Tag Archives: Julia Gillard

Fighting to be mother of the nation

18 Sep

A grim mum and dad on the way to Family Court

When we hear Tony Abbott fighting to protect the human rights of asylum seekers against Julia Gillard‘s implacable determination to traduce them, we know we’ve entered a twilight zone in which we may remain trapped for quite some time.

The  battle for political control lurches from one abusive and accusatory encounter to the next, between she who would be mother of the nation, and he who would be our dad. Like children caught in an acrimonious parental break-up, we are forced to listen to the protagonists defile and mock each other with no regard for the confusion and insecurity they are sowing in our hearts and minds.

As if that isn’t enough, they are hell-bent on turning the ingrained gender expectations on which we build our lives inside out, as dad fights to be more caring about people than mum, when everybody knows it’s supposed to be the other way around.

Driven by ego and their unrelenting determination to pulverize one another, they have made the fate of a handful of asylum seekers their theatre of war, and we, along with asylum seekers, are collateral damage in their fight to the death to take the lowest moral ground and on it plant their victory flag.

Frightened and disbelieving, we watch as concern for the less fortunate manifests across our previously hard-as-nails dad’s visage. Mum’s face daily becomes more grim, her lips closed tight in a forced smile as she digs in deep, while dad berates her for her cruelty. If she’ll send unaccompanied children to Malaysia what might she do to us?

But can we trust this newly compassionate dad, dare we consign our future to his hands? So many times he’s dropped us on our heads! So many times he’s failed to feed us and left us sitting in our own excrement while he selfishly attended to the well-being of his body, on his bike and on the beaches!

Neglected as the fur flies, we struggle to understand our mother’s betrayal. Our uncle Bob is of little help, he’s got nothing good to say about either mum or dad, and seems to have cast us to our fate. All the rest of our aunts and uncles and cousins in Canberra have chosen to keep silent, in the way families frequently decide to keep out of the matrimonial upheavals of their members. Like police called to a domestic, they know any interference will likely see them end up with bloodied noses, if not blamed for the problems in the first place.

All this discretion is well and good, but what about the children!

Aunt Janelle came out and called for on shore processing, but her lone voice was immediately  drowned out and only reported in a regional newspaper. It was then that it dawned on us that this battle is not really about asylum seekers. It’s all about mum and dad. It’s about who gets to be the boss of us. It’s about who can hold out the longest. It’s about whose will triumphs, the female or the male. It’s about dad being pissed off that mum got a better paid job than he did. It’s about mum fighting him to make sure she keeps it. Asylum seekers are the cover story. Dad doesn’t give any more of a toss about their human rights than mum. He’s faking it. She’s also faking just about everything, except her determination to break him and grind him into the ground with her high-heeled boots.

That’s the real mum she promised to show us and never has, not even in the Women’s Weekly where every mum is supposed to be real.

How can we stand this much reality and hold onto our sanity?

As in the worst of marital breakups, this one will be fought until there’s nothing left to fight over, until the participants are left shredded and bleeding out, all assets gone to pay the lawyers, the children in therapy, the dog forgotten and starving, extended families torn asunder, forced into warring tribal groups who turn their backs on one another at weddings and christenings, and boycott each other’s funerals.

Stock up on food and water. Get in plenty of candles. We’re in this for the long haul and we’re going to have to stand on our own two feet because the adults have left the building. Who knows what the outcome will be?

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Don’t bully my girlfriend, pleads Tim

16 Sep

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

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

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

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

Who’s the bully? Tell me again?

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WEL, you did ask about Julia

14 Sep

In response to this Women’s Electoral Lobby invitation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet, and yet, and yet…

 

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

12 Sep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

8 Sep
Kevie-lisa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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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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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It’s confirmed: Abbot and Gillard have got it wrong

16 Aug

Today’s Nielsen poll revealed some interesting information about Australian attitudes to asylum seekers, and the hard-line off-shore processing policies pushed by both major parties.

According to the poll, 53% of us believe that boat arrivals should be processed  in Australia, not off-shore. This puts Abbott and Gillard out of step with the majority of the electorate as they both pursue their expulsion plans, either to Malaysia or Nauru.

It could be speculated that the responsibility for this unexpected surge of public compassion towards boat arrivals lies with Gillard’s Malaysia solution. While many of us could apparently come at Nauru, Malaysia is a step too far, given the uncertainty asylum seekers will face there. The concept of expelling children to that country is also highly unpalatable, and likely to be contested by the UNHCR.

There’s a nice irony in imagining that Gillard might actually have done herself no favours with her Malaysia deal, when the government’s intention was to win support from an Australian public they perceived as demanding they demonstrate increasing toughness in their treatment of boat arrivals.

Perhaps instead they’ve managed to sicken enough of us with their conservative, bullying rhetoric, and the tide has begun to turn. One can only hope. The sight of federal police armed to the teeth, in training on Christmas Island to push boat arrivals onto planes bound for Malaysia, was not edifying. All this violence and threat against a handful of unarmed people asking for asylum?

Maybe we just didn’t need to see Julia chucking a Tampa. 

At this stage, there’s little the government can do, having committed to the Malaysia solution and facing a court battle next week. This poll, like so many others recently, can’t be encouraging.

60% of us also believe that those found to be refugees should be granted permanent protection in Australia.

With so many big issues facing us, one has to wonder yet again what the government stands to gain with its theatrics over boat arrivals, especially when asylum seekers arriving by plane are treated quite differently. There’s no legal justification for this difference, and there’s no rational necessity for it either. It’s politics.

This latest poll casts concrete doubt on the government’s judgement in this matter. They’ve outdone the Howard government in their ferocity towards boat arrivals, and it just might be starting to backfire, particularly as the boats aren’t stopping.

The answer is so simple. Initial detention for health and identity checks, release into the community while claims are assessed, re-settlement or return if the claims aren’t substantiated. It’s not rocket science. It’s humane, it’s responsible, it’s common sense, it’s legal. Why, then, do Abbott and Gillard have to make it so hard?

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The impotent threats of impotent leaders

11 Aug

They may come from different political perspectives (in theory, anyway) but there are interesting similarities between British PM David Cameron’s authoritarian threats against the rioting mobs, and those used by Julia Gillard on the matter of water-borne asylum seekers.

Whenever there is social unrest of almost any kind, politicians pull up the same violently repressive cliches: stamp out, crack down. I/we will not allow, full force of the law, tough stance against criminals, illegals, queue jumpers. This ritualized language is the backbone of authority’s discourse when faced with challenges it ‘s very likely incapable of controlling. The less likely the possibility of control, the more violently repressive politicians’ language becomes.

While there is a place for dissent and disobedience in a liberal democracy, these acts can only be performed within the strict parameters of acceptable middle class behaviour. It is not acceptable to riot, either in the streets of London or behind the razor wire of a detention centre. Middle class manners do not allow for extreme behaviours of any kind. This is why politicians have absolutely no hope of competently addressing extreme behaviours: they don’t understand them and they’re scared to death of them. All they can think of to do is threaten with imprisonment or expulsion, either of which may at some point become necessary, but neither of which do anything to calm a red-hot situation.

The bottom line is, David Cameron cannot control the rioters. He may bring in water cannon. Australians know from Woomera that doesn’t work. It’s a very bad look, especially for a country aiming to put on the best Olympics ever next year. The effects of water cannon are extremely temporary, unless it inadvertently kills or injures someone, and it’s use will further incite the rioters it blasts all over the streets.

The bottom line is, Julia Gillard cannot control the asylum seekers who are already here awaiting assessment, or those she intends to expel to Christmas island. She cannot stop them trying to poison themselves, going on hunger strikes, sewing up their lips or killing themselves. Her plan to despatch them to Malaysia is now completely out of her control, and in the hands of the High Court. Even if she has them shot again them with bean bag bullets she’s still got no control over them, and that’s a bad look too.

You cannot control human beings who feel they have nothing to lose. You can only attempt to create a society in which human beings are not driven to that extreme. People exhausted by failure frequently resort to savagery. Politicians consistently fail to understand this. There’s no votes in understanding it.

Once, in less sophisticated times, the public might have been reassured by politicians using tough language in a crisis. Not anymore, but politicians haven’t caught up with the change in the public’s credulity. Consequently they look increasingly impotent as it becomes more apparent that their rhetoric is hollow. The objects of their wrath are entirely un-cowed by the blustering, and more often than not, they’re driven to greater extremes by the threats.

So Cameron throws hundreds of youths in jail. Imprisonment then becomes a right of passage and the offenders emerge even more brutal and brutalized than when they went in.

God only knows what’s going to happen to the asylum seekers, but it doesn’t look like the boats are doing any stopping, and there’s still the problem of expelling unaccompanied minors into very uncertain conditions and futures.

So what exactly do the politicians hard line positions achieve?

Votes, of course. Because there’s still enough of us who want to hear the rhetoric, even if we know it doesn’t work. The authoritarian rhetoric reassures. It makes us think somebody’s in charge even though we don’t really believe it. In full authoritarian flight, the politician appears to possess the “truth” about the situations we’re facing, and the right things to do about them. It’s a chicken and egg thing: the use of authoritarian language facilitates authority.

Of course, the fact that these events are taking place at all signifies the degree to which our politicians really have lost control.

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