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Woman up, Ms Gillard!

20 Sep

 

We shall not be moved

As soon as she took office, Julia Gillard signalled that she intended to take a hard line on the off shore processing of asylum seekers who arrive here by boat. The new Prime Minister announced a processing centre (sounds a bit like a fish canning enterprise) in East Timor without, it subsequently emerged, first having properly consulted with that country as to its willingness to partner with Australia in the venture.

As we know, the East Timor proposition came to nought, and served to position the new Prime Minister as a woman who perhaps spoke too soon, and incautiously. This cast early doubt on her capacity for tough. She’s had to work hard to dispel this initial doubt because everyone knows a woman who seeks high political office has to be twice as tough, twice as hard and twice as mean as any man. Unless she wants stay on the backbench for her entire career and be of no interest to anyone other than her electorate.

The Malaysian “solution” has also thus far come to nought, not because that country declined to co-operate with Gillard’s tough plans to expel boat arrivals including unaccompanied children, a new benchmark in tough that left me gob smacked and tearful, how female of me, but because the High Court of Australia found the current Migration Act incompatible with the government’s tough policy. In a

After having petulantly (unwise choice, petulance erodes tough) attacked the full bench as activist judges who were missing an opportunity to stop the boats (an ignorant response from a lawyer: as if it is the High Court’s job to stop the boats) Gillard has now proposed amendments to the Act that will grant an immigration minister unfettered control over the expulsion of asylum seekers to any country he or she decides is suitable, should he or she deem that to be in the national interest. The amendment will ensure there can be no further legal challenges to such a ministerial declaration.

Never underestimate the power of a woman.

Theoretically, this amendment could lead to asylum seekers being refouled, that is sent back to the countries from which they have fled. The UN Refugee Convention proscribes this course of action. The Convention does allow us to relocate asylum seekers to a third country for assessment, however that third country ideally would also be a signatory, and certainly would offer protection of asylum seekers’ human rights, including non refoulement.

We have now strayed so far from the Convention that the only reasons for us to continue as signatories are that we would look like very bad (if tough) international citizens if we withdrew, and withdrawal would undoubtedly put the kybosh on our aspirations to a seat on the UN Security Council. So we will maintain our status as signatories, whilst abandoning pretence to anything other than minimal observance of the Convention. Amending the Migration Act will legitimise our hypocrisy. Not only has a woman proved she is better at tough than the men, she’s also surpassed them in the hypocrisy stakes.

Qué viva liberación de la mujer!

I just love how that sounds in Spanish.

I am woman hear me roar

The fact that Gillard chose to announce her East Timor “solution” hours after taking office indicates that she was determined to position herself from the start as a woman who is capable of great tough, especially on asylum seekers, that hapless and motley collection of human vulnerability who, one could be forgiven for concluding, exist primarily for Australian politicians to use as a yardstick for their implacability capability. Tough implacability apparently being the sole measure of strength in this brutalized country’s brutalized politics, formerly epitomized by Liberals John Howard, Philip Ruddock, Peter Reith, Alexander Downer, et al.

In a bold and successful tilt at gender equality, Gillard has now proved beyond question that a woman can be much better at tough than a man. We have the extraordinary vision of Abbott refusing to co-operate with Gillard’s proposed amendment on the grounds that it strips asylum seekers of all human rights protections, including those written into the Act by his predecessor John Howard who we thought was tough at the time, but who now looks like a little bitty pussycat.

In other words, Abbott has voluntarily relinquished his inherited title of sovereign head of the continent of Tough to Gillard, because worrying about asylum seekers’ human rights is so not tough that he might find he’s stranded himself off shore in the very leaky boat of mercurial public opinion. It could viciously turn, public opinion could, and drive Tony, soon to be despised as a bleeding heart if he’s not careful, past the shores of need to the reefs of greed, through the squalls of hate.* Who knows where he might make landfall? Maybe Malaysia.

Who would ever have thought it?

Gillard’s off shore processing stance was adopted in response to focus groups who want rid of boat arrivals like a good householder wants rid of rats and cockroaches, having learned from Pauline Hanson and John Howard that asylum seekers are a threat to the very fabric of the Australian way of life, and quite likely terrorists to boot. Focus groups aren’t going to put their weight behind any politician who can’t show them some tough, and kick the bastard refugees out as soon as they disembark from their bastard cobbled-together boats. If they sink and die it serves the importunate bastards right, is pretty much the attitude of focus groups the government consults.

The people of the focus groups found their natural leader in Gillard. She, like Pauline Hanson, validated them and gave them a voice. You aren’t racists, she told them. If you worry about border security and our nation’s sovereignty you are not racists, and their hearts swelled with gratitude at this Prime Ministerial liberation from the burdensome slur of bogan racism laid upon them by middle class tosser academics, soy milk latte sipping left wing inner city über cool arty farty wankers, and maybe that nerdy egg head Kevin Rudd as well, even if he did try to hide it. Julia speaks their language, she has the right accent; she makes it OK to hate boat arrivals and call it border protection, and she’s tough. What more could a focus group want?

 A victory for women

Julia Gillard is unquestionably the mistress of the politics of tough, and the blokes she’s bulldozed in her single-minded pursuit of the title can only lie trashed and spent in the gutter, marvelling at her prodigious talent.  In the patriarchal culture of hegemonic masculinity Gillard has proved herself to be more skilled and adept than any bloke. Suck it up, chaps. You should have tried harder to keep us pregnant and barefoot.

Julia is a role model for our female young, demonstrating how a woman can indeed be harder, more mean, and infinitely more tough than a man by honing her skills on powerless asylum seekers. There’s no issue in Australian politics that comes anywhere near providing the same opportunities for the performance of tough. Climate change you might protest, but that doesn’t yet have the human element essential to modelling first class tough. Derogatory remarks about the legitimacy of a photograph of one polar bear looking desperate on a melting ice floe can’t compare with the opportunity to send unaccompanied minors to a country where they might get caned, just for being in it.

Here’s the rub

However. Here’s the rub. If it was your desire to see a change in the monotonous political culture of “how thoroughly can I trash somebody to show how tough hard and mean I am,” if it was your hope that women might introduce an alternative to the tough, hard and mean meme that can only ever be maintained at the expense of others because it is founded on being tough hard and mean to somebody, you’re likely to be feeling a bit disillusioned.

If women in high political office are going to be the same as men and worse, why do we want them there, you might be asking? Why do we need anymore mean tough and hard politicians, and especially why do we need women politicians who think they have to up the stakes and be even meaner, tougher and harder than the men?

Why do we value and reward the mean, the tough and the hard in politics above all other characteristics in the first place, whether they manifest in a man or a woman?

Julia Gillard is living proof that the qualities required for political office in Australia are un-gendered. She is the living proof that women can do anything a man can do and more, in that world. She’s living proof that women are capable of the same oppressive and repressive patriarchal attitudes and behaviours that in other contexts feminists have vigorously protested and fought to liberate us from for decades, only to have our first female leader head right back into the brutal bloodied heart of the patriarchy’s savaging body, and prove that not only can we equal them in their dark arts, we can outdo them.

Woman up, Ms Gillard, and stop copying the blokes. It’s not yet too late. Things can’t get much worse for you, so if you’re going down, do it in a blaze of female glory by being tough enough to change your mind, because very soon Tony Abbott’s going to start looking better at pretending to be humane than you are, and that’s just going to mess with everybody’s heads, possibly terminally. Then you’ll find yourself and your party cast into the wilderness for a good few decades, while the rest of us have to find ways of staying alive under a coalition government led by a failed seminarian who likes going round mostly naked, and has a bad and unreconstructed attitude to women.

From one woman to another this heartfelt plea: have mercy, Julia. Have mercy.

*Leonard Cohen, Democracy.

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Fighting to be mother of the nation

18 Sep

A grim mum and dad on the way to Family Court

When we hear Tony Abbott fighting to protect the human rights of asylum seekers against Julia Gillard‘s implacable determination to traduce them, we know we’ve entered a twilight zone in which we may remain trapped for quite some time.

The  battle for political control lurches from one abusive and accusatory encounter to the next, between she who would be mother of the nation, and he who would be our dad. Like children caught in an acrimonious parental break-up, we are forced to listen to the protagonists defile and mock each other with no regard for the confusion and insecurity they are sowing in our hearts and minds.

As if that isn’t enough, they are hell-bent on turning the ingrained gender expectations on which we build our lives inside out, as dad fights to be more caring about people than mum, when everybody knows it’s supposed to be the other way around.

Driven by ego and their unrelenting determination to pulverize one another, they have made the fate of a handful of asylum seekers their theatre of war, and we, along with asylum seekers, are collateral damage in their fight to the death to take the lowest moral ground and on it plant their victory flag.

Frightened and disbelieving, we watch as concern for the less fortunate manifests across our previously hard-as-nails dad’s visage. Mum’s face daily becomes more grim, her lips closed tight in a forced smile as she digs in deep, while dad berates her for her cruelty. If she’ll send unaccompanied children to Malaysia what might she do to us?

But can we trust this newly compassionate dad, dare we consign our future to his hands? So many times he’s dropped us on our heads! So many times he’s failed to feed us and left us sitting in our own excrement while he selfishly attended to the well-being of his body, on his bike and on the beaches!

Neglected as the fur flies, we struggle to understand our mother’s betrayal. Our uncle Bob is of little help, he’s got nothing good to say about either mum or dad, and seems to have cast us to our fate. All the rest of our aunts and uncles and cousins in Canberra have chosen to keep silent, in the way families frequently decide to keep out of the matrimonial upheavals of their members. Like police called to a domestic, they know any interference will likely see them end up with bloodied noses, if not blamed for the problems in the first place.

All this discretion is well and good, but what about the children!

Aunt Janelle came out and called for on shore processing, but her lone voice was immediately  drowned out and only reported in a regional newspaper. It was then that it dawned on us that this battle is not really about asylum seekers. It’s all about mum and dad. It’s about who gets to be the boss of us. It’s about who can hold out the longest. It’s about whose will triumphs, the female or the male. It’s about dad being pissed off that mum got a better paid job than he did. It’s about mum fighting him to make sure she keeps it. Asylum seekers are the cover story. Dad doesn’t give any more of a toss about their human rights than mum. He’s faking it. She’s also faking just about everything, except her determination to break him and grind him into the ground with her high-heeled boots.

That’s the real mum she promised to show us and never has, not even in the Women’s Weekly where every mum is supposed to be real.

How can we stand this much reality and hold onto our sanity?

As in the worst of marital breakups, this one will be fought until there’s nothing left to fight over, until the participants are left shredded and bleeding out, all assets gone to pay the lawyers, the children in therapy, the dog forgotten and starving, extended families torn asunder, forced into warring tribal groups who turn their backs on one another at weddings and christenings, and boycott each other’s funerals.

Stock up on food and water. Get in plenty of candles. We’re in this for the long haul and we’re going to have to stand on our own two feet because the adults have left the building. Who knows what the outcome will be?

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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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Mr Rabbit vows: I’ll sell my arse!

29 Aug

Independent member for New England Tony Windsor, otherwise known as Mr McGregor, revealed yesterday in an interview from his farm that Tony Rabbit had confessed to him that he’d do anything other than sell his arse to be Prime Minister of Hill Top Farm, but if absolutely necessary, he’d likely do that as well.

When confronted Mr Rabbit, looking pale and drawn, declared that he did not use that kind of language, and people in the farmyard should check with Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail if they wanted to know the real truth about him.

Precariously balanced on his hind legs, and too weary to hold up his ears, Mr Rabbit claimed that he’d been over-medicated when he had the alleged conversation with Mr McGregor. He’s since weaned himself off his daily intake of three hundred cups of camomile tea, and says he’s left the addiction in the past. As is well-known in complimentary medicine circles, excessive and sustained intake of the tea can cause hyper-sexuality and an overblown sense of worth, making an offer to sell one’s arse and to anybody, entirely plausible.

Meanwhile the real farm boss, Jemima Puddleduck, continues to search for a suitable nest in which to safely lay her eggs. This has proved to be an ongoing challenge moving forward, as one after another they’ve been broken the minute she’s introduced them to the light of day.

Expert opinion suggests that Jemima seems unwilling to allow the eggs their full gestation period (see PM’s Premature Enunciation at No Place For Sheep, an exclusive barnyard publication with no ties to the Murdoch Weasel Press). This practice inevitably results in brittle shells that are excessively vulnerable to critical and destructive predators.

Finally, and sadly, we heard today that Mr Jeremy Fisher aka Christopher Pyne, Manager of Opposition Business in the House of Representatives, was yesterday taken by a trout. Mr Fisher was casting his flies into a lily pond close to his home, in the hope of getting a few good bites. According to preliminary reports Mr Fisher first caught a nasty stickleback, upon which he pricked several of his fingers. Distracted by pain and licking his wounds, he was caught off guard by the unprovoked attack of the hostile fish.

Mr Fisher was wearing a plastic raincoat, the flavour of which did not, in the end, appeal to the predatory trout, which spat him out onto the muddy bank where he lay fighting for his life, his nose and mouth dangerously clogged with fish spittle.

Fortunately Mr Rabbit, having failed in his efforts to sell his arse, staggered by on his way to the refuge of his family home. Upon seeing his colleague’s dire condition Mr Rabbit called paramedics, one of whom was later identified as his second-in-command, Benjamina Bishop Bunny. Ms Bunny, readers may recall, was immortalised in the popular ABC television satire The Chaser, when she employed her infamous death stare to smash an innocent garden dwarf to smithereens.

As we go to press Mr Fisher is still in intensive care. In a freak side effect of the trauma, he has lost his voice and is expected to never again say anything other than “Ribbet.”

Mr Rabbit has since reminded the entire Hill Top Farm electorate that he’s already made it clear that unless he writes something down, it has no substance whatsoever. As no one can produce any written evidence that he ever proposed the sale of his arse, this casts doubt on Mr McGregor’s colourful account of events.

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Craig Thompson’s credibility, and why we (and Tony Abbott) tell lies

25 Aug

Embattled member for Dobell, Craig Thompson, continues to steadfastly maintain that he did not authorise the use of his Health Services Union credit card to pay for the services of prostitutes.

The card was apparently used to obtain many other non-work related services, and there’s $100,000 in cash withdrawals unaccounted for. Thompson continues to insist that his signature was forged.

The Union has now, somewhat belatedly some might consider as problems were first detected in 2008, referred the matter to the police. Fair Work Australia have also been investigating for this period, at a glacial pace it would seem.

As the inimitable Barnaby Joyce put it, if Thompson is the victim of a fraud this would have entailed someone breaking into Thompson’s house, stealing his wallet and credit card, using it  for nefarious purposes, breaking into the house again and returning the wallet and card, all of which must have gone undetected by Thompson. Or he’s lying. Take your pick, said Barnaby.

Around the age of two we usually begin to understand that other people and their minds are separate from us. This is the precursor to lying because in order to deceive someone, we need first have some understanding of what they might be thinking.

The tendency to lie is a natural one: as soon as we learn we have language with which to defend ourselves, we use it in order to avoid trouble and punishment. Part of the process of maturation is that we hopefully learn more useful and rewarding ways to deal with difficulties, rather than resorting to lies.

Lying can also be a sign of intelligence and cognitive skill. An accomplished liar convincingly  creates an alternative version of reality, and maintains it. This is most effective when the liar convinces him or herself that this version is truth. This isn’t difficult: if we tell the same lies often enough they gain authority within our own minds and lying becomes easier.

The motives for lying are usually tied up with self-esteem and self-preservation. We want to create the best version of ourselves, we don’t want to face the consequences of our actions,we want respect. We lie about mistakes to avoid punishment, we lie because it often works, at least for a time, and brings benefits.

However. Lies can be self-perpetuating: more lies have to be told in order to maintain the original deceit. The more serious the lie, the more it erodes trust in all social relations. Truthfulness and straightforwardness are the glues that hold society together and allow us to function: not everything can be governed by written contracts.

For example, Tony Abbott‘s declaration that his word means nothing unless it is recorded and signed is a profound breach of public trust. Whether or not he maintains this same position in his intimate life, I don’t know. One would hope not, and it isn’t unusual for a practiced liar to engage in the kind of cognitive dissonance that allows him or her to be highly principled in one area of their lives, and a complete scoundrel in another.

Clearly not everything a politician says can be formalized, and Abbott’s admission is a warning that he cannot be held accountable as he is a self-professed liar. In this he differs from Thompson, who insists that he is truthful against mounting evidence that this is either not the case, or he is part of a bizarre conspiracy that requires him to protect a guilty party by stoically shouldering the blame and humiliation of serious accusations. Somebody used the credit card. Somebody made large cash withdrawals. If not Craig, who?

Either way, Thompson is involved in a serious deception.

Lying isn’t always a bad thing and sometimes it’s necessary. The wise lie with awareness and care, and they know when to come clean. In general, it’s less complicated to tell the truth, and some research indicates that while people can forgive a lie when it’s confessed, they find it very difficult to forgive  serious and repeated deception that involves extended violation of trust. Nobody enjoys the shock of discovering they’ve been lied to. It can change a relationship permanently.

In general, human beings have positive expectations about another’s behaviour. We tend to take things at face value unless we have a reason not to, or have already been seriously damaged by a liar.We survive on the assumption that others are co-operative and trustworthy. If we didn’t we’d grind to a halt, because the energy required to stay constantly alert to the possibility of lies and to check everything, would detract from our ability to function. There’s a balance between being ludicrously naive and reasonable wary, and it pays to be co-operative.

Deception causes enduring and significant harm. This may be why politicians are frequently so despised. “Lying politicians” has become a tautology. Politician’s violations of public trust have long-lasting effects. They seem to have very little idea of their enormous responsibility for constructing and maintaining the kind of society in which we all live, and they apparently don’t care, with a few exceptions.

When the rot starts at the top, that sets the tone. If a country is governed overwhelmingly by liars and deceivers, nobody should be surprised if lies and deceit are the order of the day in all parts of its society.

Of course, in the Thompson matter there’s always the possibility of an evil twin.

It’s all about Julia. Nostalgia, trust and fear

15 Jul

There’s a member of our household we affectionately call Mrs Chook, for reasons none of us now remember. Mrs Chook is central to everybody’s emotional well being as she is generally unfailingly just and fair, and takes a reasoned position on matters some of us might get rather too het up about. She’s also broadly supportive of the Carbon Tax, and is gently critical of my attitude to Julia Gillard.

So imagine my astonishment when last night watching the ABC news clip of Julia’s speech at the Press Club, the bit where she got all choked up, Mrs Chook yelled: “For God’s sake, it’s not all about you!”

We have two dogs visiting while their humans are overseas. These dogs leapt up from their fireside spots in anger and fear at the tone in her voice, as did the Dog who lives here all the time. I stared at Mrs Chook until I could manage a feeble “What?”

“I’m sick of it,” she yelled, getting up off the couch with great energy, and striding into the kitchen.

“Sick of what? Sick of what, tell me, tell me,” I begged as a scurried after her, my world rocked.

“Haven’t you ever noticed? She always says ‘I.’ I have done this, I have done that I will do this, I will do that! Right back when she took over what did she say then?”

I opened my mouth but Mrs Chook wasn’t interested.

“She said ‘I have taken over,’ I I I. What about the bloody government? What about everybody else, all those people, some of them actually good, who do so much bloody hard work and it’s always I! She isn’t a bloody President! What has she got against saying ‘we?’  Or ‘The government?’ Why is it always about her?”

I take this outburst as a bad omen for the government. If someone as fair and rational as Mrs Chook gets this fed up, anything can happen.

Julia became nostalgic at the Press Club for where she came from, the school she attended, and her first win when working at the law firm Slater and Gordon. I’ve noticed that when things in the present are difficult and testing it’s a fairly normal human reaction to become nostalgic, and yearn for a time that in retrospect, and compared with the shit field one is currently attempting to negotiate, looks rosy and comforting and is one to which one longs to return.

The ABC rather cruelly titled their clip “Real Julia.” However, we did get a glimpse of the real Julia in that emotional slip. Unfortunately, and this is what so aggravated Mrs Chook it seems, the emotion was all about her.

Tony Abbott is very good at manufacturing fear, he learnt it from John Howard who learnt it from Goebbels. Yo! Godwin’s Law already!

Abbott has fertile ground – in general Australians have become (have always been?) a fearful people, controlled by catastrophic expectations that create a free floating and irrational anxiety about what could happen to us if…

This fear of catastrophe is apparently unassailable. Reason and logic stand no chance against it. It dominates the public and private  imagination, and people look to governments to protect them and assuage their fears.

The public doesn’t want governments offering challenging vision and the excitement of change.  The public wants things safe and ordinary.

In general we live in a mindset of scarcity, rather than abundance. No matter how good things are for us in comparison with the rest of the world,  we worry that it might get worse soon. This causes an inability to empathise with anyone who is not in our immediate circle of concern. That circle can be very small, and as fear takes hold it will inevitably shrink further.

We live in a culture of constructed vulnerability and this creates a diminished sense of agency. There are experts in every aspect of human life, telling us what we should do and how we should do it. Even the most common sense matters must be subjected to expert research in order to be validated, in fact common sense has been so thoroughly discredited as a human value it barely counts any more.

As a consequence we increasingly perceive ourselves as passive subjects who must be protected from walking too close to the edge of a cliff as we are incapable of judging for ourselves when we’re in danger. Somebody in authority has to tell us and put up a fence. This constructed powerlessness makes us angry, frustrated and incompetent. We can’t trust ourselves, the dominant culture tells us. We must be regulated for our own good not to take risks.

Enter the LNP. Only too happy to tell us the danger we are in, and only too happy to offer us the solutions. Abbott and his cronies are whipping up a perfect storm. The government’s popularity is in the death zone. Gillard has a major trust issue with the public, and has ever since she took over the leadership. Abbott would not be nearly so successful if the ALP had a leader the public trusted a good deal more than it trusts Gillard. In this sense, the ALP did the groundwork for Abbott, and he’s used classic propaganda techniques to run with it. The public is ready and waiting, prepped by learned helplessness to follow the one who apparently offers security and freedom from fear.

“It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success,” Goebbels wrote, and Howard, with his propaganda war on asylum seekers that led to his re-election, brilliantly demonstrated this. Abbott watched and learned.

This is not the time for the PM to get personal with us about herself. That moment is long gone. Mrs Chook has a point. There is an entire government there. We need to be hearing from many more members of it. Gillard will do herself no favours getting emotional about her personal history at this point. Abbott is conducting a vigorous propaganda campaign against her and against the government, and he’s succeeding. While it’s two years till the next election, there could be a by election at any time. The government doesn’t have the luxury of thinking it’s got time on its side. The threat of an Abbott-led government is constant.

Now there’s a catastrophic expectation, if anybody’s looking for one.

“From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”

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Rudd cancels party; pot calls kettle black, and it’s all good for the mad monk

20 Jun

This time last year, freshly ousted Prime Minister Kevin Rudd promised a “first anniversary of my knifing” party for his then staffers.

As the anniversary looms there’s entirely unsurprising and rabid media interest in the proposed gathering, causing the now Foreign Minister to cancel the event for fear of damage to his front lawn, and because of former staffers’ natural reluctance to run the gauntlet of television lights and media exposure to celebrate the occasion with Kev.

However, there should be some formal acknowledgement of this anniversary. After all, the circumstances were unprecedented and historic. Never before have we seen a first term PM chucked out by his party. While insiders may have been aware that something was going down, the event seems to have taken the majority of the media and most of the general population entirely by surprise.

Ever since that spectacle Rudd, a solitary essence, has  haunted the ALP and parliament, inconsolable and unforgiving as the undead. To the degree that we now have such ex luminaries as former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie calling for Rudd to move quietly to the back benches, and then quietly disappear.

This is further proof, if further proof was required, of the ALP’s endemic weakness for magical thinking. The “Rudd fading into obscurity ship” has long since sailed, if indeed, it ever got off the slips.

There have also been calls for Gillard to sack Rudd. But on what grounds? The man is performing well in his job. While his undermining of the Gillard government is as effective as a tribe of white ants secretly gnawing away at the timbers of a Queenslander house, Rudd’s mission is accomplished through innuendo, not the kind of direct attack that could be used as a justification for throwing him out.

And how is it possible to sack an elected representative for giving interviews about how he felt when they threw him out of his job?

Now we have the extraordinary situation of 60% of voters backing Rudd as preferred PM, while a dismal 31% back the woman who replaced him.

Somewhere in the last couple of days I came across an article in which Karl Bitar lamented that at the time of Rudd’s ousting, the ALP did not take sufficient advantage of a golden opportunity to explain to the electorate just how “odd” Rudd is. Had we known Bitar seems to believe we would have been far more accepting of the coup, and joined with Gillard and the faceless men who engineered it, in rejoicing at our liberation from the odd.

Bitar calls Rudd odd? Pot and kettle, anyone?

In the meantime, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott must be overwhelmed by the ammunition regularly supplied to him by the ALP to help him shoot them down. They never disappoint him. They’re always there when he needs them.  Now he wants a $69 million carbon tax plebiscite, telling  ABC’s AM program this morning: “I want the Australian people to have a direct say about the biggest economic change in our history. This is the vote the Prime Minister didn’t allow us to have at the last election. I want this to happen.”

Whether or not Abbott can succeed with his plebiscite proposal is as yet unclear. What he will succeed in immediately achieving is the further aggravation of discontent amongst a great many people who are outraged at the prospect of the carbon tax, especially in view of Gillard’s promise when she took over from Rudd that she wasn’t going to introduce one.

The manner of Gillard’s ascension to the top job caused considerable upheaval in an electorate that might not have been enamoured with Rudd at that particular moment in time, but was certainly not ready to have others chuck him out without consultation. Many of us got off on the wrong foot with Gillard, so to speak. Since then, the ALP has not managed to hold onto any ground they might have initially gained.

This certainly isn’t all down to Rudd. Getting rid of him isn’t going to help, in fact it’s likely to make matters even worse. Rudd is more popular than the PM. Why would anyone in their right minds think that sacking him on what could only be extremely tenuous and dubious grounds, be anything other than another desperate act of self-destruction for the ALP?

The man has too much public sympathy. They might as well have him cast in bronze as a holy martyr, while the mad monk becomes more and more convinced of his divine right to rule.

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Sarah Palin on Qanda. Hazaras in boats. End live exports of all sentient beings. Now.

31 May

At the beginning of Q&A last night a startled tweet manifested on screen. “Eeeek!” the tweeter wrote. “Is that Sarah Palin?”

Kate Lundy (???)

The tweet referred to Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary for  Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, and I had the same sense of dislocation when I saw her. Having just returned from the US where Palin was pretty much unavoidable if you ever turned on the television, I thought I was still in that country, and hadn’t  endured that fourteen hour flight home after all. A quick self-inflicted slap to the upside of my head brought me back to the present.  It wasn’t Sarah Palin on Q&A but dear God, it was too close for comfort.

I have no idea if Ms Lundy is deliberately cultivating the Palin look, and to some degree, the Palin style. She might want to think about what she’s doing or else like Tony Abbott‘s anti carbon tax rally, she might attract groups she’d rather not be associated with. We all know how shallow the punters can be, and appearance can count for much more than it should.

Over at the Drum yesterday I discovered an excellent piece by Deakin University researcher Vince Scappatura,in which he analyses the mainstream media interpretation of a report commissioned by the Gillard government on the push and pull factors thought to influence the decision of Afghanistan’s Hazara population to attempt to seek asylum in Australia.

The report reveals that dire economic circumstances, ethno-political disturbances, mistreatment and discrimination by the Taliban, killings, kidnappings, arrests and subsequent disappearances, and the complete inability of the government to protect Hazaras in remote villages are all compelling push factors in decisions to flee. The research concludes that these factors are of more significance than any pull factors endemic to Australia.

However. Andrew Probyn and Nick Butterfly in the West Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald, claimed the report showed that the main reason Hazaras flee in boats to Australia is for a better life. Their actions are a livelihood strategy, they aren’t fleeing bullets, says Andrew Bolt. It’s a lifestyle choice, dammit!

No mention at all of the multitude of factors in play, including persecution and death, that provoke Hazara people to sell up everything, pay people smugglers, and embark on a journey that 80% of them fear they may not survive, but even so, it’s a better bet than staying where they are. They are also aware that they might spend years in vile detention centres being sent mad with grief and uncertainty. Even this, they consider, is better than staying where they are.

Now the Gillard government intends to export Hazaras to Malaysian refugee camps, where they will be further mistreated, badly fed and physically abused. Mother of God, what kind of people are we?

by Jeff Cavins

Over at On Line Opinion today you’ll find an article by me on pornography, the media and Gail Dines. Dines received wide coverage during her anti pornography campaign here , especially from the ABC. However, there has been comparatively little researched response  published on the ABC to the claims Dines makes about the effects of porn, it’s availability, and the media’s responsibility for the ruination of the sexual lives of men. I have no idea why this is so. Thank you OLO for picking up the slack and widening a very necessary debate.

Finally , I cannot bring myself to speak much of the hideous treatment of cattle exported live to Indonesia, as revealed on Four Corners last night. There is no need for a lengthy inquiry into this trade, an inquiry that will only  delay its termination, and prolong the unspeakable suffering of these animals. Alternatives must be found and found immediately.

This is just one more example of a government that lacks any real connection with human beings and other species, not to mention the planet, who are in dire and extreme situations. A government that lacks imagination, and is bereft of decency, morality and ethics. Unfortunately, the opposition is no better.

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Julia Gillard: our First Hollow Woman.

3 Apr

by Debbi Long via flickr

I’ve been in denial about Julia Gillard‘s prime ministership since her first day on the job. I’ve only just decided I’d better examine this unhealthy emotional defense, and my resistance to doing even that is strong.

The most common form my denial takes is whenever I see or hear Gillard I struggle to block her right out of my awareness. I don’t just “switch off,” I wish it was that easy, no, I have to actively deny her entry into my consciousness, rather like a metaphysical turning of not just my back, but my whole being.

If I’m not quick enough, and she gets in despite my lack of hospitality, I find myself swearing without either finesse or coherence, as well as making the medieval hand gesture used to ward off the devil, that one like the “call me” sign but with the first and pinky fingers and facing the other way, usually directed towards the enemy’s third eye.

I used this against John Howard as well, I’m not partisan.

The thought that generally accompanies this bit of theatre is “She’s not really our Prime Minister, someone else is, she’s just a pretend one till the real one comes along, so I don’t need to listen to anything she says, she’s a usurper.”

It isn’t just  question of not believing a word she says. I didn’t like how she acquired the top job. I didn’t like the maternalistic undercurrents revealed in what she told us when she took over, along the lines of: “the government has lost it’s way and I’m here now to get it back on track.” Tickets on herself, is what I thought, an understandable assessment when we recall that hardly anybody in the general population knew what was going on in federal Labor at the time.

I didn’t like her rush to placate the Australian Christian Lobby‘s fears that gay marriage might be legalized. I didn’t like her rush to console xenophobic focus groups with promises of off shore asylum seeker processing in East Timor. These very early comments, when most of us were still in shock and had other things on our minds, signaled that her primary concern was pleasing interest groups the ALP perceived as pivotal to them staying in power, rather than any wider concern for the country.

I didn’t like the “real and realler” Julia idiocy, and instinctively felt that anyone who has to tell the world they’re going to be real now when they weren’t before is probably permanently untrustworthy, and terminally lacking in credibility. I wonder to this day how any self-respecting woman could think it was OK to make such coyly precious announcements about herself, while simultaneously appearing in an airbrushed and highly glamourised state in the Women’s Weekly. I wonder as well, what it says about that woman if she secretly thought the real/unreal Julia thing was crap, but did it anyway because the faceless men told her she should.

I railed vigorously about this at the time and some of my friends told me to shut TF up, anything was allowed because we had to stop Tony Abbott. I didn’t talk to them for a while, on account of what looked to me like their dodgy means to an end morality.

I still can’t get a sense of the “real” Julia. I don’t know who she is or what she stands for, and if she has any wisdom and vision, it’s not apparent to me. Julia Gillard is, as far as I can tell, entirely a product of the ALP machine, and she will do whatever it takes to keep that machine functioning and in power, like all good middle managers should.

It isn’t the country she cares about. It’s the ALP running the country that is her primary concern. In this, Julia Gillard is our First Hollow Woman.

I thought this morning that my emotions on this matter (as opposed to my rational thoughts) are rather like those of the adolescent who suddenly acquires a step-parent. The individual concerned has been around for a while as Mum or Dad’s love interest, and you’ve coped with them because they haven’t actually moved in. But suddenly there’s a marriage, or a move into de facto status, and they’re in the family, taking the place of the real parent who left or died.

You hate the interloper. You can’t help it, they’re not who you want to be there and they wield power you feel they have no right to have. Your life’s mission becomes getting rid of them. In your opinion, they have no authority, moral or otherwise. They got the position because they either pushed the real parent out, or leapt in when there was a sudden vacancy you didn’t have any control over. It’s not fair, you aren’t going to accept it, and anybody who thinks you’ll eventually come round has rocks in their head.

Which is not to say I’m pining for Kevin, because I’m not. I just want somebody I can look up to: it’s lonely when there’s no one at the top to admire.

Gillard is only PM because of those pesky Independents, she doesn’t have a mandate. It is extremely unfair, in my opinion, that we should have been faced with a choice between her and Tony Abbott, no country deserves that fate, although there are those who argue that we get the governments and leaders we deserve.

Taking a step back from my adolescent-like prejudices against the PM, and looking at it woman to woman, I find I still don’t see Gillard as having wisdom and vision. Were I to encounter her in the workplace I would watch my back, keep my distance, and never go for an after work drink with her because she’s not the type who’d consider anything off the record, and watching my mouth when I’m trying to relax is counter productive. She’s a political woman through and through, and she’d give them her life and yours.

To be fair, wisdom is a quality that is sadly lacking across the board in our politics. It seems to have become negatively associated with the ageing process, although some claim to find wisdom in the eyes of the newborn. Either way, it doesn’t have much attraction for the masters and mistresses of our political universe. Wisdom is unfashionable. A choice was made between wisdom and focus groups and the latter won hands down. Common sense was collateral damage.

As for their vision, well, that seems to be entirely restricted to their vision of their own potential power. That has quite possibly always been the case with politicians. I’m scared to posit a past when leaders were really leaders, and the people who elected them were far more deserving of quality and wisdom than are we.

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