Tag Archives: Julia Gillard

And the winner is: Ms Gillard

28 Nov

I don’t know about anybody else, but I think by now Julia Gillard has hands down won the verbal battle currently consuming the emotional and mental energies of our elected members. Her confident stamina in the face of the Opposition’s unrelenting (if largely ineffectual) attempts at reputational savagery is astounding. I get tired just thinking about it. I can think of many occasions in my life when I would have given anything for even a smidgen of Ms Gillard’s élan.

What a role model she’s turned out to be! If you overlook the knifing, asylum seeker policy, single parents on Newstart, Palestine, but what the hell, nobody’s perfect and credit must be given where it’s due, must it not and the PM can do scathing repartee better than any of them.

The Opposition, led in this fight by an increasingly bedraggled and war-weary Julie Bishop loyally firing her beloved boss’s shots, have well and truly lost the battle. Having produced little more than exorbitant amounts of piss and wind, they will limp defeated from the chamber tomorrow to lick their Gillard-inflicted wounds over the break and good riddance to them, I say.

I still have no clear idea what the PM is supposed to have done, but I don’t care really. If nobody has managed to come up with anything of substance for twenty years, and by the gods plenty have tried, then I for one am willing to call bollocks and move on.

I do hope they all lift their game next year, because the political discourse has gone to the feckin dogs.

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The REAL Gillard hypocrisy

11 Oct

In the brouhaha about sexism and misogyny, the passing of legislation to reduce single parent payments to the Newstart allowance when a child reaches the age of eight has gone comparatively unremarked.

The government will save some 700 million dollars through slashing up to one hundred dollars a fortnight off payments to about 150,00 single parents,the majority of whom are women.

With no evidence to support the theory, the government believes that forcing single parents into poverty and charity handouts will increase their ability to find work.

At the very least, one would expect that before taking this drastic action the government might have commissioned a study, an inquiry, a report, a something into what actually happens to people when you take away what little they already have. Off the top of my head I’d guess it makes them desperate. I’d guess it makes them depressed. Neither are states of mind conducive to taking charge of one’s life and neither are states of mind conducive to the best parenting.

Common sense would suggest that the way to get single parents off benefits and into the workforce is not to first reduce them and their children to crippling poverty.  The “we will make you and your children homeless and hungry and then you’ll get a job, won’t you” approach is punitive, classist and I believe sexist.

I have no idea what the ALP stands for anymore. I have no idea what kind of a feminist Julia Gillard is when she delivers passionate speeches about misogyny and sexism while at the same time making life so much more difficult for some of the most vulnerable women in society.

If ever we were to plead “Somebody think of the children!” then now would be the time. Because it will be the children of single parents who will suffer most as a consequence of the Gillard government’s cuts.

So Ms Gillard can make as many fancy speeches as she likes about misogyny and sexism, while she’s willing to condemn women and children to living on a Newstart allowance that almost nobody considers even remotely adequate, just to achieve a budget surplus, her words are little more than a noisy bell and a clanging cymbal, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

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I think I’m done with you now, Ms Gillard.

5 Sep

After an absolute tosspot of a day negotiating with the galaxy’s most arrogant medical practitioners ever, I come home to find that Julia Gillard is giving the keynote address at the Australian Christian Lobby Conference in October.

I have studiously refrained from criticising the PM over the last few months. I have heeded my grandmother’s caution: “If you can’t say something pleasant don’t say anything at all.”

But now the feckin gloves are off. Any woman who can support the ACL to that extent is not my friend. Keynote speaker at the ACL National Conference?  

SAY IT ISN’T SO!!

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Leadership chatter. Assange’s passport. Blonde girls in short shorts

24 Jul

There is no way chatter about ALP leadership is going to stop before the next election, the next leadership change, a decision by the party to close ranks and stop white-anting, or a blackout by the media on the topic.  The latter is the most unlikely option, so we might as well resign ourselves to endless speculation, and learn to stick our fingers in our ears.

I’ve now arrived at what I like to call the “shit or get off the pot” point. It’s that place in the mind you reach when you’ve had a gut full of listening to the same narrative over and over and over again. Usually I’m hounded to this place of ultimatum by people who are deeply dissatisfied with their intimate relationships and feel they have to tell me about it because I’m a good listener. Over a period of years they reiterate their complaints against their partners with a monotony that makes me feel like pulling out my fingernails with pliers, on the theory that the resultant physical pain will  distract me from the mental anguish I’m enduring by having to listen.

It’s a human failing, that we can be so afraid of change we choose instead to remain in a state of miserable grievance. Indeed, the very act of complaint becomes a raison d’être. The  whine: “Oh, if I could only be happy” replaces any possibility of actually finding happiness because one has, without even thinking about it, chosen whining as a way of life rather than risking satisfaction.

There is of course the opposite situation in which there seems to be a destructive addiction to superficial change while the underlying matters remain un-addressed.

As with all things, it is necessary to find the middle road, grasshopper.

But I digress. I don’t care who will lead the ALP to the next election. Being an ALP leader is a poisoned chalice. Anyone mad enough to take it on has my sympathy, but only in the abstract. The present leader, Julia Gillard, is drinking deep of the tainted wine and nothing good will come of it for her, just as nothing good eventuated for her toppled predecessor, Kevin Rudd. What this says to me is that the problems are not entirely to do with party leaders, and that continuing to change the leader will do nothing to resolve the problems.

I know there are good people in the ALP who deliver results for their electorates. My own federal member, Janelle Saffin, is one of them. It does seem that in politics the good people are either not interested in taking prominent roles or are not considered prominent role material by the back room boys and girls who determine these matters. The criteria the back room crowd use to arrive at their choices is puzzling. I strongly suspect those moral and ethical qualities we don’t talk about anymore, lest acknowledging our loss breaks our hearts, do not rate highly in their list of necessary leadership qualities.

Of course one could also argue that on becoming leader a good person may well undergo a transformation, goodness and leadership seemingly anathemas in today’s political world. According to ALP legend Kevin Rudd, who seemed decent enough, became the antichrist when they won government.  I liked Julia Gillard as deputy PM. Enough said about both.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the unsettling Julian Assange story as aired on Four Corners last night, was the effort by then Attorney-General Robert McClelland, presumably supported by the PM, to rescind Assange’s Australian passport at the time of the Wikileaks cable dump. Footage of PM Gillard declaring Assange’s actions to be “illegal” without any evidence at all for that declaration, also gave pause for thought.

The US, of course, was the nation-state most grievously affected by the dump. Our government’s rush to condemn one of its own citizens looks sadly like a an ill-considered attempt to show what good and loyal friends we are to the US, by cutting Assange loose without bothering to establish his innocence or guilt. This is an example of what I mean about the incommensurability of goodness and power.

I would hate to think I live in a country where anyone’s passport can be taken away from them because the government says so, without any investigation and without any evidence that the accused has done anything to justify such drastic action.

Assange has committed no offence against his own country. It is yet to be determined whether or not he has committed any offences in any country. Yet our PM declared him guilty of illegal activities, and decided he should be relieved of his passport. This is very scary stuff, and we should not take it lightly. According to Four Corners, plans to relieve Assange of his most important document were abandoned when it was pointed out that leaving him in possession of his passport would make tracking his whereabouts that much easier.

And people wonder why Assange is worried for his future?

I was baffled during the programme, by the blurred and recurring shots of a young blonde woman in short shorts walking away from the viewer along a train station platform. This young woman seemed to bear no resemblance in dress or manner to the two women who have accused Assange of sexual misconduct. She did seem to signify sexual availability, and presumably the long blonde hair referenced her Scandinavian origins. I have no idea why this image was necessary, except to imply a certain stereotyped lasciviousness in young Swedish women which might by association be extrapolated to the complainants. Hmmm. Tacky, anyone?

And just who wears short shorts?

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Don’t let facts get in the way of hate…

21 Jun

In December 2010 when the WikiLeaks cable dump hit the headlines, Prime Minister Julia Gillard declared: “I absolutely condemn the placement of this information on the WikiLeaks website – it’s a grossly irresponsible thing to do and an illegal thing to do.”

A couple of days later, Ms Gillard was at a loss to explain her inflammatory comments.

“The foundation stone of it is an illegal act,” Ms Gillard told reporters in Canberra.

But the “foundation stone” was the leaking of the documents to the website, not the publishing of the cables.

“It would not happen, information would not be on WikiLeaks, if there had not been an illegal act undertaken,” Ms Gillard said.

Mr Assange’s lawyers have said they are considering defamation action against Ms Gillard after she accused the whistleblower of “illegal” conduct over the leak of US documents.

Thus our Prime Minister launched a campaign of misinformation about both Wikileaks and Assange, based solely on her personal opinion and clearly with little if any regard to her legal training.

The government then attempted to find legal cause to withdraw Assange’s Australian passport, in spite of the fact that he had broken no Australian laws.

Hardly surprising then, that Assange and his team of lawyers have come to believe he’s been abandoned by his government. While it may be true that Assange has received whatever consular support is due to him, Prime Minister Gillard had Assange hung, drawn and quartered from the get go, and she has never retracted her accusations and her condemnation.

If we follow Ms Gillard’s logic, then the newspapers who published the leaked cables they obtained from Assange, newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Guardian, The New York Times et al, are also acting irresponsibly and illegally because ““It would not happen, information would not be on WikiLeaks [or in the SMH, the Oz, the NYT, the Guardian et al] if there had not been an illegal act undertaken.” 

At this point I quote Anna Funder, winner of this year’s Miles Franklin Literary award:  I have spent my professional life studying totalitarian regimes and the brave people who speak out against them. And the first thing that someone with dictatorial inclinations does is to silence the writers and the journalists.

 

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This is a link to an account by The Guardian of the events in Sweden that have led to Assange being accused of sexual misconduct. As you can see, the circumstances as described are unsavoury, though they would not all necessarily be considered sexual offences in Australia. They are also entirely a matter of she said/he said.

I have no idea of their veracity and I believe Assange, for his own sake, ought to have the opportunity to respond to the allegations made against him.  As well, the complainants are entitled to have their allegations addressed. It is puzzling that Swedish prosecutors are delaying the resolution of the women’s complaints by demanding, against, apparently, their own Supreme Court decision on interviews (see below) that Assange return to the country, rather than conduct a video link interview with him.

Bjorn Hurtig, Assange’s early Swedish counsel, makes these observations in his witness statement:

I also think it unreasonable that in a case of this kind, where extensive mutual assistance between the UK and Sweden would readily permit a video-link interview, for the prosecution to be so absolutely insistent that Mr Assange return (and at his own expense) to face questions that could easily be put over the video-link.

[Assange has many times offered to do this, and offered to engage in interviews with Swedish officials in person in the UK. The Swedish authorities have consistently refused these offers, demanding extradition instead. Assange continues to offer to answer the allegations via video link from the Embassy of Ecuador.]

I note that at least one of the complainants have been interviewed by telephone and the insistence that Mr Assange come back to Sweden merely for an interview is, therefore, unreasonable and contrary to the decision of our Supreme Court (NJA 2007, p. 337).

The problem for Assange with returning to Sweden is explained here. Briefly:

Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the WikiLeaks founder in the US, said Assange and his legal team considered it highly likely that he would face an onward extradition to the US if he were sent to Sweden.

The concrete reality [is] that he was facing a political prosecution in the US, he was facing the death penalty or certainly life in jail. Faced with that, he had extremely limited choices.

The US empanelled a secret grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks and Assange in May 2011, but has not issued any requests for his extradition to the UK or Sweden. However, Ratner said both he and Assange believed it was “more likely than not” that a sealed indictment had been drawn up.

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According to a Human Rights Watch report, Sweden has form. In 2001 Sweden was involved in the illegal US rendition of  two asylum seekers suspected of terrorism from Stockholm to Cairo. This involvement violated the global ban on torture. Both asylum seekers were tortured when they arrived in Egypt, despite assurances given to Swedish diplomats.

The UN Committee Against Torture concluded that Sweden violated the Convention against Torture by illegally expelling him [Al Zari] to Egypt, and stated that “procurement of diplomatic assurances [from Egypt], which, moreover, provided no mechanism for their enforcement, did not suffice to protect against this manifest risk.”

The US has imprisoned Private Bradley Manning, the WikiLeaks cables source, in a manner that has been described by Glenn Greenwald as “conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture.”

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One need not be a conspiracy theorist to see where this is headed. The bizarre refusal by Swedish authorities to question Assange by video link in an interview which is designed to establish whether or not there are grounds for bringing charges against him. The oft -forgotten fact that Assange has already been questioned on these matters while in Sweden, the allegations were dismissed, and he was allowed to leave the country.

And on the matter of these allegations it’s worth reading this brief interview with Oscar Swartz, author of A Brief History of Swedish Sex: How the Nation that Gave Us Free Love Redefined Rape and Declared War on Julian Assange.  Swatrz claims that  in Sweden: “Sex is being increasingly used to control communications – and as a political weapon,” and says his book shows “how Sweden descended from one of the western world’s most sexually liberated nations to its most repressive.”

The hatred expressed against Assange in Australia is frightening, and much of it seems to be based on personal antipathy. A great deal of it seems to originate with journalists and has from the start, as I wrote in these two articles in December 2010

It is even more frightening in the US where there have been calls for his assassination and demands that he be hunted down like bin Laden. Hatred such as this, and the unworthy example of presumption of guilt set by Prime Minister Gillard at the start of the story obscures the complexity of the narrative, and reduces it to a George W Bush story of good versus evil.

Personal opinions about Assange and his character ought not to blind anyone to the bigger picture unfolding here. There is something rotten in the manner in which these events have been and continue to be handled by the Australian, Swedish, and US governments. This should sound alarm bells for all of us, especially, one would think and hope, for journalists and writers whose responsibility it is to hold governments to account and protect us from dictators. WikiLeaks efforts to do this may have been clumsy, and at times carelessly cavalier. However, to my mind, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange & WikiLeaks have struck a blow for transparency in high places that in spite of claims to the contrary has struck nerves. For this they have my admiration and my ongoing concern for their welfare.


 

 


 

  

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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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The PM, belief, and marriage equality.

12 Jun

On Qanda last night, Prime Minister Julia Gillard was asked the inevitable question about her position on gay marriage. To which she replied that nobody who knows her personal circumstances (she lives in a heterosexual de facto relationship) would be surprised to hear her say that a relationship doesn’t need to be a marriage in order to be successful.

If the question had been about the purpose of marriage and whether or not we ought to abolish the institution, then Ms Gillard’s observation would have been mightily relevant. But it was not. It was about why Ms Gillard does not support same-sex marriage. The PM ought not to have been allowed to get away with avoiding the question, and with employing the classic obfuscation by conflation tactic, so beloved by politicians.

There are two separate issues in play. One: is there any need for the state to involve itself in relationships in the first place through the Marriage Act? Two: given that Marriage Act is unlikely to be abolished anytime soon, on what grounds do we continue to prevent same-sex couples who wish to marry from doing so?

The PM does not support same-sex marriage because she deeply believes marriage can only be celebrated between a man and a woman. Every time Ms Gillard refers to the Marriage Act to support her “belief” someone needs to remind her that the Act reads as it does because John Howard made it so. In 2004 the Marriage Act 1961 was amended in federal parliament to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The Amendment also states that any existing same-sex marriage from a foreign country is not to be recognised as a marriage in Australia.

Like any other citizen, the PM is entitled to her personal opinions. Legislators, however, are not entitled to legislate based on their personal opinions. If we are to continue to forbid same-sex marriage, we need to have very good reasons for that. “I believe” is not a reason.

Many of us strongly defend Ms Gillard when she’s subjected to attacks on her personal choices by conservative moralists who believe a woman isn’t  “complete” unless she has children. This belief is as silly and as offensive as the belief that only heterosexuals should be allowed to marry. It’s not very long since Ms Gillard would have been prohibited from holding her current job because of ludicrous and offensive beliefs about what women should be allowed to do. Not reasons. Beliefs.

If any politician wants to deny marriage equality to those who seek it, I want to know on what grounds they justify that denial. I don’t want to hear about their beliefs on the subject. I don’t care about their beliefs. I want some good solid reasons to support their denial of this equality. If belief had been allowed to govern our world, we’d still be flat earthers and Ms Gillard would not Prime Minister, living in a de facto relationship in the Lodge.

Time to give something back, PM?

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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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