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

6 Sep

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

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

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

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

So exactly how will this “stop the boats?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How to incite a moral panic about sex

5 Sep
220

Image via Wikipedia

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

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

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The pornography panic: a dodgy testimonial for a dodgy product

4 Sep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Note to Julia: don’t go to the mattresses

2 Sep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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After the High Court decision it’s time for co-operation on asylum seekers

31 Aug

If the government and the opposition have any sense and decency, they’ll give up their vile battle to find some way of forcing off-shore processing, and take advantage of today’s High Court decision to co-operatively work towards processing all asylum seeker claims on-shore, and resettling those found to be refugees.

Nobody has to lose face. The Court has made the decision for them with a resounding 6-1 majority. Both government and opposition have no choice but to accept this.  The Malaysian solution is illegal. The decision could also affect plans to send asylum seekers to either  Nauru or Manus Island.

Time to end this shameful decade. We do indeed live in a wonderful country when our judiciary can hold our government accountable and prevent profoundly unethical, immoral and cruel action against those who have done nothing more than request the help we are legally obliged to offer.

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Gillard blames the Tea Party for rude signage, Albrechtsen says get real on rough s*x. Just another day in paradise

31 Aug

It is but a few short months since Julia Gillard made a fawning, obsequious speech to the US Congress declaring, among other things, that the US must be at the centre of a new world order, and “I firmly believe you are the same people who amazed me when I was a small girl by landing on the moon.”

“I firmly believe you are the same people??” Oh, never mind.

In a bit of a turn around, Ms Gillard this morning expressed regret at what she perceives to be the “Americanization” of Australian politics after placards plastered with slogans such as “Ditch the Witch”  and “Bob Brown’s Bitch” were held aloft at recent anti carbon tax rallies by ageing demonstrators.

An aside: if we were ever in doubt, these rallies ought to convince us that demonstrating is definitely for the young. I don’t want to be thought ageist, but if you’re going to distort your features with rage and flying spittle, it looks a whole lot better if the facial features are fresh and young to start with. Howl me down if you will, but for every thing, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn and if you’re smart, you just suck that sad fact up and go for dignity.

Back to the placards. We do not want to follow the Tea Party’s downward spiral into personal abuse and extremist comments, says the PM, and public expressions of displeasure such as those displayed at the anti carbon tax rallies are not faithful to the robust Australian tradition of political debate that is the envy of other nations.

Have a look at these and tell me the PM isn’t being a girl.

I haven’t even put up the rude ones with language a whole lot more racy than witch and bitch.

The placards that offended Ms Gillard are obviously nothing to do with the influence of the Tea Party, which wasn’t in existence when these representations of the Howard/Bush alliance appeared around 2003, expressing public opinion on the invasion of Iraq.

If anything, the public has been comparatively restrained in its depictions of Gillard.

In Oaxaca, Mexico in 2006, I watched furious demonstrations against the then governor of the state, in which he was depicted life-size in papier-mache entwined with a busty blonde mistress and escaping the city in a helicopter. The slogans that draped the tableau read (in Spanish of course): This man is a murderer of children and he f**cks his mother, and other spectacular insults, leading me to contemplate the remarkable contradiction between the power of the church in Mexico and the freedom of the people to foully abuse their politicians.

I am willing to bet every peso I have that the Tea Party had nothing to do with the Oaxaca signage either. The PM might as well have suggested we are being Mexicanized.

What I do wonder is why Ms Gillard chose to comment at all on the placards, because there’s really no way of doing it that doesn’t make her look a bit precious, especially the attempt to tie it in with the Tea Party. Someone really needs to tell her that silence can be golden, and that knowing when to talk and when to shut up is the beginning of wisdom.

Janet Albrechtsen. Well. Ms Albrechtsen has today written a column in the Australian in which she encourages women to take sex instruction from that rapidly tattifying TV series Sex and the City. The one in which everyone wears Manolo Blahniks to the corner store, and, oh god I can’t be bothered talking about it. It held my attention for a nanosecond and then I thought I must be waiting at the dentist’s flicking through Cosmopolitan magazines to distract me from fear, and not at home on the lounge at all.

Albrechtsen titles the column Let’s not be tethered by simple sexual stereotypes. That’s got to be an ironic reference, I thought, right? Wrong.

The “tethered” in the title refers not to sexual bondage, or at least I don’t think it does, her piece has done my head in, but to an anonymous male ‘fessing up in a British tabloid newspaper about what he calls his inner goat. This fantasy animal apparently carries the burden of the young man’s less attractive sexual urges, the ones that make him want to bang a woman brainless, without first shaving, washing, putting on cologne or even asking her name.

As one of the Sex and the City women expresses a desire to be banged brainless, this all ties in, somehow. You’ll have to read it, it’s beyond my powers of explanation.

Albrechtsen also takes the opportunity to be supportive of Bettina Arndt who apparently encourages all men to love their inner goat, in spite of the vile reactionary  howling of the feminist furies who, as one would expect, have no sympathy for inner goats and want them strung up by their little goaty beards.

All this seems pretty harmless and daft,  but where it gets icky is when Albrechtsen uses as an example the Strauss Kahn case, in which the alleged victim suffered vaginal bruising, to argue that injuries such as that do not necessarily indicate rape. “The stubborn puritanism that says if a woman is bruised during sex it must be rape needs to be challenged,” she writes. This is in response to a comment by Richard Ackland, in which he muses about how sex can possibly be consensual and cause vaginal bruising.

This is an example of how our media is rapidly going down the toilet. Janet Albrechtsen in the Australian critiques Richard Ackland in the SMH who discusses the DSK evidence using information gathered from a postmodern media pastiche, then Albrechtsen analyses something written by Bettina Arndt in an un-named British tabloid. Albrechtsen then recommends that her readers watch hour after hour of the TV series Sex and the City, and everybody winds up in a piece on No Place for Sheep about tethered goats. I ask you.

Vaginal bruising can of course occur during consensual sex and it doesn’t have to be rough sex. Rough sex can also be consensual. Perhaps Mr Ackland needs to watch Sex and the City. Or one of those late night French films on SBS. It is amazing how throwaway comments can reveal so much about a person, often far more than we ever needed to know or indeed that the person ever intended to tell us.

In a porn movie, a hotel maid might well enter the room of the Head of the International Monetary Fund, a room she believed was empty, and on encountering the great man’s inner goat emerging naked from the dunny, find herself overcome with desire and mysteriously compelled to spontaneously offer her body to the horny stranger for consensual rough sex that leaves her bruised and injured.

Yep, as a porn movie that would work. But in real life, it stretches all credibility. I think Albrechtsen is arguing that men ought to be allowed to say they want to bang women silly sometimes, and women ought to be allowed to say they sometimes want to be banged silly and they don’t mind incurring some vaginal bruising in the process. These are deeply personal matters about which, unlike Richard Ackland,  I have no opinion I’m willing to share.

Quite what any of that has to do with the events that occurred in Strauss Kahn’s hotel room, I don’t know.Perhaps it will all become clear in the future when we’ll all know the difference between the sheep and the goats.

Update: My curiosity piqued by a commenter’s reference to Ms Albrechtsen’s intimate life, I spent a little time researching this and discovered that the lady appeared on the arm of Mr Michael Kroger, Victorian Liberal Party heavyweight, business man and political commentator at union boss Paul Howes’ 30th birthday bash on Saturday night.

The two are apparently a new couple. I do not know if this goes any way to explaining Ms Albrechtsen’s strong identification with the women of Sex and the City, the inner goats of men, and bruising sex.

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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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Rainy day woman on marriage

27 Aug

It’s raining cats and dogs and all my plans for Saturday centred around the outdoors. Thwarted, I turned to my computer and read this piece on the Watermelon Blog in which David reckons it’s time to make the billionaires pay the rent; and this piece on the Political Sword, in which Ad astra alleges that Tony Abbott is the worst opposition leader in our political history, and gives resoundingly convincing arguments to support the allegation.

Rainy days are good for musing and as I ventured out to give the dog an airing, I thought about marriage, and gay marriage in particular. I fully understand why people want to get married. Heck, I did it myself twice. I did it once in a church and once with a celebrant. It was nothing to do with the state, or religion, or societal expectations. It was everything to do with my heart. In retrospect the heart alone isn’t  the smartest organ from which to make such major decisions, but I didn’t know that until I’d done it twice.

In another of the triumphs of hope over experience with which my life is littered, I’d probably do it again if the circumstances ever arose.

People usually enter into a formal commitment to one another full of good will, desire and hope. It doesn’t always work out, and we pick ourselves up from the wreckage and start our lives over, often to do it all again. It’s a public expression of mutual love, and it’s valued by many as the ultimate such expression.

It seems to me there’s two arguments going on in the gay marriage debate. The first is that gays and lesbians ought to be entitled to the same public expressions of their love and commitment as are heterosexuals. This is a no brainer, IMO. Love is no respecter of genital arrangements. In a world that needs love as much as this one does, we should be celebrating it everywhere we find it. It seems extraordinarily mealy-mouthed and mean-spirited, not to mention ignorant, for any heterosexual to insist that it can’t count as marriageable love when it blossoms between same-sex couples.

The second is the interrogation of marriage itself. Like, marriage? What is it good for? Well, I could get cynical here and say not much. But in my experience that’s a conclusion everyone has to come to, or not, in their own good time and their own good way. The idea of marriage continues to exert a powerful emotional hold. No amount of rationalizing is going to change that in the near future. I know many couples who after years of living together decide to do the marriage thing, even though de facto arrangements are as legitimate. We are encultured to view marriage as the strongest commitment couples can make. This may change, but currently, it’s what we’ve got.

It seems unfair to expect that same-sex couples, rather than demanding inclusion in the culture ought to contest it, although there are voices in the gay and lesbian community raised against the institution, as there are in the heterosexual community. Nevertheless, I doubt that marriage is going to go away anytime soon. So it matters a great deal that same-sex couples have the right to celebrate their commitment just as heterosexuals do, if they so choose.

And that’s the real argument. It’s an argument about equal rights. Whether you think marriage is a necessary institution or not is largely irrelevant at this point. Currently there are couples who are denied access to marriage solely because of their sexual orientation This is discriminatory and breaches their human rights.

None of the arguments put forward by opponents of same-sex marriage stand up to scrutiny, and most are mired in superstition and religion. We have a Prime Minister who is beholden to neither superstition nor religion. So let’s move forward, Ms Gillard, unless of course the Australian Christian Lobby, those vocal opponents of same-sex marriage, have got you under their thumb.

Finally, my apologies for spelling Craig Thomson’s name wrongly in a previous post – I gave him a p when he shouldn’t have a p. He does not have a p! There is no p!! How can anyone believe anything I say if I stick p’s in where they don’t belong! Respect the p, Jennifer! Respect the goddamn p!!

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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.

The high cost of obstinacy

22 Aug

Guest post today by Gerard Oosterman, artist, farmer and blogger

The treasury informs us that 2.4 billion has been spent on detaining boat people since 2000. This has worked out at $100,000 per boat arrival. I wonder how long this stupid waste of money will be allowed to continue.

The tide in favour on off shore detention has been turning, and ever so slowly there now appears the realization that if not from a humanitarian but from a financial point of view, we might be better off to swallow our pride or blind obstinacy and simply do what the rest of the world has been doing for many years. That is, dealing with a difficult problem that presents itself directly on most of their doorsteps, on a never-ending and daily basis.

After all, not many countries have the luxury of submissive sovereign nations such as PNG and Nauru, or excised islands close by, where refugees can be sent and left to slowly languish while awaiting the assessment of their refugee status.

In the meantime, there are serious concerns expressed daily about the treatment of asylum seekers in detention. This treatment results in hundreds of cases of self harm, mental break-downs, riots and the involvement of the Australian Federal Police. These events ring alarm bells worldwide especially at the UNHCR.

No matter what we do to try to dissuade the boat people, they will continue to undertake dangerous voyages to escape their circumstances and find a better life for themselves and their children. They have little or nothing to lose.

So what is this deep fear that Australia has about boat people who, no matter what, will continue to arrive at our doorstep? Are they armed? Do they threaten Us? Do they come with murderous intent, do they come to rape and pillage? The general and not unreasonable assumption is that many more will arrive  if we let our guard down. That might well be true. So what?  Australia happily takes in more than a hundred thousand migrants in a year. If a thousand boat people a week arrive on our shores, what is the problem with that?

If we reduced our normal intake of migrants by fifty thousand we would still not increase the overall number. Consider that fifty thousand migrants from ‘normal’ channels are those that are in less urgent need than boat arrivals, then why not give priority to asylum seekers? Consider how our image would change overnight.

Currently, we are viewed with horror by many world-wide as images and have been since the Tampa. Then there are the terrible sights of refugees burning and self harming, and those terrible drownings at Christmas Island. Sometimes, the footage resembles Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners are also languishing after many years.

The advantage of age is the luxury of hindsight. I remember still a similar
fear of refugees and new-comers in the late fifties and sixties. The ‘reffos’ and Italians and Greeks were knife pullers and worse, garlic eaters. They would catch trains or buses while speaking strange languages. That fear for Southern Europeans later changed into a fear for the boat people from Vietnam. They would allegedly bring exotic diseases, and they wore funny hats.

All of those fears were unfounded. Can you imagine Australia without the huge benefits from all those brave enough to risk dangerous journeys to come here?
We would all still be slurping milk-shakes, eating meat pies with lamingtons for dessert, and thronging around the six o’clock swill pubs. Those killer Sundays, they were deadly quiet with just the stray dogs about,scratching their fleas at deserted suburban rail-stations. Instead, we have a lively and varied society.

We still seem to harbour similar fears against the Afghans, Burmese or Iraqis, again based on ignorance, prejudice and an unwillingness to change.

Why do we allow fear to compete so sadly with compassion?

Come on Aussies. Open your hearts. Take the risk and deal with those
unfortunate boat arrivals as best as we can. Deal with the problem with honesty and do it in Australia. Show the world we care and have compassion. We are the largest
and least densely population country in the world. Not just a country but a
complete continent with the smallest population.  Let’s also have the
largest hearts.

Gerard blogs at  Oosterman Treats Blog

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