Now, we all know that poor Tony Abbott, after unaccountably losing his ministerial salary, is undergoing severe mortgage stress and struggling to pay the bills for his daughters’ private schools. Maybe that accounts for him popping up in what really is looking like today The Opposition Organ, rather than being boned by Fairfax, where his column previously appeared. Maybe he’s returning to his journalistic roots and angling for a gig as op/editor, which after all is up for grabs, Tom Switzer having joined Brendan Nelson’s staff. Along with Peter Hendy and other architects of WorkChoices, which would no doubt account for Nowhere Man’s stellar political trajectory.
John Howard used to say over and over again that he wasn’t a commentator, a line recently picked up by Malcolm Turnbull. Tony Abbott obviously is one, writing flights of fantasy about Rudd stepping down for Julia Gillard in 2012, justified by all sorts of far fetched historical parallels (after all, we all know in commentariat land nothing new ever happens, and everything that does happen can always be explained by analogy to Gough Whitlam or Tony Blair or Bob Carr of whoever). Continue reading ‘Monkish meditations’
The Age:
The Age believes Attorney-General Robert McClelland will announce today that he will introduce amendments to Parliament as early as next month to alter around 100 federal laws.
The changes will not allow gay marriages or same-sex couples to adopt children, and the issue of access to the Family Court for same-sex couples is still being resolved.
Some of the changes would take effect immediately, but many financial laws — such as social security, tax and veterans’ affairs — would be phased in by mid-2009. But first the changes will have to be passed by the Senate, where the Coalition retains its majority until July 1.
Even after then, Labor will need the vote of conservative Christian and Family First senator Steve Fielding and independent senator Nick Xenophon if it cannot clinch Coalition support.
Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson has signalled he backed the principle of removing discrimination against gay couples but has yet to secure formal support from his colleagues.
This is the sort of situation that led to my rabbiting on so much about the importance of balancing the Senate in our last election. I’ll bet on Fielding voting against this bill, in which case unless the Liberals support it it won’t go through. Continue reading ‘Rudd govt anti-same-sex-discrimination bill depends on the Senate balance of power’
Former Howard Government minister Kevin Andrews and AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty seem to be continuing their attempts to blame each other for the Haneef debacle. You’ll recall a couple of days ago that a “source”, most probably Keelty or somebody close to him, claimed that Andrews had cancelled Haneef’s visa without bothering to tell the AFP. Now we have the bite back from Andrews. From the Oz:
FORMER immigration minister Kevin Andrews had no idea of powerful evidence of Mohamed Haneef’s innocence when he controversially revoked the visa of the then terrorism suspect last year. Mr Andrews will tell the Rudd government-ordered inquiry into the bungled case, which opens today, that Australian Federal Police did not inform him of evidence debunking allegations against Dr Haneef’s second-cousin Sabeel Ahmed - allegations that had led to the subsequent terrorism charge against the Gold Coast doctor.
These guys were supposed to be in charge of protecting us from Scary Terryrists - one, of course, still is. Thank your favourite deity that there seems to be so few actual Scary Terryrists in Australia, or we’d really be in trouble…
In comments on my thread about the beat up on the Griffith “madrassas” and subsequent own goal from Vice-Chancellor Ian O’Connor, Andrew Bartlett made a very telling point:
The sick irony is that The Australian’s anti-Muslim fear-mongering is being directed at an Institute that has sought to do precisely what heaps of hectoring politicians and pontificating media pundits (including a number from The Australian) have demanded Muslims do - get engaged in public debate, build links with the wider community and seek to honestly confront some of the challenges of Islam in the modern world. And yet they are prepared to run major pieces, most of them containing gross distortions, five days running, attacking this Unit despite not any evidence that it is actually promoting Wahhabism.
It’s very true that we heard an awful lot in the Howard years about the need to encourage “moderate Islam”. I don’t cavil with that, but I think it’s based on a fundamental misconception - that pluralism doesn’t exist in Islam, but rather there’s one essence of the faith that can be clung to either more fervently or less strictly. That ties in with all the claims that Islam is violent, etc. What it does is completely efface the diversity within Islam and Islamic communities, and actually plays into the hands of the Wahhabi mob who want to impose a unitary version (I almost wrote “unitarian” - heh!) of their views and reinvent Islam as a monolith. Perhaps The Australian should run a “shock! horror!” expose on itself. All that is a prologue to a link to a post at The Immanent Frame, written by John Bowen on Harvard Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na‘im’s new book Islam and the Secular State.
Continue reading ‘Islam and the secular state’
Channel Seven is being sued for defamation by Mercedes Corby.
The gravamen of Ms. Corby’s case is that Channel Seven’s Today Tonight program, in the persons of its presenter Anna Coren and reporter Bryan Seymour, had promised Ms. Jodie Power $100,000 and a trip to Canada if she made false statements on air implicating Ms. Corby in illicit drug dealing. The truth of the matter is ultimately for the court to decide, but the salient point is that the matter is only before the court because Ms. Power made contestable statements, and the station broadcast those statements, about a specific individual other than herself who has standing to sue.
An obvious question this case raises is whether the practice of paying interviewees to make sensational, misleading and/or false statements is widespread in the genre of tabloid current affairs television. I can think of two such interviews, both broadcast on tabloid current affairs programs, about which I have long held grave suspicions.
Continue reading ‘Coren’s (alleged) Cash for Crud, and moral panics about “welfare bludging”’
“Olympism”.
Andrew Bartlett dissects for us the official goals of the “Olympic movement”:
* “Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.”
* “The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.”
* “The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practising sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.”
* “Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.”
But sport has nothing to do with politics, does it? Thorpey said so. And a gaggle of superannuated IOC bureaucrats/marketing men. (They all appear to be men. What’s with that?)
Andrew goes on to detail the fact that human rights abuses in China go far beyond Tibet. It’s a great post. Go read!
Continue reading ‘I learned a new word today’
Perhaps our Christian Prime Minister has been reading Luke 8:18. I suppose we’re lucky that those who have little won’t find even the little they have taken away from them, but Andrew Leigh and Peter Martin are surely justified in asking why a fairly dodgy election promise to start with is being implemented in such a way as to disproportionately reward those who are already well off.
The redesigned scheme, due to come into effect on July 1, works like this: Every dollar that first home savers put into an account - up to a maximum of $5,000 - will be matched by a government contribution of 15 cents.
Except for Australians earning more than $80,000 per annum. They will get a government co-contribution of 25 cents for every dollar they invest. Really. …
Unless they earn more than $180,000 per annum in which case they will be blessed with a government contribution of 30 cents per dollar they invest.
That’s right.
Wayne Swan’s made much of creating incentives to save. I can’t for the life of me see why high income earners need public incentives. I thought we’d had enough middle class welfare under Howard. Now it seems we’re to get upper class welfare under Rudd.
Continue reading ‘To those who have, even more will be given’
I have no idea what that means. [I think I’m channelling Letterman.]
The point of this post, of course, is to register and share my excitement that Adelaide’s favourite, The Audreys have a new album out, When the Flood Comes. Available now.
Continue reading ‘Audreys of the world unite!’
If there’s any doubt remaining after the Haneef affair that what passes for justice in terrorism and law enforcement matters is nothing of the sort but a blatantly political bag of tricks, the comments from David Hicks’ prosecutor, Colonel Moe Davis, should lay it to rest.
The former chief prosecutor of the US military commissions at Guantanamo Bay said overnight he would not have pursued Hicks because the case against the Australian was not serious enough.
The ex-prosecutor, Air Force Colonel Moe Davis, told a pre-trial hearing for another Guantanamo Bay inmate he had “inherited” the Hicks case and wanted to focus on cases serious enough to merit 20-year jail sentences, with the Australian’s case not meeting that mark.
Davis also said the commissions were tainted by political influence and evidence obtained through prisoner abuse.
The mendacity of the Howard government - pushing for Hicks to be charged after he became a political problem, after letting him stew because doing so was a political advantage - stands exposed. Continue reading ‘The politics of Hicks’
Beneath the fold is the regular repost of the LP comments policy. All commenters are asked to read the comments policy before posting and abide by the policy on threads. In light of recent discussions, please also note this comment.
Continue reading ‘LP Comments policy’
It may just be that Greg Hunt knows he’s never actually going to have to justify his policy ideas to Treasury or the Productivity Commission. But, at the moment, you’d swear he was the Greens environment spokesperson, not the Liberal Party’s. He’s proposing a whole raft of measures to promote the development of solar energy in Australia.
Of most direct short-term interest is the proposal for a national “feed-in tariff” scheme. To explain this, first some background. If you’ve got access to grid electricity, solar panels are currently financial lunacy. The solar system I’m currently being quoted on (thanks to commenter wilful for the tip) costs about $12,000, and generates about $225 worth of electricity every year. By contrast, if I left that $12,000 in the bank, I’d get at least double that after tax. If I put the money into a share fund, over the course of a decade I’d probably do much better again. I’d be able to pay for GreenPower from my electricity supplier, and have a considerable pile of money left over.
So why am I looking at solar cells? Because of the massive government rort known as the Photovoltaic Rebate Programme. Essentially, the government will pay $8000 towards the cost of my 1 kilowatt installation. I only have to pay somewhere around $4000, and it works out pretty close to cost effective.
Continue reading ‘Greens Coalition propose national solar feed-in tariff’
The dense booklet, which was overseen by former prime minister John Howard, describes the uses of the stump-jump plough, the emergence of the Heidelberg school of art, the location of Phar Lap’s heart and depicts Australia’s first governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, as “firm but humane”.
It’d be nice if the Rudd government grasped the bit between its teeth and just scrapped the citizenship test. Do we really need a Rudd-era one to supplant the Howard-era farce? Would anyone care except Planet Janet?
Props to Petro Georgiou for speaking up on this again.
I’m fairly sure Chris Evans - the Immigration Minister - doesn’t believe it has any value. What will be gained by setting up a review panel? And, incidentally, why is there a “former Olympian” on the panel anyway? To put a word in for teh sport? To carry the torch for that warm and fuzzy feeling of the unity of humankind we get when we think about sporting contests? If there’s any political pain in getting rid of such a nonsense, surely taking it now rather than stretching out the debate would be good politics. After all, when you’re riding so high in the polls, you can afford to take a few decisions which might be right but not universally acclaimed.
And, just think - admirers of Sir Hubert Opperman and Walter Lindrum would no doubt applaud!
Elsewhere: Tim Dunlop says “Just dump it!”
I haven’t finished watching tonight’s Four Corners, which I taped so I could watch Big Brother (don’t worry, I’ve already condemned myself) and Good News Week, but it struck me as being somewhat more of an interesting take than I’d anticipated. I don’t want to comment now myself, without having watched the show in its entirety, but I thought others who had might wish to do so.
We could probably also do with another open US primary thread, since the last one took an unhelpful turn, and there’s another round coming up soon.
So have at it, if you will.
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There’s a thought provoking review of Richard Barbrook’s new book Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village at Mute magazine. I came across it via bookforum.com, and my curiosity was piqued because I received a flyer for Imaginary Futures enclosed with another book I recently ordered from Pluto Books in the UK (whom I wholeheartedly endorse for customer service btw - not only did they deliver a book I needed from Britain within a week, but I got an email telling me about it from an actual person as opposed to an Amazonbot).
Ian A. Boal asks some interesting questions - how did we get from seeing the computer as an instrument of dehumanisation (think HAL in 2001 and other such fictional and filmic representations of the 60s and 70s) to seeing it as a utopian saviour of humanity? How can we understand the history of “digital utopianism” and what of the interests and social positions of those who spruiked it?
Continue reading ‘Intertubes and catalogues, liberatory and otherwise’
What’s with the Iemma government? About the only time they seem to hit the national news apart from scandals and stories about the collapse of public services is when some new height of absurdity is reached in their apparently obsessive desire to fence everything off from anyone bar dignitaries. Yesterday, Morris Iemma unaccountably locked the public out of a ceremony to unveil a statue of a New Zealand soldier on Anzac Bridge. Today, the charges against the Chaser boys for their APEC stunt are dropped, and ABC tv news reports the government warning ominously that it might send the wrong message to people contemplating something similar for the inordinately expensive Popefest in July - where all the usual panoply of exclusion zones, special police powers, fenced off areas of the city, redirected roads and so on will be in place for what looks set to be a spectacular flop, at least as far as frustrated Sydneysiders are concerned it would seem.
Please enlighten a puzzled Queenslander. Is it that they only get the illusion of power in a state they’ve made ungovernable when they can erect fences and restrict civil liberties? Is this the reductio ad absurdum of Bob Carr’s law and order campaigns? A distraction from electricity privatisation? Would they be happier with the North Korean style of staging a public event? Puzzled minds want to know!
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