Category Archives: Politics

The real Australians

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Don’t you love the real Australians? The ones who can tell you what a real Australian is? The ones who like to demonstrate they’re a real Australian. I’m very thankful to this person for setting me straight on a couple of things:

“I LOVE A SUNBURNT COUNTRY..WITH CHOPS N SNAGS N CHIPS, KANGAROOS AND,HOLDEN V8’S I LOVE THIS PLACE TO BITS, CAMPIN ON THE RIVER OR SWIMMIN BY THE SEA, AUSSIE AUSSIE AUSSIE THIS WIDE BROWN LAND FOR ME, SO CMON MATES GRAB A BEER A RUM OR BOURBON AND RAISE YA GLASSES HIGH, AND GET SOMEONE WHO DOGS US, AND PUNCH THEM IN THE EYE, COZ IM A FLAMIN AUSSIE, ILL TAKE IT IN ME STRIDE, DONT LIKE IT HERE THEN BUGGER OFF COZ I HAVE AUSTRALIAN PRIDE copy and paste this to your wall if your a proud Australian.”

 

I especially like the “DON’T LIKE IT HERE” comment. Too bloody right, I get annoyed whenever I’m confronted by people saying they don’t like Australia. Well, I’ve never actually heard somebody express it but I’m sure they’re all over the place. Here’s further evidence someone shared with us that the Australia-haters are about:

From the lyrics of the Famous MERLE HAGGARD for those “blowins” that are bagging
AUSTRALIA DAY”

If you dont like it leave it and let this song that i’m singing be a warning…
When your running down my country man your walking on the fighting side of me”
Now BUGGER OFF “

Ironically it is in fact only this “ozzie pride” set who are demonstrating hate toward Australia.

Sorry blokes and sheelas, whenever you say “love it or leave it” you are expressing ill-will toward some often imaginary fellow Australian or an actual person who might have demonstrated their imaginary un-Australianness by simply daring to say ‘hang on a second, some Australians are actually different’. When you, the self-proclaimed “real Australians” diss things that fit outside your narrow definition you are in fact dissing aspects of the broader reality of what Australia is (as opposed to the selection of advertising jingles from the past 80 years you string together to tell us what Australia is). You’re the ones who are expressing that you have a problem with other Australians and therefore by extension – Australia. You are the ones literally showing the opposite of pride in Australia. Australia is a much larger thing than the narrow lists, mostly of consumer items, you define it by. Australia is not a shopping list.

I saw a comment from one of my fellow real Australians referring to young Australian of the year 2012, Marita Cheng, as …young “Australian” of the year. In the context the inference made by those quotation marks was clear – she’s not a ‘real’ Australian because her name’s Cheng and she’s got Asian eyes. Yet what this band of real Australians don’t get is that her very position makes it official – she is in fact the Young Australian of the year, a formal reflection of who Australia is and what we stand for, on the historical record in perpetuity and indelibly, and yet you and I both know there are self-proclaimed ‘real’ ozzies out there who will look at her and believe they have the right to say – she’s not a real Australian.

When telling you what a real Australian is they’ll often give you their own personal shopping list as a means of demonstrating that a real Australian is, surprise surprise, in fact identical to themself. Ironically what they’re actually demonstrating is a degree of insecurity about it. A “real” anything doesn’t have to go around constantly trying to prove it. They just be it.

Cultural cringe my arse.

Here, have a “reality” check real Australians, and tell me – in what aspects of this story does Australia take pride and in what aspects do we not take pride?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3FvCdTg6fk

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/australia-day-2012-address-full-speech-20120123-1qdh9.html

 

Obama enlists Australia’s help to keep China in check?

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With all our moral superiority surely we are guaranteed to prevail. Remind me again – what are we prevailing against?

During Barrack Obama’s visit to Oz last month, if you could find your way through the standard rhetoric that America has no closer friend and ally than (err… where are we playing tonight?), the ‘close personal relationship’ between the two leaders, and the various stupifying “Barrack can speak Ozzie” and “kangaroo was on the menu”, one actual meaningful theme managed to get some representation by our media, albeit often misrepresented to the point of contradiction.

The US will rotate 2500 marines a year through the Northern Territory and the US Navy will some time soon have a semi-permanent presence out of Western Australia. This is a small presence in comparison to other coutries who enjoy the US military’s favour. The universal media take on this is that we are sending some sort of a message to other nations of the region, specifically China. With reference to China the commentary on our common purpose with the US varies only in degree from the mild ‘to address’, others ‘to counter’, ‘to contain’, ‘target’, ‘take an aggressive stance’… to the most unfriendly ‘to encircle’. Whatever word you use it articulates a paranoia about the growing importance of China’s economy and what it might mean for Chinese influence.

Much was read into Obama’s speech to the Australian Parliament but the message contained in it that was directed to China was inferred, oblique, gentle, and tempered by in fact praise for China. All of the inspiring and positive things Obama had to say on a broad range of subjects were almost completely unreported in the media and subsumed by narrowly focused overblown reporting of some sort of defiance toward China. I’d urge anyone to listen to the man’s own words and completely ignore the headlines in the media which serve no purpose but to heighten mistrust toward China.

http://media.smh.com.au/news/national-news/in-full-obamas-address-to-parliament-2778964.html

The media seem to be stuck in a cold war era imaginary world where we with our friends the US are the good guys and China the bad guys. What makes them bad? Obama made oblique reference to economic protectionism, government which lacks the legitimacy of the will of the people and violation of universal standards of human rights. But anyone who thinks we the West can claim any sort of moral high ground on such things is naively and tragically mistaken.

In the city of Falluja where the US saw its most intense fighting during the Iraq War there’s a stark increase in the number of birth defects among newborn children, most reports putting it at between an 11-15 times increase over the period prior to the US lead invasion. There’s a cemetery dedicated to children born with serious birth defects who survive only a short time. The fallout from US weaponry appears to be (and logically) to blame – US materials such as depleted uranium and pospherous both mooted as either definite or probable cause depending who’s doing the surmising.

To wreak such suffering on small children, many of them as yet unborm, is as sinister and insidious as humanity gets. This is done by Western peoples in our name. And yet the US has done this before. Two generations later the chemicals used as defoliants by US in Vietnam continue to cause birth defects in that country’s children. We simply close our eyes and ears and do not learn from the evil that we do, we ignore it and instead comfort ourselves naively in our imagined virtuosity beside the evil that others do. Human rights? If you were to count up the numbers of people killed, maimed and traumatised by the various nations of the world since the end of WWII and rank the nations in order of the most killing and maiming that has been done you would very quickly arrive at one nation which stands out well ahead of all others.

Government that enjoys the legitimacy of the people? It has been my observation that US elections both Presidential and Congressional are widely believed to be circuses which disempower ordinary people while guaranteeing the hegemony of a media and financial elite, and that they have proved a model for electioneering throughout the Western world. It is only a decade ago that George Bush was able to win an election through a US Supreme Court action which succesfully disenfanchised a poor, mostly African American community and thus tipped the result in Florida.

Level playing field with regard to international trade? For all the increased development and wealth that they can bring, US free trade agreements have often resulted in great travesty for ordinary working people in both the US and in their trading partner nations. The North American Free Trade Agreement is the obvious though not the only case in point. Many US jobs disappeared, contributing to urban decay and the disenfranchisement of American manufacturing workers, while south of the border Mexican workers suffer conditions that would constitute criminal offences just about anywhere in the developed world – workers being locked in factories, forced overtime and unsafe work environments, particularly for a predominantly female workforce, are among the travesties we hear about.

To articulate such things is often misconstrued as ‘anti-Americanism’. The truth is its precisely because of a close sense of fraternity and familiality with the US that I feel it is my place to put the world in such terms. To highlight such wrongs is not to hold them up as the complete or even typical picture of the US. For me they do however mean that to go around pointing the finger at China would be a perverse gesture coming from a US President. The West, and the US in particular have long ago forgone any position of legitimacy in claiming some moral high ground, if one ever existed.

The reality is that, as Barrack Obama really said in his speech to the Australian Parliament – China, like the US, is a very big and multi-faceted thing. Of both these nations there is much to behold in admiration and even wonder, and yet there are times when power is wielded discriminately, unfairly and inhumanely by individuals and institutions within each of these great nations.

I have no objection to US Military involvement in Australia so long as the result is not to signify pre-emptively we are not friendly to other peoples of the region. I don’t believe announcements about comparatively very small numbers of troop rotations through Australia and joint naval exercises that have always existed at any rate are really about sending a belligerent message to China. I certainly hope not. After a decade of futile and costly intervention on the far side of the globe resulting in very unsatisfactory outcomes it is only natural the US should pull its head in and start to reallign its focus closer to home. However as the media keeps playing up this belligerence toward China it is only a matter of time until enough people are convinced of the imperative that it becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy, and all of those lingering cold war tensions become a reality once again. With an eye to history it is possible to imagine such things could escalate into conflict. If that does happen the genesis of it will have been in the mass idiocy of the opinion-mongers and not in any real social imperative.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/30/faulluja-birth-defects-iraq

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/13/falluja-cancer-children-birth-defects

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8548961.stm

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23977

http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/agentorange/chi-agent-orange3-dec08,0,2946008.story

http://worldfocus.org/blog/2009/01/15/agent-orange-devastates-generations-of-vietnamese/3625/

http://ussc.e-newsletter.com.au/link/id/zzzz4ecb14823a486422P/page.html

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/obama-enlists-us-on-side-of-the-free-20111117-1njy8.html

http://www.smh.com.au/national/obama-takes-aim-at-china-in-new-asian-world-order-20111117-1nk6j.html

I wouldn’t normally cite Peter Costello, but one point he makes here about the left’s embracement of Obama (despite announcements regarding US military) almost warrants the Costello smirk: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/line-of-left-behind-obama-forget-old-beliefs-20111122-1nspe.html

O.H.M.S. Monday to Friday

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Farewell Elizabeth II, our Queen and Sovereign.

I like to use it now and then, I stick it in the subject field on my email sometimes to lighten the atmosphere. I tell my son Bryce I’m On Her Majesty’s Service, me and James Bond. It’s only a generation or so ago public servants stopped using the acronym O.H.M.S.  Only by convention though – nothing’s actually changed in the position, role and purpose of the British monarch in Australia since Queen Elizabeth II ascended to the throne in 1952. I just skimmed the constitution and can confirm it is indeed a fact that Monday to Friday I am in the service of the Queen.

“Ascended” is a definitive word here. The Queen’s legal status in Australia is ‘monarch’ or ‘sovereign’. Check the words out in the dictionary and you’ll find that Queen Elizabeth II is in fact the person who has supreme rank, power and authority, she is above all others in character, importance and excellence, she is independent of outside authority, the supreme ruler, greatest in degree, superior to all others. The legal dictionary in fact says the sovereign is “possessed of supreme power”.

That is a pretty extraordinary position to be in you’d have to say. In fact in literal terms there is no greater honour. There are many out there who would even say it’s a bit extreme. So it is worthwhile taking a few moments to consider how it is the sovereign came to be the sovereign.

Most obviously the Queen is the Queen because her dad was King George VI. George VI became King because his elder brother Edward VIII was forced to abdicate when he decided to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson. It was the doctrine of the Church of England that once divorced a person could not remarry, and the Monarch is also sovereign over the Church of England. It was seen to contravene the laws of succession and therefore by the terms of the Statute of Westminster (1931) required the assent of the Parliament of Great Britain and the Parliaments of the Dominions including Australia. When Australia’s Prime Minister along with those of Great Britain, Canada and South Africa opposed a change to the law of succession (the Irish Prime Minister was indifferent and the New Zealand Prime Minister had never heard of Wallis Simpson) Edward VIII rightly pointed out that there were “not many people in Australia” and their opinion didn’t matter.

Deeming such a marriage to be in contravention of the laws of succession was stretching a long bow. What was left unsaid, at least publicly, is that Edward VIII had been bonking Mrs Wallis since long before she became a divorcee and that’s where the real moral imperative had been breached. Also she was an American – simply not of sufficient stock. Edward VIII had no chance.

Both George VI and Edward VIII became King because their dad was King George V. During World War I George V was forced to drop the royal house’s German name ‘House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha’ in favour of a newly invented English name ‘House of Windsor’, and also to drop his German titles – partly to distance Britain’s very German royal family from the wartime enemy but also in an endeavour to closer affiliate himself with the British people after his first cousin Tsar Nicholas II of Russia had been overthrown. For this reason he was also unable to offer sanctuary to his first cousin Nicholas II, who less than a year after being forced to abdicate was taken into a basement and summarily executed along with his wife and three daughters, having been separated from his remaining two children whose bodies were only recently identified in the Ural Mountains.

George V became King because his dad was King Edward VII. Edward VII became King because his elder brother Albert Victor died of penumonia in 1892, and also because he himself escaped an assassination attempt in Belgium in 1900 (in protest against the Boer War), and also because his mum was Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria became Queen because her grandfather was King George III, because her dad’s three older brothers all died without legitimate sons, and because her dad Prince Edward died in 1820 when she was an infant also leaving no sons. The term ‘legitimate’ is interesting here. Victoria’s uncle, King William IV had a loving partner Dorothea Bland with whom he had ten children. She was an Irish actress however, and before William IV a single mother. The consummation could never be married.

Queen Victoria survived a number of assassination scares and also a growing Republican movement. She blamed the death of her beloved husband Albert on the burden of worry he carried over her son Prince Edward’s philandering, a conflict which interestingly precipitated over yet another Irish actress.

Queen Victoria was the last British Monarch of the House of Hanover. Hanoverian sovereignty began with King George I upon the death of his second cousin Queen Anne in 1714. Queen Anne had more than 50 closer male relatives who were prohibited from taking the Crown because they were Catholic. Queen Anne was the last sovereign in the line of the House of Stuart. The House of Stuart, initially the royal house of Scotland, took sovereignty over a newly ‘United Kingdom’ in 1603 when James VI (James I of England) succeeded his 3rd cousin Queen Eilizabeth I. Queen Elizabeth had imprisoned James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots, and had her beheaded in 1587.

Queens Elizabeth I and II, Victoria, Anne and a handful of others all became sovereign because they had no surviving brother to become King. Since 1980 a number of European royal houses have dropped male primogeniture – the preferential succession of the eldest male over all other siblings, and it appears we’ve decided the British monarchy should get with the times. No issue got more media coverage in relation to last month’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting than discussion surrounding the laws of succession. Everyone appears to be in agreement – preferential male succession is outdated, unfair and it’s time for it to change. It excludes half the population of the world after all.  Um… er… hang on a second…

Yes it is unfair when somebody is excluded from something because of their gender. However to hail this as some sort of ‘moment’ in the cause of equality is hollow when by definition monarchy means the rest of us are un-equal. It is not as though half the population of the world are being excluded from becoming the sovereign. Unless you can call the current sovereign your mother or grandmother – everyone is excluded. As a concept ‘monarchy’ on its own is much more exclusive than male promogeniture. What is the point in doing away with the preference for male heirs when monarchy itself is a much more unfair institution? It is a barren conversation and when enacted the gesture will be meaningless for everyone but the Windsors.

We’re not talking about somebody’s life savings or personal property to pass onto our kids when we die. We are talking about sovereignty over you and I, where nothing qualifies the person other than that a succession of distant ancestors raped, pillaged and murdered their way to the top, followed by a further succession of ancestors who continued to intrigue and murder over several hundred years to maintain privilege which had initially been taken by fear and force, followed by a further succession who maintain their position of privilege through no means other than celebrity hysteria. Literally the British Monarch is the assertion that one individual is superior to all others (you and I) because a distant ancestor murdered an Anglo-Saxon king 945 years ago. It’s preposterous in the true sense of the word. It would be laughable if it weren’t so real. Monarchy is a concept thats days have been numbered since the 18th Century and it is a measure of mass simple-mindedness that celebrity hysteria has sustained this institution into the 21st Century.

Edward I is credited with inventing the ritual “hanged, drawn and quartered”. Edward’s treatment of his kin Simon de Montfort in 1265 is depicted here. But they were different times you say? Exactly.

 

 

Occupy this and that…

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Occupying in the name of?

Couple of weeks ago I was touring Japan and focused on my mission to follow the footsteps of historical characters Murasaki Shikibu and William Adams. I read the newspapers regularly but skimmed past the stories about the Occupy Wall Street movement in favour of the radiation and renewable energy stories which are not surprisingly a particular preoccupation in Japan at the moment and also denote a very hopeful shift in priorities. I did note however the point was made that the Occupy Wall Street movement had attracted support from a broader community and not just the usual anti-establishment types. Unfortunately the sloganeering of the “counter-culture” was visible and every bit as predictable and mind numbing as that of the garbage-peddling corporate “establishment” these types convince themselves they’re in the process of toppling. It is a sad irony that sometimes a cause’s impact can be diluted or even diminished through a constituency that differentiates itself, marking it’s arrogance toward others and thus switching off the very people who need to be won over in order to advance the cause. Getting around calling ourselves “The 99%” demonstrates the same type of conceit John Howard did whenever he liked to tell us he spoke for “the silent majority”, only this latest slogan is laughably implausable (and yes I know the figure originates from the distribution of wealth but used in the context it is there’s an undeniable double-entendre). A more accurate guess would be that approximately 99% of people have not asked to be spoken for and a good number of them would resent it.

The cause spread to other cities in the US then to other parts of the world, including my country, and wherever it’s gone the unfortunate tang it leaves is just more of the old counter-culture routine that never got anywhere in the past. So we could be forgiven for speculating it will run out of puff, get bored and eventually go home having said and achieved essentially nothing new.

Out there in the suburbs however mums and dads and other plain people are among those calling for change. Neither the mass media’s penchant for 5-10 second grabs nor the counter-culture’s penchant for Che Guevara flags and indelicate slogans distills or articulates exactly what it is that has ordinary average folks riled up.

In my country we’ve mostly not yet felt the brunt of the global financial crisis. We are aware of the GFC in a broad sense but it’s hard to get a feel for it through the TV news. I have friends and family in the US however and the insecurity and loss of affluence is palpable, more than just a feeling. It manifests itself in so many ways in daily life – reduced activity and income at work, shuffling jobs to stay afloat, the dream of a higher education for your kid that seemed a real possibility a couple of years ago now a topic to be avoided, even postage to loved ones overseas suddenly prohibitively expensive. Real tangible every day stuff that disappoints, saddens and astounds people. Here in Oz I do sense a growing commentary that the cost of living is becoming noticeably more stressful.

On the macro-economic front developments in Europe are the big news currently. Back in 2008 when key players in the banking industry suddenly discovered they were no longer liquid, the genesis of what we call the GFC, Great Britain was the first country to move to take public funds, taxpayer money, and prop up the banks to keep them afloat. Other governments around the world followed suit, including of course Barrack Obama’s US administration. Yes, Barrack Obama took taxpayer money and handed it over to the banking industry, the machinations of which we are advised were responsible for creating the crisis. This was a necessary evil we were told because should the banks fail it would have dire consequences for all of us, the way our whole society works is dependent on the liquidity of the banks. Thank you the banks said, we will take the taxpayer’s money.

The French Government offered cheap capital to the country’s banks, at 1% interest. Like elsewhere the theory was this would make capital available for business and citizens to borrow money to drive the broader economy by building houses, buying and selling services and manufactures… But it didn’t happen. People instead tightened their belts, decided they didn’t need the second plasma TV, held off buying a home, wouldn’t take more risk in their businesses. The French banks being banks after all, decided instead to invest that cheap cash where they could get returns. Greek Government bonds were paying 14-15%. Sounds good – borrow money from the French taxpayer at 1% and get 15% return for it from the Greek taxpayer. Mind boggling in its simplicity.

Like much of the rest of the world economic activity in Greece floundered and the Greek Government’s speculation that it could actually pay those sort of returns turned out to be grossly optimistic. In recent weeks a new buzz phrase has appeared in discussion of a Greek bail-out “allowed to default in a controlled manner”. But what do these economists mean by ‘controlled’? Well, a bail out of the Greek Government includes not only ensuring funds are available to cover public sector salaries and services, but also bailing out the banks who would otherwise bear the brunt of the default. Did you catch that? So the taxpayer, not only in France but throughout the developed world, bankrolled the banks in response to the GFC in 2008. Now that that money has simply disappeared taxpayers across the EU are being asked to pick up the tab. Huh? Understandably some of those mums and dads literate enough to follow this are feeling like they’re being swindled to a historic degree. It’s creating a rift in the EU with the French Government demanding more for the banks and the German Government, contributing most of the funds, pushing for less. The compromise proposed yesterday has the Eurozone and the IMF calling on the banks to accept a 50% loss.

Back here in Oz not only crusty fringy anti-globalismists but plain old suburbanites do take note of the growing cost of living and the diminishing service and commitment they get from business starkly juxtaposed against growing profits and/or the greed of many elite business people as they take ever increasing executive salaries, bonuses and severance payouts. Telstra is but one example but an excellent case in point. Under Ziggy Switkowski and then Sol Trujillo the company’s value slid. The company lost market share for the simple reason it treated consumers and shareholders with an arrogant disregard. An explosion in the different types of products and services could not make up for the dive in commitment to and respect for the customer. Yet the executives who oversee such mindless short-termism are remunerated rapaciously and walk away when the brand has been trashed.

Ordinary people notice when their taxes are handed over to business interests and this practice is broader than just the current crisis in the finance industry. They do sense the irony in this in light of capitalist principles that guarantee in ordinary people’s small businesses if they lose liquidity the business ceases to exist and often along with it they lose homes, cars, and marriages. No-one suggests the Government – taxpayers should pick up the tab. They notice when the cost of things increases sharply and they notice when as consumers they are treated with disrespect. They notice when business elites take remuneration that is so dispropportionate that it can only be described as greed. They similarly notice when companies make stratospheric profits out of resources that belong to all of us yet seek to share the wealth only among the business elite.

I can’t help feeling though this movement will ultimately have no role in bringing it to an end. Short of an armed revolution change will only ever occur from within,… or if the situation simply becomes untennable. I think the insecurity many people feel is a sense that government and finance industry bail-outs are merely buying time and setting us up for an even harder fall when the system is finally utterly bankrupted, which we’re wondering may be inevitable because it’s hard to see how it can be sustainable. Eventually either society says ok let’s stop propping it up or society becomes incapable of propping it up. That’s the importance of the current debate in Europe around Greece and the French banks. You have to wonder if it might be better to let the whole thing collapse in on itself leaving no money to operate public services, no money for you and I to buy a home, but also no money for the Sol Trujillo’s of the world to pilfer. Maybe only that would truly result in renewal.

 

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-23/eurozone-approves-more-funds-for-greece/3595608?section=business

http://www.news.com.au/business/sol-trujillos-20m-payout/story-e6frfmbi-1111118980729

http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/03/03/a-bit-rich-australias-ceo-payout-shame/

http://www.businessday.com.au/business/sols-9m-final-pay-packet-20090813-eiuw.html

http://www.occupysydney.org/

http://www.occupysydney.org.au/

 

Yes please, I want to be one of the 5,000 (part 1)

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For the past week I’ve been trying to finish a new post on this blog about what’s really wrong with the public service. As I sailed into it however it just kept getting bigger. Today I came across new information that just takes me deeper into this subject and though at first I was excited I suddenly realise I can’t publish much of it at this point as to do so would breach my conditions of employment. I will therefore have to steer clear of specific and significant examples to support my opinions. For now.

Last week the O’Farrell Government here in New South Wales brought down its first budget. It was pretty tame by most accounts, particularly for a conservative party who’d been out of office so long and who have such a landslide majority. In my own area, the environment, it is interesting to note that programmes appear to have been more or less maintained. In the newspapers the only cut to programmes I saw mentioned was a cut of $400 million in spending on infrastructure. One of the budget’s loudest proclamations was “more police, nurses and teachers…” You’d be hard pressed to find a Government of either stripe in recent decades who didn’t promise that one. From the handful of headline numbers in the budget it quickly becomes clear this Government’s biggest cuts will be in relation to Public Service employees. $8 billion they expect to save over the next 4 years by getting rid of 5,000 public servants. Public service salary increases are pegged at a maximum 2.5% PA or 1.1% below the CPI – effectively lowering real wages (and ironic alongside O’Farrell’s stated aims of “attracting the best people” and making the NSW Public Service the “first employer of choice”).

It’s in keeping with conservative ideology which oversimplifies and personalises the problems within the public service. There is something in the conservative idea that there is a problem with public servants, but the problems amid personnel are minor in comparison to the problems at the top. The public sector’s biggest problems and the cause of most waste are the over-subscription to private consultancies, the way we engage with the private sector in general, and the constant perceived need to restructure. These problems sit with the senior managment, senior executive and Ministerial levels of public administration. On this the O’Farrell Government show no signs of being any less out of touch than their predecessors.

I look forward to the day I can substantiate these claims by sharing with you, dear reader, some specific examples.

Antitheism, marriage and the country music crowd

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There’s something evangelical in the forthrightness with which some atheists disparage Christians. I’m an atheist, but I defend the right to have a religion. Many who call themselves atheists are probably more accurately described as antitheists, a term which suggests a more active aversion to believers. Yes, an evangelical Christian who wants to ram their faith down your throat is a pain in the arse and very likely a bit ditzy, but in reality you come across very few. Yes, those ancient religious texts are littered with outdated ideas, some of them abhorrent today, but literal or extremist followers are the exception, and universally good sentiment can also be found in them. Yes, there are people who identify as Christian who are blinkered and ignorant enough to assume you and I will see as self-evident that Muslims or new age spiritualists, for example, are some sort of problem. Yes religion is often in the mix when intolerance has led to travesty, but intolerance does not exist exclusively within religious paradigms, and to paint religious people or entities as innately intolerant is neither demonstrable nor rational. Intolerant Christians do exist, yet it’s been my observation that intolerance is more commonly expressed against those of faith by antitheists, or by pseudo-intellectual nouveau hippies, which is ironic, considering the proportion of society who identify as Christian. It’s probably due to the prevalence of Christianity in Western society that those who arrive at atheism or new-age spiritualism, have done so from a position of rejecting Christianity, and therefore feel the compulsion to denounce it. Christians are in reality a pretty diverse bunch (64% of Australians identify themselves as Christian) and represent the good and bad that can be found throughout all of humanity. Religiosity of itself is not responsible when individuals or collectives do evil.

Thankfully I can advocate this particular type of tolerance from reasonably solid ground. As far as I know freedom of religion is enshrined in the constitutions of every modern democracy including that of my own country (section 116). These documents are the product of the best minds of their time and while democracies do provide the facility to change them, religious freedom remains codified. That includes the freedom to identify with a majority just as much as any minority.

That said, I think it’s worth mentioning the plight of one of the most celebrated atheists of recent times, Stephen Hawking. The irony is that from everything I’ve read he is not the rabid anti-theist he’s made out to be. He is an atheist but also he’s a media darling and like most celebrities so much of what he says is extremetised by the media. I’m not bright enough or well read enough to comment on his science but with regard to his atheism, of the few quotes I see repeated from The Grand Design (obviously the media are paying more attention to reading each other than the book) the assertion that god is not required to explain the universe is hardly an attack on the faiths of the world as it is over and over portrayed. It’s an assertion of his faith in science, but not a dissing of other faiths. In fact when the media obsession with Hawking’s atheism broke some years back he practically had to be goaded by journalists to comment.

Even enthusiastic antitheists like Laurence Kalnin who do think it necessary to approach the debunking of god with greater than missionary zeal find they have to address the fact these mythologies stretch back into prehistory. It’s religion with a god or gods mostly in their sites but it’s theism in general they know people need to be led away from.

Until European settlement historically recently, indigenous Australians are now understood to have maintained extraordinary social and cultural continuity stretching back several tens of thousands of years – the literal remainder of Neolithic society and it survived in places up until less than a lifetime ago (which is not to say indigenous Australia does not survive to this day). Aboriginal Australia constitutes such cultural and social complexity and nuance that from some angles it makes Western society look underdeveloped. The last remaining Neolithic society had spirituality, mythology, faith and religion to explain the world and humanity’s place in it. In Europe archaeological evidence demonstrates that even older human societies including Neanderthals practiced ritual burial. Despite what anyone believes humanity could or should be, if we consider simply what humanity is – religion is definitive and I would argue demonstrably a fundamental human process. To think you can deny anybody their religion then is to deny their humanity. It simply won’t work. A cat is a cat, a bird is a bird, no matter if you call it a dog.

It’s a point that’s been done to death but in some ways science is not so different from religion. It’s motivated by a yearning to make sense of the world or to answer questions like ‘why are we here?’ or ‘where did we come from?’ I personally place great credence in science, but I’ve never felt compelled to set the others straight, and as far as those particular questions go I’ve never wasted a minute of my life. I am here, that is all.

That’s more than a preamble but I wrote about zealotry among atheists conscious of where this blog is heading next.

Some weeks ago a facebook friend posted a link to a story on same sex marriage which sparked conversation that went sort of like this (including the messy spelling, grammar and punctuation of facebook shorthand):

Fred marriage for me is a religious thing for me and god greated adam and eve not adam and steve this is what hes has said in the bible i,m sorry if there are people out there who are offended by this. god didn,t created same sex marriage and marriage is secreted thing

Wilma the great thing about facebook is that we can all express our opinions!!!!

Fred the last time i checked gay and lesbians were the minority group so why should they be allowed to get married i,m sorry but i don,t support it marriage is for men and women not man and man or women women

Betty W e dont all have to support everything,But I believe that each person has the right to their own choices and to whom they love and wish to spend their lives with,who are we to decide for them.and if they wish to make their choice legal then they should have that right,I also believe we have a loving and understanding God,who said love thy neighbour,he didnt say only if its of the opposite sex.Sorry Fred ,but I do believe this and I married the opposite sex,because I wanted to…

Barney God loves all unconditionally…though I do think that if a particular religion does not what to except gay people getting married…. then thats there choice I suppose…..If 2 people wish to commit to them selves (whether gay or not) by a civil union, then I believe the law should uphold this!

Betty I do agree,

Dino If you’re going to go down the bible path Fred, I trust that you will follow it completely? For instance, did you know that in the Old Testament Leviticus 19:28 forbids tattoos. I hope you don’t have any. I also hope you’ve never worked on the Sabbath, because Exodus 35:2 states that you must be put to death. I also trust that if you’ve played a game of football that you’ve made sure you’ve used a synthetic ball, because one made out of pigskin is considered unclean (Leviticus 11:7-8). Oh, and heaven forbid you’ve ever eaten a few prawns – you’re going straight to hell if you have (Leviticus 11:10). Besides Chapter V, section 116 of the Australian constitution says that we’re a secular state and the bible shouldn’t even come into it.

Rockette I think we all miss the point.as well,these loving couples that live together probably most of their lives want the marriage so they havethe same rights as any other married couple.to be next of kin./.and as a christian,we shouldnt be jud…geing any one.if you love the person,you live with the person,you share your worldly goods with the person,then they should be able to have the same rights as any one else.that share their lives,and be your next of kin legally if that is what they choose.does it matter what we want, should it not be what those indiviuals want.its their lives.If your hetrosexual it s not going to affect you anyway.your ok as it is. and how we each embrace christianity,is our own choice,people are they dont choose to be

Rocky When I was young a gay person meant that the person was a happy person. A persons sexuality is their own business so long as it doesn’t impinge on the rights of others, so having had gay people in the band, and having known so many lovely gay people, I don’t see why they should not have the rights of every other human being. I think homophobics have tendencies towards being gay, and lash out to prove the opposite.

Rockette I dont want to know what happens in the privacey of ones bedroom.male or female.but lets let everyone enjoy the same rights,God forbid theres enough things now stopping people from being altogether happy,let us please do something to add to… others happiness and contentment.is it going to hurt anyone,the only people this will really matter to is the people who want to do it.and all us heterosexuals can still marry the opposite sex,

Scribblehead I like your comment Rocky “I think homophobics have tendencies towards being gay, and lash out to prove the opposite.” it can also be out of a paranoia that someone might think they’re gay. if you’re confident in who you are then you don’t feel the need for this over the top demonstration of your ‘straightness’. you just are.

 

There was a lot more discussion but I think this is more than enough to get the drift. Looking past the obvious absence of logic in statements like – ‘gays are a minority so why should they be allowed to get married’, the problem with using Christianity to advocate the exclusion of anybody from marriage is that the state of marriage is not owned by Christianity. The majority of people in the world are not Christians and marriage is practiced by all of the peoples of the world of every faith and by the irreligious like me. Marriage is a universal social phenomenon which has developed in all societies. Though like religion it’s obviously not mandatory, it’s another thing which defines humanity, it’s a fundamental, and to deny people marriage is to deny them their humanity.  In a literal sense it just can’t be done.

One thing I find noteworthy about the conversation is that it occurred between country music musicians and their fans. It’s a reminder of my own susceptibility to prejudice that I was surprised the overwhelming balance of opinion was in support of same sex marriage. Should I have been surprised? I think most would agree that country people are more likely to be socially conservative.  So what should we make of the context? I think at the very least it demonstrates anecdotally that perhaps there is much broader support for same sex marriage across the community than some people imagine.

Asylum seekers and Leaderlessness

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In the lead up to the 2010 election, Malcolm Fraser quit the Liberal Party citing general dissatisfaction with the party’s direction, but making special mention of the party’s attitude toward asylum seekers. He wanted to remind people that when he was Prime Minister there were many more boat people arriving in Australia than today. In Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, war had destroyed people’s lives. From Vietnam alone about 2 million people fled in boats looking for a safe place to live. Fraser reminded Australians that back then our political leaders understood the situation these people were in. Australia had an obligation toward them not only because we had participated in the Vietnam War, but also because we are signatories to the United Nations Convention on Refugees. We were adherents to international law. At the time, Australia took 137,000 refugees from Southeast Asia.

Fraser’s old adversary put it succinctly. “We’re all bloody boat people,” said Hawke.

Recently asylum seekers have come here from countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Congo, Somalia and Burma. The news is full of hellish stories about what’s happening to people in those countries.

Last month’s Four Corners story Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields is typical of the reporting coming out of these countries. We use the euphemism ‘push’ factors, but when confronted with such graphic imagery the perception that ‘pull’ factors have any bearing on people’s decision to flee their country is just plain dumb. The story showed graphic footage of Sri Lankan government forces performing summary executions and mistreating the dead bodies of people who were clearly civilians, many of them women and showing signs of torture, rape and mutilation. Soldiers were recorded on video boasting of mutilating a young woman’s corpse. The story also explored evidence that Sri Lankan government forces deliberately bombarded the makeshift hospitals established to cater for the many thousands of casualties, overwhelmingly civilian and a large proportion of them children, not once or twice, but specifically following hospitals wherever they were established. The story described how the UN eventually had to suspend its practice of providing the GPS coordinates of hospitals. Traditionally the UN provides combatants with the location of hospitals so that under the terms of the Geneva Convention, a reflection of fundamental codes of decency common to all civilized human beings, they be excluded from military strikes. The UN belatedly realised Sri Lankan Government forces were using the information for the opposite purpose. Too late. The whole idea of hospitals had to be abandoned.

Faced with such evidence it is difficult to form an opinion which doesn’t incorporate the concepts of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and a word not to be bandied around – genocide.

In Australia it’s hard to imagine a situation where we would need to run for our lives leaving everything behind. That is the truth for these people. They are not queue jumpers, opportunists, terrorists, illegal immigrants, criminals. They are not coming to take your job or infect your neighbourhood with their foreign languages, foreign religions and foreign food, nor to vandalise the prisons you choose to lock them up in. They are literally running away from their homes and their countries to save themselves and their children from murder. Just like in those movies you and I like to watch, or like some terrifying nightmare, only it’s real. They are running to escape and to save their children. To recognise this is not to succumb to bleeding-heart mumbo-jumbo, to dramatise or exaggerate.

When we treat asylum seekers as though they have no right we are more or less complicit in the crimes being committed against them. This type of injustice pre-dates Nazi Germany but as that is the yardstick we like to fall back on… picture a family fleeing the type of brutality suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Then picture yourself turning that family away or locking them – man woman and child, in detention. Imagine persecuting them, denigrating them, vilifying them. Whose behaviour is closer to the criminal, you or the asylum seeker?

There’s this notion – a naïve nationalistic vanity, that asylum seekers come here due to our level of terrificness and the luckiness of our wonderful country. They want to grab a share of it – the ‘pull’ factors. If that were true then, cripes, we don’t measure up to the rest of the world very well. Compared to other countries Australia doesn’t receive many asylum seekers at all. Australia isn’t among the top ten countries for the number of asylum seekers who arrive. In 2009 for example, Australia received less than 0.6% of the world’s asylum seekers. That year Canada, a country with about one and a half times the population of Australia, received 33,250; Sweden, less than half our population, received 24,190; Austria, about one third our population, received 15,830. Asylum claims in Australia that year were high – 6,170. Only 2,726 of those came by boat. Compared to some countries Australia does have a high proportion of arrivals by boat because we are surrounded by sea, with no land borders. But the preoccupation with boat arrivals is yet another misconception when, at most, little more than a third of all asylum seekers arrive that way.

For those of you who can’t understand why a person would climb aboard a rickety boat and risk their lives on such a perilous journey, those of you who can’t put yourselves in the shoes of an asylum seeker, let me try it for you. As an asylum seeker I’d be thinking I need to get to a place where you won’t terrorise or murder my child, rape my wife and slice the tits of her dead body, then kneel me down and put a bullet through the back of my head. Congratulations Australia, that’s your ‘pull’ factor. But hang on, don’t feel smug and heroic just yet.

Unlike Australia, most countries do not have a policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers. In fact Australia is the only country in the world with a policy of mandatory detention throughout the determination process. Could this in fact be part of our problem? The thing about detention centres is you have to build them and run them, whether they’re onshore or offshore.

In 2001 the number of asylum seekers worldwide was the highest in 20 years. That year 5,516 boat people risked their lives to reach Australia. Australia didn’t have enough detention centres to lock the all up.

John Howard’s government decided to send asylum seekers to pacific island countries to be processed. This was very popular with those Australians who don’t like asylum seekers. In Nauru for example, the Howard government built an $80 million dollar detention centre. It cost $2 million per month to run. Most asylum seekers sent to Nauru were eventually assessed to be a genuine refugees and were resettled in Australia. However most had been detained in prison-like conditions for an extended period, up to three years.

During that time the number of boat people arriving in Australia dropped sharply, but it’s hard to gauge how much to attribute this to the Howard government’s policies because all over the world the number of asylum seekers dropped by 50% in the same period. It’s fair to say though, considering we receive comparatively so few asylum seekers, maybe they did succeed in enhancing our reputation for being inhospitable.

Recently, asylum seeker numbers have increased again worldwide. In 2010 the number of people seeking asylum in Australia was up to 8,250 while in the US, for example, the number reached 55,500.

Australia’s refugee intake in the past decade has averaged about 13,500 refugees per year no matter where they applied for asylum, how they got there, or who was in government. The Gillard government’s agreement with Malaysia to redirect 800 asylum seekers their way in return for 4000 already assessed to be genuine refugees, will have no bearing on the overall number of refugees resettled in Australia. If sending these asylum seekers away was designed to placate the asylum-seeker-hating trash media and those who read and listen to them, it certainly missed the mark. The trash media and their readers and listeners don’t discern between asylum seekers and refugees – they’re all foreigners we don’t want in our neighbourhoods. All they see is 800 undesirable dirt traded for 4000. It didn’t win the Gillard government any friends among refugee advocates either.

Back when John Howard announced the date for the 2001 election he said “more than anything else this election will be about leadership”. Nobody could have anticipated the way in which he was thereafter proved correct. When the MV Tampa sailed over the horizon, Howard stayed true to form and led the Australian people sincerely according to his principles, xenophobic and steeped in a racist past as they were, while Beazley tried to second-guess the polls in a remarkable display of followership. In the face of those first polls coming out of commercial television, Beazley oscillated, wrong-footed and stumbled. Instead of leading according to his conviction and affecting the polls, he tried to be guided by them. Perhaps he allowed his minders to convince him this was his job. It’s the Australian Labor Party after all. Such speculation is seldom if ever directed at the other side of politics. Either way, this is clearly not leadership, it is followership. With the unfortunate exception of Mark Latham, it nicely encapsulates Labor’s electoral approach in the past decade and a half. The same gutless leadership is the reason why the Gillard government doesn’t simply have no mandate to implement their climate change policies, but has a mandate not to implement a price on carbon pollution, no matter how right the policy may be. In 2010 the ALP took the small target strategy to new depths of nothingness, when what was needed was bust through or bust. What was required was simply leadership.

Howard and his senior ministry began articulating myths like ‘sleeper cells’, and rumours such as Philip Ruddock’s one that asylum seekers were spending up to $20,000 to be smuggled to Australia. That particular misrepresentation painted a very unrealistic picture, yet people swallowed it. The same furphy is now being repeated by Labor’s current immigration minister. That’s 25 times Afghanistan’s per capita GDP. They could buy five business class airfares for that amount. Peter Reith’s contribution to the demonization and dehumanisation of the world’s most powerless people is much celebrated – what type of people throw their children overboard, he beseeched us. Not asylum seekers, even on a leaky boat, as it turned out. The Australian Navy’s advice to Reith was that it just wasn’t true. Sorry, not listening was the reply.

The asylum seeker ‘problem’ is not that people come here by boat or plane or go somewhere else first. The problem is we’ve complicated things too much. The problem is an inefficient and unproductive bureaucracy which does not complement the mandatory detention policy at all, rendering it unsustainable in the current global climate. People end up staying in detention absurdly long periods while the bureaucracy processes them, until after months or years of figuratively bashing their heads against the wall they begin to do it literally. Most of us have suffered the dehumanising indignity of dealing with Government departments. Imagine if years in detention were the outcome, after you’d been terrorised by murderers and risked your life crossing perilous seas to escape.

We can expect more asylum seekers. Look at what’s happened in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. For every soldier, fighter, gun, warplane, bullet or mortar you see on TV there are dozens of people running from them. What are we going to do, keep building detention centres here and overseas? Keep trading asylum seekers for refugees at a rate of 1 to 5? Our refugee intake is guaranteed to rise over time but that policy’s got to be the dumbest – unless asylum seeker numbers drop a refugee intake of 13,500 would blow out exponentially in a very short space of time. Unsustainable.

There is a clear alternative but it requires… leadership.

 

References:

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bn/sp/AsylumFacts.pdf

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/intguide/SP/asylum_seekers.htm

http://www.aph.gov.au/Library/pubs/BN/sp/BoatArrivals.htm#_Toc233686294

http://www.immi.gov.au/media/fact-sheets/60refugee.htm

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-06-21/australia-ranks-46th-in-refugee-intake-table/2766300

http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/04/17/asylum-seekers-the-facts-in-figures/

http://www.scoa.org.au/FAQRetrieve.aspx?ID=35755&Q=

http://www.ajustaustralia.com/informationandresources_factsandstatistics.php

http://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/docs/news&events/rw/2010/4%20-%20Myths%20and%20facts%20about%20refugees%20and%20asylum%20seekers%202010.pdf

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-05-18/understanding-the-asylum-seeker-debate/2718820

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2011/s3260535.htm

 

Thanks to my son Bryce MacNamara as much of the research and content is borrowed from his speech for the 2011 Wideview Public School public speaking competition.