Archive | May, 2016

There’s only one leader in the debate & it isn’t Turnbull.

30 May

Bad Leaders

 

If there is one piece of knowledge we’ve painfully acquired during the last few years in Australian politics, it’s that a leader of both major parties can be brought down by colleagues at any moment.

Voters may be witness to the stormy trajectory of a leader’s demise, as we were with Tony Abbott. Then again, it might come entirely out of nowhere as happened with Kevin Rudd, when we woke one sunny morning to find him slaughtered, and Julia Gillard dancing on his grave.

In a paradoxical correlation, the more insecure leadership in the ALP and LNP becomes, the more our elections assume a presidential quality in which public focus is steered towards leaders rather than policies. Logic would argue against this focus, given the proven temporary nature of leadership, together with the factions within both parties struggling for control. The leader and faction you voted for today may not be the leader and faction you end up with for three years, because unlike in a presidential system, the parties have been at liberty to oust a leader at any time.

Since the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd debacle, the ALP has put in place certain measures that make it more difficult for their leaders to be chucked out, and it’s astonishing to me that they aren’t making more of this thrust for stability in their election campaign. If you aren’t united how can you govern a nation, asked Mr Shorten before Abbott’s demise, a question all of us ought to ask before we vote.

If you vote ALP, you have the reassurance that their time and energy is less likely to be squandered on internal leadership battles. They are freed from those concerns to concentrate on actually governing, which is far more than can be said for the LNP.

As opposition leader Bill Shorten pointed out in the Leaders’ Debate last night, Turnbull is controlled by his party while Shorten is in control of his.  This may well be the best zinger we ever hear from Shorten, and it zings with truth.

You are a leader in nothing but name if your every move is orchestrated by those you ostensibly lead, and there is no doubt that Turnbull has compromised himself almost beyond recognition in order to soothe the slavering right-wing in his party and retain their support.

Turnbull demonstrates few, if any, political leadership qualities. He’s a man who wanted to be Prime Minister at any cost not because he wanted to steer a country wisely into its future, but because he wanted to be Prime Minister. In this, he is no different from the man he ousted.

Shorten is the leader of his party in every sense. He won’t be thrown out. He doesn’t have to submit to factional demands in order to maintain his leadership. He is at liberty to focus on good governance in ways that Turnbull is not.

If you’re voting for the man and not the policies, it makes no sense at all to vote for Turnbull. He could be gone, even if he wins, and your vote is down the dunny.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m over the leadership dramatics. We’ve been badly served by the major parties’ internal strife for long enough.

There is only one leader in the debate, and it isn’t Turnbull. There’s only one major party in the debate that comes anywhere near allowing real leadership, and it isn’t the LNP.

That being said, we should still weep for our lack of decent choice.

 

This is not a rape.

25 May

 

Monsters under the bed

Monsters under the bed

The representation and simulation of rape has existed in many cultures, from the time humans first learned to make art. Sadly, none of these thousands of years of representation and simulation have done anything at all to prevent sexual assault.

So it is with some cynicism that I read artist Sophia Hewson’s explanation of her latest work as an attempt to bring the rape of women to our attention in the hope of subverting patriarchal notions of female victimisation and self-sacrifice, thus turning the trauma of rape into the liberation of empowerment.

While it is true that a raped woman need not remain forever a victim, and that the recovery of empowerment post trauma is indeed a real possibility, I’m at a loss as to how a video of a simulated “rape” scene will in any way assist the difficult progression from victim to empowered survivor.

Titled Untitled (“are you ok bob?”), the work is a video Hewson “arranged and choreographed” featuring herself and a male stranger she invited to her home to “rape” her on camera.

Immediately we note the absence of rape criteria: this is a pre-arranged consensual act, not a sexual assault.

All that is seen of the “perpetrator” are his hands and arms: the camera remains focused on Hewson’s face throughout the act. In itself this focus is, according to Hewson, a transgressive act: raped women are frequently depicted with eyes downcast, in what is presumed to be avoidance, and learned shame. (It is also an effort to protect oneself from being further violated by the gaze of others at a time of great vulnerability, among other things). Hewson claims she is instead “looking back at us from the experience” and indeed she is. However, the experience from which she is looking back is one of consensual sex, not rape.

Hewson did not enjoy making the video, she states. Not enjoying consensual sex with a stranger you’ve choreographed to “rape” you differs considerably from experiencing an act of sexual assault.

I confess myself entirely dumbfounded by this latest feminist effort to expose the damage done to raped women through a depiction of not-rape that effaces reality. I think I ought to be angry, but I’m too baffled for anger. Who is the consumer for whom this work is created? Is it intended for the titillation of the safe? Is it rape porn? Is it as ethically bereft as poverty porn or disaster porn?

Is it co-opting suffering for personal gain? For the delicious thrill of not being one of the violated, for the guilty pleasure of being privileged enough to only pretend it’s happening, like children frighten themselves by imagining monsters under the bed, just for the euphoric sensation of discovering there are none?

For mine, this work marks an alarming low in the discourse of sexual assault. It is bereft of context. Its raison d’être is as a simulation of rape, entirely gratuitous. It will be viewed with appalled fascination, no doubt by many, but what it will do for women and our unenviable position in the patriarchy is not apparent to me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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No, Beyonce’s sportswear does not empower me

16 May
This is an ironic photo from 1970's not Beyonce's sportswear LOL

This is an ironic (iconic as well) photo from 1970’s not Beyonce’s sportswear LOL

 

I do a fair bit of exercise. I go to Pilates, Feldenkrais, dance class, aquarobics, and in between I walk, run & swim, largely unsupervised.

With the exception of the water-focused exercise I wear the same clothing to every activity: leggings, comfy bra, tee-shirt, bare feet or runners. I’ve yet to enter a sportswear store in search of empowering work out gear.

The idea that the clothing I choose to wear when I put my body to work empowers me is, to be honest, elephant shite. What empowers me is using my body, and as long as I haven’t clothed it in something likely to result in strangulation or a bone-shattering fall, what I’m wearing while I work my sweet ass off is of no effin consequence at all.

True fact. We do not have to wear any particular garment in order to be empowered by exercise. Empowerment is to be found in becoming familiar with our bodies and what they can (and in some instances cannot) do. Empowerment is to be found in the enjoyment, the satisfaction, the gratification of using our bodies to the best of our ability. When my Feldenkrais teacher instructs me to “open those knees, Jennifer, wider, wider” I’m giving the finger to all those years the nuns told me to keep them closed.

Do not be tricked into outsourcing your empowerment: it can never come from an external source such as celebrity leggings, & Beyoncé is only after your money.

Neither does Beyoncé’s sports line empower the women who manufacture it: …a seamstress employed to make the clothes in Sri Lanka told The Sun newspaper: “When they talk about women and empowerment this is just for the foreigners.

The disempowered seamstress is paid just $8.50 a day in her sweatshop to produce for foreign women garments described as “empowering.” Oh, the feckin, the heartbreaking irony.

In my experience, the process of self-empowerment is a long and gruelling one. It requires a woman to deconstruct all the disempowering shite she’s been told about herself, and replace it with the wondrous adventure of discovering who she can actually be and what she can actually do, without the toxic dictates of societal expectation that all too often require us to shrink our potential, rather than expand it.

Claiming we can get all this from wearing a designer sweatshirt and leggings  is actually adding to the burden of crippling shite most of us haul about every day. We can’t. We don’t. Telling us it’s even possible is an anti feminist act, and yet another example of capitalism’s co-option of women for profit.

Nobody is winning here, except Beyoncé. Not the women in sweatshops, not the women shelling out for promises of empowerment. It doesn’t matter what a woman wear while she empowers herself.  It only matters that she does it.

 

 

 

 

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Let them eat toast

13 May

 

Class War

 

By now, you’ve probably all heard the tale of Duncan Storrer, the man on $20,000 a year who asked assistant treasurer Kelly O’Dwyer on Qanda why people much wealthier than him are getting tax breaks and he isn’t.

Let them eat toast, replied O’Dwyer, but those mofos can cost up to $6000 so two good people began a fund-raising campaign for Mr Storrer to get himself a toaster bigger than his very kitchen because this is class warfare and it’s time to pick your feckin side.

Newscorpse immediately launched a savage attack against Duncan, despatching Princess Caroline Overington to find Duncan’s estranged son who when found had nothing good to say about his dad so obviously, dumbo, Duncan had no right to ask his question because his son hates him. No, I’m not linking to Overington’s piece of trash.

Chris (doglover) Kenny’s son  has also publicly proclaimed his hatred for his father but Newscorpse doesn’t see that as an impediment to Kenny’s authenticity. Apparently earning over $80,000 a year restores any authenticity one might lose as a consequence of your children hating you.

(There are in fact very many impediments to Kenny’s authenticity: his son’s hatred of him is not one of them.)

According to another Newscorpse Princess, Rita Panhini and some of her followers, the ABC needs to be pilloried for allowing Duncan entry to Qanda in the first place, and no government minister should appear on that show again until the audience is subject to an income test.

Newscorpse then attacked Duncan for not paying any net tax, overlooking the fact that Newscorpse pays no net tax either but  that’s OK because Newscorpse has a $6000 toaster it uses to burn to a feckin crisp poor people who ask inconvenient questions so it’s exempted from tax which is only for poor people anyway who have to pay it as punishment for being poor because the doctrine of predestination teaches (read this, it explains a great deal about the LNP) that if God wants you to be rich you’ll be rich and if you aren’t it’s because you’ve pissed him off so NO TOASTER FOR YOU.

Not yet satisfied with the zillion buckets of their own stinking piss they’d poured over Duncan, Newscorpse discovered his rap sheet and plastered Duncan’s offences all over the Herald Sun’s front pages today. Duncan has a record, ergo Duncan may not ask a question on Qanda about income tax.

Yes. This is our country.

Let us not pay attention to the entirely legitimate question Duncan asked, a question many millions of us would dearly love to have answered by Treasurer Scott Morrison or, if we have no other choice, Kelly (let them eat toast) O’Dwyer. Let us instead go through the questioner’s trash cans in a mammoth effort to discredit and invalidate the perfectly legitimate question  he is perfectly entitled to ask from his seat in the Qanda audience upon which he is entirely entitled to settle his bum, even if he only earns $20,000 a year, because last time I looked, asking questions didn’t have a means test attached to it.

But wait. There’s more. Newscorpse chief political editor at one of its many sordid publications, Ms Samantha Maiden, will later this month appear in court to be sentenced for drunk driving and leading police not once but twice on a drunken car chase along the Hume Highway and surrounds. In spite of being found guilty of all charges, Ms Maiden has continued to write her regular column, indeed, in one of her first tweets after appearing in court she called a respected economist a dickhead, rather a reckless judgement from an individual who’d just been found guilty of drink driving and attempting to escape not one, but two police pursuits.

For reasons not immediately apparent to this writer, Ms Maiden’s criminal activities do not invalidate her opinions, while Duncan’s do.

Why have the frothing Newscorpse contingent gone after $20,000 a year Duncan like dogs in an advanced stage of rabies?  Because Duncan’s question threatened them so profoundly they have to try kill him stone dead, or at the very least, silence him and anyone like him, forever. This is a message from the LNP to the country: Stick your neck out and we’ll set our backers onto you, your family and your life till there’s nothing left of any of it. We will exterminate you.

This is a class war. Make no mistake about it.

In case you still have doubts, yesterday Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull took flight into the exclusive “gentleman’s only” Athanaeum Club for lunch, after being confronted by single mother, Melinda, on the matter of how hard it is raising her children after family tax cuts.  As the Huff Post reports it:

The visit [to the exclusive club] comes after the PM addressed a Business Women and Working Mothers Forum in Sydney on Wednesday, and not long after he was confronted on the street by a woman named Melinda who claimed his policies were hurting families. 

Class war. Gird thy loins.

 

 

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How politicians force us to make a choice we should never have to make.

11 May
Ironic points of light

Ironic points of light

 

The phrase, Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite, frequently attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville but in fact coined by French counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre, is translated as “Every democracy gets the government it deserves.”

It’s not a sentiment with which I entirely agree: many factors are at work in a liberal democracy such as ours that bring into question the core assumption of informed choice, not least of which is propaganda distributed by media with vested interests, and its collusion with political and financial elites. This piece in Alternet makes interesting arguments against de Maistre’s maxim, describing it as a toxic idea that needs to be laid to rest. It’s worth a read.

I’ve listened carefully to all the pragmatic arguments of ALP supporters, as I have for the last seven years. I know that in almost every way an ALP government is far preferable to life under an LNP administration.

And I am enraged at finding myself yet again in a situation where I would have to endorse the torture of asylum seekers and refugees in order to have a government that we in a liberal democracy deserve. This is a choice no one has the right to force upon citizens and we need to get very angry about being put in this position. 

All my life I voted Labor, until in 2009 then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd got into a face-off with Indonesia over Tamil asylum seekers picked up by the Oceanic Viking, refusing to allow them to be transferred to Christmas Island for refugee assessment.

In 2012 the Gillard government reopened detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru that had been closed by the Rudd government in 2008, at which time Immigration Minister Chris Evans described the Pacific Solution as a “costly, cynical and ultimately unsuccessful exercise.”

In 2013, newly returned Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced, “asylum seekers who come here by boat without a visa will never be settled in Australia.”

The ALP lost my vote in 2009 and they’ve never got it back. It was a difficult decision: my local member was a woman I admired, and it was hard to imagine her supporting Gillard and Rudd, who appeared to be in complete harmony on the matter of torturing those who legally seek asylum in this country.

Refugee policy is one of very many issues to be considered when deciding on the government we deserve. For mine, it’s a fundamental issue: if we have as our government a group of people who take pride in destroying the lives of those who have committed absolutely no offence by arriving here on boats, indeed, who have done so in response to the invitation we continue to extend as signatories to the UNHCR Refugee Convention, we have as our government a group of barbarians who will not hesitate, should it serve their purposes, to take severe action against any other group who in some way threaten their hold on power, or can be used to shore up their grip on governance.

For the last sixteen years LNP and ALP governments have used asylum seekers as scapegoats, fuelling entirely unsubstantiated public fears about the stranger as terrorist, and pitting those fleeing the destruction of their homelands and in many cases torture and death, against disgruntled voters who are being let down and damaged not by asylum seekers, but by their elected representatives.

Asylum seekers have proved and continue to prove infinitely useful to both major parties, as distractions from their own failures, inadequacies and corruptions. This is the moral calibre of our politicians: that they will actively or passively engage in and perpetuate this torture of waterborne asylum seekers for their political gain. There is not one of them, LNP or ALP, that I wish to support in their vile exploitation of human beings.

The Pacific solution uses cruelty as a deterrent to asylum seekers, and in so doing, compromises every single voter in this country, and ensures we are complicit. Every time we agree to pragmatically compartmentalise, we agree to the ongoing torment of refugees and asylum seekers. In this sense we do get the government we deserve as we agree to the ongoing torment of human beings by both major parties, in order to create for ourselves the life to which we feel entitled.

This is a piece written by a young friend starting out on his career as a journalist. It’s his perception of Manus Island and Nauru, together with information on what can be done to assist refugees. Cameron’s article  brought to mind some lines from W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages…

There are among the young ironic points of light, exchanging messages in this stuporous world. In them I trust, because I have lost all faith in the adults who govern us.

 

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Are you rational or self-interested, PM?

3 May

Self Interest

 

“We mustn’t let empathy cloud our judgement.”

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull urged the Australian people not to get all “misty-eyed” about the fate of refugees held in off-shore detention. He followed this urging with the above statement, after learning that the late Nauru refugee, Omid, had died as a consequence of setting himself on fire.

Turnbull urged us to stay “rational” when considering these matters.

However, if you think he’s only talking about the plight of refugees we continue to torture, think again.

Turnbull isn’t the first to expound the false dichotomy of empathy and judgement: determination not to allow empathy for raped and molested children to cloud their rational judgement is one of the factors that enables the Catholic church hierarchy to shelter perpetrators of these crimes.

Note how in these examples from church and state “rational” in both cases reflects the institution’s best interests.

It’s remarkable how the “rational” so frequently coincides with self-interest.

There’s nothing wrong with being rational. It’s a human attribute and a useful one. Like so many other useful and admirable human attributes, the rational has been co-opted by the self-serving to justify (rationalise) cruelty, and contempt for anyone considered “other.”

Empathy, on the other hand, rarely equates to self-interest. For a start, empathy asks that we imaginatively walk a mile in another’s shoes, an act entirely at odds with interest only in the self.

There is no either/or in the matter of empathy and judgement. No legitimate judgement can be made without empathy. Empathy is what tempers decisions that are otherwise entirely self-serving.

Turnbull’s attitude is a core belief of today’s LNP.  If you think it applies only to refugees you’re dreaming. It is the default position of the present-day Liberal towards anyone considered in some way less worthy. It’s why they won’t tackle negative gearing. It’s why they fund private schools and want to strip public schools of all assistance. It’s why they don’t care if you can’t afford private medical insurance and suffer horribly as a consequence. The LNP will not let empathy cloud their judgement not only of refugees, but of every citizen in this country who suffers as a consequence of their self-interested (rational) policies.

Rational or self-interested? You decide.

 

 

 

 

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