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What is Conservatism and What is Wrong With It?

2 Apr

australian-conservative

 

Former Associate Professor of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, Phil Agre, defined  conservatism thus:

Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

It’s worth reading Agre’s essay, to which I’ve linked above.

The core assumption of conservatives is that they are an aristocracy, that is, they are “the best type” of human being, and being the best type of human being are therefore entitled to govern. Here Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s phrase “women of calibre” springs to mind. Women and men of calibre, as determined by the conservative measure of calibre, are entitled to thrive and are entitled to rule.

This is what is at the heart of Joe Hockey’s protection of the wealthy: because they are wealthy they are by definition the best of human beings, of the highest calibre, and the most worthy of support and tax exemption.

With this assumption at the heart of political and social convictions, a sense of entitlement will inevitably be the driving force. In Australia this sense of entitlement does not generally originate in bloodlines: we are egalitarian to the degree that those of humble origins can and do form the conservative political aristocracy that considers itself the “natural” ruler, the “best” group to govern. The essential requirement is not breeding or wealth, but that one subscribe to the  ideology of entitlement, fuelled by the fervent belief that nobody else can do it as well.The conservative assumes, for no apparent reason other than the assumption itself, that he or she is born to rule.

Conservatives have become even more delusional than they were when they largely sprang from the ranks of the wealthy and the “well-bred.” At least in those instances wealth and breeding provided some perceived external justification for the born to rule ideology. Currently, the ideology requires no external justification: it has come to be justified simply because it exists.

If this is your starting point you will be unable to regard anyone outside of your privileged ruling class as anything other than a lesser being. This thinking is not conducive to democratic government.

As Agre observes, conservatism is founded on deception, largely self-deception. It requires only a belief in one’s superiority but no external proof of any particular accomplishment other than the ability to convince others of that inherent superiority and its naturally ensuing entitlement.

On the whole, the current crop of conservative front benchers are quite unfathomably stupid, blinded and halted and lamed by the conviction of entitlement that is their raison d’être.

Where do babbies of calibre come from? They just are.

Where do babies come from

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If you can’t deal with vulnerability you’ve no business being in government

1 Apr

Vulnerablitiy

 

If there’s one single characteristic that defines the Abbott government, and increasingly the ALP opposition, it’s their utter lack of care for people who are in some way vulnerable.

One might once have been tempted to use the phrase “lack of compassion” but it’s been rendered almost meaningless through overuse, and besides, in the current political discourse the word “compassion” carries negative value,  being framed as a weakness unless directed towards victims of plane crashes, and hostages. Almost everyone else faced with difficult circumstances is implicitly blamed for finding themselves in them, denied care, and all too frequently punished.

The public attitude politicians seem most to represent is one expressed to me on Twitter yesterday, after I’d remarked that it was time to leave Craig Thomson alone as he looked like a man at the very end of his rope and enough is enough. He’s putting on an act, he’s putting it on, a couple of people responded. And you know this how? I felt like replying, but didn’t, thinking it pointless to attempt to challenge that level of ignorance in 140 characters. I’d be at it all day to no useful purpose.

He or she is “putting it on” is a phrase that has always been used by people with a particular mindset towards anyone who reveals vulnerability. It’s used repeatedly about asylum seekers who express their distress through the only means available to them, their bodies. It’s used about people who attempt or express the desire to attempt suicide. A variation of the phrase was used by the former headmaster of Knox Grammar Ian Paterson, about a boy who was being sexually abused on his watch, when he claimed the victim was a “drama boy.”

This lack of care has brought us to situations such as this one, in which a five-year-old child currently in Darwin with her family, has attempted suicide because she so fears being returned to detention on Nauru. I’m waiting to hear Peter Dutton declare she’s “putting it on.”

For mine, this attitude reveals a great deal more about the person expressing it than it does about the object of their derision. It tells me they are bereft of imagination, and incapable of thinking themselves into another person’s shoes, even momentarily. It tells me they are terrified of vulnerability and must attack anyone who confronts them with it, however distanced from that vulnerability they may be.

Consider the mental attitude of a person who is compelled to declare on social media that an individual unknown to them is “putting on an act” when he says publicly that he is close to suicide. It is this mental attitude that forms the Abbott government’s demographic, and to whom the government plays with callous contempt for any vulnerability it does not consider legitimate, that is, vulnerability experienced by anyone other than the group with which the government  identifies.

The conservative mind dehumanises those it does not perceive as one of its tribe, because it does not consider the concerns of “outsiders” as valid as its own. The Abbott government exemplifies this in its attitude to tax reform for example. Consider this piece by Ross Gittins on Treasurer Joe Hockey’s budget spin, skewed to benefit the tribe to which Hockey belongs, at the expense of those who are most financially vulnerable and thus, outsiders.

No matter where you look in government and many opposition policies, you will find they have in common lack of interest and care for the vulnerable, and overwhelming bias towards groups they consider their own. The Abbott government’s attempts to push through a budget almost universally regarded as unfair, and its attribution of that failure as a failure to properly  “sell”  unfairness, reveals everything you need to know about the conservative mind. They couldn’t sell unfairness, which is their ideology, so they need to work out how better to do that in the future.

There’s a building body of opinion that the conservative mind is incapable of compassion for any other than those it recognises as its own, and the attitudes and actions of this conservative government, and to an increasing degree our supposedly left-wing opposition, fit this conservative ideological profile.

This harsh and unyielding position, erroneously claimed as strength, extends itself beyond the immediately human to vital matters such as climate change, with Abbott’s reputation as the world’s worst climate villain perfectly expressing conservative contempt for the vulnerable situation of the very planet on which we must all exist.

We need politicians who can cope with vulnerability of all kinds. It isn’t so much compassion we need as intelligence, and particularly active emotional intelligence, of which compassion is a part. I doubt there has been a time in our living memory when Australian politicians have been further from this intelligence, or a time when it has been more dangerous for them to be so.

They’re “putting it on” is a particularly invidious perspective to take on the vulnerability and distress of others. It’s ignorant, it’s defensive, it’s dangerous. If you can’t deal with the sight of another’s vulnerability that’s your problem, not theirs. Vulnerability is not legitimised or delegitimised by the social class to which you belong. When a government can’t deal with vulnerability of all its citizens it is not a democratic government. It’s an ideological tyrant.

 

 

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Drugs and Depression

30 Mar

 

drugs two

 

 

Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot believed to have deliberately guided Flight 4U9525 into the French Alps killing all 150 people on board was reportedly suffering from depression, and possibly taking anti-depressants to treat his illness.

What hasn’t been mentioned so far is that many anti-depressants disclose in their list of possible side-effects a warning that they may trigger suicidal ideation, suicide or attempted suicide, and in some instances, violent and aggressive behaviour. While clinical studies continue into the association between these drugs and certain behaviours, the evidence is sufficient for drug companies to be compelled to disclose the possibilities to potential users.

There is, justifiably, a concern that depression and those suffering from it will be increasingly stigmatised as a consequence of this tragedy.  As the Guardian reports: In a sign of continued nervousness in the light of the tragedy, there were reports on Saturday of pilots offering personal assurances to passengers. One woman tweeted: “Pilot on my @Delta flight announces he and co-pilot are ex-military and ‘we both have wives and kids and are very happy’.” 

Apparently being “ex-military,” male, and with a wife and children is some kind of guarantee against depression which will be news to many people given the astronomic rates of post traumatic stress disorder diagnosed in military personnel, to address just one aspect of an idiotic comment that is a small example of the facile discrimination and prejudice anybody with a mental illness can encounter.

Australia has the second highest use of anti-depressant medication in the world after Iceland, from which we can conclude that depression is a common illness in our society and a lot of us are using drug therapy to help us manage it. Death from drug overdose is twice as likely to be caused by drugs prescribed to treat anxiety, insomnia and stress than by illegal substances, a Victorian coroner recently reported.

And it isn’t just drugs prescribed for depression that can cause mental disturbances. I have beside me a box of Metoclopramide, prescribed for nausea caused by other drugs, with a list of potential side-effects as long as my leg, one of which is “mental depression.” There are antibiotics that can cause anxiety. There are anti psychotics that can cause hallucinations. There are sleeping tablets that can cause bizarre sleepwalking behaviours.  If anything we need more awareness and education about the possible side effects of prescription drugs, and how those side effects can be safely managed.

It would be the worst possible outcome if the tragedy of Flight 4U9525 was used to stigmatise people with depression not only in the airline industry but in every other occupation. There have already been demands that airlines dismiss pilots with depressive disorders, and while no one wants a pilot in the throes of a seriously depressive episode flying a plane, depression can be managed and people do recover.

As usual there’s been a scramble, instigated by the country’s most reliable drama queen Prime Minister Tony Abbott, to ensure such a tragedy doesn’t occur on an Australian airline. Australia’s national security committee met on Sunday at Abbott’s insistence to discuss preventative measures.

Good luck with that. Absolute safety can never be guaranteed, and flying is still a whole lot safer than driving the Pacific Highway, and a whole, whole, whole lot safer than being a woman in a domestically violent situation in Australia. So far this year, the average is two dead women each week. Still waiting for the Minister for Women to call an emergency Sunday meeting about that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Women are not responsible for the crap things men do. End of.

17 Mar

This piece by Paula Matthewson totally nails it on the “Credlin, Horsewoman of the Apocalypse” narrative aggrieved men in LNP circles are telling themselves and everybody else to explain away their shameful, dishonourable gutlessness, and I include Prime Minister Tony Abbott in this sweeping gender generalisation.

If Credlin is indeed the only person Abbott trusts and takes advice from, that demonstrates an appalling weakness in the character of the leader of this country. Not because she is a woman, but because Abbott is apparently fool enough to listen to primarily one advisor.

If Abbott allows his chief of staff to tyrannise all comers, that is evidence of Abbott’s inability to handle responsibility and decision-making.  Nature abhors a vacuum and Abbott is a vacuum and fate has given him Credlin to fill the vacuum that he is. It is the vacuum running the country we need to be concerned with, not the filler who can be replaced by another filler, and another, but always leaving us with the vacuum at the top.

 

empty head

 

The weakness is not Credlin’s but Abbott’s, and it will still be Abbott’s weakness if Credlin is despatched.

Even more alarmingly, Credlin’s advice seems to be driving Abbott on a hiding to nowhere and still he takes it, which only goes to prove my point. The man is stupid beyond redemption.

It is customary in this patriarchal sewer in which we dwell, fighting off the bloody rats, to blame women for the crap pathetic things men do. I’ve had a gut full, to be honest, having experienced this on a very personal level for the last few months. Women are not responsible for the crap things men do, whether it’s in politics or the personal, women are not responsible for the crap things grown men do, end of.

I do not say this to offer support for Ms Credlin, because I don’t feel any. I cannot abide people who wag their finger at other people, and Ms Credlin seems to do this rather a lot. It’s a gesture that reveals a multitude of other characteristics, none of which I find in the least appealing. Be that as it may, whatever Ms Credlin’s undesirable traits may be, they have absolutely nothing to do with Tony Abbott’s. They just happen, at this moment in time, to be a spine-chilling fit.

This is why Abbott got it so wrong when he attempted to use charges of sexism against Credlin’s many critics, and where the critics got it wrong as well. The problem is the Prime Minister handing over so much of his power to his chief of staff, regardless of gender, and what it says about the PM that he is willing to relinquish so much power to an unelected employee.

Abbott is a dangerously inadequate leader.  It’s got nothing to do with Credlin. He was before her and he will be after her. This is what we should be worrying about, not the bloody horsewoman of the apocalypse, which is about as big a piece of hyperbole I’ve heard in many a day.

Let me say it one more time. Women are not responsible for the crap things men do. If this is a government of grown ups, they need to acknowledge that first, and urgently.

 

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Random political concerns

17 Mar

Political Greed

 

1. Is the taxpayer funding Treasurer Joe Hockey’s defamation case against Fairfax Press?

Nobody seems to be able to get a satisfactory answer to this question, so this morning I sent Mr Hockey a tweet:

If the taxpayer is not funding Mr Hockey’s action, why doesn’t the government simply come out and say so, thus laying the speculation to rest? Things are bad enough for them, one imagines, without further unnecessary public grumblings.

I do hope the Treasurer has time to spend on the budget, given his preoccupation with savaging Fairfax in court for allegedly making him look “odious.” Fairfax also allegedly made Hockey’s dad cry, and caused his daughter to ask him if people were trying to buy him.

Just as well Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd never took up arms against the Murdoch Press, otherwise they’d have spent their entire political careers in court. The idea of politicians suing media for defamation is mind-bogglingly stupid but as Treasurer Hockey claims as justification: “The only thing you walk out of politics with is your reputation.”

Ummmm….. He was being ironic, right? Right?

2. With the next budget due in about eight weeks, why is Prime Minister Tony Abbott still reassuring us that he is “listening” to our concerns about the last one, rather than looking to the future and giving us some indication of what is in store? Instead he seems intent on adding to the list of “backflips” he’s had to make since last May, and once again we find ourselves in country that has become all too familiar since Abbott took leadership of the LNP, the Land of Unrelenting Negativity. Is there anything more negative than backflips?

I was right yesterday and today I have totally changed my mind and I am still right, otherwise known as the Christopher Pyne patented olympic gold backflip, heralds a new low in egregious LNP spin. The Education Minister was forced to de-link higher education reforms from the funding of scientific research, an abhorrent linkage that should never, in anybody’s wildest dreams, have existed in the first place. Somewhere in all the sound and fury Pyne managed to add that it is all Labor’s fault.

The explanations and excuses for this spectacularly bizarre method of governance are that it continues to be the fault of Labor, that Abbott is “learning” from his mistakes, that Abbott is “listening” to the people’s discontent, and that everything jaw-droppingly frightful he says is taken out of context, nevertheless he stands by it and if he doesn’t, everyone makes mistakes and anyway, anyway, it’s all Labor’s fault.

A Prime Minister still in the potty-training phase is a frightening prospect for a country. Abbott has been in politics for decades, served as a Minister in the Howard government, and as Leader of the Opposition. He is by no means a political novice, and yet we are being asked, almost daily, to give him another chance to adapt to his new responsibilities.

If he is still attempting to grasp the nature of his job by now, he needs to resign from it, because no country can afford a leader who this far into his first term still has no idea what he’s doing and where he is going.

If, like me, you are finding it difficult to keep up with Abbott’s horrible mangling of just about everything, Sally McManus has thoughtfully set up a “Tracking Abbott’s Wreckage” page right here.

3. In case you are confused by Senator George Brandis’s tumultuous, some might even allege abusive relationship with the proposed metadata laws, here’s what he said this morning. Bloggers, he declares, are not journalists, so we are not covered by the amendments that will protect those who are “journalists by profession.”

The debate over whether or not bloggers are journalists continues to exercise legal and media minds in Australia, while the issue is far more clear-cut in the US and New Zealand. Essentially in Australia bloggers will not be protected by the same metadata amendments as are professional journalists, in that we have to reveal our sources whilst they do not. This would likely affect a blogger such as the indefatigable Wixxyleaks, who continues to do a sterling job exposing the HSU/Kathy Jackson shenanigans.

Essentially, metadata retention laws create a situation in which we are all assumed to be guilty of something in our online lives. The ramifications of the state taking such an attitude towards its citizens are many, and I don’t believe it’s what governments are designed to do in a liberal democracy. The utter spinelessness of the ALP on this matter ought to make us vote for anyone but the major parties, because there’s not, as I might have said before, a bee’s dick of difference in their policies on this. Governments are not granted power in order to turn it against citizens, en masse and if they do, they can expect that one day the citizens will, en masse, turn against them.

Civil Disobedience

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Abbott shirtfronts an onion. It’s a lifestyle choice

16 Mar

Seinfeld. George eats an onion

 

Prime Minister Tony Abbott made international news the other day by eating a raw onion, skin and all.

This is a peculiarly Australian test of hegemonic masculinity – ruling class males must, before reaching retirement age, eat a raw onion to camera, ensuring a visual record of arrival at full status in the dominant group.

It is required of males in the political hierarchy that the Initiation of the Onion be performed sooner rather than later. Prime Minister Abbott has been somewhat tardy in fulfilling his obligations, as was evidenced by the discontent among his back benchers, who attempted some weeks ago to move a spill motion in an attempt to unseat him.

Eat the raw onion! they demanded, or get off the pot.

Hopes are running high now that after completing his final initiation Abbott, having absorbed the mystical power of the onion much in the way that primitive peoples believed that eating the heart and liver of warrior enemies would increase their strength and fortitude, will change his leadership style to one that better accommodates the many layers of complexity any leader must deal with in his followers.

It is the opinion of this writer that Prime Minister Abbott might have better served the country and his own interests by retaining the onion, intact, between his teeth, in the manner of a pig on a spit with an apple in its jaws. That way he would not have been able to yet again put his foot in his mouth, as he did when two days ago he decided to describe Indigenous people living in remote communities as making a “lifestyle choice.”

There are perhaps few other phrases so redolent of white middle-class privilege as the phrase “lifestyle choice.” Such language could not be more irrelevant when discussing remote Aboriginal communities, unless the Prime Minister is so impoverished in imagination as to believe that forty thousand years of attachment to country can be reduced to the contemporary concept of  “lifestyle choice.”

A more outstanding example of solipsism would be difficult to find, even from this Prime Minister whose great talent is his ability to perceive the world and everyone in it as existing only through his eyes. If he stops looking at us, we aren’t here.

Of course the term “lifestyle choice” has been used by ruling-class hegemonic masculinists before in relation to asylum seekers arriving here by boat. These people are not refugees fleeing persecution, they are serial pests flitting from country to country, stubbornly intent on fulfilling their lifestyle choices. Otherwise they are terrorists. Yes. The hegemonic masculine mind projects its own understandings on to the world outside of it, and look what it comes up with.

Personally, I think it would have been far more interesting had the Prime Minister shoved the onion up his arse. Much more of a talking point, and a unique way of adding value to that asset. After all, the apprehension is taking hold amongst Australian people that our PM speaks, increasingly, from that orifice.

Of course it would first be necessary to remove the suppository of wisdom in order to make room for the onion, but the shelf-life of suppositories is a short one, and much of it may have melted, making removal a relatively straightforward procedure.

Perhaps the consumption of the onion indicates the PM has taken a new if tentative  step along the long and winding road to wisdom. It was Socrates, I believe, whose advice for a good, wise and moral life was to first, Know Thine Onions.

onions-300x225

 

 

 

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I don’t effing care if you call yourself a feminist or not.

8 Mar

Like Groundhog Day, International Women’s Day yet a fucking gain, finds itself hijacked and imprisoned in the eternally recurring culture war chatter, I won’t dignify it with the term debate, as to whether you call yourself a feminist or not.

I could not give a rat’s chlamydic arse if a woman calls herself a feminist or not. In fact the minute I get a whiff that the argument’s on I want to start flame throwing.

I don’t care about your personal philosophies on this day at this time. I don’t care if you are personally confused about whether or not to put on make-up in the morning. I so, so do not care if you have a luxurious bush or a full Brazilian. I do not care if you are sometimes a good feminist sometimes a bad one, whatever the fucking hell either of those things actually are. Fuck off with all the confessional shit just for today, and engage with a bigger picture, I’m begging you.

I have a dream. In my dream every woman with a public voice just for once refuses these speaking and writing engagements and instead throws her weight behind a National Day of Mourning on March 8, for the women world-wide, and particularly in Australia because this is our homeland where we can best have influence, who are murdered and abused by intimate partners, as well as the children who witness and suffer.

I have a dream that if women with a public voice do accept speaking and writing engagements on this, our one fucking day of the entire fucking year, they will agree to speak out all day long about domestic violence, government responsibilities, and the safety and protection of women and children, and nothing else.

I have a dream that we will march in the streets with banners and posters and candles on this day, protesting the deaths and injuries, emotional and physical, that so many of us across all demographics endure or have endured in the place where we are supposed to be safe, our homes.

I have a dream that we will unite to take on this Abbott government full frontal in its despicable cuts to frontline domestic violence services that will leave women in the most remote and already under-serviced areas with absolutely nowhere to go.

It is far more important, sisters, that we keep women alive and capable of adequately functioning than it is that we get more already privileged women on to fucking boards, or listed in Wikipedia, or winning fucking literary prizes. The only way we will do this at this point, is to get our lady arses out into the sodding streets, and if necessary, just like the women who got us the vote, chaining ourselves to the fucking railings until politicians give our dire, deathly situation priority.

Dear ladies, for 364 days of the fucking year you can write and speak all you want about your bush or your Brazilian, or your personal philosophy, or how women have to learn achieve within the same rotten, stinking, oppressive power structure as men without even questioning that fucking structure, otherwise they will be automatically forbidden entry to it, but for one day, for one fucking, fucking day, can we focus on the biggest, most life-threatening danger to women in this country, and how nothing has improved in family violence statistics since feminism’s second wave, over forty years ago.

And if we can’t, I’m going to poke everybody’s eyes out with fucking burnt sticks.

Listen to this Background Briefing report this morning on the effects of the Abbott government’s funding cuts to frontline domestic violence services. Then tell me your fucking pubic hair choices matter. Tell me after listening to this whether you call yourself a feminist or not matters jack shit in the scheme of things.

Sorry for all the language.

No, I’m fucking not.

I-am-a-feminist

 

 

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A Royal Commission worth its salt

7 Mar

royal_commissionFormer headmaster of Knox Grammar, Ian Paterson OA, has over the last few days experienced a most spectacular fall from grace as he attempted, before the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse in Institutions, to ‘rewrite’ the history of his mismanagement of the sexual abuse of students under his care, by what appears to be a nest of pedophiles employed by the school as teachers.

Stripped of all his considerable power, Paterson was confronted by the realities of his alleged failures and their consequences, while arrangements were made at Knox to rename the Paterson Centre for Ethics and Business as part of an eradication plan that includes calls for him to be stripped of his Order of Australia.

If ever a Royal Commission was worth its salt, this one is. I understand there have been some five hundred referrals by the Commission to police for further investigation.

However, what the Commission demonstrates more powerfully than anything else is the complex web of secrecy and denial that allows the sexual abuse of children, both in institutions and the home, to continue at unthinkable levels for many, many decades. Only with the enabling silence of others can crimes such as these flourish.

We have witnessed, heartbreakingly, since the Commission shone its light on the Catholic and Anglican churches and the Salvation Army, as well as other institutions, that their common practices were designed not to protect the children in their care, but the pedophiles who filled young lives with confusion, fear, and long-lasting trauma.

It is worth remembering that our Prime Minister and Minister for Women, Tony Abbott, himself provided support and a reference for convicted pedophile John Nestor, describing him as “a beacon of humanity.” (This link is a thorough and interesting read, by the way.)

It is also worth remembering that Cardinal George Pell, compassionately challenged towards the victims of his pedophile priests, was a moral and spiritual advisor to both John Howard during his term as Prime Minister, and Tony Abbott. Pell was Abbott’s personal confessor, and Abbott is a staunch Pell defender. The Cardinal’s recent hasty removal by the Vatican from the Commission’s inquiry into sexual depravities in the Catholic church, to take on fiscal responsibilities in Rome, was convenient for both men.

The conspiracy of silence perpetrated by those with power and authority such as Paterson, Pell, Abbott and many, many others has caused the misery and ruination of untold young lives. If the Royal Commission achieves nothing else, it has exposed this conspiracy and some of the powerful names who supported it. Most will not, of course, suffer the same fate as Paterson, though they undoubtedly deserve to.

We can thank our lucky stars this Royal Commission was instigated by the previous government, because the likelihood of the Abbott government allowing these atrocities against children to be exposed and interrogated is less than none.

We are witnessing, and not just in Australia, the overthrow of a cruelly silencing and mendacious narrative, and in its place, the narrative of experiential truth. This is a global shift of extraordinary proportions, and I think we can take heart from it, even in these dark times.

 

 

 

 

 

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A government of barbaric inconsistency

5 Mar

Only weeks after announcing cuts to frontline services that assist women and children escaping domestic violence, Prime Minister Tony Abbott today announced the government will spend $30 million on a domestic violence “awareness campaign.”

While public education on the matter of domestic violence can never go astray, funding such education while simultaneously removing frontline safety nets for women and children experiencing violence in real-time is an act of unconscionable duplicity, and barbaric inconsistency.

One woman each week is slaughtered by an intimate partner during episodes of domestic violence. One woman is hospitalised every three hours with injuries due to domestic violence. KPMG reports domestic violence cost Australia 14.7 billion last year, some 1.5 billion more than in 2012.

Minister for Women Abbott has slashed funding to front line services such as legal aid, and refuges to which women and children in fear of their lives can flee. Offering a sop of $30 million for education while leaving women and children unprotected and with nowhere to turn, is political expediency of staggering proportions.

I do not recall money being offered for “awareness campaigns” on the matter of young men subjected to king hits. I recall an absolute outcry from all levels of politics, and proposals for immediate legislative changes.

I do not recall any politician, state or federal, ever holding a prayer vigil for women and children slaughtered in their homes by an intimate partner, though there was no shortage of them at the vigil held this morning for Chan and Sukumaran, the Australians sentenced to death for drug smuggling in Indonesia.

Let’s not forget Abbott’s reputation for punching the wall beside a woman’s head, and his reference to a woman as a “chair thing.”

In fact, if you want to refresh your memory about the many disparaging things the Minister for Women has said about women here you go

This man doesn’t care about women. No man who cared about women would remove services that helped them escape violence, injury and death. Any man who cared about women would move heaven and earth to ensure essential services are in place.

No man who cared about women and children would financially prioritise an “awareness campaign” before actually saving lives.

The Minister for Women is a dangerous and opportunistic fraud. He has blood on his hands, the blood of women and children who now have nowhere to go to escape violent homes. How many more will he allow to die before he reinstates front-line funding?

Or does he think he can get away with a band-aid?

domestic_violence

 

 

 

 

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Censured: The problem is Brandis not Triggs.

3 Mar

George Brandis

 

Yesterday’s Senate censure of Attorney-General George Brandis for his treatment of Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs, has no direct constitutional or legal consequences. It is important, however, that the censure motion is on record as an example of attempts to bully into silence the head of a statutory authority the Attorney-General is obliged, in his job description, to defend against malicious attack.

If the government of the day is dissatisfied with the performance of the head of a statutory body there are presumably procedures in place to deal with that situation. I doubt very much that one of them is instigating personal public attacks. At the very least, the Attorney-General should be aware of the proper way to go about addressing perceived performance failures, and follow those guidelines.

Professor Triggs was entitled to natural justice. Instead she was subjected to an appalling attack by the very person who is obliged to ensure her right to natural justice is honoured.  This alone is just cause for censuring the Attorney-General, who could not have more blatantly failed to carry out his duties.

An Attorney-General who behaves in such a manner has gone rogue. He is not upholding the principles and duties of his office. He is making up the rules as he goes along. He is supported absolutely in his feral abrogation by his Prime Minister, Tony Abbott.

This is our problem. It isn’t Gillian Triggs. It’s a government that has scant regard for any statutory body, any procedure, any law that doesn’t suit their ideological ambitions. The HRC is an anathema to the Abbott government, not least because one of the Commission’s responsibilities is to monitor and report on the actions of that government. What better way to demoralise and disempower the HRC than to publicly and ferociously go after its head?

 

 

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