Archive | September, 2011

The Rudd affair: there’s a lesson in this for everyone

12 Sep

Today’s Neilsen poll in the Sydney Morning Herald shows that Labor would win an election now if they sacked Julia Gillard as their leader and brought back Kevin Rudd. 44 percent of those polled prefer Rudd, while only 19 per cent support Gillard.

Seven out of ten Australians are unhappy with the manner in which Gillard achieved leadership, and there’s a widespread perception that Rudd was our “elected” and therefore legitimate PM, overthrown without public consultation and replaced by a leader who has never been popularly accepted as legitimate.

There’s a lesson in this for political parties in government. No matter how difficult your leader, if it’s his first term and if the public are unaware of or unbothered by his annoying managerial practices it is most unwise to unseat him overnight without first informing the voters that you have a problem with him, and testing the waters for indicators of possible reactions to change.

While in reality we all know we don’t elect our PMs, and that our political parties are entitled to change leaders whenever they feel they need to, the Rudd experience ought to have demonstrated to every politician that reality means little in the face of outraged public feeling. The public’s narrative is that faceless men took our PM before he’d even got through his first term, for no good reason, and replaced him with someone we didn’t choose. That someone would have had to be superlative in every way to be accepted by a disgruntled electorate, many of whom felt themselves to be disenfranchised by Rudd’s sacking.

It is never a good idea to create among the voters a sense of their being out of control of their fate. No amount of academic discussion about the Westminster system was ever going to address the emotional indignation many voters felt and continue to feel about having their “chosen” PM axed, without so much as a focus group first. While the move adhered to the black letter of the Westminster system, in terms of voter consciousness that clearly counts for almost naught.

What the ALP apparently forgot is that they are not a law unto themselves when in government. Sacking a leader of the opposition is a very different matter from sacking a PM. There’s a widespread public feeling that we have a far higher stake in the matter when the party is in government. While strictly speaking this isn’t the case, emotionally and psychologically it is. Australians apparently live in a state of cognitive dissonance in which on a rational level we know political parties are responsible for choosing their leaders, but emotionally voters feel and behave as if we are electing a president. While the reality is that only the PM’s electorate has any influence, reality isn’t the determinant. The fantasy that we choose our leader is far more powerful.

This fantasy was fed by the ALP’s campaign against John Howard and the Coalition. It was a presidential style campaign, with Rudd at its heart. They chose to run a campaign built on the presidential fantasy. They used Rudd to win government, and then they kicked the voters in the guts by chucking him out and claiming their right to do that under our Westminster system. They had it both ways. The public quite rightly felt duped and betrayed when we woke up to find Kevin 07 replaced by Gillard. We hadn’t signed up for Gillard. We’d signed up for Kevin 07 and no amount of telling us we don’t elect our PM was going to soothe our indignation and our sense of having been exploited by among others, a sizeable contingent of the unelected.

Gillard’s on-going refusal to reveal the circumstances surrounding her ascension only serves to stoke the public’s outrage at being treated like mushrooms by the PM and her party. If you take down a PM it’s everybody’s business. You aren’t just replacing a party leader, you’re replacing the country’s leader, especially if you’ve got there in the first place on the strength of that leader’s public appeal.

Rudd’s replacement would have had to be superhuman in every way to get the voters through their angst at losing “their” PM. Gillard didn’t stand a chance. The chalice was poisoned. What is staggering in retrospect is that those behind the coup apparently had no insight into the psychology of the electorate, and no understanding of the difference in the emotional attachment voters feel for a Prime Minister as opposed to an opposition leader. Thwarting voters’ irrational beliefs profoundly soured Gillard’s leadership potential. It’s astounding that nobody apparently took this x factor into account.

The lesson is: deprive people of their fantasies at your peril. As a good therapist knows, you dismantle treasured fantasies with great care, over time and in an atmosphere of mutual engagement. Pull out the rug in one authoritarian fell swoop and you’ll likely be dealing with rage, resentment, and loss of trust for a long time to come.

The Nielsen Poll also revealed that 54 per cent of Australians prefer on-shore processing of asylum seekers as opposed to 25 per cent still arguing for an off-shore solution. The Gillard government is out of step with the public on this issue as well. Regardless of this, the government is likely to attempt to amend the Migration Act to enable non- country specific off-shore processing of asylum claims, at the sole discretion of the Minister for Immigration.

 

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enough of the real, time for the surreal

9 Sep

Going away for a few days to see the Surrealists and catch up with family.

But before I go, Tony Abbott’s nasty little game of threatening to deny pairs when Craig Thomson wants to see his baby born could well incur bad karma. What if a whole bunch of Coalition MPs go down with a lurgy just when he needs them most?  Oh, I feel a plot coming on – selective botulism in the parliamentary dining room?

See you next week.

At home with Julia: where’s the respect, eh?

8 Sep
Kevie-lisa

Well, that was weird, I remarked to Mrs Chook as the credits rolled. I didn’t laugh. I couldn’t see the point of the show. The arguments about why it should never have been made are funnier. The outrage at how disrespectful this show is to the office of Prime Minister is especially laughable given the disrespect the Prime Minister showed to the office when she knocked Kevin Rudd out of it without so much as a thank you for trusting me and giving me all those portfolios and making me your deputy. No, all he got was, it’s time for you to shove off now, tosser, I’m taking over.

I don’t know that we’ve got much respect for the office of Prime Minister in this country, unlike the Americans who insist that no matter what idiocies are performed by the incumbents, the office of President is still deserving of their respect. No matter how inept, immoral and inane a President might be, the office is above all that and remains untainted by the antics of the mortal. It’s a nice idea, but what’s the point of it?

The cast of At home with Julia looked as if they were imitating marionettes. You could almost see the strings lifting their limbs, and manipulating their facial expressions. It was like one of those children’s movies where humans are filmed and then made to look like cartoon figures. The only convincing sentient being was the dog. Perhaps this was intentional: a clever comment on…something or other that happens in Canberra.

It’s a mystery to me how anybody could expect to make anything funny and interesting out of Julia Gillard’s private life. I mean, hello. As a friend of mine said the other day if they had to knock off Kevin, couldn’t they at least have replaced him with someone with a bit of charisma? Well, not unless they brought in someone from overseas, they’re a bit light on charisma in the Labor Party at the moment. No charisma at all, but on the other hand, what good did a charismatic politician ever do anybody?

Right now I’d settle for some signs of intelligent life.

It did occur to me that it’s interesting how when Kevin was thrown out, everybody complained about how awful he was to work with but we the general population were unaware of that fact and were very surprised to be told of his intolerable idiosyncracies and foul mouth. Now the general population is overwhelmingly disappointed with Julia, and everybody in the government is telling us how marvelous she is to work with and how warm and funny she can be at dinner parties.

Whatever happened to the rubbery figures? Now that worked. Can we get them back, Auntie?

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Racist prophecies from Department of Immigration replace informed advice

8 Sep

In a briefing to Tony Abbott yesterday, Department of Immigration secretary Andrew Metcalfe warned the Opposition leader that on-shore processing of asylum seeker claims would lead to 600 boat arrivals a month. This would cause overcrowding in detention centres making community release inevitable, and this in turn would cause tensions between asylum seekers and the community comparable to those that allegedly led to the rioting in Paris in 2010, and more recently in London.

It’s enough to make a grown woman cry.

Without offering any evidence at all for this causal chain, Metcalfe takes it upon himself, along with his officials, to offer unsubstantiated opinion that is divisive, hostile, demonizing, racist and irresponsible. Is this an indicator of the culture inside the Immigration Department? Of course it is.

Metcalfe then makes a fantastical leap, linking riots in Paris with the riots in London and other UK cities, just because they’re all riots, I suppose. Just because people from non Anglo cultural backgrounds took part in both of them, as did whites, but don’t mention that. Just because immigrant families were involved in the Paris riots and some immigrant families took part in the UK riots. Or just because Mr Metcalfe and the Immigration Department don’t like refugee families who arrive by boat from the Middle East and Metcalfe just has a feeling in his water that they’ll riot if they get out into the community in sufficient numbers just like they have in Paris and London.

Metcalfe doesn’t have to substantiate this ignorant drivel before he and his staff broadcast it to Australia, it’s sufficient that they think it for it to become their professional advice to politicians.

Even the most superficial assessment of the Paris and London riots would concede that there were very different factors at work. The Paris riots broke out in a self-described immigrant ghetto on the outskirts of the city, where young French citizens, ostracised because of their skin colour and/or their immigrant parentage, rioted against French President Nicholas Sarkozy‘s right-wing anti-immigration rhetoric, and the miserable and disadvantaged circumstances of their lives.

The UK rioters came from a much wider demographic, and overt political protest was not a motivating factor. Few of the UK rioters could be described as living in ghettos comparable to those in Paris. But a riot is a riot, according to Metcalfe. Let’s not split hairs. If they’re from another culture, the Middle East in this case, if they’re refugees and if there’s enough of them, they’ll riot, causing social upheaval, fear and destruction in previously safe Australian communities.

The asylum seeker debate, (though to call it a debate is to dignify it) is top-heavy with unsubstantiated codswallop useful only to those who harbour the evil desire to whip up fear and uncertainty in the community. Has everybody turned into Pauline Hanson, because what’s come out of the Immigration Department in the last twenty-four hours could have been written by her.

We are awash with these generalizations, that are nothing better than lies and obfuscation. They are not argument and they are not debate. It’s unacceptable that public servants are given free rein to express uninformed and ignorant racial prejudices in the guise of advice to politicians. There’s opinion and there’s advice. The latter requires evidence and substance. Metcalfe’s conflation of the London and Paris riots is ignorant personal opinion, and to use ignorant personal opinion as the basis for policy advice to government and politicians is unprofessional.

On August 16 Andrew Metcalfe fronted a parliamentary inquiry into mandatory detention of boat arrivals, and suggested that politicians should consider the usefulness of detention as a deterrent. He also urged them to consider how to achieve a better balance between our international obligations and our need for border security. At the time, some of us were encouraged by Metcalfe’s stand, however in view of yesterday’s irresponsible claims, it would seem his racist fear of rioting Middle Eastern immigrants trashing our communities will inevitably dominate and prejudice his thinking.

Is this another example of senior public servants telling politicians what they think the politicians want to hear? Or have we been granted an insight into a racist culture in the department that nicely corresponds with both government and opposition policies? Is racism so ingrained in this country’s asylum seeker/border protection policies that neither senior public servants nor politicians no longer feel any need to even attempt to conceal it?

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Dear Julia: when supping with the devil use a long spoon

6 Sep

Julia Gillard this afternoon invited Tony Abbott to a briefing tomorrow on the legal implications of the High Court’s decision last week on the Malaysia solution. Abbott has accepted.

It’s looking increasingly likely that the two will join forces in amending the Migration Act to stop any possible legal disputes preventing off-shore processing of asylum seeker claims.

Common sense and decency have long since fled this debate. It defies rationality that the major parties are willing and eager to continue spending billions on off-shore processing and mandatory detention.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect is that last time we used Nauru as a dumping ground for asylum seekers who arrived by boat, almost every one of them was found to be a refugee, and sent to Australia where they now live. As the majority of boat arrivals are granted refugee status, we can only anticipate that this will continue to be the case. Unless of course, Ms Gillard has it in mind to indefinitely detain genuine refugees in Nauru or some other off-shore prison, until she can persuade another country to grant them sanctuary.

So exactly how will this “stop the boats?”

Just when we thought Gillard’s judgement couldn’t get any worse, it does.

In her final abandonment of the Labor platform on refugees, Gillard appears to have entered into an ego-driven game of one-up-man-ship with the High Court. Her ill-disguised pique with Chief Justice French adds personal prime ministerial face-saving to an off-shore processing policy that is already populist, right-wing and economically insane.

The mental and physical damage the Gillard government will continue to inflict upon asylum seekers and their children by subjecting them to mandatory detention and off-shore processing is of no consequence to Gillard. In spite of mounting evidence and protests from just about everyone involved in the detention system about the damage sustained by both detainees and those who work in these grim places,Gillard continues to pursue a policy that she is fully aware seriously harms many, and she does it for personal and political gain.

An alliance with Tony Abbott on asylum seeker policy is but the latest Gillard political misjudgment and it ought to be the last. As Philip Adams wrote today, resign Julia, resign.

The High Court decision gave the ALP a golden opportunity to extricate themselves from a disgraceful and shaming policy without losing too much face.

While Gillard was perfectly entitled to criticize the decision, her opinions were wrong. She’s been shooting off her mouth on the asylum seeker issue since day one, when she announced that we’d be expelling boat arrivals to East Timor without first properly negotiating her plan with that country. Things have gone downhill from there.

If there is such an animal as the national psyche, government and opposition policies on boat arrivals are doing it nothing but damage, as willful misrepresentation, weasel language, outright lies, complete lack of compassion and political and personal selfishness over-rule every other consideration, such as our responsibilities to the region in which we stand out as the wealthiest country, our voluntarily incurred responsibilities to the UN Refugee Convention, and our right to behave humanely and generously towards those in need. Julia Gillard is denying us that right. Julia Gillard is shriveling our national heart and soul. Julia Gillard is turning this country into a land of hard hearts and closed minds.

I wonder if she’ll have the sense to get anything Tony says in writing.

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How to incite a moral panic about sex

5 Sep
220

Image via Wikipedia

In On Line Opinion today How to incite a moral panic about sex. Researchers claim there’s increased sexualized images of women in popular media, but their only source is Rolling Stone magazine.

Have they gone too far and confused sexy with sexualized? There is a difference and it’s an important one. Jennifer reads between the lines.

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The pornography panic: a dodgy testimonial for a dodgy product

4 Sep

This is a link to an extract in the Australian from the new book on pornography by conservative Christian commentator Melinda Tankard Reist, and feminist academic Abigail Bray. (Thank you, Matthew, for the link). It’s an account of the feelings of an “ordinary” middle class professional woman on finding that her male partner has accessed pornography sites on his laptop.

She discovered her partner’s interests when she borrowed his laptop and for some unexplained reason, decided to trawl his internet history. Presumably she suspected possible nefarious behaviour that led her to check up on him.

At the beginning of their relationship, she’d “discovered” Playboy magazines in the back of his wardrobe when she was left alone in his apartment for the afternoon, so her suspicions were aroused early on. Or maybe she was just looking for silverfish.  Something sent her burrowing through the bloke’s wardrobe in search of something about him he hadn’t voluntarily revealed.

The woman experienced her internet discovery as: “viciously invading my sexual identity and choking it with images that were distorted, ugly, degraded. The internet history revealed that this was no occasional thing but a regular search on my partner’s part.”

The anonymous woman experiences her discovery as a fundamental threat to her relationship. Her partner’s predilections, she feels, have infringed her rights. One counsellor reinforces these feelings, another explains that men are different, aren’t they, and as there was no agreement about him not pursuing his interest in pornography at the beginning of their relationship, the woman really has no right to introduce one now.

After being confronted and disgraced, the male agrees to give up his pastime, and even gives the woman permission to check up on him via his internet history. Which she does, finding he has an occasional lapse. She stays in the relationship, and her final word on the matter is: “I wait for the day he’ll say he understands and that he’s sorry.”

The reader is given no idea of the type of images the hapless fellow is accessing, only that the aggrieved narrator loathes and is deeply threatened by them. This means little outside of her subjective experience. One person’s porn is another’s harmlessly sexy fun. There are couples who happily watch it together, though these two clearly aren’t of that cohort.

The story give rise to many questions, one of which is to what degree do we have the right or the ability to control our partner’s sexual imagination? The fact that the author is so distressed by her partner’s interest demonstrates that she believes there is something inherently wrong with him imaging women other than her in sexual situations, and with perusing images of women other than her in sexual situations. But isn’t that hopelessly unrealistic? Doesn’t almost everyone have sexual fantasies, even about a person who is not their partner? We are sexual beings, monogamy is a cultural not inherent state that can require enormous self-restraint and self-vigilance. Looking doesn’t mean doing, except in the Christian tradition where if you covet your neighbour’s wife (or his donkey, that reveals the worth some Christians attach to women doesn’t it?) you’ve morally transgressed.

As there’s no indication of the type of porn the bloke is looking at, the story implies any and all such images are wrong, and it’s wrong for any man in a relationship to be looking at them. The alleged “wrong” in this instance takes the form of sexual betrayal, treachery and breach of trust. It is clearly regarded by the offended party as an indication of her partner’s lack of character and his moral weakness. He requires surveillance, for his own good I presume, so she willingly takes up the morally superior role of policing him, and the responsibility for keeping him sexually pure. This actually conforms to some right-wing religious beliefs about the role of a wife. (I have used this link once before with a warning to turn down your sound because there’s a spectacularly bad piano rendition of Rock of Ages.)

It isn’t difficult to imagine situations in which the use of pornography can be problematic. If a man (it’s usually men, apparently) prefers masturbating with the aid of sexual imagery to having a sexual relationship with his partner, to the degree that it negatively affects their life together, then they probably need to address that. The writer of this account doesn’t mention whether that’s the case or not. Is he still making love with her as well as looking at porn? Or has he given her up in favour of porn? We don’t know the scope of the problem, we just know that she doesn’t like him doing it. Well, this alone isn’t a good reason for anyone to be forced to do or not do anything.

I’d argue that everyone has the right to their private imaginings. Everyone has the right to secret places in their psyche that they can’t or don’t want to share. This isn’t betrayal or treachery or infidelity: it’s being human. If we can’t allow that to a partner maybe we’re the ones who need help.

As a case history or as an example of the harm porn can allegedly cause, this story is rather incomplete. Indeed, there’s way too much left out for anybody to read it as anything more substantial than one of those (probably made up) testimonials one finds on the websites of dodgy companies selling dodgy products that can’t be marketed any other way.

I haven’t read the book, which is an editing collaboration between a right-wing conservative Baptist and a radical feminist academic (radical feminist and right-wing Christian alliances? It’s true, misery really does make for strange bedfellows) with contributors including Gail Dines who once wrote: “Pornography is one more form of media. It’s a specific genre which, by the way, is very powerful because it delivers messages to men’s brains via the penis, which is an extremely powerful delivery system.” Don’t say you haven’t been warned, chaps.

If this extract is a typical example of its contents, I can’t see how its going to add much to the debate about pornography which all too often (think Gail Dines again) is dominated by histrionic first person accounts of alleged horrors pornography has brought to a life, accounts that aren’t verified or verifiable. There’s porn and there’s porn, but for those who have taken a set against it, all porn is dangerous porn, and all men who look at it are morally fouled. Extremist attitudes to pornography,like extremist attitudes to anything, are rarely honest and rarely helpful.

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Note to Julia: don’t go to the mattresses

2 Sep

While we’ll probably never know just what the legal advice to the Gillard government on the Malaysian solution was, it’s apparent from the Prime Minister’s shock and displeasure that some of it at least was based on the presumption that Chief Justice Robert French would maintain consistency with judgements he handed down when a judge in the Federal Court, and find in favour of Immigration Minister Chris Bowen’s declaration of Malaysia as a suitable country to which we could safely expel asylum seekers who arrive here by boat.

This advice apparently didn’t take into account the fact that there are seven judges sitting in the High Court, not just French. The result was 6-1, an overwhelming majority, and even if French had remained consistent and predictable, he would still have been outnumbered.

Julia Gillard also asserted that the High Court decision has now turned migration law on its head by virtually rewriting it. In reality, the decision has done nothing more than give substance to the protection requirement that already exists in the Migration Act, by concluding that Bowen’s declaration did not fulfil those requirements.

The legislation in question, Section 198A of the Migration Act, was written and passed during the Coalition government’s incumbency. The Court’s decision is nothing more or less than an interpretation of the language used by the Howard government. It is the task of the High Court to interpret legislation written by Parliament. It’s the job of politicians to see to it that the legislation they’re introducing is written appropriately in the first place. The High Court used Parliament’s own language. It did not write any new language. It did not rewrite the Migration Act.

Gillard’s attack on the High Court, and Chief Justice French in particular, does her no favours. Her claim that the High Court missed a golden opportunity to end “the people smuggling evil” is fanciful. It is yet another example of the weasel language used by government and opposition to wrongfully criminalize everyone involved in boat arrivals.

For example. A case is currently underway in Victoria that challenges the definition of “people smuggler” currently used by the Gillard government and the Abbott opposition. Lawyers defending an Indonesian man charged with aggravated people smuggling (a new criminal offense created last year) will argue that in order for their client to be found guilty of this offense, prosecutors must prove that there were five or more people on board his vessel who were not seeking asylum in Australia. As well, prosecutors must prove that asylum seekers brought here by boat have no lawful right to come to Australia.

Under domestic and international law, those fleeing persecution and danger have every right to come to Australia by boat without papers, and request asylum. Therefore, the argument goes, there is no “smuggling” of such people, and the boat crew cannot be charged with people smuggling. They are legitimately transporting legitimate asylum seekers.

Gillard has only herself and her advisors to blame for the situation in which she now finds herself. Casting about for scapegoats isn’t going to help.

It’s not unusual for anyone to lash out when they’re displeased and cornered. But this is the last thing Gillard can afford to do. She’s got a fight with News Limited on her mind, and has already incurred allegations of being thin-skinned in her reaction to stories they’ve published about her. She’s complained about the anti carbon tax demonstrators and their offensive placards describing her as a witch and a bitch. Anthony Albanese didn’t help by describing some of the electorate as of “no consequence” because they don’t agree with him. And now Gillard’s attacking the High Court and the Chief Justice in particular for thwarting her Malaysian solution, a solution she really ought to be grateful somebody prevented her implementing, given its immoral nature. Yes, we do need regional processing of asylum seeker claims. No, we don’t need to introduce that by trafficking in human misery.

This is not the time for the PM to go to the mattresses. There’s not one battle here she can win, or even fight with dignity. She’s coming from a position of extreme political weakness with very little public support, never a good place from which to take on institutions such as the media and the legal system. The PM is bleeding out, and she needs to staunch her wounds before willfully incurring any more.

Julia Gillard takes great pride in her tenacity and determination. I recall her mother telling the media in the early days of her daughter’s new job, that never backing down is one of her characteristics. Strength of will and steadfastness are admirable and necessary traits for someone who aspires to high political office. However, it’s equally necessary to know when to yield to circumstances with dignity and grace. Flogging dead horses because you don’t back down never did anyone any good.

Gillard could take this opportunity to accept the High Court’s decision without further castigation and accusation, and get on with organizing on-shore processing of asylum seeker claims. She could get on with the job of establishing a regional processing centre. She could choose to ignore News Limited’s sorry little campaign against her. After all we can see it for what it is, and News Limited have even less credibility with the public than the Labor government. She could choose to ignore the rude signage and crude insults aimed at her by Allan Jones and his band of ageing climate change deniers. She could, in other words, rise above the slings and arrows and be a real Prime Minister. This could be her moment. It may not save her and it may not save the government, but it would certainly go some way towards salvaging a little bit of personal dignity, and in so doing, set an example for the rest of the party.

We live in a democracy. High court judges can change their minds. People can take to the streets with placards. Newspapers can write inaccurate stories about politicians and be required to remove them. Tony Abbott says you don’t ask permission, you just say you’re sorry later. Julia Gillard herself plays fast and loose with the truth when she feels like it. What the High Court did yesterday was to enact democracy, and the Prime Minister of this country is the very last person who should be complaining about that.

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