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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Don’t bully my girlfriend, pleads Tim

16 Sep

Tim Mathieson has pleaded with critics to stop bullying Julia because she’s a woman.

He says he can’t understand why some of her most harsh critics are women. You could have a gander at this Tim, it might give you a few clues.

Its been said to me a few times over the last few days that women in politics need to be harder, and meaner, and more brutal than men if they’re going to be accepted. Well, all I can say is who needs anybody more mean, hard and brutal than many men in politics are already? If women have to get more cruel to make the cut, what’s the point of them being there at all? And Gillard has certainly outdone any male politician in recent history with her policies on asylum seekers.

How bizarre, to call victimization for Ms Gillard, the woman who’s determined to send unaccompanied children to Malaysia!

Who’s the bully? Tell me again?

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Why Xenophon was wrong, and at home with Tim

15 Sep

There are several arguments to be made against Nick Xenophon‘s decision to name a priest accused of rape in the Senate last night. Some of them can be found here in the Punch.

But for me the stand-out objection is that the alleged victim, Archbishop John Hepworth, didn’t want him to, and asked him not to.

The aftermath of rape is complex for a victim. Many are left with a frightening and unsettling sense of having lost all control over their bodies and their being, and of being rendered utterly powerless in the face of another’s will.

One of the ways a victim can become a survivor and reclaim his or her sovereignty is to have control over if and when they speak about their experiences, the manner in which they choose to do that, to whom they wish to do that, and what exactly they wish to say. Xenophon took all this away from John Hepworth when he over-rode the Archbishop’s wishes, solely to satisfy his own sense of outrage.  In this, he further abused a man we know has great credibility as a rape victim of two other priests.

This is not Senator Xenophon’s tragedy. He has no right at all to attempt to determine the course of its unfolding. His first duty was to John Hepworth. What he did was disregarding of Hepworth’s express wishes, it was disempowering to a man already struggling with great pain, and it was abusive.

Xenophon claims he faced a great moral dilemma in deciding whether or not to name the alleged rapist. No, he didn’t. It was dead easy. He just had to listen to the alleged victim, and nothing and nobody else.

In respect for John Hepworth’s wishes I will not name the priest, and ask that any commenters also refrain from naming him.

≈

At home with Julia seems to be shaping up as a cri de couer on behalf of househusbands, oops sorry, house de factos. Maybe it should be called Home Alone – one man’s story because it’s all about Tim, with the PM cast as the neglectful if well-meaning career driven partner.

The storyline last night was unspeakable. The device of the three young boys appearing intermittently to comment on proceedings like a Greek chorus is lifted straight from ABC TV’s Doc Martin series in which the neurotic doctor is stalked and hounded by a bunch of gloriously cheeky giggling adolescent girls. It worked beautifully in Doc Martin, it’s appallingly bad in At Home.

Why, I ask. Why did they do this? What is the point, what does it mean, when will it end?

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WEL, you did ask about Julia

14 Sep

In response to this Women’s Electoral Lobby invitation:

 Julia Gillard has been receiving criticism from all sides and her popularity is at an all time low. Although it is certainly arguable that our Prime Minister does deserve some of the criticism it is worth looking at the nature of the criticism and the impact of the recent satire “At Home with Julia”.

 Check out these articles and let us know what you think:  

Unsettling home truths,  Julia undeserving of At Home with …and so are we

I’m about to make observations that could be attacked as gender biased if you were on the lookout for that kind of transgression.

It’s particularly shocking to me that Prime Minister Julia Gillard is determined to amend the Migration Act to enable the expulsion of women, men and children to Malaysia, because I don’t expect this of a female politician. After years of being highly educated in theories on the construction and performance of gender, it seems that deep down I still cling to the atavistic expectation that a female politician will care about the fate of asylum seekers, and I still feel shocked when she doesn’t. Hope over experience. Now there’s a trap to watch out for.

It isn’t yet clear to me if Gillard also intends to expel unaccompanied minors to Malaysia but if that is her intention, I’m gob smacked and quite frankly, tearful. I expect a woman to care about the fate of female and male children. I can’t bear it that she doesn’t. It’s like she’s betraying a core female principle. The shame of it.

This is as irrational as complaining that Gillard knifed an elected PM: I know we don’t elect our PMs, and I know the Westminster system allows political parties to replace their leaders without going to the polls over it. Nevertheless, I was and remain aggrieved that she did it. I was not among the feminists who rejoiced at the ascension of our first female PM. I found it alarming that those feminists decided to ignore the means in favour of the end. Things have only gone down hill since then.

There have been from time to time outbreaks of feminist indignation that the criticism, abuse and disrespect directed towards the PM are gendered. I’m going to add to the allegedly gendered criticisms by saying up front that I am horrified that a woman is acting without any care at all for other human beings solely for political gain. I’m not as shocked when male politicians do it: although it is just as despicable it isn’t very surprising. I am still not entirely en-cultured to the concept of men in politics being interested in caring in the way I’ve taken it as given for women.

I need to examine these gendered beliefs because it’s increasingly apparent that female politicians can be as care-less as men, and likely even more so if they perceive it to be politically expedient. I need to adjust my expectations to the reality that when the political chips are down, nobody much in politics cares about the fate of asylum seekers, regardless of their gender.

The women are up there with the men in the “don’t give a damn” stakes, and in this I include those Labor women who are saying nothing. I cannot bring myself to believe they have entirely abandoned the Labor principles currently being espoused by Doug Cameron. Yet their cowardly silence on their leader’s conspicuous lack of care indicates that if they haven’t yet thrown all ethical considerations to the winds, they don’t have the guts to come out and support the very few blokes who are attempting to restore some human decency to the discussions.

This morning, to my great relief, I read that my own federal Labor MP, Janelle Saffin, has bravely broken ranks to support onshore processing. Now let’s see how many others step up to support her. I’m ready and eager to eat my words. Congratulations, Janelle, you’ve got guts, girl.

This is an aspect of gender equality I for one did not anticipate. I would have liked to see the capacity for caring among male politicians raised to equal that which I was educated to believe is possible for women. Instead the country’s most powerful political woman has decided to lower our female caring standards to the point where she cares less than do many of her male colleagues. I didn’t think anyone could go lower in the uncaring stakes than John Howard and Philip Ruddock, let alone a woman.

This isn’t what was supposed to happen. This isn’t the kind of influence women were supposedly going to bring to government. We weren’t supposed to get up there and model care-less-ness to our girls. Our first female PM wasn’t supposed to make caring about other human beings (even if they aren’t exactly “like us”) a naff concept for our girls, or our boys for that matter.

So uninterested in giving a damn has the ALP become that the concept of caring about boat arrivals has absolutely no place at all in their asylum seeker discourse. Anyone who attempts to introduce it is thrashed, and then abused for bleeding out.

And I’m not fooled by the politically expedient and hypocritical concern for sinking boats. Treating people very badly to deter other people is a profoundly morally dubious proposition. Let’s not forget asylum seekers have committed no offence, and arrive here at our invitation. We aren’t attempting to prevent criminal behaviour with our harsh punishments and indefinite detention, because there’s no criminal behaviour in the first place.

I know I will be scoffed at for espousing a form of biological essentialism about the “caring nature” of women. Nobody can scoff at me as much as I’ve scoffed at myself. Nevertheless, is it such a bad thing to hope for a dimension of care in this dreadful debacle? Is it such a bad thing to hope that this dimension might be introduced and upheld by the women we’ve elected?

Of course I know both personally and professionally that women can be terrifyingly uncaring. Cruelty and ignorance are un-gendered. Has the struggle for gender equality revealed another unpalatable truth: that to expect and hope for caring women in politics is as naïve and sexist as to expect and hope for caring men?

On television the other Sunday evening I watched three young women prepare themselves for a Saturday night out. It was their right, they told the reporter, to go out and get as fall down drunk as the boys. The boys have always thought that was their prerogative, but those days are over we’re equal now.

The young women dressed up in pelmet skirts and very high heels, drank down more shots than I’ve ever had in my life before they even left the house, and the last we saw of them that night was in Accident and Emergency where one of their number was vomiting her guts up while the others milled round drunkenly, trying to stay upright and hold her hand at the same time.

Asked a few days later if they thought it was worth it, they claimed they did. Girls can do this now, they said proudly. In other words, girls don’t have to care anymore than boys do about their own welfare or anybody else’s.

And there you have it. Women have become equal in our right to abandon care, from the top down. Perhaps it was always thus and our liberation has merely exposed another fantasy.

And yet, and yet, and yet…

 

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Naming the priest: a moral dilemma

14 Sep

Food for thought: is it acceptable for Nick Xenophon to name in parliament a priest accused of rape ?

Xenophon argues that the Catholic church has been aware of the accusations for at least four years and has failed to investigate. He warned the church that unless they stood down the priest until the investigation had been completed, he would name him. The church refused to stand him down, and has expressed outrage that Xenophon named him when the man has denied the allegations and has not been found guilty of them.

Xenophon counters by pointing out that the church has had more than enough time to investigate, that the man is in a position of trust, and that keeping sexual abuse secret is what allows it to flourish.

A few ethical tangles to unpick later in the day.

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

12 Sep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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enough of the real, time for the surreal

9 Sep

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

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

See you next week.

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

8 Sep
Kevie-lisa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Racist prophecies from Department of Immigration replace informed advice

8 Sep

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

It’s enough to make a grown woman cry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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