Mercurius wrote last week on the rotten state of NSW politics. My apologies to those living in the states bordering NSW as you would have noticed the stench worsening through the week.
The source of the foul odour is the ICAC investigation into shady development deals done by the Wollongong City Council. That alone is an interesting story and has implicated a number of Iemma ministers. The rogues gallery being NSW Housing Minister Matt Brown, Police Minister David Campbell, Health Minister Reba Meagher and Minister for being mentioned in ICAC Investigations Joe Tripodi. Continue reading ‘Iemma ain’t no Big Fella’
Cate Blanchett has been tapped to select the participants for the Creative Australia bit of the 2020 summit, part of a steering committee including luminaries such as Tim Costello. And News Ltd honcho John Hartigan. Well that should ensure that the coverage remains laudatory.
What I don’t get is this.
Professor Davis told The Age the committee members had been drawn from their worlds not just for their expertise but also for their networks, so they were well placed to advise on those who should be invited to the summit. The choice of former Coalition ministers was designed to get as broad a range of people as possible.
“They will have a key hand in deciding who will be there,” Professor Davis said. Tim Fischer had already come up with “name after name”.
Bully for him. Or for all of us. But how does this mesh in with the nomination process? - and nominations were supposed to have closed. Is that just a sleight of hand while teh elite pick other members of their favoured “networks”? Or is the whole point about being in a network that Tim, Cate, John or whoever can now give you the headsup to get your nomination in since coincidentally, or maybe conveniently, the deadline has been extended?
Henry Jenkins’ work on popular cultures and the internets has been recommended to me, though I haven’t gotten around to reading his stuff. It seems as if I really should take a look at his latest - Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Essays in Participatory Culture. This review in Particip@tions by Neil Perryman suggests it contains at least one intriguing essay:
‘Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking’, an essay that examines fan forums dedicated to the discussion of slash fiction, and which originally appeared in Theorising Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity (1998), follows. This is one of Jenkins’ first attempts at forging a dialogue with the fan community, growing as it did out of the author’s frustration with ‘academics who had little or no exposure to the fan community itself (who were) writing increasingly inaccurate descriptions of fan practices and perspectives’ (p.61).
If you don’t know what slash fiction is, think Kirk/Spock.
the argument (at least as framed by Walker) is really one about intellectual turf.
[Go read the rest of the comment too, cos it’s all relevant to this.]
Disciplinary boundary policing often reflects two things (at least) - firstly, the fact that the academy (and society more broadly) is characterised by division of labour. No one can really be a polymath - and that clashes with the whole fiction of the cultured individual. Stuffing opera arias or Shakespeare quotes into heads doesn’t really do anything if it doesn’t inspire a love of genre and works. Secondly, it reflects some sort of dumb-assed alpha (usually) male desire to pretend to know everything about everything, and to appear to do so. Either as a defensive reaction to being too narrow an expert, or out of a condition of general ignorance masquerading as a renaissance individual with a patina of learning standing in metonymically for polymathery (polymathematics? polymathishness?). Not that I have anyone particular in mind (heh!), but that seems to be a thing in the blogosphere as well.
Tonight the charismatic and chatty Maxine McKew paid a visit to Melbourne as part of the promotional activities for TheBattlefor Bennelong: The Adventures of Maxine McKew, Aged 50something by Margot Saville. McKew regaled the audience with a variety of anecdotes, including to do with the resident of Bennelong who believed the former Prime Minister didn’t like his people that much (the man was an Asian Australian), the Liberal who won enough money to buy a Lexus thanks to McKew’s win, and the reason why her partner Bob Hogg looked grumpy on election night. Continue reading ‘Maxine in Melbourne’
But the stoush over Section 39 may yet pale into insignificance compared to another radical change that slipped through the parliament by agreement between the Government and Opposition whips on the same day as Turnbull spoke to Hughes’s advice, February 12.
Under the terms of this cross-party deal, “lactating mothers” - their term - will be able to vote by proxy in divisions if they are engaged in maternal duties at the time.
This is historic and potentially revolutionary. This is the first time in the history of the Australian Parliament that an MP can vote without actually being in the chamber.
Read on for how this may potentially lead to FRAUD! …and RADICAL CHANGE!
We see that you’re running for President of your country again, showing your continued lack of understanding - despite the rather dramatic lesson of the past eight years - of first-past-the-post electoral systems.
RollingStone, the magazine that’s known for treating female performers, ahem, seriously, is currently featuring an article about the travails of Britney Spears on its website (my print-out of the article has the by-line saying, “Ho lost it all” rather than “How she lost it all”). In charting the rise and fall of Britney, the piece seems to be suggesting that she is suffering from a severe case of arrested development and a desperate need to rebel against the image of wholesomeness others forced her to adopt. Britney apparently also needs to surround herself with folks who won’t challenge her take on her plight, which reminds of another famous singer from the South who was equally ill-equipped to deal with fame, or at least the unhealthy aspects of it.
Forget all that guff about some student politician becoming the senior governing Liberal in the land if Brisbane’s Mayor Campbell Newman loses his race for re-election on March 15. It’s nonsense anyway, and it’s moot to boot - “Can-Do Campbell� is sailing towards victory. Private party polling conducted late last year shows Newman with a near 60% primary, and insiders from each campaign camp don’t believe much has changed.
But that doesn’t mean the Brisbane City Council campaign lacks interest. With an integrated Council taking in most of the metropolitan area, a budget twice that of Tasmania’s, Councillors paid just less than State pollies, and a host of cutting edge urban issues to the fore, both the Labor and Liberal parties are playing for high stakes.
Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s “Minister for Everything�, Russ Hinze, pushed through legislative changes in 1982 which saw the direct election of the Mayor. Hinze failed to clear the way for the Nats to take over the city, but did see a succession of outsiders – most notably the Liberals’ Sallyanne Atkinson, Labor’s Jim Soorley and Newman himself – storm in from outside the ranks of Councillors to win the top job. Newman’s problem is that, while he beat Soorley’s lacklustre successor Tim Quinn by a narrow margin, the ALP still controls the Council, holding 17 of the 26 wards.
This uneasy exercise in cohabitation has seen the Libs take a minority of seats in Civic Cabinet, the Lord Mayor jealously guarding his budgetary powers, and Labor Deputy Mayor David Hinchliffe take on the American sounding title of “Majority Leader�.
Shlomo Benizri, an Israeli politician from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, has blamed a recent spate of earthquakes in the Middle East on the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, liberalising laws regarding homosexuality.
Mr Benizri said earthquake damage could be avoided if the parliament stopped “passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes”.
One wonders whether Mr. Benizri’s words have come to the attention of certain political and religious forces in the countries neighbouring Israel, or certain other political and religious forces in Israel’s main supporter, the US. If so, the mind boggles at the possible responses the next time a big one hits either California or Iran.
Morality was a word my parents never used. Truth was the word. Truth and facing things like an animal.
- Nastassja Kinski
Everyone, I imagine, has seen the 1982 sort of remake. The original is stunning classic noir horror. Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (and its sequel, Curse of the Cat People) is on ABC1 at 1.05am on Tuesday.
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
I had the good sense yesterday to sleep through Brisbane’s hottest day of the year (and in the process I think put paid to my flu… almost), waking up around the time the cool change came through and the temperature dropped about 15 degrees from its 40 degree peak… And today, I wandered out to my alma mater at UQ to return some phd thesis library books, then after a CityCat ride over to West End, dropped by the dvd store in the Valley to return Rise - Lucy Liu as a girl reporter vampire!
If you’d like to see a larger image of the photos, click on them then click on “full view” once you’re inside the gallery.
No doubt everyone’s seen the Kevin Rudd cardboard cutout the Libs brought into Parliament yesterday. Tony Abbott made it clear that the disorderly behaviour was designed to force the government to consult on the question of Friday sittings, or to prompt the Speaker to take matters into his own hands. After all, as Anthony Albanese remarked in Question Time on Thursday, it’s unlikely that branding Rudd as lazy is going to be a credible message.
It’s worth taking a step back to return to some of the little noticed coverage of this innovation in December. At the time, Liberal sources were quoted as worrying that a whole day for backbenchers would lead to their own MPs putting their feet in their mouth or prosecuting internal party disputes in the public eye. That says something about the state of the Coalition.
Still, while Lindsay Tanner may well be right that the behaviour on show yesterday resembled what you might expect from Young Libs after a few too many g&ts, there’s a serious problem for the government here. The lack of the ability to hold a division means that rulings by the Speaker or Deputy Speaker can’t be properly enforced, and it also incidentally disables the opportunity for tempers to cool during the lengthy process of actually holding a division. Whether or not the public blames the Libs for the risible scenes visible on the news last night, a smart Leader of the House should have a rethink.
The aphorism “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” may have (apparently) been the coinage of one Bernard Baruch, a stock trader and later adviser to Woodrow Wilson and FDR. It’s such a favourite amongst computer geeks I’d assumed that it was coined by one, as it neatly pigeonholes the tendency of people to assume that the tools and skills which they themselves possess are the best ways to tackle the problem at hand.
Given that, it’s surprising to see the US’s National Academy of Engineering has identified as its 14 Grand Challenges For Engineering for the (still-new, I suppose) century. While there’s certainly some worthy challenges amongst them, whether many of them are primarily, or even in large part, the domain of engineers seems kind of doubtful.
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