Tag Archives: Abbott, Tony. FORMER Australian Prime Minister

Abbott on Pell: “One of the greatest churchmen Australia has seen.”

4 Jul

When I saw Cardinal Pell on Qanda a couple of months ago, I felt a kind of  appalled pity for the man.

Pity, I hasten to add, is not an emotion I enjoy, based as it is in disinterested contempt, and complete lack of interest in its object’s fate. When I pity someone, they are pretty much dead to me.

Pell seemed subject to moments of confusion and rather bad judgement.

Then, in the ABC Four Corners report this past Monday on the sexual abuse of children by priests of his church, Pell again seemed quite out of his depth, and rigidly adhering to a well-worn script.

Pell clings to his belief in the word of three priests, even though there is very strong evidence to the contrary, including an admission in court by an accused rapist, Father F, that he did indeed perform some of the criminal acts of which he stands accused.

Pell was himself accused of sexually molesting a child,as is discussed here in an 2008 interview conducted by ABC journalist Ali Moore with former priest and now commentator Dr Paul Collins. Reading this 2008 interview I was struck by the similarities. Four years later, Cardinal Pell does not seem to have changed his perspective, in spite of more ghastly revelations about the behaviours of his priests, and the number of suicides thought to be related to sexual abuse.

I’m sometimes undecided as to who is the worst offender: the perpetrator or those who cover up for the perpetrator. I can only imagine the number of little kids whose lives would have been so different if the church authorities who knew about the pederasts in their ranks had taken proper action. Proper action in this instance is informing the police, however the Catholic church seems loathe to concede that sexually molesting a child is a crime, and treat it accordingly.

I note here that Cardinal Pell was very, very quick to threaten legal action against Catherine Deveney when he felt she had slandered him in a tweet. His reputation apparently warranted the protection of the law, unlike the lives of the children whose rape and molestation his church failed to report to the police.

As far as the mistreatment of children is concerned, I’m of the opinion that there are no innocent bystanders. Everyone who has anything to do with children professionally is required by law to report suspicions of abuse. This ought to include the Catholic church. When anyone knows something bad is happening to a child and keeps it quiet, she or he is enabling the perpetrators. The church takes that one step further and protects them as well.

It is my hope that like the US, it will be possible in this country to charge Catholic bishops and hold them criminally liable for the behaviours of the priests they supervise.

In the meantime I take my hat off to the ABC journalists who are persisting with this story, as well as other stories of child abuse. As a survivor, it does my heart good to know there are people willing to pursue these criminals and uncover their crimes. It is very difficult to speak about these things when you’ve endured them. We need others to help. We need others to confront and challenge those who would be innocent bystanders, and in their denial and silence, enable abuse to continue. I know it’s awful to have to listen to these things. But it is far, far worse to experience them.  Thank you to everyone with the courage to listen and care, and say so.

Finally, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is credited here with having described Cardinal George Pell as ” one of the greatest churchmen Australia has seen.” If this is a measure of Abbott’s ability to judge character, and an example of someone he profoundly admires, I fear even more for our future should he become the next Prime Minister.

Tony Abbott, trainee priest, St Patrick’s Seminary

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“If that means deaths at sea continue, he said, so be it.”

26 Jun

As I read today’s piece by Peter van Onselen on the asylum seeker policy stand-off, the following stood out: 

One well-placed Liberal source told The Australian that Abbott would rather see Labor continue to bleed politically with ongoing boat arrivals. If that means deaths at sea continue, he said, so be it.

Let me just say that again.

One well-placed Liberal source told The Australian that Abbott would rather see Labor continue to bleed politically with ongoing boat arrivals. If that means deaths at sea continue, he said, so be it.

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Fasten your seat belts: turbulence ahead

25 Jun

It was with a certain contempt that I watched footage of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott piously declaring that he would hold his forked tongue for twenty four hours while the bodies of drowned asylum seekers were recovered and taken to a makeshift morgue on Christmas Island.

And I noted the absence of any comment, pious or otherwise, from Shadow Minister for Immigration Scott Morrison. Perhaps they’ve put the muzzle on in case he comes out with observations somebody might construe as racist.

However, it seems inevitable that all gloves will be off when Parliament resumes today, and we will be subjected to the self-interested politicising of the plight of asylum seekers that began with John Howard and hasn’t stopped since.

No doubt the government will attempt a revival of its Malaysia plan. This surely will necessitate re-negotiations with that country, as the initial agreement covered only 800 boat arrivals, after which, presumably, we went back to how things always were.

Mr Abbott will no doubt adhere to his demands that the government re-open his beloved Nauru detention facilities, because, he will argue, when they were operative they stopped the boats. Quite how the Nauru option will stop the boats is unclear to me, after all, practically everyone who got to Nauru was found to be a refugee and resettled. Hardly seems like a disincentive.

What both major parties apparently fail to grasp is the desperation of people who undertake these journeys. The dangers they face are no deterrent. They risk their lives to have a life. An inability to comprehend desperation is fairly typical of most politicians. They lack the imagination, and are far too occupied with saving their own arses than they are with the plight of human beings in dire circumstances, at home and abroad. Lack of political will is responsible for some of the most obscene travesties on the planet.

What we urgently need is a regional approach to managing people movements. This will require a degree of co-operation between the government, the Coalition and the Greens. This possibility looks as likely as Gina Rinehart funding care and housing for homeless children.

What we will get is yet another extended brawl that will achieve nothing. Then there will be another catastrophe in which more lives are lost. Then we will have another extended brawl that achieves nothing. Then there will be another catastrophe in which more lives are lost.

As well as the asylum seekers, you know who I feel sorry for? The good people of Christmas Island who have to deal with the stark reality of these events in their back yards.

This piece from the Castan Centre unpacks the complexities with clarity. The author addresses the notion of saving lives by deterring asylum seekers from embarking in the first place. Perhaps, if our objective really is to save lives, we would supply safer boats?  Or is the saving of life a cover for deeper concerns about border protection and just stopping the boats?

Thus far our politicians have proved themselves entirely inadequate on this matter. It isn’t good enough. Refugees are not going away. The numbers seeking resettlement here are miniscule compared with many other countries. It is a regional problem, but how can Australia take a responsible role in addressing it at this level when our politicians continue to domestically exploit widespread human misery to further their own interests?

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Belief versus human rights

13 Jun

After my blog yesterday on Prime Minister Gillard’s belief that homosexuals should not be allowed to marry, I became embroiled in several robust Twitter fights. One of the points of contention was that the PM, like anyone else, is entitled to her personal beliefs. I was threatened with Voltaire, told belief does not require any knowledge, described as intolerant and blind to the mote in my own eye,  and finally accused of risking the downfall of the government and an Abbott ascendency, by criticising Ms Gillard’s personal belief about same-sex marriage.

While there’s a good community here at Sheep, Rupert Murdoch I’m not.

Be that as it may, the fights led me to thinking about belief. While I agree that everyone is entitled to their beliefs, I don’t agree that everyone is entitled to act on those beliefs to the detriment of others. Once a belief is extrapolated from the personal realm and used to determine the lives of others it is no longer personal, it is political.

Personal belief can legitimately determine the course of one’s own life. If you don’t believe same-sex marriage is right, for example, then don’t make a same-sex marriage. Nobody in our country will force you into an arrangement that powerfully disturbs your moral sensibility.

What disturbs me, however, is the argument that personal beliefs ought to be set apart from the interrogations we are at liberty to apply to all other human processes. The personal belief is elevated to the sacred, inspiring respect and reverence simply because it is a personal belief, and regardless of its substance. While I find this bizarre, hinting as it does at some transcendental exterior governance, I have little problem with it, as long as the belief remains in the realm of the personal. When it becomes prescriptive, I argue that it is no longer protected from scrutiny and critique by reverence.

Tony Abbott, for example, holds a personal belief that abortion is wrong, as well as being opposed to same sex marriage. In this article titled Rate of abortion highlights our moral failings Mr Abbott explores his personal beliefs about this procedure, including his belief that abortion is a lifestyle choice made to suit the mother’s convenience.

Of course Mr Abbott is entitled to hold these beliefs. Anyone can believe anything they want. He is not entitled to impose his beliefs on others. When he does, the belief has ceased to be personal, and has become political.

If I am expected to unquestioningly respect Ms Gillard’s personal beliefs on homosexual marriage, I gather I am also expected to respect Mr Abbott’s beliefs on abortion and refrain from challenging them?

What about Hitler, because no argument about belief is complete without a reference to Hitler. Hitler’s personal belief was that  human beings who did not fit his ideal didn’t deserve to exist. Including homosexuals. When Hitler’s personal belief burst out of his private realm, millions upon millions of human beings were starved, tortured and murdered. Yet Hitler’s personal belief ought to have gone unchallenged because personal beliefs are sacred?

I could go on with endless examples of the dire repercussions of actions based on personal beliefs, but I know you’ve got my drift.

Perhaps a belief can be considered sacred only as long as it remains personal. Once it affects anyone other than the believer it is no longer personal, and no longer entitled to protection from interrogation.

Were I to be given the chance, I would ask Ms Gillard if she has reasonable, plausible evidence for her core belief that homosexuals should not marry. I use the term core belief  because I’m assuming that the PM has actively thought about her position on same sex marriage and has come to a state of justified true belief. Otherwise we would be dealing with something more akin to superstition, of the kind practised by Jim Wallace and the ACL.

The reason I care about this has nothing to do with marriage, about which I personally give not a toss. It has to do with the right all homosexuals have to be treated equally. It is about the right homosexuals have to be recognised as being as fully human as heterosexuals, and as entitled to participate in our institutions to precisely the same degree. This is not, in my opinion, a matter for anybody’s personal beliefs to determine. It’s a matter of human rights.

 

 

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Casting the first stone: the Thomson affair

22 May

I don’t know if Craig Thomson is telling the truth. I don’t know if Kathy Jackson is telling the truth. I never know when Tony Abbott is telling the truth, and I’m not at all sure about Julia Gillard either.

That I don’t know when leaders are lying has been most forcefully brought home to me as we’ve witnessed self-righteous politicians and journalists, almost all united in their obsessive desire to get Craig Thomson for something, construct narratives that inevitably cast Thomson as guilty, because it suits their purposes.

I don’t know if any of the people responsible for governing our country and reporting on that governance tell the truth. I can’t even be bothered attempting to establish their veracity. It’s too exhausting. I’ll assume they are all liars until it is demonstrated otherwise.

What has also been most forcefully brought home to me throughout this saga is that we don’t seem to have many journalists anymore. We have opinionistas. I could count on the fingers of one hand the reports I’ve read that deal with the facts. Rather, the media is flooded with the subjective opinions of self-important commentators, most of whom, I strongly suspect, have their own barrows to push though they apparently feel  under no obligation to disclose what those barrows might contain.

These are the most powerful arguments I can make for leaving the Thomson matter to the courts, because when all around you are self-interested liars, the law is all that’s left. Even the law doesn’t guarantee that truth will out. But it’s our best shot. It’s all we’ve got.

This blog post unravels some of the complexities of the situation, the ones the mainstream media don’t report. As does this one. And this one. Why, I ask myself, are the self-appointed mainstream experts not discussing these aspects? Isn’t it something of a moral crime to deliberately omit large chunks of a story?

No matter what Thomson has or hasn’t done, the witch hunt continues to be ferocious. To my mind, the authenticity of Kathy Jackson’s claims is equally tenuous, but we have not seen anything like the same ferocity directed at her. The public attacks on Thomson are astounding, whipped up by politicians and media, and why? Because we have a minority government. Would anyone give much of a stuff about the internal upheavals of a branch of the HSU if we didn’t?

Thomson is accused of serious misconduct. Unfortunately, this is not an unprecedented event amongst MPs from all parties. As things stand today, I’m more sickened by the fake outrage swirling around Thomson, perpetrated by politicians and much of the media. I doubt there’s many among this crowd in a position to cast the first stone. I don’t care what any one of them “thinks” about Thomson’s guilt. There’s not one of them whose opinion I trust or respect.

And this is the real lesson of the Thomson saga: that our public discourse is dominated by a bunch of self-interested thugs who care nothing for the truth and are entirely unwilling to permit an environment in which the truth can emerge. Whatever the outcome with Thomson, he has been punished already way beyond his alleged crimes, and the punishment will continue for the rest of his life and the lives of his family members. This punishment has not been sanctioned in the courts. It is entirely arbitrary and administered by an unrelenting moral lynch mob.

For the politicians and journalists feeding off this saga there will be no punishment for their moral failures. There will be no punishment for their destruction of the presumption of innocence on which our system of justice is based. This, to my mind, is the biggest crime in this sorry mess, and the one most likely to be ongoing in its capacity for moral destruction.

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A fit and proper halibut

3 May

Yesterday Philip Adams tweeted that Grahame Morris ought to be smacked about the head with a halibut for his comment that Julia Gillard “should be kicked to death.” There’s a great analysis of Morris’s comment and the media’s almost total silence about it here.

It wasn’t a great week for the PM as next Joe Hildebrand, in his analysis of where he thinks the government has gone wrong, included this gratuitous paragraph:

And, to be frank, the fact that Gillard has no children perhaps also limits her exposure to what’s happening in the world outside the rarefied corridors of Canberra or the Melbourne dinner party set. If the PM moved in broader circles or had better political instincts then this would not be an issue but it seems as though she needs every avenue to the outside world she can get and kids can be a great – if often unwelcome – conduit to what’s really going on. Having said that, this is of course a deeply personal matter and entirely one for her. It merely presents as one reason why she may be so insulated from popular opinion.

He was set upon by a small army of tweeps, including myself, for writing sexist claptrap that I won’t even begin to dignify with argument in this post. Overwhelmed by our aggression, Hildebrand asked us to stop. Of course we intensified out attack. Surely being employed by a boss declared not a fit and proper person to run a newspaper business must trickle down, even to hacks like Hildebrand? How come he wrote three paragraphs about new FM Bob Carr without any speculation as to how his child free state might insulate him from foreign affairs?

The mouthy Murdoch minion retired for a while, then reappeared to tweet that we should read his work properly before rushing to judgement, and he provided a link in case some of us wanted to revisit it. There’s a deconstruction of Hildebrand’s opinion piece here that’s worth a read.

It then occurred to me out of nowhere that a halibut would likely be a better PM than Tony Abbott. This fish is a flat one, and a member of the right-eyed flounders species. It’s also a bottom feeder. All in all, barely distinguishable from the LOTO. Bereft of the capacity for contemplation, the halibut is undisturbed by ethical considerations. Lacking a moral compass, it is not compelled to seek the good. Caught unawares it opens and closes its jaws while simultaneously releasing mouth farts. Yes. Bring on the fit and proper halibut. We’ll never know the difference.

Halibut

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If this was The West Wing: the Slipper affair

28 Apr

Imagine this. Peter Slipper, Liberal MP is fast losing favour with his peers. Their  leader, Tony Abbott, admits to looking for ways to get rid of him. Mr Slipper meets a young man called James Ashby and feels an attraction. He attempts to persuade Mr Ashby to come and work for him. But the young man quite likely perceives that Slipper’s on the wane, and maybe not such a good prospect for on-going employment.

Then, by a bizarre convergence of bizarre circumstances outwardly set in motion when the ALP gave Kevin Rudd the flick but undoubtedly in play long before any of  us punters were aware of such machinations, Peter Slipper finds himself, courtesy of the ALP, in the Speaker’s Chair in the House of Representatives, reborn, newly robed and now in a position to give those who would have seen him gone the big finger.

Suddenly Mr Ashby wants that job. Now, this could well be because Mr Ashby is possessed of a healthy ambition, and Slipper’s sudden elevation makes working for him a whole other thing, as they say in The West Wing. But imagine another scenario. The LNP, finally rid of Slipper in one sense as he resigns and becomes an Independent, may feel itself outwitted by the Gillard government’s nifty move, quite likely highly aggravated, and chafing under Slipper’s authority at Question Time.

So somebody sets a honey trap. Slipper has a record of complaints of alleged sexual harassment against him. There’s allegedly video of him in an “intimate” situation with a young man on a bed. He’s already expressed more than a passing interest in Mr Ashby. So now might be a very good time for Mr Ashby to accept that job offer, mightn’t  it?  Who knows what might come of it? It could even bring down the government.

The subsequent text messages and emails indicate Mr Slipper’s interest in Mr Ashby, which was interpreted by Mr Ashby as sexual harassment. The matter is now subject to civil proceedings.

My primary objection to the honey trap option is that I find it hard to believe the Coalition has the brains to put this together. But they might have hired consultants.

If this was The West Wing Peter Slipper would know that his duty was not to himself but to the men and women who saved him from mediocrity and obscurity. He would recognise that for him to reappear in the Speaker’s Chair when Parliament sits next (yes, I know, they are two entirely different systems of government but suspend disbelief)  will be nothing short of farcical, and will set in motion a series of events that could well see the country under the leadership of the Dark One. If this was The West Wing, Slipper would sacrifice anything to avoid that outcome, especially his short-lived career as Speaker. He would stand aside until all allegations against him are dealt with.

In The West Wing everybody has their fair share of flaws from POTUS down. But what binds them is their goal: to keep POTUS where he is. They manage to overcome all personal differences, scandals, and weaknesses in their pursuit of this goal. This is what eventually drove me nuts about the show, but I could be wildly wrong. That tight-knit group gathered round Jed Bartlet seem to lack malice and ego. Even in their most flawed moments they convey a fundamental decency and an inherent capacity for redemption. I find this unrealistic, and just too damn sweet for my taste, but then I love Tony Soprano.

However, as someone pointed out the other day, in the cut throat race to become Presidential Candidate all manner of mud is slung, and many arrows fired. When it’s over, everyone gets behind the chosen one because getting your party into the White House supercedes personal rivalry, hatred, ambition and apparently most human flaws. Bartlett’s merry band of quippers take this to another level and seem to care for one another better than even Jesus’s disciples. As someone who grew up in the shadow of the Australian political system I’m calling bollocks on that.

However, there’s no doubt  we could do with a bit of this kind of loyalty in Australian politics. Peter Slipper has the opportunity to demonstrate how it’s done. He owes the Gillard government big time. They took a punt on him when everybody else was plotting his downfall. It’s not their fault it turned sour. The most ethical move available to Slipper at this point is to quietly withdraw until the civil proceedings have been resolved and if this was The West Wing,  he’d have announced it already.

As far as the civil proceedings are concerned, it may well be that the last thing the LNP wants is to see them fought out in court. Awkward questions will no doubt be asked of James Ashby, such as who briefed him on Slipper’s alleged peccadilloes in 2003 and why? Who is financing the court action? How much simpler if the government falls, the Dark One leads his people into the Lodge, and the civil case is quietly withdrawn, never to be heard of again?

Of course with the exception of President Bartlet The West Wing crowd aren’t politicians, perhaps this is the difference. But wait. The episode I watched last night featured a rather nasty Republican hell-bent on unearthing an ancient scandal about White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry. At the last minute he was confronted by a Good Republican Man who told him muckraking was killing their party and it had to stop. The nasty man’s efforts were thwarted. I did not find this believable. I’m sorry. I did not.

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Coalition moral high horse is nothing but a braying donkey

22 Apr

Before Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and his braying band of born to rule big mouths get too comfortable up on their freshly saddled moral high horses, they might do well to consider this: Speaker of the House of Representatives Peter Slipper has a history. The LNP is aware that this history includes, according to this account, alleged sexual harassment and sexual behaviour that some of their number found unacceptable enough to complain about:

According to the court documents, the Howard government was aware of Mr Slipper’s sexual relationship with another young male adviser – and other allegations of sexual harassment – as early as 2003.

Megan Hobson, a former adviser to Mr Slipper, approached John Howard’s then senior adviser Tony Nutt after she – and two other women – had viewed a video featuring the Speaker and the young male adviser.

According to the court documents, the video included footage of Mr Slipper lying on a bed with the male adviser and hugging him in “an intimate fashion”.

After hearing her concerns about the video, Mr Nutt allegedly told Ms Hobson to “forget all about it”.

The Coalition has overnight moved from “forget all about it” to “he must step down these are serious allegations.”

While the staffers Slipper allegedly harassed are adults, the Howard government’s attitude reminds me of the church officials who, when informed of the sexual predilections of some of their priests, simply shuffled them around from parish to parish, rather than call them to account and deal with the damage done to children in their care.

Sexually harassing an adult in your employ is an abuse of power. It’s against the law. It can cause a great deal of distress, sometimes long-term, for the unwilling recipient. It’s not a situation anyone should have to deal with when they arrive at their workplace every day. What the Howard government did, and what the Coalition has continued to do ever since, is cover-up serious allegations made against Slipper because it was expedient for them to do so, in spite of these alleged actions being against the law.

It’s a given that sexual abuse of all kinds perpetrated on  both adults and children can only continue to the extent that it does with the collusion of others. Institutions look the other way, or actively cover up  and repress allegations. It’s a given that we aren’t going to make big inroads into sexually abusive behaviours until institutions cease to enable the alleged perpetrators by protecting them from scrutiny. This is everyone’s problem. Politicians need to be leaders in this. They need to take action and be seen to take action when allegations of this kind are made against one of their number.

The Coalition doesn’t have a leg to stand on in the Slipper scandal. The way the situation was initially handled by them is disgraceful. They covered up allegations of a crime. They told complainants to “forget all about it.”  They showed utter disregard for staffers who had allegedly suffered sexual harassment.

Sexual harassment in the workplace is sickening. No less sickening are those who hold positions of power that permit them to do something about it, and instead choose to cover it up for their own gains. Get off your moral high horse Mr Abbott. It’s really just a braying donkey.

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Tony Abbott, Freud, the death metaphor, and nannies

31 Mar

Bereft of anything resembling policy and driven by a singular obsession to become Prime Minister, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has to find a way to keep himself in the public eye. How better than to make offensive statements, sit back and wait for the outrage, then apologise publicly for your error in judgement? He’s on record as admitting a “slight tendency to draw attention to myself,” and BTW, I recommend this link: it will take you to an excellent blog on Abbott and women, a topic I cannot bring myself to address right now.

This is not a technique for the faint-hearted, but it can be carried off by someone whose sense of entitlement is so overweening, he believes he’ll be forgiven anything. Do it often enough and people can become inured to it. “Oh, that’s just Abbott, he’s always saying outrageous things and then apologising.” This can have the effect of minimising the offensive nature of his remarks, as one follows another with such rapidity the observer can barely keep track. I hope somebody is keeping a list.

Cynic I may be, but I see this as a deliberate strategy. I don’t think Tony Abbott is always making gaffes, though I admit he does that as well. In any case, it hardly matters – the gaffes also reveal a great deal about the man’s beliefs and mindset. A gaffe can be interpreted as a Freudian slip in its original sense:  the numerous little slips and mistakes which people make — symptomatic actions, as they are called […] I have pointed out that these phenomena are not accidental, that they require more than physiological explanations, that they have a meaning and can be interpreted, and that one is justified in inferring from them the presence of restrained or repressed intentions  [Freud, An Autobiographical Study (1925)] 

Yes. That. Especially the restrained and repressed intentions.

For example, I don’t believe for a moment that Abbott had forgotten the Sarah Palin crosshairs rhetoric and the attempted assassination of US Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords when he warned in Parliament that Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her colleagues had “targets on their foreheads.” What Abbott revealed in making this threat (and it is a threat) is that he shares the Palin mindset, the “lock and load” vision of politics that inspires the metaphor of killing your opponents, rather than just winning an electoral contest. In the case of Giffords, the metaphor became reality. The degree to which Palin’s campaign influenced Giffords’ attacker is likely impossible to ascertain. However, if leaders use violent and murderous language against their opposition,they  set a violent and murderous tone for  political discourse that makes the possibility of violent and murderous action a little more thinkable. No amount of apologising from Abbott can undo the revelation that he thinks in these terms. This is not one of those sporting metaphors so beloved by some politicians. It is a metaphor of death.

Although here I must confess that I’ve argued against the viability of death as a metaphor as follows:

Initially the death metaphor appears to be a viable until one looks more deeply into the associations it claims to make. Unlike any other metaphorical associations, those made with death are entirely incapable of substantiation: we have no idea at all of death’s composition and qualities. Death denotes radical absence, both of the sentient being and of knowledge: it signifies radical ignorance, and the utter impossibility of knowing. There is nothing in life, it can be argued, for which death can be asked metaphorically to stand.

But that’s another story and I only refer to it in case somebody who knows pulls me up for using a figure of speech I’ve claimed at some length is unusable. This is known metaphorically as covering my arse.

And so to nannies. Let me say right off I have no quarrel with people employing nannies. Had I been able to I would have, because working full time and looking after little kids is no joke. For a brief period when I lived overseas I had an au pair and it was heaven. However, it never occurred to us that anyone else would help us pay for  it. Tony Abbott seems to think it’s perfectly acceptable to extend the child care rebate to include families who employ live-in nannies. He proposes that this would be paid for “within the existing funding envelope,” necessitating big cuts in the rebates currently given to families who use day care centres and Family Day Care.

Given that a certain standard of housing and living is required to employ a live-in nanny or au pair (who receive wages plus room and board) this is not a viable option for families without spare rooms, and on a budget that cannot accommodate feeding and housing another adult. If everyone’s rebates are to be cut to service those families with the means to accommodate live-in nannies, this makes it even less likely that lower income parents would be able afford to employ live-in help. It will also put an unacceptable strain on those who are just making ends meet with the child care rebate to which they are currently entitled. All in all, it sounds like a plan to take from the less well off to give to the affluent. Why am I not surprised at yet another Coalition expression of universal entitlement.

Of course, this is quite likely another of Abbott’s attention-getting scams. And it has succeeded. The Opposition Leader is apparently in a place where even negative attention is better than none. Any nanny worth her salt would by now have sent him to the naughty corner to think about his behaviour.  For which she would likely receive this look:

Related articles

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The King’s Tribune, The PM gives the msm the finger, and things you might like to read.

2 Mar

I don’t know if you’re familiar with The King’s Tribune, a monthly journal on politics, media and culture. It’s available in hard copy and online, and it’s the only journal our household reads cover to cover.

And this month I’m proud to be a contributor:

http://www.kingstribune.com/current-issue/1469-down-among-the-women

Journalist Jill Singer wrote a piece for the Herald Sun about the legal threats made against me by Melinda Tankard Reist a couple of months ago. I was enormously cheered by her perspective and it’s with some amazement that I hear she’s being replaced at the Herald Sun. Can it be true that her replacement is Lara Bingle?

As regulars know, I’m no great fan of Julia Gillard’s but driving home from my water ballet class this morning I laughed out loud when heard how she’s turned the tables on some prominent msm journalists with her announcement of Bob Carr as Foreign Minister. This follows a couple of days of unrelenting media criticism on the topic, from some who may now like to eat their words. Not that they will.

Even to my jaundiced eye, a “fairly unrelenting anti Gillard campaign” seems a realistic assessment of the last few months’ coverage by some journos, whose lack of objectivity remains inexplicable.

After the leadership question was settled the other day I firmly resolved to accept Ms Gillard, and focus all my critical faculties on Tony Abbott and his gang of thugs from now until the election. This is because I would rather have needles in my eyes than do anything that might assist those agents of Satan into government.

So please, PM, stay on track, continue to give the bastards hell in question time, and don’t do anything silly. I’m not in your electorate so I won’t be voting for you, but as I’m rather fond of my local federal member who works very hard for us, I can safely say the ALP has my vote, barring any unforseen and disagreeable event that might cause me to protest at the ballot box.

At Hoyden about town, there’s this piece on free speech that is worth reading.

At Liberty Victoria there’s the piece that sparked a Twitter exchange between myself, Sandi Logan and others, where Mr Logan displayed his mastery of Orwellian doublespeak, of which more later.

If you are interested in what’s happening in the US in the battle for the right to control what women do with our bodies, this piece from Salon is a must read.

And this little piece brought joy to my heart when I read it. As you might know, Optus took legal action in an effort to silence AFL boss Andrew Demetriou who’d accused them of stealing content and other nefarious practices. It was his personal opinion, the judge decided, and refused an injunction. At least we live in a country where we can still express personal opinions without being legally gagged. Hoo haa!


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