant women, babies and the sick, frying in the sun, although the point the Government wanted to make came through loud and clear. So did hateful comments from Joe Public. I don't do chat rooms or Talkback radio apart from the ABC's Australia Talks Back, but I did lurk a good deal in internet discussion boards on 9MSN at the time, checking out the zeitgeist. While some people might be shocked that the public embraced the Pacific Solution and the inhumane treatment of asylum seakers so readily, I'm not at all surprised. I've read enough vicious posts from anonymous people of the "throw them to the sharks and toss some burley in as well" kind to be surprised. I learned a lot more of the stomach churning detail from the book. How the people frying in the tropical sun had their lives further put at risk by a cynical mind-game exercise, where civilians (ie. Doctors and nurses as well as journalists) were prevented from ever accessing the Tampa - so that the government could claim that no announcement of intent to enter Australia had been made and they could escape their legal responsibility of granting asylum. We're talking a man having seizures, a pregnant woman experiencing pain, a fracture, and small children here. Add to that extreme heat and malnutrition, plus (despite the best efforts of Arne Rinnan and his crew) poor conditions, and anyone who has even done a two-day First Aid course will realise how much at risk these people were. The way these sick and exhausted people were turned away on a "voyage to nowhere" before the so-called Pacific solution was developed. Ross Hampton, Peter Reith's press secretary, who, as part of a general journalism blackout of the incident, gave direct instructions to the military not to allow any "personalising or humanising images" of asylum seekers to reach the public. I think that particular bit of bastardry was the standout, for me personally, and I'd like to devote a whole blog essay to it one day. The general contempt for, and breaking of, not only Australia's immigration laws and international law, but the protocols governing the safety of life at sea - endangering all of us in the future. The threats of prosecution to the wonderful ship's captain, Arne Rinnan (Rinnan, you're a hero. Our government and public service owe you and your rescuees a big, big apology. But you won't get it, so let me apologise on their behalf.) The vicious Border Protection Bill, under which the government could force unseaworthy ships off the coast-again on voyages to nowhere-and exempted the government from any civil or criminal liability for any deaths. I could go on. The politicisation of the public service. The lies about Children overboard and the SIEV-X tragedy. The expert shifting of blame to the Defence forces. The razor-wire gulags that have been a feature of our lives since the 1990s. Bastards. I've switched to lighter reading for the mo' because it just makes me so miserable and ashamed that these things have happened in my country, and that so many of my countrymen- and women supported it. The Tampa "crisis" (Jeez, I'd hate to see how Australians behave in a real crisis) may be over but the underlying disease remains. JH continues to politicise the public service. He (and the rest of his party) continue the farce of I wasn't told, I had no knowledge, whenever they get caught out in their skulduggery. And they still shift the blame for it. They are still the masters of spin, and the public still loves them. Jack Robertson has a brilliant, angry article on that in this week's Webdiary - it fairly makes flames come out of your monitor. Get your asbestos clothes on, and go and read it.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 7:45 PM ----- BODY:

Just do it!

Does irony ever get any more delicious than this? -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 5:34 PM ----- BODY:

A week behind, as usual

Bettina "Agony" Arndt and Bill Muehlenberg of the rightwing association the Australian Family Association had a bit of a whingefest on the ABC's PM program about sex discrimination commissioner Pru Goward's commonsense remarks about Dads and work-family balance--

Mark Colvin: Should divorced and separating parents move beyond equal rights, to consider equal responsibilities, when it comes to joint custody of their children? And should men be more active in arranging their working lives so they can be more involved after divorce?

She was commenting on a current Federal Parliamentary inquiry, which is investigating whether separating parents should get automatic joint custody. All the woman is saying is that, like brain surgery and loss adjustment, it's good to have some practice at something before making it your way of life. She also suggested that some separations wouldn't occur in the first place if parental responsibility was shared more equally by some parents. How dare she! Well, we'd expect nothing better of the AFA and Agony (and John Howard, who chimed in with a suitably hedged and meaningless statement.)But I would have expected better from the third commentator in the PM program. Check out this guy's credentials:

Peter Llewellyn-Smith is an experienced industry trainer specialising in work/life balance and sustainable change. Most recently he has worked within corporate organizations such as the ABC & AMP. Peter has consulted with the Federal Government on projects that focus on work and family. He is currently an executive committee member on the Work+Life Association committee. Peter is undertaking research into men, health, and organisational change. ...(Curtin Think Tank) Scientific research, popular writings and a general social debate all indicate that men are becoming more interested in relationships, fathering, and balancing their work/ family commitments. Men are seeking workplaces that provide flexibility in how, when and where work is completed - they want challenge, control and balance. Hence, for many men a key question has become "how can I balance my workplace responsibilities with my family and personal needs?" This is not simply a question for individuals. Efforts to balance work and personal lives are having tangible payoffs for organisations. As the face of the workforce continues to shift, key business indicators including productivity, turn-over, morale and staff loyalty are being impacted by an organisation's strategy to support the work/home relationship. (Peter Llewellyn-Smith)

So, here's a guy who is really across the issues of work/life balance and is a catalyst for change. He'd be very much in favour of the more workaholic dads pulling back their coronary-inducing work schedules and doing more hands-on parenting. Right? So here's what he said in the PM program:

PETER LLEWELLYN-SMITH: Pru does talk about families-friendly policies and the need for men to become more proactive in encouraging changes in the work force to support them. And I agree with her in part, particularly around the white collar environments, but in terms of the blue collar situation, for a lot of blokes this is not a reality. The reality is that they struggle their guts off to pay off their mortgages, to pay for the kids' education, to pay for food on the table and that contribution to the family is something that is being lost in this debate.

Look, I don't want to downplay the difficulties people face in rearranging their lives to accommodate their parenting responsibilities. Lordy knows it took me a couple of years to take the plunge and reduce my working hours (and live with the commensurate loss of income.) Is it just me, but I don't find this guy's comments positive or useful. This is a man who conducts seminars or training sessions on balancing work and personal life. What the hell goes on at these seminars? "Mate. You work 70 hours a week. You don't need to change, it's too hard to change, especially because you're blue collar". (Ever heard of a union?) "These people who want you to spend more time with the kids, mate, they just don't appreciate you." Meanwhile, out in the world, men are quietly getting on with walking the walk of reinventing work/life balance, while others talk the talk. Like this guy, or my boss, or my friend who combines a blue collar job with being the primary carer (organising work days around school hours.) Or plumbers in the building industry in Victoria, (also blue collar), who have clustered most of their rostered days off around school holidays. Or my childrens' dad! They're doing great. Perhaps they're the ones who should be giving the seminars.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 3:49 PM ----- BODY:

The great fruitcake rebellion of 2003

(Update - I just had a look at my last posts, and noticed that blogger has converted ALL my text into italic. Just in case anyone is actually reading this, this was Not My Idea. Sigh.) US blogger Lambert, via Atrios, has come up with a fabulous, non-violent method of political dissent. Has this or that politician utterly lost the plot? Send them a fruitcake!

(Republican congressman) Bill Thomas is a fruitcake... Make him even nuttier by sending him one! Send Bill Thomas a fruitcake! Let's try a little media manipulation of our own. You can fax Bill Thomas a fruitcake image here: Washington Fax: 202-225-8798 Bakersfield Fax: 661-637-0867 If you want to send Thomas a real fruitcake, why not send one of those petrified holiday ones you've never thrown out? Good liberals recycle! Or you can send him a new one: (Snip) Thomas's addresses are: (Snip)

Lambert provides a link to a page of useful fruitcake images which you can easily email to the politician of your choice, but the idea of sending actual fruitcakes sounds like a lot of fun. Can't you just see the feverish activity of the political staffers as they bring in the cops and sniffer dogs to deal with these sinister parcels? Many readers, it seems, are taking up Lambert's challenge.

UPDATE: Fruitcake Rebellion Roll of Honor 1. Fruitcake sent. $8.95 is a small price to pay to make my voice heard. (alert reader RCSanders) 2. Ok, sent a fruitcake. Feel better. Thanks everyone, for making it possible. (alert reader tena) 3. Just mailed my fruitcake. I really enjoyed "fruiting' the repubs. They deserve all the fruitcakes they can get. Besides, $8.95 is a small price to pay to get my country back!!!!!! (alert reader Colleen) 4. Fruitcake sent to Thomas' home office in Bakersfield. Hopefully he'll get the point. At least I didn't have to fill out a nine-screen form that first asks if I'm for or against fruitcake. (alert reader whump) 5. I faxed a letter of complaint, along with a picture of a fruitcake from that Google search you posted. I believe he's still my Rep., unfortunately. (alert reader dark avenger) 6. Another fruitcake inbound for D.C.! (alert reader Tartarus) 7. Another fruitcake on it's way to Thomas. Hope he's got a big appetitie! kriselda jarnsaxa 8. My family all pitched in to send Billy Boy a big ol' concrete block o' fruity stuff; thanks for the links!>/I>

Now, who am I going to send my fruitcakes to? Pauline Hanson's no longer in government, but there's Bill Heffernan, the Mad Monk Tony Abbott, Wilson Tuckey...Jeff Kennett's gone too, but he does make periodic threats to return and you can't be too careful. So many fruitcakes, so little time...
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 8:44 PM ----- BODY:

Yes, children need father figures

(and not just boys, either, as our lovable PM thinks). BUT... this is perhaps not a good time to invoke that excellent principle. The patriarch of a family erm, well known to police, who is himself in jail and two of whose sons have been killed in what's described as "gangland killings", has requested bail because his grandsons need a father figure, according to the barrister. I agree they do - I'm just not sure he's the one. "...Defence barrister Nicola Gobbo said Moran, 58, was needed at home to act as a father figure to his grandchildren." (She also said he was suffering from depression, seemingly unaware that the two circumstances might conflict somewhat.) And from the Australian,

Nicola Gobbo, for Moran, told the court her client should be released on bail so he could be a role model and a father figure to the children of his murdered sons. Suzanne Kane, sister of Jason's widow, said the family was devastated and there were no men to support the Moran women. "We just can't help our kids at the moment," Ms Kane said. "They just need him (Lewis Moran)."

Right. You can imagine the phone call. "You've got to come home, Lewis. Little *** doesn't even know the difference between pseudoephedrine and amphetamine, and little *** has gorn right off his guns. He needs someone to clean 'em with and help saw them off. And how do you reckon they can go after the (expletive) who topped our Jason all by themselves? Give us a break. These kids need a farver figure!"
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 1:01 PM ----- BODY:

That's why we have leaders

About the argument that is so popular in the last few days, and has been ever since the Toppling of the Saddam Statue. The one which goes, "OK, so there was no connection between Iraq and the attack on the world Trade Centre (and now, it appears there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction), but we still did the right thing by bombing and invading Iraq, because Saddam was such a brutal dictator and now we have liberated the people of Iraq and transformed their lives for the better." This is being peddled from the highest echelons (Bush, Blair, Howard) down to the newspapers Letters pages and talkback - and isn't confined to right wing commentators. My problem with this is.... Let's set aside the unwillingness of the US occupying regime to take responsibility for the situation (Via Alas, a Blog) and the lack of a proper postwar plan for the governance of Iraq (via Calpundit... the breakdown of basic infrastructure...the need to establish basics like clean water... the ever increasing rollcall of civilians killed...the emergence of old Ba'athist functionaries in new positions of authority under the US regime and the looting of the unguarded Tuwaitha nuclear research centre...the damage and looting of archeological treasures (via Body and Soul)...the unexploded cluster bombs lying around endangering children (via Salam Pax)... The list is endless. No, I don't agree that the Iraqis are happy and liberated. But. Let's assume for a moment that the most optimistic assumptions of the Right were all true, and that the Iraqis are now happily on the road to a civil and safe society. Are they really saying that I should approve of my country going to war against another country (and in a few years, that might mean committing my son to go and get killed) and not want to be pretty bloody sure of what it is all for? that I would happily go to war just because the rulers of the Free World say so, and that like peons, we will do it without the right to know the reason, because, you know, there MIGHT be some favourable outcome, or something might just pop up which would make it all worthwhile? That's objectionable, to me. But many americans, it seems, eagerly embrace this idea. (Via Calpundit again):

...here's a question: Are they concerned the administration might have emphasized false intelligence to build a case for the war against Iraq? "I don't care about it at all," says Sims, while her mother and sister nod in agreement, "because we don't know anything about this [classified] intelligence. We can't know, as ordinary citizens, and we don't want to know -- it's scary -- and that's why we have leaders, and they worry about that for us. I trust him to lead. I trust that he's doing good things in the Oval Office and not bad things, if you know what I mean. "And I love that he's a Christian man."

Is this kind of thing what we want? Do we want the democratic process to be so infantilised? -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 7:01 PM ----- BODY:

Births, Deaths and urban pests

We're all devastated at Swampy Mansions because our greatest idol has died. Rest in peace, Barry, Walrus of Love. We're never never gonna get enough of your lovin'. But, a reason to be cheerful-- Happy birthday John Ashton! Tim Dunlop (look for July 3) points to a post on SUVs (Urban Assault vehicles) by Slacktivist. One of my pet topics. Let me point out a really good link which would address Slacktivist's criticism-- yet again, Background Briefing to the rescue with interviews with people who have really done their homework. One facet of the Urban Assault vehicle thing that doesn't seem to get much press. We all know that sales of FWDs / SUVs are through the roof. We see the flotillas of them as we navigate our increasingly perilous suburban and country roads. The safety analyses of these things presently concentrate on the safety aspects of SUVs per se-- their damaging weight and size in impacts, their propensity to roll over. What they haven't focused on yet is the fact that these things are all going to get old. And we all remember the unroadworthy bombs we drove as youngsters. (Actually, many of us still do or are near the borderline.) These unroadworthy bombs may weigh two tonnes. When they rolled off the production line, with their bullbars and luxury interiors, they were scary enough. In 2015, my little son or daughter may be tempted to buy one, third or fourth hand, because it's now a bargain (in their eyes)-- a two tonne, rusted, decayed, Mad-max hulk, with questionable shockers and brakes. Or somebody else's little son or daughter will. And those questionable brakes and shockers will fail, or the car will merely succumb to young-person, first-car driving, and roll over. Or the questionable brakes or simply young-person-driving will send them careening through an intersection, where they will crash into the driver's side of my son or daughter's smaller car. Don't get me started about SUVs.
I'm going to try to update my blogroll. That means - yes, going into the Blogspot Template of Death! Last time, it took me over a week to get back into my blog. As Oates said to Captain Scott as he left the tent on that fateful Antarctic expedition: I am just going outside, I may be gone some time. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 7:46 PM ----- BODY:

Arborophobia (2)

(Continued from Arborophobia (1) below) One of the fearful results of this proposed greenie architectural values is that cows will invade our roofs (talk about basing your argument on a few rare, anecdotal examples) and dreadful birds will invade our park, and attack our babies!

Johnson talks approvingly of buildings you can't see because of the trees surrounding them. Tokyo comes in for praise because of new rules that "require" rooftop greenery. "Property owners who don't comply will be subject to fines," notes Johnson approvingly. His hero architects are "out to save the world", pay homage to Gaia, the ancient Greek goddess of Earth, and advocate "control of world population growth". Control, control, control. Johnson writes of a house in New Zealand with a roof covered in rubber and soil on which a "natural grass lawn grew. Ultimately, the owners had to build a fence to protect cattle from grazing on the roof." That's the problem with nature. It has a habit of moving in. Not that that matters to Johnson, who praises the ibis, the large white bird with a long bill that has become such a pest in Sydney parks, eating people's lunches and pecking at their babies. Johnson says the ibis is "a Sydney example of the new urban ecology". One hero of the book is Jeffrey Bell, who has the Orwellian title of environmental system project officer, outcomes division, at Camden Council.

No, Miranda, that's not an Orwellian title - that is a silly corporatist title of the type much loved by modern managers who have embraced economic rationalism. More on the subject of conservationists being akin to fascists and being control freaks. In another example of why anyone to the left of Andrew Bolt cannot afford to say anything silly, Miranda pounces on this ridiculous statement by one lunatic Austrian in - wait for it - 1970.

In the world of Johnson and friends trees have more rights than people. In one surreal example he cites a Viennese architect who asked in the 1970s: "Why shouldn't a tree instead of a person live in a flat if there is a shortage of oxygen?"

That is proof positive, isn't it, that all ecologists are deepest green and hate humans? Surely Miranda could have found an example that wasn't thirty years old and thousands of miles away? If that example isn't good enough for you, consider this: isn't it deeply suspicious that the designer of Taronga Park Zoo enjoyed his job? According to Miranda, it's because the animals couldn't hold an opinion of their own. Therefore, authoritarian, QED. (that's not because he's an environmentalist, Miranda; it's because he's an architect. Believe me, I know!)

Taronga Park Zoo is one of Sydney's greatest urban success stories, according to Johnson and Stephen Lesiuk, one of the landscape experts quoted in the book. And it's all because the animal clients are more pliable than humans. "Unlike an architectural brief, the brief for animals is towards health and safety requirements," Lesiuk tells Johnson. "It becomes more of a systems brief."

Miranda cites Johnson's admiration of the hanging Gardens of Babylon and Singapore as further proof that he is "look(ing) longingly to authoritatian regimes". I had imagined Singapore would be every neocon's dream. But nup - Too touchy-feely and green for her.

Ominously, Johnson cites Singapore and ancient Babylon as model cities for his philosophy. In Singapore, where you can barely breathe without being fined, and graffiti artists are regularly flogged, the authoritarian former ruler Lee Kuan Yew drove a "garden city" agenda with an efficiency which meets Johnson's approval. Johnson is also taken by the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, giant terraces of greenery built by King Nebuchadnezzar, a totalitarian despot who offered up his son to be burned as a human sacrifice and had thousands of wretched slaves to water his shrubs.

By that kind of reasoning, you couldn't admire any work of art or architecture without explicitly giving consent to the whole political system of the day. You couldn't, for instance, admire the Pyramids of Gizeh without getting the urge to implement a system of indentured slavery at home. So, a stand of mature trees outside your house - particularly if you can't see past them to the water view or if they obscure the house itself-is not the shady delight you think it is; it's an authoritarian plot by the Government. Get rid of all those trees and Sydney could become another Santorini, only instead of uniform whiteness (so authoritarian!) it will be revealed in all its grubby decaying patchwork, concrete tangle and advertising clutter. I can't wait. Read the whole thing here. Strangely, she dismisses with half a sentence the chance to score a political point out of the recent bushfires, which commentators are blaming on "greenies" - incorrectly, as it happens. She may have come to the honest realisation that that just has no legs. More on that topic one day.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 7:28 PM ----- BODY:

Arborophobia (1)

I have been having blogger problems, as you know. I suspect it's not accepting posts over a certain size, therefore, I'm going to try to chop this up and post it as 2 or 3 separate posts. Here goes! I mentioned earlier I'd be blogging about a strange article by Miranda Devine (again, the Opinion pages of the Fairfax press - SMH this time). It's a few weeks old now, but the occasion for it - environmentalists and how the culture warriors of the right perceive them-is unlikely to go away any time soon. Miranda is a self-proclaimed rationalist conservative, but in this piece, it's apparent that this strange diatribe against "greenie" architecture is not just the usual howling of the neoconservative denied a profit. It goes deeper than that - down in her Celtic soul, the woman is scared of trees. And I'd say that that is true of many hedge-clipping, lawn -poisoning, rose-squirting, concreting Australians. Australia's forests have been endangered ever since the first European set foot on its shore in 1788. The invaders did not only bring with them an agrarian - pastoral society which saw wilderness or wetland as unused land to be cleared, fenced and turned into something useful, and a Christian mythology which gave "man" dominion over the earth, fowl and creeping things (including, of course,trees). They brought something else with them as well-the primordial fear of forests, which predates Christianity. In European thinking, the forest or the wilderness has been a repository of evil or of chaos. We are all familiar with the Brothers Grimm, Perrault and Hans Christian Anderson stories where the forest is a place of magic and danger. To the Druids, places had their own strong personality, which could be influenced by human activity. Trees might be venerated by some, but too many of them in one place was thought by the ancient Europeans as a scary place. The Irish settlers, in particular - Devine's ancestors - had obliterated all their forests by the 17th century, so they were not in the mood to muck around with trees.

City of trees would be a false utopia SMH, June 5 2003 Practicality and residents' rights will be turfed to make way for the sacred greenery, writes Miranda Devine. When the NSW Government Architect, Chris Johnson, launched his book Greening Sydney in April, the Sydney Town Hall was decorated with bamboo, top to bottom. Mr Bamboo and Multiplex trucked in huge pots of the stuff so you could barely see the beautiful building, and any humans who ventured up the famous steps were dwarfed into insignificance. The problem, as Picton environmental consultant Ian Tait pointed out later in a letter to this newspaper, was that golden bamboo, Phyllostachys aurea, is a terrible weed, "a major invader of bushland in the Sydney region".

Yes, bamboo is a really bad idea and it is a good demonstration of how, when people try to greenwash and score some easy, cheap photo opportunity (linked to Multiplex building developments) you are not going to get anything remotely like what real environmentalists would recommend.

But the bamboo faux pas was a fitting metaphor for a scary book (My emphasis) in which humans, particularly of the home-owning kind, are treated as impediments on the way to turning Sydney into a little green utopia, a Rousseauean model for the rest of the world. And if city slickers have been surprised by how quickly green zealotry has reduced our national parks to ash, wait till they see what the Johnson revolution has in store for their backyards. Among the most alarming ideas (My emphasis) in the book is Johnson's desire to eliminate the water views of harbourside suburbs by planting huge "sacred trees" along the foreshore, preferably figs every 200 metres.

Note the prose peppered with words like "scary", "alarming", "revolution", "Sacred Trees". It's a bit like something out of Lord of the Rings.

(Johnson) claims the harbour foreshore is one of Sydney's "most threatened green landscapes" and complains about the "great driver of Sydney's property prices - water views. Tens of thousands of extra dollars accrue to apartments with sweeping views across Sydney Harbour. OK for the occupants but what of the rest of Sydney?" Johnson advocates a plan developed by an environmental consultant to Planning NSW: "Development shall recognise that the provision of unrestricted (by vegetation) views to waterways is in conflict with the public interest." If he has his way, Sydney landholders who spent up big to buy a water view should be prepared for state confiscation of their prize asset.

OK, we are in more familiar neocon territory here. Johnson is preventing the poor Sydney waterfront landholders from getting their water views, and threatening their property values. And, by association, he is preventing the poor Sydney developers from making a buck. Talk about standing up for the weak and powerless little guy, Miranda!
(Continued in "Arborophobia (2)) -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 8:38 PM ----- BODY: Hmmm, Blogorrhea's been getting these Big Post error things too. And he's put in some whacking big posts since, on Katherine Hepburn. Go and have a read. So, there's hope for this blog, I think. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 8:19 PM ----- BODY: Testing, testing. I'm having problems with the new Blogger. It seems to be something to do with links. Here goes. Will it work?...... -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 7:53 PM ----- BODY:

We’re here defending terrorism, okay.

I was watching Foreign Correspondent a while back, and was interested by this item in which the journalists conducted a voxpop of intelligent twentysomethings in Baghdad, their thoughts on the Iraqui conflict and the US occupation. The TV equivalent of Salaam Pax, almost. They weren't saints or martyrs - just ordinary young bourgeois like the ones I sometimes roll my eyes at. But some were willing to speak out and give the US a serve for coming in with its tanks and bombs to "liberate" their country. Towards the end, a young Iraqui called Haider Hamza was able to speak to an american soldier. The soldier, a young blonde, fixed her cold blue eyes on Haider and said,

SOLDIER: We’re here defending terrorism, okay. [Weren't you supposed to be defending against terrorism? Freudian slip?] Now all those civilians that died in the World Trade Centre, you heard about that right? HAIDER HAMZA: Yes, I heard. SOLDIER: I’m sure you did. Those are civilians, those were all civilians.

In other words, there were, and are, American soldiers in Iraq who still believe the war in Iraq was about Iraq being responsible for September 11. Or worse, they know it's a crock but they want to believe it. Here's a quote that sent my namesake, Smart Remarks into conniptions (via Tom Tomorrow):

...And despite there being no link between Iraq and the September 11 attacks (Specialist Corporal Michael) Richardson admitted that it gave him his motivation to fight Iraqis. "There's a picture of the World Trade Centre hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my flak jacket. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think, 'They hit us at home and, now, it's our turn.' I don't want to say payback but, you know, it's pretty much payback."

I also saw a graffito (sp?) on a wall among the rubble: "This is for 9/11". Do they really believe this stuff? or do they just want to believe it? and which is worse?
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 11:35 PM ----- BODY:

Ratbags on the net? Don't laugh!

I was interested in Trish Wilson's debunking of "Parental Alienation Syndrome" on her blog, not because this issue affects me, thank the lord, but because I'm interested - if that's the right word- by the rise of ultra-right Men's groups and their success or failure as lobby groups with our Government. We have had a nasty outbreak of it here. Gobsmacked was not the word for it today when I saw this article about our Prime Miniature and his new direction on family law. This week, he announced he was going to take a new look at the system of child custody, with special reference to introducing the system of 'rebuttable joint custody', yet another policy plagiarised from the US. This, on the Alan Jones program -- with the Man Who Would Be Adviser to governments on his many right-wing hobby horses. The Age article says

if John Howard goes ahead with changes to Family Court custody battles, John Abbott and two other Adelaide advocates of father's rights will take credit for laying the groundwork.

The name caught my eye. John Abbott? Is this the same John Abbott who formed the Blackshirts, a very nasty, very sick group of vigilantes who terrorise women and children in Melbourne? The same John Abbott who has repeatedly copped a blast from the Attorney-General, Rob Hulls, for his intemperate language, and violent, threatening behaviour? I'd be interested to know. That particular John Abbott and his cohort dress up in black with black caps or balaclavas and masks, and march around suburban streets where separated mothers are living, yelling insults through megaphones, knocking on doors at night, threatening and intimidating women, children and even grandparents. Abbott said in one interview, among other things,

"People should take (adulterers) out, find the nearest branch and hang them for what they're doing. But unfortunately the law does not allow that, and we are law-abiding. The question they need to ask is how long before the laws change. "When they do, the adulterers will hang up like chandeliers in every park. And that will come."

If it is the same John Abbott, then what does that say about our country, that the man in the Prime Minister's office is being manipulated by one of the country's greatest nutters and various tinpot organisations? The AGE article goes on to say,

For years Mr Abbott, the political officer of the Richard Hillman Foundation, joined two other men scarred by Family Court battles. They were a former South Australian Liberal Party official, Geoff Greene, and the Joint Parenting Association president, Yuri Joakimidis. The policy - known as rebuttable joint custody - is used by several states in the US. According to Mr Abbott, the son of divorced parents whose own marriage ended in an acrimonious custody case in 1998, the issue landed on Mr Howard's desk as a result of a strategy he formulated two years ago. He put a draft bill drawn up by Mr Joakimidis, who had researched the American laws, to One Nation's Senator Len Harris.

From the information available on the Blackshirts John Abbott on the net- you need a strong stomach-- his own life-changing marriage breakup was in 1990, not 1998. However, even if it's a different John Abbott behind the lobbying, the involvement of One Nation and the Richard Hillman foundation are a worry. Adele Horin, in the SMH, gives very good reasons why even academics known to be sympathetic to dads are pointing out that the idea of making 50-50 joint parenting the default (with the onus on the mother to prove otherwise at her own expense) is not a good idea. However, with "Academic" being a dirty word in the anti-intellectual climate of Australia today, Howard would rather listen to organisations like the Richard Hillman Foundation. I googled the Foundation, and found the kind of site which, by bad spelling and poor web design, make it very difficult to find out what they are about. However, "fact sheets" (!) will take you to a page with a plethora of wacky right-wing anti-feminist links, including "Agony" Arndt-- and she's one of the saner ones. The Richard Hillman organisation is an amateur antifeminist think tank, and they're fans of the Parental Alienation idea. So, the PM would rather listen to extreme right wing organisations and junk social science than the universities on this one. New Zealand's starting to look good.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 11:01 PM ----- BODY:

Baying at the moon

I'm not sure what phase the moon is in at the moment, but the neocon cabal of sob sisters who are given free rein in the Fairfax press have been baying and frothing at the mouth even more than usual. I'm sure there are many, like me, who rather enjoy reading these ratbags; it's a toe-curling pleasure watching them perform in public, rather like watching The Office, or perhaps a train wreck. Bettina "Agony" Arndt gets her rants published regularly in the Age, where anyone with an antifeminist agenda seems to be welcome in the Opinion pages. (I don't know if this is a particular bee in the editorial bonnet, or what.) Anyway, with this article, "Oh, for the Glory days of Manhood", she surpasses herself and ties herself in more knots than the most accomplished yogi in order to "prove" that, again and as usual, the problems men experience in the modern world are all because (all together now) Feminism has gorn too far.

If men ever dared to reflect wistfully on former glories of patriarchy, high on the list would be the freedom once enjoyed by the man of the house to come and go as he pleased. That's long gone. The married man today rarely has rights to control his own leisure. Hell, no. He's now on a leash - a very short leash.

Now, that's funny, I could have sworn that I was using precious computer time to update my blog while my darling is out at indoor soccer (on other nights, read, out at the pub, or fishing-- yes, he likes to fish in the wee hours.) But that's just not good enough for Agony! According to her paradigm of male leisure, he should be happiest when... visiting prostitutes!???? I kid you not. Read on...

Take a look at the sex survey - The Australian Study of Health and Relationships - published in April by La Trobe University. It suggested fewer men may now be paying for sex, with older men significantly more likely to have used prostitutes than younger ones, despite the fact that such illicit activities have traditionally been dominated by the young. Are men being scared off by concerns about sexually transmitted diseases? Or is it that there's no longer any need to pay for sex, given the abundance of willing women? Perhaps, but there's also the interesting possibility that men simply aren't being allowed the unrestricted leisure that they once enjoyed to engage in such activities. It is far too risky to head off down to St Kilda for a quickie when tabs are being kept on your time out.

Well, he isn't quite in the first flush of youth,Bettina; I suppose you could have a point there; when he comes home smelling of fish in the wee hours without actually catching anything, I do wonder sometimes. But I digress. Bettina siezes on a study by Michael Bittman of who uses ABS statistics to try and show that womens leisure is of higher quality than that of men. However, she does not mention that the same Michael Bittman also says,

vertical networks, eg patriarchal families,link 'unequal agents in asymmetric relations of hierarchy and dependence’, and are therefore capable neither of facilitating democracy nor of generating genuine civic-mindedness. Jennifer Wilkinson and Michael Bittman, Volunteering, Social Participation and Democracy- the heart of the matter

As if the idea that visiting prostitutes wasn't the sine qua non of male leisure wasn't enough, Agony continues digging herself in deeper:

A man can still enjoy his leisure - the can in front of the telly, kicking the football around with the kids - but these days his fun is largely of the carefully monitored domestic variety, with limited opportunities for drunken debauchery, hooning and whoring. This has seen the decline of the fine Australian custom of slipping off to the pub to knock back a few ales on the way home from work. The local, the corner pub that once thickly dotted all our towns and cities, is fast disappearing....."

Isn't this insulting? If I were a man reading this, I would be furious. You will have noticed that Agony sets herself up as the defender of poor men against vicious feminists (or, even, women in general), however, do you see yourself in this insulting picture? If you are not comatose with a can, you would rather be hooning and whoring? Is there no middle ground between doing nothing and being a kind of grunting, inebriated poor man's Wayne Carey? Notice also, "kicking the football around with the kids"..."wiping snotty noses" (Children, ick!) I expect Agony Arndt has few nephews and neices, as she doesn't appear to realise that there are other things you can do with kids these days, and that many fathers actually enjoy the time spent with them. I suppose if you can't imagine having a really good time without "head(ing) off down to St Kilda for a quickie.....drunken debauchery, hooning and whoring", it's a little hard to understand. Note I'm all for the occasional drunken debauchery; it's the prescription of such as a preferred mode of living which is a little extreme. (Hey, I mean for the majority of us, Bettina; you go right ahead.) This icon of the 60s also appears unaware of a world in which men AND women actually slip off to the local pub, together. Radical! One of the people she quotes to "back up" her questionable conclusions is Doug Stevens, a Social Science academic in New Zealand. Googling Doug, we find that he is doing exemplary work with work/life balance issues, and is no way endorsing the whorin', drinkin' life that Agony thinks he should have. ( As a committed father, with 10 and 13 year old daughters, he is also an excellent role model of work and life balance: using flexible work arrangements to assist with after school soccer practice; sharing in school holiday care and helping his wife when she started a small, home-based business. In the early 1990s, Doug along with his colleague, Tina Fitchett, lobbied and finally won approval for the building of a child care centre on one of the campuses. " D'oh!) But look at the portrayal of domestic life a la Agony. The poor wretches! "wiping snotty noses" (She loves kids, doesn't she!) "... and sorting darks from whites." Oh, the humanity. The truth is that most men - or a lot of men - simply grow up, and love being with their children, and enjoy themselves in a myriad of ways that were not thought of when Agony Arndt was growing up. But Agony seems to be saying that men won't adopt civilised behaviour of their own volition; no, they're still the beasts who have to be kept on a short leash. Images of leashes and reins abound in this article; perhaps the sight of their older married brothers straining at the leash is giving them pause. ..."etc. With friends like this, do men need enemies? And isn't this "Men Beasts, Women Angels, Women keep men on leash" interpretation of life somewhat nineteenth century? After an inexplicable digression where she attempts to blame the demise of the corner pub on women (ignoring all other social, economic and demographic factors), she delivers the solemn coup de grace:

When the American National Marriage Project surveyed young men last year about their marriage intentions, it found "the freedom of not having to be responsible to anyone else" was one major reason men were reluctant to commit to marriage. The researchers concluded that "like Henry Higgins, these young men fear losing their solitary pleasures by 'letting a woman in their life'." Who can blame them?

News flash! Young men don't like domesticity! isn't that one of those bleedin' obvious study results which are so mocked by the neocons when they are coming from the other direction? What amazing revelations will Agony bring out next? Also, from my extensive reading of these rightwing columnists, I thought it was the selfishness of young women that was supposed to be behind the demise of the human population, but then consistency is not a feature of this article, or this writer. And imagine the reaction if a leftist / feminist were to advocate "head(ing) off down to St Kilda for a quickie.....drunken debauchery, hooning and whoring", and "these young women fear losing their solitary pleasures by 'letting a man in their life' "in a national broadsheet. The cries of "extremist ratbag" would come from the Arndt / Shanahan /Devine / MacGuinness camp before you could say "Skankin'!" (Next: A Celtic classic from Miranda Devine-- Bigger, badder and even madder than Agony Arndt.)
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 9:39 PM ----- BODY:

A Plague, a Plague of Hugo Weavings

Remember back in the olden days, until ooh I guess the early 80s, movies about The Future were usually about Space travel, and featured shiny, squeaky-clean interiors with banks of spotless computery stuff and all-white gear (think of the fab Spacecraft flight attendants in 2001.) It was more interesting when movie makers started to portray the Future as deconstructed "post-civilisation" grunge instead. But now that's become a cliche, too. I tried to suspend disbelief and enjoy the Matrix Reloaded, I really did. But life with Neo and Trinity in the Good Ship Nebuchadnezzar brought out the Inner Mum in me. "Tsk," I couldn't help thinking, "With all this techno stuff, is it too much to ask they should bring a washing machine on board? Look at the dirt ring around Neo's neck!" It was the grubby mattress ticking which really turned it into farce, though. It reminded me of the Vogon Spaceship in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

``Good grief,'' said Arthur, ``is this really the interior of a flying saucer?......It's a bit squalid, isn't it?'' Ford frowned at the grubby mattresses, unwashed cups and unidentifiable bits of smelly alien underwear that lay around the cramped cabin. ``Well, this is a working ship, you see,'' said Ford. ``These are the Dentrassi sleeping quarters.'' (Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

It was the 100 Hugo Weavings though, that did it for me. And the constant fighting where people are continually flying, hovering and kicking each other on the chin with maximum force without a bone being broken. But mainly all the Hugo Weavings.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 8:23 PM ----- BODY:

Pinko ratbags at it again

Senator Richard Alston thinks the ABC is a nest of commie ratbags. Quelle Surprise! Specifically, he is in a tizz over the ABC's supposed bias against the war in Iraq and distrust of the US. He would like them to stop being so anti-American and engage in unbiased, factual reporting. I'm reminded of the February 2003 analysis of the Murdoch print media by Roy Greenslade, of the Guardian, where he found that out of 175 news editors worldwide, 175 supported the war in Iraq, as did Murdoch. That's an amazing coincidence. If the present government's supporters had their way and the ABC was privatised or abolished, would that be the kind of dispassionate, unbiased reporting you had in mind, Richard? As for CNN and FOX....... The Liberal government has punished the ABC for its lese-Majeste (including airing details of such unmentionable subjects as Australian detention centres and Senator Alston's taxpayer funded, $40.000 Plasma TV by squeezing the national broadcaster's funding in the current Budget leading to the axing of two new childrens' programs. Children, huh! That'll teach them to have such pinko parents and watch TV without ads; Gods knows how much money Hasbro and KFC have lost as a result. Attacking the ABC and calling for its privatisation has become something of a sport among the Right in the last few years. Now that the government is thinking about a Free Trade Agreement with the US, including relaxation of our local content and media ownership laws, this is more important than ever before. Meanwhile, across the Pacific, Media ownership laws are under threat, too. Alas, a Blog and Trish Wilson , among others, are jumping up and down and we should be, too.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 6:49 PM ----- BODY:

Rich Mum, Poor Mum

When this Internet thingy was moving out of its origins in Academia and the military and gaining momentum among the common folk, there were news reports of a new social division that was going to take place between the Information Rich and the Information Poor. The Information Poor being people who could not afford to access online information. I'm one of the privileged in that I can get access to the internet at home, although it's only a dialup connection. However despite running the internet equivalent of a battered VW Beetle, blogs, Google, international newspapers and journals have given me the ability to research topics I'm interested in to a degree I never would have thought possible. Except. I've recently lost access to one of my favourite must-reads, because they are now a user-pays (and pays highly) system. The Independent Argument used to be my favourite source of opinion writing, and I miss it. I especially miss the wonderful Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and her passionate writing on world events, asylum seekers, ethnicity and being Muslim. I miss Deborah Orr's social criticism. I won't need to wipe coffee off my keyboard because of something funny John Walsh has said. Oh, it's only £1 for 24 hours access ($2.50 in my money), but 24 hours doesn't appeal; I liked to return to their stuff for Quotable Quotes and checking. For a year's subscription it's £30 ($75) and that doesn't give you access to everything - just a limited "package". Disclaimer - I'm not poor, but not so rich that I can fling $75s around. The New York Times, LA Times etc may annoy by making you register and login, but at least they don't discriminate by the ability to pay. For professional journalists perhaps, who could claim things like newspaper subs on tax, perhaps it might work OK, but for ordinary working stiffs like bloggers, this creates an internal subdivision between the Information Rich and the Information Not So Rich. Goodbye, Yasmin, Deborah, Philip, Janet...(Sniff)...I'm deleting you from Favourites.

-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 11:03 AM ----- BODY:

Buffy: Advisor to the US Administration

I saw a post by Ampersand the other day relaying some online discussion of Buffy and its gender politics. Here's another slant - I'm not a Buffy fan, but I thought it was interesting that

....in real life anti-terrorism strategists were pointing to Buffy as an example of what not to do. Just three weeks after 9/11, a forty-two-page report by Anthony H. Cordesman on "Biological Warfare and the 'Buffy Paradigm'" was issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. .....What Is the Buffy Paradigm? Although Cordesman noted that Buffy deals with existential questions, his main point about the Buffy Paradigm is that the vampire slayer "lives in a world of unpredictable threats where each series of crises only becomes predictable when it is over and is followed by a new and unfamiliar one." Some other elements of the paradigm ar * What expertise there is consists largely of bad or uncertain advice and old, flawed, and confusing technical data. * The importance of any given threat changes constantly, past threat behavior does not predict future behavior, and methods of delivery keep changing. * It is never clear whether the threat is internal, from an individual, or from an outside organization. * All efforts at planning a coherent strategy collapse in the face of tactical necessity and the need to deal with unexpected facts on the ground. * The balance between external defense, homeland defense, and response changes constantly. * No success, no matter how important at the time, ever eliminates the risk of future problems.

Read the rest of the article in Dissent Magazine by Maxine Phillips, where she comes to Buffy's defence and offers her own, alernative Buffy paradigm. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 10:38 PM ----- BODY:

How's the liberation going in Iraq?

Pamela Bone thought that the Coalition of the Willing was going to set Iraq on a path, not only of peace and freedom, but of the liberation of women. Sisters would be surfin'. More than that, the war was the only way to do it. Lefties who thought the war was still unjustified were just selfish. Reading these links from Jeanne D'Arc, I have to say, it isn't happening. Just like Afghanistan and Kuwait - my, how unexpected. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 7:49 PM ----- BODY:

Our Gulags

A program on Four Corners on 19 May took the issue of the way Australia treats its asylum seekers from its hiding place behind the issue of the war in Iraq, and put it back where it should be -- on centre stage and in our faces. This article in Margo Kingston's Webdiary gives voice to the depression and anger that many Australians feel, and explores further the unholy alliance of a Government and a "commercial in confidence" privatised system -- You don't tell me too much about what you do, just get me this "outcome".

"I came out here in 1939 as a refugee from Nazi Germany, and I never thought I’d be queuing up outside a concentration camp all these years afterwards to visit the inmates there. That’s a real surprise to me, I have to say." (Walter Bass, visitor to Villawood Detention Centre)

ACM (Australasian Correctional Management) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wackenhut Corporation, a giant American security corporation. Wackenhut is a "jail organisation with a jail philosophy." (ABC, Background Briefing, 6/10/2002.) Mr Ruddock claims Wackenhut provided value for money. It certainly provided for itself according to testimony from former staff. It also "provided" the incarceration of adults and children(some unaccompanied) who are not charged with any crime and most of whom are fleeing persecution. It "provided" Withholding of medical treatment, plumbing, sewage and washing facilities for people, some with diseases or disabilities. Psychiatric harm. Self-harm, attempted suicide. Inappropriate drugging of detainees. Separation of families. Assault with batons and water cannon (the first time Water cannon has been used in Australian history, it's claimed.) It also provided a high level of secrecy-

"The contract with ACM is secret, so accountability is lessened. ACM doesn't speak to the media or the public, and the government can hide behind contract confidentiality and the inordinate time it takes between saying they don't know about the latest allegations and seeking advice from ACM. " (SMH, Margo Kingston's Webdiary, 20 May 2003) It's been described as a "danse Macabre" between the Immigration authorities and the private company.

"I have never known, and I’ve not been able to find, any previous example of Australia detaining people, including children, sick people, elderly people, pregnant women, completely indiscriminate in other words, detaining people in detention centres endlessly, in cruel circumstances with no access to any of the ordinary fundamentals that go with being a human." (Marcus Einfeld, former Federal Court judge)

80% of detainees featured in the program were found to be genuine refugees. It is a scandal that their misery was used for private profit. It's the privatisation of cruelty. The system is designed to provoke extreme behaviour from inmates and jailers alike while encouraging the public to think of asylum seekers as "illegals" and "queue jumpers". We are being encouraged to think that they throw their children, deliberately, into the sea. It's our treatment of the children which will be the worst, when we look back on this period in our history. We are all implicated in a system of "border protection" where some lives are worth less than others. Strangely, actual terrorists persist in travelling by air, instead of spending desperate weeks on leaky boats. Further reading: Spare rooms for Refugees, Rural Australians for Refugees, and Siev X. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 8:07 PM ----- BODY:

I don't want your Tax cut, Mr Costello

So, my take-home pay is to increase by a fabulous $4. As the Liberals' Senator Vanstone remarked (once she'd removed her foot from her mouth), what will that buy you these days? And whatever made you think we'd imagine you were being generous? As Fran Kelly reports,

FRAN KELLY: ....Even with the more generous tax scales announced last night, only 75 per cent of taxpayers are now paying 30 per cent or less in tax not the 80 per cent promised three years ago. That means more people are paying more tax. SIMON CREAN: Just take this year alone - bracket creep will yield them, I think it's $3.2 billion. They're giving back $2.4 billion. So they're still in front now.

Why am I so ungrateful? Because I'm worried my son and daughter will be severely limited in their chances of a good Tertiary education. I'm worried about how we will fare under an increasingly user-pays, two-tiered health system. I'm worried about the absence of any serious environmental measures and the lack of awareness of the need for government spending on infrastructure and social capital. Brendan Nelson, Peter Costello and the rest of the Baby Boomer politicians got the benefit of free University education, brought in by the Whitlam governmentin the 1970s. Their spin doctors had to do a bit of thinking on that one, as interviewers had an embarrassing habit of bringing up the subject. Some have even suggested that if Peter and Brendan want to pull the ladder up after themselves, they should at least pay the cost of their university education back from their enormous salaries. The counter-spin they have chosen goes as follows: Why should the majority of hard-working taxpayers who don't go to university subsidise a middle class minority of University students who will benefit greatly from their university studies? This has been a big hit with truculent talkback callers. This argument really makes me reach for my gun, because John Howard has been known to dismiss arguments against rising social inequality as the "Politics of Envy". That's an excellent soundbite, but they don't have the slightest hesitation in using the Politics of Envy to justify increased University fees and crippling student loans. (It's stealing ideology from One Nation again; the idea that university educated people are an Elite who will hijack society with their leftie views if we allow the wrong people in.) It's a furphy, anyway. For one, we all benefit in many ways from the tertiary education of others. Second, the freely available university education of the 1970s-80s did make university education available to people who wouldn't otherwise have been able to. And as many before me have pointed out, no-one uses all the taxpayer funded goods that they help to contribute to. No-one uses every highway, every hospital; not everyone benefits from Government tax breaks to woodchipping and real estate speculation. As Terry Lane says,

There is some appeal in this reasoning. I would quite like to make my own spending choices which are presently taken out of my hands by politicians. I would not spend one voluntary cent on military adventures abroad, hanging off the arse of George the Smaller. Killing Iraqis is not my idea of money well spent. But I would willingly redirect what I am saving on invading foreign countries to comfort foreigners living in misery. I am not just lining my own pocket here. I also wouldn't spend any of my hard earned on Institutes of Sport -- I would rather it went to subsidise orchestras. I would also be mean about politician's salaries, perks and obscene superannuation payouts. And I would take away the prime ministerial aeroplane and let him queue up like the rest of us. Oh, all right, he can travel up the front -- we won't deny him all ego gratification.

Yes, you read it correctly - one class of tertiary students in Australia will still have their degrees paid for by the taxpayers - No, not the ones studying nuclear physics, biology or Baroque music-- I mean the geniuses at the Australian Institute of Sport! The Clever Country! And that's another thing, thanks for reminding me, Terry. Instead of crowing about our surplus, which is simply money taken from us and not spent, can't we give a billion or 3 to the Iraquis-- whose country we have just helped to make into a pile of rubble-- and the Balinese, who have got the rough end of the stick after their livelihood has been all but destroyed by the recent Sari Club bombing. Australia has part responsibility for both of these disasters and we should be doing something about it. The Liquid List and Nathan Newman's and Silver Rights' posts on the subject, they both suffer from public perceptions that they are mediocre candidates-by-default, and further, (because of this obsession with appealing to some imagined Centre), that they do not have the guts to stand up to anti-democratic, racist or otherwise nasty measures introduced by present Government.

Why is Kerry inevitable? Aside from the basic strong support he has on his own, he is likely to be everyone else's second choice as the field narrows. Just look at the candidates and think about where their supporters will go. On issues like the war, Kerry's strategic waffle makes him the obvious consensus candidate... I get the impression this guy is thoroughly underwhelming ("...everyone else's second choice....Strategic waffle makes him the obvious consensus candidate...")

(Homer Simpson voice, scratches chin): "Strategic Waffle, eh!??" That, to many Australians, describes Crean in a nutshell. Yet both men have good qualities and at times they are capable of formulating good policies, as many people have pointed out. I sympathise, in a way, with both Kerry and Sime; that kind of "dull, boring machine man" reputation is hard to shake. However, (grinding sound as I drag out soap box) the Australian Federal Labor party (like the Democrats) has to stop trying to beat the Liberals at the economic rationalist game and return to their former role as the party of equity and social justice. There are some thoughts on the subject here and here from the journalist Margo Kingston. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 6:56 PM ----- BODY:

The Klingon thing

Alas! It was all a media beatup... of course. (Via Ampersand). -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 1:33 PM ----- BODY:

Jobs for the Boys, Girls, and Klingons

Because of linking blogs from other blogs of interest, I seem to have a disproportionate number of Oregon blogs on my favourite reading list. That doesn't count as a coincidence, of course, it's because they link to each other. However, oddly enough, I noticed that both MacDiva and Silver Rights might be looking for work soon. In that case, I suggest they brush up on their Spoken Klingon.

Position Available: Interpreter, must be fluent in Klingon. The language created for the "Star Trek" TV series and movies is one of about 55 needed by the office that treats mental health patients in metropolitan Multnomah County, Oregon. "We have to provide information in all the languages our clients speak," said Jerry Jelusich, a procurement specialist for the county Department of Human Services, which serves about 60,000 mental health clients.

This is one organisation which is prepared to boldly go the extra light year for their clients. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 8:56 PM ----- BODY:

Saving Jessica

When the movie based on "Saving Private Jessica" comes out, as it inevitably will, it might be fun to compare and contrast the events as portrayed in the movie with the same events as reported in these two articles in the Toronto Star and the London Times. Via Blogorrhea (Links bloggered - scroll down to "History is but Contending Discourses", May 9.)

There's a bit for Mel Brooks fans, too. When F-Troop does finally turn up, they handcuff bemused staff and wounded patients, and proceed to trash the joint: The Iraqi medical staff fanned out to assess the damage. In all, 12 doors were broken, a sterilized operating theatre contaminated, and the specialized traction bed in which Lynch had been placed was trashed. "That was a special bed, the only one like it in the hospital, but we gave it to Jessica because she was developing a bed sore," Houssona said.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 6:25 PM ----- BODY:

Hey!

Salaam Pax is back! If white on black web pages make your brain hurt, the new posts (from March 22) have been reprinted in the Guardian.

The Joys of Globalisation

The Patrick Corporation has landed a reconstruction contract in Iraq. That'd be the Patrick corporation that tried to train an alternative non-union workforce in Dubai and used security guards with balaclavas and rottweilersas part of their Human Resources policy when the workforce got uppity. Lucky, lucky Iraquis.
While we're on the subject of the Maritime Union of Australia, wages and conditions, I can now segue effortlessly into another topic I was going to blog about. We live near the docks, and Our Port of Melbourne Authority has started an Adopt a Ship program in the kids' school. Each school is allocated a container ship - "ours" is called the PONL Encounter. They have a big map of the world in the corridor with a little magnetic ship so they can follow "their" ship's progress around the world (well, that's the theory, but the temptation to move the ship around is overwhelming to littluns, so that the PONL Encounter seemed to be stuck somewhere in the middle of Algeria last time I looked.) The kids brought home a Fact Sheet about the ship -- its weight, height, tonnage, who the crew are, what it does and so on. The idea is that the kids track the ship and contact the crew via email to learn all about life on a container ship. Cute, lovable project! I read the Fact Sheet on the PONL Encounter and my heart sank. Right up the top (and you have to give them credit for honesty here) is Where the Ship is Registered...Liberia. Uh-huh. Further down, we learn that the entire Officer class is German while the entire crew is Philipino. Apparently, there aren't any Australians employed in the crew. (As Human Interest, we are told that the officers eat traditional German food, while the crew eat rice and curries.) Uh-huh. So the kids are adopting a cute, lovable Flag of Convenienceship. At least it was built in 2002, so it won't have turned into a rust bucket yet, like so many of them. I thought about making some kind of comment to the teachers. But it's only a primary school, so I think it's probably premature to try to startany kiddie-style beginner activism... like, providing email suggestions for the class: What award are the crew paid under? Why are there no Philipino officers or German crew? How did Liberia become such a great maritime nation? What is a Merchant Navy, and why don't we have one any more?.... My friend Cath says forget it - let them have the fun of following the ship around and don't spoil it for them by calling it a Ship of Shame. So I'm shutting up and bloggin' it instead. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 3:33 PM ----- BODY:

Texas Crude

How's that George Bush! Landing on an aircraft carrier in a Viking jet ("at high speed" according to the report I'm reading in The Age) and emerging "in a flight suit with a helmet under his arm." (Notwithstanding that the aircraft carrier was moored somewhere off the Californian Coast, so the need for George's combat gear is not immediately obvious to us non PR types.) The news article, which I haven't bookmarked and unfortunately has moved on, goes on to say, "During the flight Mr Bush took the controls of the plane. As one of the crew put it, "he regressed, he became a kid." If any more proof was needed of the boys-and-their-toys mentality... His lapdog, John Howard, has been visiting the Presidential ranch for the last couple of days. One can only imagine the orgy of brown nosing that has gone on. Despite the very real possibility that Howard will sell Australia down the river (as well as committing our young people to more US conflicts) to appease the giant, a small "odd spot" item on the ABC news last night took a straw poll of Texans - not one guy or gal stopped in the street knew who "John Howard" was. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 8:12 PM ----- BODY:

Bankrupting Medicare

Many of us here down in Oz are worried the Australian Government will scrap the Medicare system -- a system of universal medical care funded by an annual levy-- and move towards more of a two tier system, or should that be three tier; A squalid, second-rate "safety net" public system for the poor and aged (health card holders), private health care for the rich, and a shortfall in the middle for those who are working but can't afford expensive health cover and large "gap" payments.
In short, we're afraid of moving towards the US model, where many - if not most- personal bankruptcies occur because of medical bills.
(From commondreams.org):

US Study: Medical Bills Main Culprit In Bankruptcies Americans are 'one illness away' from financial collapse by Araminta Wordsworth Ruinous health-care costs, not profligate spending, are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy among Americans, a new study has found. "The American middle class is solid and secure and prosperous -- we are unlike anything ever known in history -- yet American families live just one illness or accident away from complete financial collapse," one of the study authors, Elizabeth Warren, said yesterday. About 500,000 people sought bankruptcy protection in the United States last year because of the crushing burden of medical expenses, says the study, to be published next month in Norton's Bankruptcy Adviser, a specialty periodical for lawyers. Read the whole article

I couldn't find Elizabeth Warren's study but I did find an interview with her on the Harvard Law School site.
-------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 7:28 PM ----- BODY:

Remembering Annie

An important date has gone by without comment from me, but then this blog is always behind (as advertised) On the 13th of April, 2001, I got an email from Tony, my friend Annie's husband, to say that Annie had died.
Annie was an artist, a traveller and seeker of enlightenment. We spent quite a large part of our childhoods as friends in Adelaide (South Australia). Later, after I'd moved to Victoria, we travelled for a few months in Indonesia, South East Asia, India and Nepal. I was the nerdy bookish one and Annie was the brave, outdoorsy one. While we were on the road together, as she reminded me years later, I was in charge of language and she was in charge of navigation. I never had her physical abilities or courage; We rode horses together when we were children and her talent, and my lack of it, made me laugh. She could be blunt and to the point; she had a zen-like quality of cutting through layers of bullshit to speak the truth as she saw it. I didn't always agree with her, but she was a person who had the rare quality of making me shut up and listen. She had a powerful tie to the land and came to love the Australian desert especially. Her favourite place, though, was the Coorong wilderness in South Australia-a beautiful, lonely place of white sand dunes and birds. Later, Annie moved to Darwin and we lost touch somewhat. As you do. And whenever we did get together, it was as if we'd never lost touch. As you do. And because I was immersed in the demanding worlds of music, and then family, I didn't feel I had time and money to visit people far away. There would be all the time in the world to see her-next year or the year after or the year after that, once things calmed down...As you do. She was such a tough, healthy, golden girl, it never occurred to me that I might lose her.
It took Annie's incipient death from cancer to make me pull the finger out and fly to Tasmania, which was where she last lived. Again, we clicked into place and I assumed the role of driver, ferrying Annie around Hobart on her many errands, buying oysters on the wharf to eat while waiting in the Palliative Care clinic, seeing friends, taking her to the asian grocery to buy Ikan Bilis and fish sauce for a Malaysian dinner she wanted to (and did) make. It was a warm Autumn, an Indian summer... very like this autumn. Before she died Annie was becoming a practicioner of Tibetan buddhism, and the Easter festival of death and rebirth, coming as it does around the time of her death, with the blue skies and long weekends of early Southern Australian autumn, can't fail to make me think of her. Write to a friend you haven't seen for years. Do it today! -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 10:41 PM ----- BODY:

They Do things Differently there

We think Australia is so like America. We complain about being the 51st state. We bemoan the creeping hegemony of US language, spelling and culture. We watch American television, hear those Californian accents every day and feel that it is all so familiar. Then, sometimes, we catch a glimpse of something that really shatters that familiarity. Something that reminds us that the US really is another country. Mostly, I get these little epiphanies from seeing how much more religious Americans are than we are, and how much more they talk about it. Ditto "Patriotism". Then - there's the increased, ever-present role of the military. The other day I saw one of those things that make my jaw hit the floor. I was watching the Current Affairs program Foreign correspondent . The program, America's Child Soldiers,described the military high schools run in poorer inner city urban areas in the US. Now I was vaguely aware of the ritzier Military academies, as well as our own Military establishments e.g. Duntroon. However, the sight of a high school where every child was in full dress uniform-and I mean FULL DRESS uniform with frogging, bits hanging off, silly hat and the whole thing, not comfy Cargoes and Camo jackets- was disconcerting. This was the High School from Hell, where superannuated Military types conduct Tours of Inspection past ranks of the most miserable looking students I have ever seen, mindless obedience is confused with discipline, and we see the school corridor with large, colourful, painted murals of ... TANKS and other Military paraphernalia! Good God! I thought, if someone had made that up I wouldn't have believed it. Poor kids. And even poorer kids when they become cannon (or machinegun) fodder. The worst thing about these schools however is what I perceive to be their cynical underlying purpose. They are situated mainly in underprivileged areas where the residents are more likely to be black or hispanic, and poor. The kids are subjected to a very aggressive recruiting program from an early age. And here's the really obscene bit: In the "No Child Left Behind" Act of November 2002, the Bush administration tied School funding to admitting these recruiters into the schools, and supplying kids' personal details and addresses!

The recruiters cited the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush's sweeping new education law passed earlier this year. There, buried deep within the law's 670 pages, is a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only with access to facilities, but also with contact information for every student -- or face a cutoff of all federal aid. David Goodman (See link below). And
Congress recently passed legislation that requires high schools to provide to military recruiters, upon request, access to secondary school students and directory information on those students.  Both the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2002 reflect these requirements. In accordance with those Acts, military recruiters are entitled to receive the name, address, and telephone listing of juniors and seniors in high school.  In addition, local education agencies must provide military recruiters the same access to secondary school students as they provide to postsecondary institutions or to prospective employers. --Memo to Principals, Commonwealth of Virginia, Department of Education>

Now that's obscene. Poor children and parents are often unaware of other avenues with which to get access to higher education. Children who commit to joining the military stream and then try to "back out" are heavily penalised, pressured and have to pay back large sums of money. This article by David Goodman at MotherJones.com gives more details. Unfortunately, some people seem to have got the idea that it is not worthwhile to fund public education, and/or that some people are less deserving of higher education than others, and therefore have to "pay for it" by putting themselves into the firing line. Could this ever happen here? I would hope that even as our callous, user-pays Government re-jigs the tertiary system to make it less accessible to poorer students, they wouldn't go as far as that... I hope. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 10:03 AM ----- BODY:

Oh, Manne

I'm really interested in the subject of work-life balance, "Family friendly" work, downshifting, and finding an alternative to an economic model which relies on neverending growth in consumption. However, in this article, Anne Manne, a local antifeminist, manages to co-opt legitimate criticisms of today's excessively materialistic lifestiles, to argue that the solution is for women to go back into the kitchen. Careers for women lead to a fraught lifestyle which is primarily consumption driven, therefore, we should go back to being homemakers instead of workers. How I wish these people would practice what they preach! If careers are bad for women, perhaps being a columnist in a broadsheet daily is bad for her, and she should stop it? Hacking away at one of the straw women she sets up in her piece, Manne laments,

Work, says commentator Ulrick Beck, is "so omnipotent that there is no other concept opposed to it ... only those who work are truly human". Feminism, Hamilton argues, has been partly hijacked by such logic."

Well, as I see it, the wonderful and necessary debate about life balance, consumption and work practices has just been hijacked by the antifeminists, and I'm not happy about that,Anne. If women go back into the fulltime homemaker role, where does that leave the men? Exactly - working in excess of 9 to 5, just like before. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 9:52 AM ----- BODY:

You're going to get Democracy, Sonny, even if I have to kill you for it

The outpouring of smug righteousness from supporters of the war in Iraq from Friday onwards has been stomach turning. These people, who have ignored the carnage in the Republic of Congo during the period-- among other things-- and have not made any mention of Burma, Tibet, etc, reckon we antiwar types are all really selfish because we think bombing the sh** out of a country and killing numerous civilians and children is not a good way to establish demahcracy in that country. Many of these commentators are simply ordinary people, who are otherwise probably quite nice, like these ones. "Well meaning and naive" is the sort of backhander usually applied to the Left. I think it many of these people are well meaning and naive. We did not hear them calling for the liberation of Iraq in the last ten years, nor during the leadup to war. No, it wasn't on the agenda until Rumsfeld et al got really desperate at the dearth of WMD discoveries and the emerging fact that there was no linkage at all between Saddam and S11. I did not hear them refer to the fact that it was the US sanctions which had greatly contributed to misery and death among Iraquis, particularly the infant mortality rate. Some of them don't seem to have heard of the PNAC agenda. Suddenly, it became clear and simple that we must go in and bomb these people in order to free them. And the picture we got of the "liberation" of Baghdad, after the alternative news services had been bombed by the US... Stage managed and airbrushed as much as possible. It has been swallowed without a murmur by people here. Hey, the people of iraq are ecstatic! Look at that photo of a US marine kissing a baby! (It's bad enough that babies are at risk of being kissed by politicians when you venture into the shopping centre. Now they're at risk of being kissed by members of an invading army for their PR dossier, assuming the baby has managed to evade the daisycutter bombs previously.) The thousand-plus killed and injured civilians have been airbrushed out of the picture. Or, it was somehow..."Worth it". US Civilians killed in the World trade centre - it's a tragedy. Civilians of "Middle Eastern Appearance" killed in a US invasion-- it's for their Own Good. So much has been overlooked in the last week. For one, that democracy has not been established. There is no freedom in Baghdad - only chaos. Hospitals have no security and no water. Marines are still killing noncombatants in their hair-trigger nervousness, and standing watching while looters dismantle public and private buildings. I'm going to the Palm Sunday peace march today, with my 81- year old Mum, who is an incorrigible old rioter. I expect to see the smug ignorant sneering on the sidelines. [The reference to Palm Sunday shows this post is published a whil after being written. It was originally posted on 11th April and resurrected from the ones I accidentally deleted, courtesy of an evil Comments box. We went to the march, and it was good. Not much sneering that I could see. Read Body and Soul's wonderful angry piece of April 13 for some of the bitter truths behind the Murdoch press's portrayal of a happy populace eager to usher in some new golden age of westernisation.] -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 9:49 PM ----- BODY:

Oh, shit.

I seem to have deleted all my posts. Anyone else have this problem? -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 9:46 PM ----- BODY: Just experimenting here with a free Comments box... Dum de dum... Talk amongst yourselves

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Comment: </textarea> </td></tr> <tr><td colspan=2><input type=submit name=add value="Post comment"></td></tr> </table> </form> -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 11:27 AM ----- BODY: <h3>Ships of Shame</h3> Daughter's school has a new project- Adopt a Ship. The children will track its progress around the world and email the crew. (Which part of the crew is a moot point as you'll see shortly.) The fact sheet she brought home is full of cute information, e.g. <blockquote> <i>She is 56 metres high from the bottom of the keel to the top of the navigation mast - Mrs {School Principal} is 160 cm tall which means if we stood 35 Mrs {School Principals} on each other's heads, they would be about as tall as the ship.</i> </blockquote> The fact sheet also provides the following information - and you have to give them credit for honesty: <blockquote> <i> The P & O Nedland Encounter was...registered in Monrovia, Liberia. Flag - Liberian</i> </blockquote> and <blockquote> <i>The officers are German and have typical German meals for lunch and dinner, while the crew are Philipino, and dine on rice and curries. </i> </blockquote> Uh-huh - it's a Flag of Convenience ship. The ones which are registered in a 3rd world country in order to circumvent environmental, safety and industrial legislation. Kind of "floating special economic zones". The ones which are responsible for so many oil spills. The ones which mean that Australia doesn't have a merchant fleet any more. At least the "Encounter" was built in 2002, which means it's not yet a complete rust bucket like many other Flag of Convenience ships. Watch this space. Some of the emails to the "Nedloyd Encounter" may ask some awkward questions. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 10:58 AM ----- BODY: <h3>You're going to get Democracy, Sonny, even if I have to kill you for it</h3> The outpouring of smug righteousness from supporters of the war in Iraq from Friday onwards has been stomach turning. These people, who have ignored the <a href="http://allafrica.com/stories/200304100101.html" target="_blank">carnage in the Republic of Congo </a>during the period, and have not made any mention of Burma, Tibet, etc, reckon we antiwar types are all really selfish because we think bombing the sh** out of a country and killing numerous civilians and children is not a good way to establish demahcracy in that country. Many of these commentators are simply ordinary people, who are otherwise probably quite nice, like <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/10/1049567805135.html" target="_blank">these ones. </a> "Well meaning and naive" is the sort of backhander usually applied to the Left. I think it many of these people are well meaning and naive. We did not hear them calling for the liberation of Iraq in the last ten years, nor during the leadup to war. No, it wasn't on the agenda until Rumsfeld et al got really desperate at the dearth of WMD discoveries and the emerging fact that there was no linkage at all between Saddam and S11. I did not hear them refer to the fact that it was the US sanctions which had greatly contributed to misery and death among Iraquis, particularly the infant mortality rate. Some of them don't seem to have heard of the <a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/" target="_blank">PNAC</a> agenda. Suddenly, it became clear and simple that we must go in and bomb these people in order to free them. And the picture we got of the "liberation" of Baghdad, after the alternative news services had been bombed by the US... Stage managed and airbrushed as much as possible. It has been swallowed without a murmur by people here. Hey, the people of iraq are ecstatic! Look at that photo of a US marine kissing a baby! (It's bad enough that babies are at risk of being kissed by politicians when you venture into the shopping centre. Now they're at risk of being kissed by members of an invading army for their PR dossier, assuming the baby has managed to evade the daisycutter bombs previously.) The thousand-plus killed and injured civilians have been airbrushed out of the picture. Or, it was somehow..."Worth it". US Civilians killed in the World trade centre - it's a tragedy. Civilians of "Middle Eastern Appearance" killed in a US invasion-- it's for their Own Good. So much has been overlooked in the last week. For one, that democracy has not been established. There is no freedom in Baghdad - only chaos. Hospitals have no security and no water. Marines are still killing noncombatants in their hair-trigger nervousness, and standing watching while looters dismantle public and private buildings. I'm going to the Palm Sunday peace march today, with my 81- year old Mum, who is an incorrigible old rioter. I expect to see the smug ignorant sneering on the sidelines. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 7:30 PM ----- BODY: <h3>It's a Hard Rubbish Night</h3> This Tuesday was Hard Rubbish day. I don't know what you call it in your part of the world. But as <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/03/30/1048962642432.html" target="_blank"> this article by Sian Prior </a> describes, it's an age-old tradition. Thanks to this much-loved system of silent barter, student households get their brown striped couches, woodwork nerds get their bits of plank and wobbly chairs, I get classic wooden orange crates and bits of horrible carpet to use as weed mats, and everybody's happy. Except for those miserable people at the Council, that is. On the latest flyers for Hard Rubbish Collection you can see the following: <blockquote> Scavenging Scavenging is an offence under local law no 6 and offenders will be prosecuted. Residents are encouraged to report offenders. </blockquote> Miserable, isn't it! Not only do they try to crush this tradition that has been a part of our suburbs since.... Oh well, since the days of hard rubbish collection... but they go that step further and encourage residents to <I> dob on each other</I>. (Aus. Colloq. To Dob: to inform, to be a tattletale, to sneak.) They really are whittling away at the Australian national character here. To their credit, the residents of our suburb are resisting the dead hand of City Hall. We put out the little boy's last bike, still working OK. Puffing down the driveway with the latest load of left-over chipboard and lo, Sian's prophecy had come to pass: <blockquote> <p><i>And from every spider web-infested shed was wheeled forth an old bicycle whose rusting chain would need only a bath in oil to be fully functional again, according to the man who put them all into the back of his ute and drove them away to a better life.</p></i> </blockquote> I felt almost teary with the absolute rightness of it as a stranger drove away with the little bike in the car boot. We got that bike from a nature strip ourselves, and now we were passing it on in kind. I gave him a cheery wave to indicate my approval as he accelerated guiltily away. (Expecting me to dob him in, of course.) It's small acts of civil disobedience like that which preserve our Australian way of life. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 8:58 PM ----- BODY: <h3>Relaxed and Comfortable</h3> Have you noticed one of the rhetorical tricks of the Right is to condemn left-wing commentators by describing them as "comfortable", "middle class", the "latte set", "well-off" etcetera? For instance, this example by Gerard Henderson, who is usually one of the more sensible conservative commentators - this time <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/31/1048962696816.html" target="blank"> losing it over Michael Moore.</a> <blockquote> <p> <i> Alienated types tend to be relatively well-off and well-educated men and women who enjoy the freedoms and riches provided by Western societies and use their status to dump on politicians and, by implication, those who elected them.</i></p> </blockquote> Egads. I never knew the MacGuinnesses, O'Reillys, Lileks, Saluzinskys, Devines and Akkermans (Akkermen?) were living in such squalor. Why did no one tell us? Can't the despised John Pilger or some other well-off lefty make a documentary on Tim Blair and Imre's rat infested concrete drainpipe.. Miranda Devine's furnished boarding house with the one hot plate...James Lileks' sandbagged, war-torn foxhole? Oh, the humanity! What about chickenhawks (like some of the above) who appear to spend their lives in, well, comfort, far from the action they're cheering on? Takes one to know one, guys. -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 9:01 PM ----- BODY: <h3>Blather</h3> Sorry about the links not working in the last post - left an = out. Here goes again -- I think I've fixed them. I only just found out how to update my sidebar... I need a support group for the HTML challenged. Are all blogs this lame when they're just starting out? I read Ampersand, Lileks, Jeanne D'Arc and others who just blow me away with their fluency. Fluency is what I ain't got. I need fluency lessons. I promise not to talk about blogging anymore; I'm new to this. Obviously! -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 9:09 PM ----- BODY: This is quite old. I'm using it as an egregious example of how some people are hellbent on stopping antiwar protest, because if you lived in Iraq, the evil Iraqui regime wouldn't let you do it. So... We have to curb our freedom of speech because otherwise we are ungrateful for the freedom of speech we have... or freedom of speech should only apply to the Right, expecially if they're talking up recent "anti-terrorist" legislation which appears to, um, curb freedom of speech and Assembly… The circularity of it all makes me dizzy. This is Bill O’Reilly in the US. He’s an news anchorman with his own program on FOX Cable news, and is known to some as the New Pope of TV Journalism. Fancy. Via <a href="http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2003_02_23_digbysblog_archive.html#89856112" target="_blank">Hullabaloo </a> <table width="80%" border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" bgcolor="#FFFFCC"> <tr> <td> Bill O'Reilly has issued the following warning: "Once the war against Saddam Hussein begins, we expect every American to support our military, and if you can't do that, just shut up. Americans, and indeed our foreign allies who actively work against our military once the war is underway, will be considered enemies of the state by me. Just fair warning to you, Barbra Streisand and others who see the world as you do. I don't want to demonize anyone, but anyone who hurts this country in a time like this, well. Let's just say you will be spotlighted. Talking points invites all points of view and believes vigorous debate strengthens the country, but once decisions have been made and lives are on the line, patriotism must be factored in." The phrase "Enemy of the State" is not usually used by Americans, now is it? But, it certainly has a familiar ring to it. Where have we heard it before?? The Kulaks Are the Enemy of the State -- Joseph Stalin The Indian shopkeepers are the Enemy of the State --Idi Amin The white farmers are the Enemy of the State -- Robert Mugabe The Jewish shopkeepers are the Enemy of the State -- Adolph Hitler Great minds do think alike. </td> </tr> </table> "The Pope"? Sounds more like our <a href ="http://www.crikey.com.au/media/2003/03/31/20030331parrotdroppingsmar31.html" target="_blank" >Parrot.</a> -------- AUTHOR: Helen DATE: 7:30 PM ----- BODY: This is the most interesting example of the sanitisation and spin on the Iraqui war. It was supposed to be surgical and clean... A quick strike with no bloodletting... No civilian deaths. We're too scientific for that. Of course, no one believed it. But so that they could convince the rest of us, they did this.... Via Margo Kingston's Webdiary: (Laurie Brereton, 5 February 2003) When this House debated the prospect of war with Iraq on 17 September last year, I was in New York, representing the Parliament as part of Australia's delegation to the United Nations. There I had an opportunity to observe the working of the Security Council, the principle UN body charged with keeping the peace. Outside the entrance of the Council, the place where Security Council representatives make statements to the press, there hangs a reproduction of Pablo Picasso's most celebrated work Guernica. The story of Guernica is well known but deserves to be told again. On 26 April 1937, German bombers attacked the town of Guernica in northern Spain. The village was left in ruins with sixteen hundred civilians killed or wounded. This act of terror - the first large scale aerial attack against a civilian population centre - outraged the world. It compelled Picasso, then living in Paris, to begin the work that would become his testament against the horrors of war and one of the greatest artworks of the twentieth century. I'm told that the UN's Guernica was donated by the philanthropist Nelson A Rockefeller in 1985. Unfortunately, it is now no longer on display. According to press reports, on 27 January this year a large blue curtain was hung to cover it up. Questioned why the painting had been covered, UN press spokesman Fred Eckhard said the blue curtain was a technically better background for the cameras covering statements being made outside the Security Council. This may be the official explanation, but the same media reports quote unnamed diplomats observing that it would not be appropriate for the US Ambassador at the UN John Negroponte or Secretary of State Colin Powell to talk about war with Iraq against a backdrop depicting images of women and children and animals crying with horror and showing the suffering of war. <b><a href="http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/05/1044318661158.html">Here's the complete article:</a></b> --------