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Life, Culture and Politics from BrisVegas
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Yeah vale Hitchens, the Bill Hicks of essays. in Casa de HB, we are also mourning Dick, Fanny and the Brownies, who are now Rick, Franny and the Elves. Please pass the Kool aid.
Yes … I felt the loss of Hitchens — a onetime and longtime member of an ORO (he was a Cliffite) rather keenly.
He was one of those people who was hard to like but easy to admire. He was quixotic, witty, rude, candid, brilliant, curmudgeonly, and radically wrong at times with it. His single issue support of Bush over Iraq was palpably sophomoric, and hard to reconcile with his background. He made it his business (or simply accepted it as an overhead of being him) to intellectually or culturally offend nearly everyone in at least one significant way. That takes some courage, and he had it in spades.
He was always worth listening to, even when one profoundly disagreed, because he always seemed to have put in the work to get to where he was, and to be earnest in his assertions.
I read that he had said of death that you get tapped on the shoulder and told not that the party’s over, but somewhat worse: The party’s going on, but you have to leave..
I wouldn’t be unhappy having those words quoted of me when last I draw breath.
Not first this week, but still travelling about. Today I’m saying hello from a PC in the laundromat at Tumbarumba, in the hills of southern NSW.
Fran,
unless its a party you want to leave. But I suppose Hitchens didn’t. I was always a bit confused by him. For (I gather) a supposed leftie he came out with some pretty horrible right wing statements. But perhaps we all do. Still, I had a sneaking admiration for him, but I’m a;ways left wondering why he bothered being so militantly atheist. I don’t think it matters if God exists or not. He/she does only if you think so.
As for Molly – seems he was horribly unlucky. A 71 year old mate of mine had a fall from the same geight and landed on a pole of metal and timber and got up with just a few bruises. He was miles off by himself in the bush, so if he’d been seriously hurt he probably would;ve died. (This was a couple of weeks ago, just after I got out of hospital.)
Paul @ 5 – Re – Molly – its a pretty common story for older (50+) men as their sense of balance gets worse but they still continue to go up ladders. Doesn’t always result in brain damage, but lots of stories of broken leg/hips which ends up being a bit of train wreck of even more health problems as they are unable to get around as much and stay fit.
It’s stoushbait, but here goes, one of the Wikileaks cables, coded 05Minsk1155, is by George Krol, US Ambassador to Belarus who in 2005 advised his government to treat the Chernobyl Forum’s Report on the consequences of the Chernobyl accident with skepticism as the Government of Belarus had not provided the forum with reliable information as attested to by Belarussian scientists. A number of other communiques from Krol and his successors around this time reveal some of the ongoing health and economic woes that beset Belarus, in part because of extremely poor governance, but also as a direct consequence of Chernobyl. Others mention some of the actions that the government of Belarus took against scientists who were inconvenient, blocking commemorative marches and thwarting research intitiatives, preventing registration of NGOs etc. Ivan Nikitchenko, geneticist, academic and member of the Belarussian Academy of Sciences was involved in attempting to set up an NGO, the Centre for Chernobyl Initiatives Support, but the government blocked its registration. I’m sure there’s more, this is just a brief reading of a few cables.
Nikitchenko died in a car crash last year and rumours abound as to whether this was truly accidental as he was involved in investigating corruption and had been a perpetual thorn in Lukashenko’s side.
I can’t link directly to the cables, I’ve tried and it doesn’t seem to work but the reference number above will get you to the first cable via the wikileaks Cablesearch, and a search for George Krol and Chernobyl and for Ivan Nikitchenko will bring up the others The economic consequences were mentioned in a cable about a World Bank programme to assist the Chernobyl region. Despite the nuclear industry PR, some lessons have definitely been learnt from Chernobyl, the consideration and measurement of internal exposure, the monumental undertaking to remove contaminated soil so as to avoid some of the long term loss of land to agriculture, and to reduce the exposure of the populace, these have both sprung from an understanding of the impact of Chernobyl.
“”"its a pretty common story for older (50+) men as their sense of balance gets worse but they still continue to go up ladders.”"”
Yep, you can see that even amongst tradesfolk(men and women) that use ladders daily. I don’t know when ” peak balance ” is but after 40 it seems to degrade, as does confidence compounding the problem.
Rule of thumb: The younguns do the high stuff.
(Drugs, alcohol, fatigue and the flu can also have an effect )
Rewatching Aunty Jack on DVD, and I am wondering which old Hercules sword-and-sandal epic it was that was sent-up with an ocker English dub which changed the plot to:
“Herco Barbuto is fighting his evil brother Euripedes to save the name of his father’s fruit shop BARBUTO’S FRUITARAMA”
If nothing else, it should be remembered for the line “Bring on the Surfies!”
@8 – many work places now ban working on ladders. Scaffold or a platform is the minimum.
@ 10:
Accountants, typists and telephonists have never been allowed to work on ladders
Paul, the existence or not of god (and other mythical deities) matters because those who are convinced of his existence so often seem to need to control the lives of the rest of us. I’m quite happy for them to believe whatever nonsense they like, provided they leave it at that and keep it to themselves. The trouble is that they seem completely incapable of that. This is one of the basic issues in Hitchens critique of the religions
OBR, true, the mining industry is at that stage (pun intended), its filtering into the biggest construction firms but not so much the smaller local ones,
but it’s inevitable.
I think, ironically, the day will come when”heavy duty” ladders will be banned in all workplaces,therefore hardware outlets wont stock them, yet the flimsy,far inferior “domestic ” ladder ( already outlawed in workplaces) will be freely available to every home handyman and Xmas light installer that has limited experience and zero training in their safe use.
Thanks su for that very informative post on the politics of Chernobyl. The relevance today is that we are witnessing variations on a theme post Fukushima. In the Japanese case the state is not actually existing socialism, as with Belarus, but neo-corporatist in which the appearance of a democratic division between the state and the private sector is dissolved in a bath of lies, corruption, poor practice and business as usual. Totally predictable.
Julia and Tony listen up: If it were just political intransigence that would be bad enough but when it continues to cost the lives of people on small boats it becomes incumbent on our political leaders to sit down and arrive at a strategy to stop people getting on these boats in the first place. Whether they are refugees or just people looking for a better life, we (and that includes Indonesia) owe them a duty of care to stop this trafficking in humanity.
Wantok,
Not invading their countries and turning bad situations into intolerable ones would be a good start.
A couple of weeks ago Faith No More played a show in Chile in which they (a) played the ‘King For A Day…Fool For A Lifetime’ album in full and (b) played their first and only show with the guitarist on that album Trey Spruance.
On the night they also played a fan-favourite B-side from that era for the first time live, ‘Absolute Zero’ from the ‘Digging The Grave’ single.
Wantok said:
No ‘we’ don’t.
For a start, this is not ‘trafficking’ in the sense that this word is correctly used. No indentured labour or prostitution or slavery is afoot here. As far as can be told, all of the adult passengers are fully cognisant of the nature of the transactions, and at least in broad terms, of the ensemble of risks attendant.
Use of the word “trafficking” (and similar “people smuggling”) in this context is a weasel term designed to provide cover for a policy driven by the need to pander to the kinds of people we saw in #gobacksbs.
More correct and non-judgemental terms would “irregular or ad hoc travel”, “irregular maritime carriage” or similar. Our duty is to ensure that vulnerable people — i.e. those in need of humanitarian protection — get the protection they need without having to schoose between an indefinite and precarious existence in a squalid concentration camp and a somewhat precarious but mercifully short boat journey. We need to give these people a better option rather than try discouraging them with an apparently worse one. I reject the notion that it is the role of government to abrogate treaty obligations, testing our credulity by saying they must be cruel to be kind.
We ought to process expeditiously at major aggregation points. We ought to give them ID checks, health checks and care, suitable albeit modest preliminary education, including literacy in English (and where needed, in their own language) and numeracy. We ought to be able to get all this done in 90 days and be able to move those who pass the test for protection rapidly be conventional means into suitable communities in our major cities and towns. If we did that, few would take up irregular maritime options.
If we did that, few would take up irregular maritime options.
Except for those whose claims for asylum were weak
Sorry Fran, this problem has been caused by this Labor government who ignorantly acted to put the the selection of the most deserving asylum seekers into the hands of others.
I don’t expect this to be a popular viewpoint in this forum, but I think it needs stating
@19 Peter TB – No, Peter, this has not been “caused” by the Labor Party.
Among the many issues involving those who watch from the sidelines is that of the apathy of the vast majority of the population who make no attempt to raise their voices in any consistent way in those forums that really matter. There are plenty of blogs (this response included) which note the destructive impact on people as we beat our breasts but you go to any meeting in your local area and see how many people turn up to voice their protests. The apathetic apparently will always win out along with the wankers who mouth platitudes.
I think the Refugee Action Coalition has made a good point saying that the criminalisation of people smuggling has made the safety situation much worse. Because boats are seized/destroyed and the crew held it encourages people organising these trips to use boats which they can afford to lose rather than seaworthy ones. And the crew are much more likely to be inexperienced.
PeterTB
Those whose claims were weak would get no advantage because they could still be deported pretty quickly. Of course, if they end up drowning, you can be well satisfied that they have received just desert. Problem solved, at least from the Lindsay-bigot perspective.
It is the case that mass drownings tend to discourage people getting onto ‘boats’. If you zero rate LQLY in concentration camps in South East Asia and think getting onto ‘boats’ is the main problem, then mass drownings become a price worth paying. Your lot ought to be celebrating, or something.
The Liberals said Malaysia dumping wouldn’t work. They were probably right about that. They wanted to tow ‘boats’ out to sea, and that probably would have lead to more drownings. Nauru would also have failed to stem the tide of ‘boats’. It’s hypocritical for them to make a fuss, now that they’ve got the result they wanted.
“you can be well satisfied that they have received just desert”
That’s unworthy of you.
“would get no advantage because they could still be deported pretty quickly”
To where do you deport someone whose identity you can’t prove? Those with weak claims pay more to come by boat so that they can destroy their proof of identity and hence improve their chances of gaining asylum. They could not do the same if they came by air.
“Nauru would also have failed to stem the tide of ‘boats’.”
It worked last time
The two recent boat tragedies are probably an outcome of the coalition/Green decision to block the Malaysian solution. Uncertainty re how long this blocking will last may also be a contributor. (Hence boats sailing at such a dangerous time of the year.)
It is most unlikely either of these boats would have left if the Malaysian solution was in place or people were confident that this solution would remain blocked long enough for people to wait for a safer time of the year.
Ironically the campaign against people smugglers may also have contributed. The destruction of boats and the imprisonment of crews is a recipe for unsafe, overcrowded boats and very inexperienced crews.
Peter TB said:
that my claim that those who drowned had oin his reasoning got ‘just desert’ was ‘unworthy’. I fail to see why. You think them crooks.
The world is a smaller place than you might think. It’s not that hard to work out where people come from.
Nauru would now be known as merely an annoying delay in making it here, but far more likely than Malaysia. There’s no real evidence Nauru would work, especially since now people know that this is no bar, and at most, only about 850 people can be accommodated there.
“It’s not that hard to work out where people come from.”
This is not correct. Only a person without knowledge of how hard this really is can make such a claim.
If person X, with zero documentation, claims to be an Afghan from village Y, then he has to be questioned very specifically. This often requires a DIMA official or local Afghan police/officials to travel that village and ask, and gather data on the village to use in questioning.
A series of good questions (catches most frauds) is ‘what baker do you get your bread from?’, ‘what is his name?’ ‘describe his shop’ and ‘what are the shops on either side?’
The sheer granularity of the information needed is very expensive and time consuming to gather.
Then, the story changes to another one, and the cycle starts again. I have seen cost for each cycle, they run at about $35,000 per cycle. Each takes 2-3 months to run.
That is why it costs so much and takes so long to determine who these people really are – and you as a taxpayer are paying for it.
But it has to be done. For example, DIMA and AFP between them have weeded out a number of LTTE war criminals and quite a variety of terrorists this way.
Kim Jong Il has died.
The Dear Leader has been Il for many years.
Spontaneous demonstrations of grief and despair are expected.
I told you I was Il!
Yes, Lefty E
14 million spontaneously grieving school children are now being re
hearsed.
They will be implementing the government’s Respect Agenda*
* attributed to Brumby (ALP) Govt.
Kim was born, according to his official biographers, in a mountain cabin in North Korea in February 1942, an occasion marked by a double rainbow and a bright star.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/world/kim-jong-il-dead-20111219-1p1sk.html#ixzz1gx0PI54Y
An exceptionally bright star, given that rainbows occur during daylight hours….
[Moderator note: Fran has moved her comment below to the Salon after I deemed this particular stoush off topic for the Media Spin thread, so OBR's original comment is over there ~ tigtog]
OBR said:
FTR, no we don’t, though one does note that as it became clear that the Karzai regime in Afghanistan would not and could not deliver peace and security in Afghanistan, refugee outflows increased. Similarly, the increased tempo of the Sri Lankan regime’s assault on the Tamils doubtless caused an increased desire to flee the country. It may well be that an increased number of Iraqis will fill out the numbers of refugees, if that country reverts to full-scale civil war. Pakistan also looks a candidate for a lot of people wanting to leave over the coming period.
It’s those ‘push’ factors OBR.
Nauru was not an effective deterrent. Initially, it may have discouraged some, but once it became clear that it was only a delay in passage to Australia, its usefulness was at an end. In any event, we are talking 800-850 places — a fraction of the numbers we have seen coming in. It might well be that if it were re-opened, that really would be as close to a ‘welcome mat’ as anything contemplated in current policy.
Nor are TPVs useful if you want to avoid people getting onto boats. TPVs didn’t allow family re-union, so it would make sense to put the family you can’t bring onto irregular maritime. Again, allowing the disingenuous claim for the sake of argument, if people really are worried about people getting onto ‘boats’, TPVs are out.
Really, the biggest deterrent to getting onto ‘boats’ are widely reported casualties at sea. If you are one of those who sets no store by LQLY in camps or source countries — and your failure to mention this at all suggests that you are — then really, you might think drownings a price worth paying to secure the greater good. If nothing else works and people really are better off in your opinion living in squalour or direct persecution than getting onto ‘boats’, then you’ve no business at all complaining to us about the policy settings. If you really think this is our doing, and for the best, you ought to be thanking us.
In all seriousness though, as long as the government keeps trying to dream up policy settings that might make irregular travel by vulnerable people to Australia seem worse than the squalour that is their daily lives, they will keep failing. Nothing our government could conceivably get away with doing will meet that standard. We’re not going to scuttle boats, video people drowning and put it on youtube. Even the Murdoch press might baulk at that. The people getting onto ‘boats’ surely know that significant swathes of the Australian population see them as little to be distinguished from locusts, and that this swathe of the population is driving current policy. If that, and the high cost of travel, and the risk of death and the certainty of abuse in Australian detention centres isn’t stopping them, then it’s hard to know what, short of the unthinkable scenario above, would.
It seems to me that there needs to be a sea-change in policy here (pun intended). We ought to demand instead that our government try acting like one representing civilised people, who genuinely want to help vulnerable people achieve sanctuary. I don’t really care what it costs, but I suspect that would work out a lot cheaper than what is being done now.
The broader question is a cultural one — what sort of people are we? Do we feel an obligation to help others in desperate circumstances or not? Will we allow bigots to speak for us, and to cover their bigotry with disingenuous appeals to the maxim “you’ve got to be cruel to be kind” or will we speak up and demand justice and humanity for those denied it?
I know where I stand on these questions.
dear all
i mark ruefully the passing of vaclav havel, a graet playwright & a great human. any one who’d nomiate frank zappa as his “ambassador to the west on trade, culture and tourism” is my kind of beloved leader.
vale, vaclav havel.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
Dear alfred,
Now there’s a human being whose passing makes the world poorer.
yours sincerely,
Ambigulous
Fran – you can “demand justice and humanity”, “Do we feel an obligation to help others in desperate circumstances or not?” – but then you have to define what that means.
Does it mean that anyone who decides they want to livein Australia and has the money to pay for the flights and the boat trip gets to. Let them all in.
Why aren’t we sending the RAAF C17s to all the refugee camps in the world and just empting them?
Do you open your doors to the homeless? Do you empty your bank accounts to give to charity? Why not?
There are budget constraints – how much should we be spending on Border Control, Immigrant resettlement costs, etc???
OBR asked:
No, it doesn’t. There’s a process for determining whether people qualify as refugees or under some other humanitarian category. Right now, the Australian government is using administrative detention, its geography, and maritime bullying to subvert the right to claim.
I should think that would be obvious. I don’t advocate that, for the record. I say that Australia should play an active part in ensuring a maintainable international humanitarian resettlement policy. Everyone in the top 25 per capita GDP should have to contribute either places or money or some combination, based on the particular circumstances of their own jurisdiction. Australia could be a regional processing centre.
Because I wouldn’t get close to being able to deal with the needs of more than even a couple of homeless — and them only temporarily. I amd keen on the Australian government putting in the resources and establishing the framework needed to assist those in need, and if that means my tax contributions (along with those of others of similar or greater means) need to rise, then so be it. If that means that housing or health policy needs changes, then again, I support that. I’m not keen on charity though. Most of them are religious and I am against private provision, except as a last resort.
Those constraints are not close to being tested, and to the extent they are being tested, this reflects the current regime’s determination to have a policy of “tough on refugees who come by boat”. They could probably break even on asylum seekers, and maybe even turn a profit, but they’d sooner make it clear to Lindsay, that they are making these “queue-jumpers” suffer.
@27, @29,
Why are people so unkimd?
Merc @ 43: Because they have been bereft of their kim!
“” Do you empty your bank accounts to give to charity? “”
Australias bank account is empty, in the red and getting worse.
The question is ” how much should we borrow (from ?) to be charitable?
But Fran, was he still worth listening to after he failed the greatest analytical exam of his entire career, why, ten years ago it must be now? Was he still a good writer, was he still a decent speaker?
I don’t think he was. I think the combination of drink and the self-destruction of his judgement ruined him for people who had enjoyed him previously. And I sort of did enjoy him up until he decided 9/11 was the perfect opportunity to purge the world of various things he didn’t like.
(In googling his recent columns I found a very well written, technically brilliant excoriation of David Mamet, but I can’t find if Hitch even wrote a single word about the Occupy movement! Left or Right or whatever, I think the man was strangely inessential as a commentator, and had been for years, regardless of his desire to stir things up.)
NickWs asked:
Yes. He was entertaining, and his composition and organisation were excellent. There was nothing banal or half-hearted in his claims, outrageous and offensive though they sometimes were.
His abandonment of left-wing politics and thus the cause of working humanity robbed him and politics of a great deal, but in a world of vacuity, he still shone clearly.
Unkimd Merc @43?
Seems that the DPRK will continue to be kimd for some time yet….
rekimd after temporarily being unkimd.
It’s an Il wind that blows no kim any good.
Maybe I just haven’t read enough of his anti-religion polemics, that stuff is always very heated.
But looking at his last months of writing at Slate, right until the end of last month, his blindness to Occupy is pretty weird. (I don’t know if he wrote about that at Vanity Fair or elsewhere.)
He did write an article about the London riots without even bothering to look at the issue of economic disenfranchisement.
At the end he finally digresses into racial alienation, though. It’s just the only context for his argument there is all “multiculturalism gone mad”, with no socio-economic criteria to be allowed at all; `I remind you that all of this was already an extremely clear and present danger, long before the all-purpose expression “the cuts” was being used for all-purpose purposes.’
I do think his final articles about the American presidential race are pretty banal, and only enlightened by the injection of his militant atheism. The “endless war” stuff is hideous.
On balance, I think in the end he stumbled between repeating himself on his strongly held beliefs and trying to find a way to stay relevant on subjects where he could barely feign interest.
Fran Barlow @18: “For a start, this is not ‘trafficking’ in the sense that this word is correctly used……. use of the word ‘trafficking’ (and similar ‘people smuggling’) in this context is a weasel term.”
Dishonest at best. Pedantically speaking you are correct about the meaning of the word “trafficking”, but the subsequent attempt to suggest that this also means that “smuggling” is inapplicable is quite wrong. They are different concepts. Even the current Australian coalition government in many media statements has explicitly drawn the distinction.
And if pedantry is going to be the argument of choice, “squalor” is spelt, well, like that.
mediatracker @20 “the apathy of the vast majority of the population who make no attempt to raise their voices in any consistent way in those forums that really matter. There are plenty of blogs (this response included) which note the destructive impact on people…”
Are you suggesting that this blog is a forum that really matters?
LOL
John D @ 24: “The two recent boat tragedies are probably an outcome of the coalition/Greens decision to block the Malaysian solution”.
There were 1228 asylum seeker arrivals in the month to 14 December alone. The Malaysian non-solution was for 800 only (plus an extra 4000 and all their costs for Australia, of course, but let’s keep it to the direct implications for boat arrivals for the moment). The fact is that the boat that sank last week would not have been covered by the Malaysian deal.
For those who were paying attention, that the Malaysian “solution” would, even taken at face value, have been a solution for about five minutes, was a major reason for opposing it.
I see you’ve given up the pretense of caring about them drowning at sea.
NickWS @46: “But Fran, was he still worth listening to after he failed the greatest analytical exam of his entire career?”
Ah yes, “he wrote stuff at odds with my opinion” equates to “he failed the greatest analytical exam of his entire career”. A great example of the Australian left’s tickets on itself, of course, but hardly relevant to any objective assessment of Hitchens.
[MODERATOR NOTE | Content redacted as it breaches LP's Comments Policy]
Silky quoted OBR about the costs of “border control” & etc then observed as follows:
It rarely takes long before they wander away from this utterly frivolous piece of handwaving.
@50
“There were 1228 asylum seeker arrivals in the month to 14 December”
Agree, that’s a very small amount. We could easily welcome at least 4 or 5 times. A like the way you think.
@51
Also I think that the original comment on the other thread could be described as being made with a certain amount of relish.
@50
“would … have been a solution for about five minutes”
So what’s your final solution? And I mean that, what measures do you absolutely guarantee will definitely stop people once and for all from ever again attempting to make a journey by sea to this country in search of asylum? And don’t say “Naru”, “TPVs” or “turn the boats around”, there’s no proof that, even if they were feasible, any of these measures would construct the fortress Australia that so many of your fellow travelers one the right seem to lust after. You’re on a long term loser on this one. The international situation doesn’t seem to be improving. You’re going to have to harden up if you want to turn anything around, a few drownings ain’t going to cut it. Why don’t you up the ante and tell us what you comprehensive package of measures involves?
@45,
Relax everybody, Jumpy brought enough predictable to go around!
If we are going to stop the boats we need to stop the wars. The reason the boats stopped under the Howard govt was because the conflicts that were producing the asylum seekers temporarily stopped and they didn’t need to flee for a while. Then the conflicts started again and so the boats started again.
@59 – “The reason the boats stopped under the Howard govt was because the conflicts that were producing the asylum seekers temporarily stopped and they didn’t need to flee for a while. Then the conflicts started again and so the boats started again.”
Is that an attempt at humour?
I reckon that it is bullshite to claim that anyone in Australia is to blame for these deaths. I don’t know all the reasons people wish to come here, but near the top of the list would be our supposed commitment to Human Rights and our prosperous communities and the safety to practice your religion without some fundamentalist, death-worshiping, misogynistic, genocidal piece of detritus waving a gun in your face. All good reasons.
As for stopping the wars, US politicians all have foreign policy ADHD, stop shooting at them for ten minutes and they will go home. But that won’t stop the wars.
Helen @16 wrote:
Not invading their countries and turning bad situations into intolerable ones would be a good start.
dylwah@61 wrote:
… the safety to practice your religion without some fundamentalist, death-worshiping, misogynistic, genocidal piece of detritus waving a gun in your face
So which is it?
Take your pick Duncan @62 Just don’t blame any current politician, that is just lazy party political point scoring.
Duncan @62,
Helen’s statement is a matter of fact.
On the contrary, Dylwah’s statement is aspirational. Quite evidently, the Coalition, of which Australia is a member, failed in both Iraq and Afghanistan to provide for the citizens of those countries “… the safety to practice your religion without some fundamentalist, death-worshiping, misogynistic, genocidal piece of detritus waving a gun in your face.”
To his eternal credit, Malcolm Fraser recognized that Australia had failed to produce the same conditions in Vietnam.
Now Australia’s Coalition partners have given up the struggle in Iraq and Afghanistan, doesn’t Australia owe a debt incurred by failure?
have we all seen the letters exchanged between Gillard, Swan and Abbot last week and this week? What a churlish, nasty little man Abbot is!
Haven’t seen them, sg. Do you have a link?
@66 – Australia’s Border Protection Policies were working just fine before Rudd/Gillard decided to change them. Abbott is not responsible for what the ALP/Greens have done.
But Fran, was he still worth listening to after he failed the greatest analytical exam of his entire career
You mean after he supported the Iraq War? Yes.
I strongly disagree with him but his defense of that war is recommended for anyone seriously interested in the subject. His arguments are salient and contain many facts inconvenient to the cause of pacifism (which is why pacifists should read it).
A great example of the Australian left’s tickets on itself, of course, but hardly relevant to any objective assessment of Hitchens.
That’s not true either. Imperialism was one a consistent subject matter for him. He advocates war against Iraq because he sees it as a way of getting rid of a dictator. In doing so he exercises blindness and emits apologies for this blatant example of said imperialism. It’s essential if you want to assess his career to consider the contradiction.
A lot of people compare him to Orwell, but there was a streak of Wilde in Hitchens.
I’d just invite anyone who is claiming that opposition to ‘boats’ is actually motivated by a genuine concern for the safety of asylum seekers or their ‘exploitation’ by people smugglers to take a look at this comment thread at The Drum:
What if we can’t stop the boats?
While some are keen to blame the ALP and The Greens for deaths of people, in 610 comments so far one will struggle to find a sympathetic word for asylum seekers amongst those most keen to “stop the boats”.
Instead, the dominant themes concern invasion by unwelcome “freeloaders” who are “cashed up” and are likely to remain on welfare, with some throwing in observations about their non-western attitudes. There’s a bidding war on how much abuse would be adequate in such circumstances, on withdrawing from the Refugee Convention and so forth. The words “bleeding heart” or equivalent are in persistent usage. One poster advocated blockading Indonesian ports and sinking vessels. Another proposed scuttling the boats and marooning them on isolated islands off the coast. Some did versions of the Four Yorkshiremen in relation to their ancestors in the post-war migration.
There’s simply no evidence at all in this thread that the majority (or even a significant minority) of those opposed to “boats” are moved by anything other than horror that non-westerners might eventually join our community.
If there are such folk, they are keeping very quiet.
@67, the letters sg was talking about at @66 are linked from http://www.smh.com.au/national/dear-mr-abbott-lets-talk-dear-prime-minister-put-it-in-writing-20111220-1p392.html
OH and look at this! It appears that anti-wind farm groups in Australia are being aided by climate change denialists, at least some of whom are an astroturf mob set up by the IPA. Who, it seems, are unhappy withe settled science of AGW but quite willing to foster rather dubious links between wind farm noise and human health.
@73 – wind farms don’t stack up on economic grounds without massive subsidies.
On wind farms, an up to date site,
http://windfarmperformance.info/
( note the bottom right graph, with subsidies )
Blair blithers:
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/cared_to_death
Does Blair not know that in addition to possessing a valid passport, the prospective arrivee in Australia also needs a valid visa. I daresay that most of those asylum seekers who flew out of Dubai for Indonesia were Iranians who may or may not have carried valid Iranian passports.
Perhaps Blair could explain to the survivors where in either Dubai or anywhere else in the world an Iranian national can find an Australian consular official who is prepared to issue a valid visa.
Blair has no interest in the truth.
Razor, wind generators may or may not stack up economically against the alternatives, but that’s completely orthogonal to the point sg was making. He’s talking about those fools and rogues in the IPA, not doing a cost-benefit analysis of wind power.
Thanks, paul of albury. I’d add graceless to sg’s assessment of Abbott, although it’s probably redundant.
Perhaps Katz could explain where in Dubai “persecution” is on the menu.
When persecuted refugees seeking a better life board flights in Dubai to take them to the promised land, they first have to wait for the planeload of eager economic migrants alight in the promised land of Dubai.
@68
The change for most of the Rudd/Gillard era hasn’t been that great. The recent High Court decision has lead to a significant change. Like most right-wingers, you have a fairly delicate constitution so I expect you’d like to hide from the inevitable upward spiral of harshness that was bound to have resulted from a continuation of Howard era policies. Unless of course you’d like to outline, just for fun, how you’d deal with a failure of punitive detention to prevent asylum seekers arriving irregularly by boat?
@71
A recommended read for Razor and the like. The boats can’t be stopped, at least not in any remotely civilized manner. Perhaps a misogynistic, ultramontanist is the right man for Razor’s job? Perhaps he can have a crusade declared, that justifies just about any kind of abhorrent behaviour.
Australia should withdraw from the UN Refugee Convention. It is an outdated document that does not reflect today’s reality.
Australia should withdraw from the UN Protection of Morons Convention, and then the likes of OBR could be towed out to sea and be left to their own devices. Just think how the country would be improved!
Hahaha!! A merciless pisstake of those shithouse mining ads – well overdue.
SATP:
How is this bait and switch relevant to the egregious misrepresentation by Blair of the requirements for flying to Australia? Do you admit that Blair ignored the fact that in addition to a valid passport, a passenger on a commercial airliner also needs a valid visa?
If so, why are you attempting to defend Blair’s egregious distortion of the truth?
Ah yes, why would people fleeing from persecution in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran or Turkey have any misgivings whatsoever regarding their future prospects as minorities in a region religiously and politically dominated by Wahhabists?
From the safe distance of Australia you might well mistake conspicuous consumption for political stability in a city-state whose more austere neighbours increasingly eye it askance, but I doubt people who’ve had their lives upturned at least once already would be so willing to gamble their family’s futures on that.
Katz quoted Tim Blair as follows:
I don’t suppose that organising people to fund the pool needed to purchase and crew the vessels in question could be defined by those sharing Blair’s animus towards vulnerable people as “people smuggling”?
Sidebar: What is the ostensible libertarian Blair’s objection to irregular maritime travel anyway?
Just a quick point about entering Indonesia through Jakarta International Airport (or any other points of entry for that matter). Any arrival would need a passport no matter who you are and, from my experience, business and tourist visas are issued on arrival so don’t have to be organised in advance. The fact that most boat arrivals have no documentation when intercepted implies that they have disposed of their passports between arrival and boat embarkation.
A sobering (heh) Hitchens story from Saifedean Ammous (@saifedean), Assistant Professor of Economics at the Lebanese American University. Via Crooked Timber.
Wantok @ 88 – for starters the passports they use to get into Indonesia may be fake. And there have been many reports from asylum seekers that the people smugglers are the ones that confiscate their passports (they probably have some value) rather than they willingly dispose of them.
dear anyone
another for the record; here is daniel dennett on c. hitchens:-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/post/a-lesson-from-hitch-when-rudeness-is-called-for/2011/12/18/gIQAV6xz2O_blog.html
yours sincerely
alfred vension
Helen, that story is a good example of why I’m not very supportive of the so-called “New Atheists.” They’ve hitched their “new” atheist cart to a very old racist horse.
eh? I don’t think the Second Wavers were defeated in the 1970s. Ask Cagney and Lacey if you aren’t sure. Maybe there was a tiny bit of pushback in the 80s, but I don’t see much evidence of Phyllis Schlafly’s success in the lifestyles of modern women. Am I missing something?
sg @93:
Huh??
Refers to his muslim-baiting, Zoot, as well as his assumption that a person of middle eastern appearance must be a “f**ing peasant”.
[content replying to a long-banhammered vexator (morphing zir ID yet again) has been deleted]
Stipulated: I was indifferent to the success of the Republic Referendum, and still am.
This was mainly defeated because a common model could not be agreed. Had the referendum posed the simple question — Should the Head of State be an Australian citizen? — there can be little doubt that the referendum would have passed. Had a second question, specified as germane only in the event that the first question was passed, sought an opinion on the model — elected by popular vote or appointed by a parliamentary college — I’m confident that the popular vote option would have passed.
I am not sure that this tells us much about progressivism though. Reactionaries and conservtaives are about as likely as progressives to feel attachment to notions of local sovereignty. The differences arise when one explores what local sovereignty entails.
@89/96 – attacking a person’s religion is not racism.
As for the article you linked to – strange how it has appeared post-Hitchens with no chance of rebuttal or Hitchens version being presented.
As for the point that the author tried to make about Israel being the equivalent of Hamas – I’m not suprised if Hitchens was either speechless, which I seriously doubt, or more likely didn’t deem it worth arguing with someone making such a morally twisted argument.
Yes, Israel is a Jewish state, but is it really run by religious fanatics in the same manner as Hamas and associated Islamofascists run the Gaza Strip? If you beleive that then I have some land in West Fremantle you might like to buy – uninterrupted ocean views – can’t be built out.
Hitchens was conflating his disdain for religion with his apparent noble desire to rid the world of fascism. Though eloquent, Hitchens in my opinion is not the best choice representative of ‘new atheism’,
[content replying to a long-banhammered vexator (morphing zir ID yet again) has been deleted]
The republic referendum was defeated because the republican activists agreed with John Howard’s republic model which was far more conservative than the electorate wanted. A less conservative model would probably have done much better.
And it’s hard to imagine Panopolous convincing anyone that doesn’t already agree with her of anything.
@100/101 – your moral certainty is so lovely.
Got any evidence to support your claims about why the Australian voting public do not want a change to our current system of government? Apart from you opinions which are obviously non-partisan and unbiased.
OBR, wasn’t it clearly established at the time that a majority of Australians were in favour of a republic? But being presented with two models, they were naturally divided; and in any case just because Australians support something doesn’t mean they’ll vote on it in a referendum. I don’t see much moral certainty in comment 100, just confidence about facts.
My memory could be wrong, though. It was a long time ago, after all.
FTR, this poll suggests that in 1999 most people preferred a republic to a monarchy (54-38 with 8 undecided).
Many direct election republicans voted against the model proposed, which is probably why the monarchist Howard thought it was worth putting. Even at the convention most delegates did not vote for the proposed model, which ought to have been a hint for those wanting to get this done. I voted informal along with about 100,000 others.
Interestingly “the new preamble” question also failed at the same referendum. I rejected it on separation of church and state grounds as it mentioned “god”.
And this paper here suggests support for retention of the monarchy may have been around 24%.
Alex @ 99:
The last successful referendum was in 1977. The successful constitutional amendments then were: –
Senate casual vacancies (changed in a way to prevent a recurrence of the ways that Cleaver Bunton and Albert Field became Senators in 1975);
Retirement ages for Commonwealth Judges; and
Allowing residents of Commonwealth Territories to vote in Commonwealth Referenda.
Fran @ 103 – although a majority would prefer a republic over a monarchy, I think that statement is a bit misleading. It think its better to say that a majority would prefer *their* model of a republic over a monarchy. I’m one of those that believes that there are some republic models which would be worse than they current monarchy. For example, I’d prefer to see the current monarchy model retained over a directly elected president.
If its put to the people again, I’d like to see a preferential type vote taken where people get to list in order their preferred model which includes the status quo.
Chris said:
That’s certainly plausible, though as I recall, the proposed HoS in each of the models would have had no more authority than the current GG, so I’m not clear how a well-informed person could form the view that some of the models proposed “would be worse than the current monarchy”. They would simply have been naturalised and non-dynastic versions of the current monarchy. Still, if you believed that this was a problem, under my proposal you’d vote against an Australian HoS to avert downside risk from republican models that might get support. I doubt many would share your view though. Of course, if the proposal for an Australian HoS did get up then at a subsequent referendum you could vote for and support your preference and oppose those worse than the current monarchy.
Personally, as I said above, I find what we call the country or the person with the funniest hat the least of all things about which to be troubled, though I will concede that I’d love to live long enough in good health to enjoy a day where that really was on the top 10 things to be bothered about.
Despite my apparent moral certainty I’m not sure if I agree with the preference for an elitist appointed model over an elected model. I was careful not to say ‘more progressive’. But my recollection was that direct election appeared to have more support than any other option, including the monarchy. But whether it would have been enough to win, who knows? I am confident that accepting the Howard republic model was a tactical mistake.
Fran @ 107 – I think its a very good feature of the current model that between the GG and the PM only one can really claim to be elected by the people. No matter what powers they may have in practice I think its pretty important that a country has in practice, only one leader at the top. This is where appearances are important.
Artificially splitting a future vote into monarchy/republic and then republic model is only being proposed by some republicans because they believe that is the only way to get it through at the moment. Apart from that, what is wrong with giving people the ability to to preference what they believe is the best model including the status quo? Just like we have a system for electing MPs I think its best that the country selects the least disliked model rather than the most popular one.
Wantok
It would be interesting to know how many prospective asylum seekers fly by commercial jet into Indonesia.
My guess is that the proportion varies hugely between different nationalities and ethno-religious groups within those nationalities.
It is likely that the poorest and most frightened take the hard route to Indonesia across the Bay of Bengal and then by land down the Kra Isthmus. These are the folks whose countries simply don’t have accessible passport issuing procedures and/or for whom it would be dangerous to turn up at any such establishment in quest of a passport.
I wonder how easy it is for Iranians to acquire legally an Iranian passport. Unlike the Iron Curtain nations during the Cold War, which imprisoned their populations, the Iranian government doesn’t care much that disgruntled folk choose to leave their homeland.
But willy nilly, it should be recognised that some asylum seekers genuinely are bereft of travel and identity documentation.
And one last thought, why do the Indos take such a slack attitude to entry visas?
Thank you Helen @96.
Memo to sg: tarring the “New Atheism” with the brush of Hitch’s anti Muslim paranoia (if that was what you were doing) is defamatory.
Chris
I don’t think it unreasonable to ask all those who are opposed to the basic principle of requiring the HoS to be a citizen of Australia to vote against it as a bloc, rather than allowing them to count those who think that with some qualification which might plausibly arrive, it’s a good idea, on their side.
To allow the monarchists to include those with whom they are in serious disagreement as their allies is poor polling.
While the preferential system you propose may seem to get around these problems (I thought in 1999 that this might have been the better approach), given the usages that attend our media — and we’ve seen this very much over climate change policy, refugees etc — it’s likely that the poll would be trolled. It’s a much tidier approach to simply ask whether people think the broad brush idea of an Australian HoS is a relatively good one. I’m not sure how I’d vote if that were the proposition, but I suspect about 70% of the electorate (and possibly quite a few more) would vote in favour. With that argument out of the way, a serious discussion about the sutiability of one or other model could take place without the ignorant din from the monarchists on the sideline.
@113 – HOS not being an Australian can easily be fixed – pass legislation to make them an Australian Citizen. Problem solved.
I doubt that whether the Monarch is an Australian Citizen or not is really the fundamental issue for Republicans. More likely is that they want to actually change our system of government. Fortunately the Australian public are smart enough to see that we have a relatively effective, stable form of government. No arguments have ever been made about how becoming a republic (in whatever form) will lead to improved governance for Australia.
OBR, I think you’re wrong there. I think the issue most republicans have with the monarchy is that the head of state is not Australian – in the actually living here and being one sense. The issue many republicans have with becoming a republic is that they don’t want to change our system of government. So they aren’t going to vote to do so in a referendum until they’re sure that the referendum is well crafted and the people charged with developing the new system are being responsible adults about it. Which many people at the time of the referendum weren’t (think Turnbull … think about his behaviour during the Grech affair … is this someone you want proposing constitutional changes?)
“More likely is that they want to actually change our system of government”
To what? Oh yeah, Sharia law …. bloody leftists.
OBR: of course the refugee convention is outdated and should be ditched. After all, refugees nowadays aren’t white and fleeing communism.
@116 – sg, that is the first time I have ever heard someone say that they have a problem with the system because the Monarch doesn’t live here. It has always been that ‘they aren’t Australian’ and therefore we have a flawed system, without explaining how having an Australian Citizen would actually make for better governance.
So a bit of goal post movement going on there – fix the ‘not an Australian Citizen’ problem and it becomes a ‘not living here’ issue.
The fact is the ‘not living here’ issue is already solved by having a GG and State Gs.
And having brought up the State Gs – everyone focuses on the Federal arrangements, but few truely look at the total implications as we a Commonwealth of States and the Monarch is the Head of each State as well. What happens to the State Gs. Doea each state then need to have a State referendum? What happens if any or all of the States vote to keep the Monarch as HOS?
And, I have yet to ever see a fully costed proposal of changing from a Constitutional Monarchy to any Republican Model. none, nil nix. And I have never seen a Cost-Benefit assessment. If it is so important, urgent and required then all that information should be available and support the proposal.
You wrote – “The issue many republicans have with becoming a republic is that they don’t want to change our system of government. So they aren’t going to vote to do so in a referendum until they’re sure that the referendum is well crafted and the people charged with developing the new system are being responsible adults about it.”
Don’t you see the contradiction between “don’t want to change our system of government” and “developing the new system”??
As for Turnbull and the Grech affair – are you implying that Turnbull knew that Grech was making a false claim and he actively particpated in that? As much as I have significant disagreements with Turnbull on a number of important policy issues – I haave never questioned his integrity. Are you?
OBR: I suspect you’ve never examined what people have meant by expressing a preference for the monarch “being Australian” – you just assumed that it was simply citizenship that was the sticking point.
Perhaps blaming other people for your own leap to assumptions is not the best response when you realise that you’ve been attempting to demolish a strawman for all these years.
Fran @ 112 – as you say, a preferential voting system gets around the problem of needing all the pro republicans agree on a new model in order to ditch the current model. All it requires is that they agree that any of the proposed models is better than the status quo. Surely thats not a big ask?
It just seems rather silly to vote for change (any change!), then have a second vote for what you change to with absolutely no reference to whether it is better than what you have now. I’d have no problem if the first vote was non-binding to help get a better view of public opinion. However the status quo should be a preference on the final vote.
Ok Chris … a compromise. … hold the plebiscite as I proposed. If more than 70% say yes, then the status quo option goes. Else we get optional preferential.
@120 – so if you are an Australian citizen but don’t live in Australia then you aren’t an Australian?
I don’t give a toss about the Monarchy. As it is, our Monarch could live in a Yurt in Outer Mongolia and the system would be fine. The current system of Government isn’t broken and is in fact one of the most effective and stable in the world. Show me how it is broken, how it can be made cheaper to run or improve governance and I’ll support change – but none of that is being proposed.
It’s been obvious for years that you don’t think much of symbolic gestures, OBR (unless they’re your symbolic gestures, of course).
For many people, this is a symbolic question which matters deeply and which simply cannot be reduced to the purely functional measurements which you are demanding. Disagree that the symbolism is necessary all you like, but stop demanding the measurement stuff – that’s not what this is about.
P.S. Therefore if your argument boils down to the cost of implementing a new symbology simply being too high in your opinion and not sufficient value for the money spent, fine. But you’ve said that quite a few different ways already, and I’m not sure that people need to keep on hearing that repeated by you quite so often in order to appreciate your stance. We get it.
Is Rupert Murdoch Australian or American? Is the passport/citizenship status really the only thing that counts?
I have never seen a Cost-Benefit assessment.
That’s funny, Razor, I’ve never seen one about our going into Iraq and Afghanistan. And those ventures cost serious dollars, not to mention lives.
Of course, I hear you say, it’s not possible to put a dollar value on protecting our national security, yada yada yada.
It’s funny how right wingers always insist on a cost benefit analysis for policies they don’t like but never for policies they do like.
dear editor
its unhelpful when the “australian” head of state or memebers of the “australian” head of state’s family go spuiking for business for uk companies in markets australia competes in. who are they representing then? clue: not australia. at present australia doesn’t get any windsors spruiking for australian business in markets in which australia competes with the uk; the uk gets all the windsors spruiking for uk business. good luck to them.
when i was younger i was motivated by the view “what does it matter – rule from wall street will continue reagardless of the livery of the parliamentary attendants or the letterhead of parliamentary stationery”. keep the olde quaint legal fiction, its not worth the trouble to change. now i’m older i’m over that & i’m now thouroughly sick to f*cking death of the royal windsor bludgers; the whole disgusting pack of them make me puke. i say bring on the republic, just to get rid of these pompous jacked up misfit parasites. and don’t give me that bullsh!t about “Ooh, the queen’s a hard worker, though” crap & bullsh!t! no quarter even for the apex of the disgusting english class system, i say.
a bas les royales & bah humbug!
yours sincerely
alfred venison
tigtog @ 123 – Murdoch isn’t even an Australian citizen anymore. Although in my experience plenty of USA people are willing to blame Australia for him
FWIW I didn’t feel I was any less an Australian when I was living and working overseas. Giving up Australian citizenship would have been a *huge* step though.
Fran @ 120 – I’m still not seeing why its necessary to remove the status quo as an option. If the majority of the population believe that the status quo is not the least worst option it simply won’t get sufficient votes in a preferential vote. Sometimes doing nothing is preferable to doing something.
I would make the it compulsory preferential voting though as I think choosing the least-worst option is far superior to the most popular one. Better to minimise unhappiness, than maximise happiness.
tigtog (and everybody): I’m not against symbolism, per se – but fake or empty symbolism annoys me. One of the “selling points” of the whole Republic was that it would “cut the Apron strings with Britain”.
What does it matter when one hasn’t snapped the bike chain with the US? At the time, I thought there were better things on the “national sovereignty” agenda. For example, why is Australia the only Western country without a bill of rights? That deseved Or why not have a look at the constitution and clean up some of the unclear bits. Section 42 doesn’t allow dual nationals to be MPs. That may be good or bad, but even the Americans permits it.
But a Malcolm Turnbull-led ego trip? Australia says meh.
Interestingly, the most pro-Republic (or possible anti-Royalist) person I met was this Dutch woman – now naturalised Australian – I met boating on the Whitsundays. I got the feeling she had never forgiven her original royal family for pissing off during WWII. She was cool with the Danish equivalent, however. They stayed behind.
jesus christ, OBR, cool your heels. It’s obvious to everyone what “being AUstralian” means. It doesn’t mean being a British person who comes here once every 10 years and is given citizenship by fiat. Why are you bothering to split hairs about this? And why the craziness of “mongolian yurt.” No one, no matter how desperate to impugn their political enemies, would accept a head of state who lives in and is from another country. Ludicrous example.
And don’t try the “move the goalpost” argument on me – you didn’t have a shred of a clue what my attitude was to the republic before this thread so don’t accuse me of shifting goalposts.
I wasn’t questioning Turnbull’s integrity, just his maturity, and republicans’ opinion of it 10 years ago (you may recall he wasn’t the most popular public figure at the time).
Yes, that’s why I was giving this as an explanation for why many republicans aren’t very interested in becoming a republic. Many republicans would happily become a republic if they could imagine a way to address all the points you’ve raised. Asking them to vote yes before they’ve seen the alternative, in the hopes that people like Turnbull and Howard would come up with an equally good system to the one we’ve got now, is pushing it a bit, don’t you think?
That was my precise point. Despite his ex-citizen status, I doubt many people would really argue that he’s somehow now not Australian at all. It’s just got more complicated. There is a difference between holding Nation-Y citizenship and being a Nation-Yian, symbolically/culturally even if not legally.
this frothing little exchange shows why engaging with you can be so tiresome, OBR. I’ve put up a couple of comments with a completely mild tone, attempting to explain the reasons why many republicans might have voted no to something they ostensibly believe in, and you’re ranting at me as if I’ve suggested beheading Queen Elizabeth.
Can’t you try and argue with what is written, rather than the fantasy leftists in your head?
I got moderated for suggesting the execution of a monarch…
[Nope, another word triggered the automod-bot ~ moderator]
@DaOoSG, I agree that it’s not the top priority for me regarding national sovereignty. I approve of the idea, I think it’s long overdue, if another referendum arrives that is better laid out I’ll vote for a republic, but I’m not actively campaigning for it.
tigtog @ 129 – still has Australian heritage, but I wouldn’t consider him an Australian anymore – he willingly renounced his Australian citizenship.
@130 – bit narky aren’t they.
For what it’s worth, I actually would be happy with what I think is called the minimalist model – cut off the Monarchy but retain GG and State Gs with all the current Reserve Powers etc.
Why does Germaine Greer keep getting upgraded to Australian status?
This metaphor doesn’t make sense to me. Australia is supposed to be connected to the US by a bicycle chain?!?
I largely agree Down & Out. I don’t say that symbolism is worthless but misleading symbolism certainly is, at least when it leads people to hold onto misanthropic perspectives.
OTOH, the old “cutting the apron strings” slogan is specious and trades on misogyny. There are no ‘apron strings’ tying Australia to the UK, and any ties that do exist have nothing to do with the monarch, but are rather about Australian capitalism’s perceived interests. A republican form of government won’t touch that. That’s one reason why Australia is so close to the US in foreign policy despite the fact that the US president is not ex-officio Australia’s head of state.
If the debate were about whether to create an inclusive government (i.e one properly answerable to the working population and composed in some sense of them) — a kind of working people’s republic — I would have an entirely different view. I suspect in such circumstances that the nationality of the HoS would be an entirely trivial matter — a footnote at best.
Why does Germaine Greer keep getting upgraded to Australian status?
Because she is Australian and lives here more than half of the year.
Speaking of ex-pat Australians, one recalls with mirth the late Joan Sutherland at the time of the republic referendum weighing in on the side of the monarchy, She even referred to England as “home”.
This, from a resident of Switzerland, which has been a republic since 1291.
Crap. Looks like Australia will be back to persecuting asylum seekers again before long….
http://www.smh.com.au/national/bowen-bends-on-nauru-for-offshore-processing-20111222-1p6yj.html
It is ethically appalling Chris. Not only that, it’s also stupid politics. It hands Abbott another win.
If Abbott/the LNP does win in 2013, it will be because of the political ineptitude of this regime rather than anything associated with it that can be held to be supportive of human well-being.
They could have had not only ethical policieds but a winning political hand. For reasons best known to their playmakers, they are choosing to trash both ethics and their political chances in 2013.
It’s one of the more bizarre examples of what happens when all of politics becomes a perverse game and not at all about public policy.
Really? We’ll have to change that, then.
@124 – tigtog, you wrote – “It’s been obvious for years that you don’t think much of symbolic gestures, OBR (unless they’re your symbolic gestures, of course).”
That’s probably because during my 15 plus years in the ADF I was subjected to many of the symbols and traditions of the Army being removed at the behest of leftist civilian beauracrats who wouldn’t have been able to pronounce esprit d’corps let alone understand what it means. They probably think Napoleon is a Brandy and “The moral is to the physical as three is to one” is completely undecipheral, even in english.
In light of the failure of the US to build nations in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is likely that a torrent of refugees will pour out of those countries.
Indeed, the dust had not settled from the last US soldier scurrying out of Iraq before al Maliki began persecuting his enemies. And the same is bound to happen in Afghanistan after the collapse of the American mission there.
Perhaps Bowen can see the writing on the wall. Push factors driving many more refugees from their homes are growing stronger. This worrying state of affairs can be ascribed directly to the failure — the utter failure — of Bush’s grand strategy.
dear sg
“[obr] you’re ranting at me as if I’ve suggested beheading Queen Elizabeth.”
quite, beheading’s too good for them. i’m for appropriation without compensation; let them live like common commoners for the rest of their lives. a fate worse than death for people who don’t wear the same underwear twice?
yours sincerely
alfred venison
And just for the record Chris, in a compulsory preferential system, my inclination is (and thus would be) to vote informal. I don’t like coercion as it taints process, and a better warrant than you suggest would be needed to justify it.
… And also the state of “the game” in North Africa.
But really, Katz, America’s inability to do anything about it’s own economic situation is just another syndrome for the powerlessness of the US nation. They’ve totally overestimated their position(s). One wonders how it it possible? Militarily and economically, America is looking at the ashes of it’s erstwhile role as global leader.
American style economics has reduced politics in the so-called free world to those funny programs which come on after the nightly news broadcast (the ones with the talking heads). A cultural tradition and not a way to actually make decisions about how a group of people want to form their collective world. (That’s been ceded to the scared and soulless people in charge of significant business interests. At least they know how to behave when they see a business opportunity. And screw democracy.)
My concern is that Australia should be reforming now, I mean, really pulling out the stops with relation to infrastructure and social infrastructure projects (education and training, health)– because the good times are coming to an end and we should really start thinking about rainy days… But, I suspect we will see, as the global economic environment continues to deteriorate, a turn towards Abbot’s brand of political idiocy.
Too bad for global warming. Globalization is in fact chaos. Refugees is a good case in point– this issue can’t be solved in a global framework. It’s impossible, there’s not even an organisation, which can take on the responsibility. Maybe Haliburton… No, but honestly, this has to be solved regionally. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq– it’s a catastrophe, but they have to solve their issues themselves and together with their neighbours. Case in point is the US’s mindless fiddling with Saudi Arabia and it’s perceived interests in the Middle East. Each country needs to be regionally and nationally integrated and not subject to black helicopters dropping either money or soldiers on them out of the blue.
Fran @ 142,
I’ve never voted informal and don’t think I’ll start now. But the ALP can go fuck themselves if they think I as a lefty “have to” preference them. Unfortunately like last year I’ll be voting Greens and putting the Libs ahead of Labor (3rd to bottom & 2nd to bottom ahead of only FF).
At least the Libs are honest to themselves (a right-wing party) unlike the ALP, how imitating the Libs is meant to win them the next election I don’t know.
Fran @ 142 – so you’d support voluntary voting then? As we’re certainly coerced to vote at the moment.
Chris,
the answer to this question depends on how you think compulsory voting effects elections? Do you think it has a positive, negative, or no noticeable effect?
How would you measure the effect? In terms of political outcome? Or in terms of social effects such as engagement. Financial cost? In any case there are alternative systems, so it’s pretty easy to compare. Does mandatory voting make politics in Australia better then say the UK? And if so, how?
Chris asked:
Technically, we’re coerced to attend a polling booth, but yes, I’d favour voluntary voting and optional preferential, assuming there were no better system in prospect.
Jacques de Molay:
I can imagine no circumstances where I could indicate a preference for the Liberals. None. It’s one thing to withhold support and quite another to add one’s weight to the stupid and the misanthropic.
Fran @ 147,
You’re making the assumption I live in a marginal seat?
I make no assumptions about what kind of seat you live in Jacques, and wouldn’t see this as pertinent in any event. Moreover, your preference position extends to the Senate, where the same applies.
In the last election, Abbott sought to count all the votes his party received in his mandate. He claimed to have won the election. It was a bogus claim of course, because amongst other things he trailed on 2PP, just. (from memory 50.16–>49.84). Those following your advice in 2010 would have added to his balance. How would he have used your support, do you suppose?
I hear your disgust with the ALP. I share it, plainly. Yet there is never an ethical case for giving aid and comfort to policies one abhors. Never. Those of us who reject LNP/ALP policies as not merely sub-optimal but unsupportable must never ever support them. It’s pretty simple.
It’s pertinent in whether my vote would actually help the Libs or not. It has nothing to do with the Senate.
I don’t care about what Abbott thinks is his mandate or not, elections are not decided by what Tony Abbott thinks the system should be. Elections are decided by seats not total votes otherwise we would’ve had PM Kym Beazley in 1998.
Again you’re making the assumption you know the composition of my seat, so please refrain from the “giving aid and comfort” to the Libs stuff, you don’t know if that is the case or not.
Personally I think it a waste to vote informal because (a) it punishes (I assume) the Greens and (b) doesn’t send much of a message to Labor (in this case). The strategists for the ALP (Hawker, Richo etc) continually state publicly “the Left” should be ignored as they will always either vote Labor or preference Labor ahead of the Libs. That is the direction the party has been moving in for awhile now, which is why we see policies from Labor these days that “we” railed against when they were in opposition.
I refuse to vote for or preference a party I used to support that now spits in my face.
Joe @ 148 – I can see both advantages and disadvantages. Compulsory voting leads to the major parties taking their voter base for granted – they have to vote and they know there’s a large section of the population who will always vote ALP or Lib/NP if forced to vote.
On the other hand there’s a risk with voluntary voting that too many people will get disillusioned and not vote leaving a minority effectively in control.
Chris,
I think the general answer is that it doesn’t matter. Compulsory voting doesn’t improve the standard of politics or governments. I disagree that having compulsory voting protects you from minority rule, though. Do you think that the UK or Canada are worse than Australia in this regard? And does it really play a factor in parties taking their voters for granted? Do Australian politicians do this more than the politicians in other countries?
Maybe there would be some social factors, which are important, like a natural inclination of younger people to be socialist, which might effect in a minor way outcomes due to compulsory voting, when younger people are more likely to not bother going to vote when they don’t have to. But this may well be balanced by other factors, elderly, working class, sports lovers, etc. There certainly doesn’t seem to be a compelling argument for either system in terms of outcomes, imo.
I think compulsory voting pushes major political parties towards the centre and away from extremes, a good thing.
But that’s just my interpretation, I’m sure there are examples elsewhere in the world that contradict me.
Chris suggested that with an optional voting system there’s a risk {…} that too many people will get disillusioned and not vote leaving a minority effectively in control.
If only the minority thinks voting makes a positive difference to public policy, then self-evidently, only a minority should vote. If the majority believe that it doesn’t matter who is in charge, they have no basis for voting at all, since by their own reckoning, they don’t have a legitimate interest in the result. If the idea that “a minority” could get into “effective control” troubles them, then it follows that they have concluded that voting may well prevent prejudice to some legitimate interest they have in the polity, and they should vote.
Right now, compulsory voting ensures that people who are ignorant and disengaged can be used by the major parties to support policies that these disengaged voters barely understand. These are often the voting cattle for the reactionary policies we see from both the majors.
If people who’d sooner go to the football or the pub or the shops simply stayed away, then the remainder might more easily conclude that voting would make a substantial difference, and the political weight of those who are engaged with public policy would increase, and it’s likely, at worst, that instead of policy being about silly sound bytes and posturing, that we might actually have policy about … err … policy.
Dunno, Fran – it doesn’t seem to actually work that way in countries which do not have mandatory polling place attendance.
Obviously, TT, non-compulsory voting is not the only issue in public engagement with politics. We have in this country, a more or less settled system of welfare, public education, and a widespread view that people ought to vote. If voting were optional, I doubt that much more than 10-15% would ‘go to the beach’ instead.
Yet the other side of the question ought also to be put. How well has compulsory voting supported:
a) evidence-based policy?
b) political pluralism?
c) engagement with policy making in political parties?
d) public understanding of the scope of state power and/or the quality and extent of the constraints upon it?
Can one say with confidence that people in Australia are, by and large, better informed or more engaged than in any jurisdiction of comparable per-capita GDP where voting is optional? I’d be surprised if that were the case.
Look at where we stand today.
AIUI, approximately 1 in every 178 potential voters is a member of a political party. Even this number may be an overstatement because there is no way of declaring that all these people are active members. One suspects that at least some are fictional — there to make up numbers for branches, or else inactive.
With the exception of The Greens there’s also very little evidence that the members of political parties shape in any serious way the policies of their respective parliamentary fractions. The parliamentary wings do pretty much what they like to win the 24-hour cycle. And when we say “the parliamentary party” we basically mean “the leadership team”. Even the parliamentary footsoldiers are supposed to march in lockstep. Essentially, what we have are two major marketing franchises, who pitch for support in ways not unlike Coles and Woolies. It may well be that the customers of these two businesses have a greater say in how they operate than do the members of the LNP and ALP.
Once every 3-4 years, the largely passive but occasionally irritable are press-ganged to a polling booth and required to vote for the major party of their “choice” at council, state or federal level. The parties themselves derive their major policies from big business, with only minor tweaks designed to nibble at their rival’s demographic, and in between that time try their best to keep the argument about nebulous dogwhistling slogans like “border security” “business models” “work choices” “boats” “debt” “carbon taxes” “our troops” or some other waffle.
I’d be lying if I said that in all my years of writing to politicians of the majors that I’d ever had a non-formulaic answer. I can’t say with any certainty that they’d even read enough of my letters to dismiss them. Accordingly, I can well understand why most people aren’t engaged. Sure they may vent on the radio or next to you on the train or in some column in a newspaper or on the internet, but deep down, they know they don’t really count. The talking heads on the radio know this too and speak accordingly. At the last election the biggest swing, after that towards The Greens, was to informal voting. In the end, politics is about what the wealthy want to get done, and voters come as supplicants to those who really run the country.
If this state of affairs is not the direct result of compulsory polling booth attendance one can at least conclude that compulsory attendance has not hindered it nor will ever underpin anything better.
Would optional participation be worse? It’s hard to see how it could be, but even if it somehow was, given that the current system is clearly inadequate, that would be an argument for something else.
If one knew that a political party in which one became engaged would not have to overcome the dead hand of coerced but otherwise disengaged and/or ignorant voters, then the incentive to become involved in shaping better policy might well be seen as greater. At least there’s a plausible chance that it might be so.
The problem is that its more efficient for politicians to focus on producing even more shrill sound byte policies in order to get those people disengaged to the voting booth, than it is to sway the votes of those already interested in politics (and therefore with an existing opinion).
@159 – if voters were as disengaged as you say they are Turnbull wouldn’t have been rolled and Rudd would hve got his ETS up.
There’s something rather sad about this, methinks.
Especially at this particular time of the year.
Helen @ 89 you ought to know that Hitchens was a lifelong supporter of the Palestinian people and an implacable opponent of the outright racism that is Zionism. That’s not to say that absolutely anybody who deserves a solid ‘serve’ ought not receive one and that applies to people who carry on like ignorant peasants but that would be in the context that is demonstrably absent from this piece of gutter sniping trash. To pretend that Hitchens was not a friend of the Palestinian people is a lie (and everyone knows it) as is a stupid claim like ‘Hitch’s anti Muslim paranoia’.
Desipis said:
Doubtful. Almost all of their ‘swaying’ of voters is FUD, and the claim that the other lot are even worse. With non-compulsory attendance, those who were scandalised by all of them might simply find other things to do rather than vote against their more hated grouping.
Things are so bad right now, that it’s hard to see that they could get any worse. Right now the government is desperately trying to convince people that they are even less humane towards asylum seekers than the LNP. They are failing of course because the LNP has a lock on that position. The fact that they are trying though is utterly disgusting.
Optional attendance could not be worse.
I caught some of Jon Faine again today. As I suggested the other day, while he’s plainly a rude, vacuous self-referential rightwing git, after the fashion of “La Grattan”, he’s no Alan Jones. Amusingly, he’s succeeded in alienating almost all of the audience as far as I can tell, especially in Sydney. I don’t know what Melbourne is like, but the Sydney folks haven’t been shy in telling him what a git he is. I suspect that having fled from the rest of the dial, those with a scrap or two of sense or humanity see the ABC as some sort of refuge, and have taken umbrage that this place too has been handed over to the other side.
That reminded me though of a question I’ve long considered but for which I’v found no satisfying answer. Why are there no left-wing ‘shock jocks’?
Some hypotheses I’ve considered:
1. Left-wingers see ourselves as children of the enlightenment. Reason and evidence and the love of humanity are our starting points. Being a shock jock entails tossing this out the window and surrendering to the lizard brain. If so, this would mean that the term ‘rightwing shock jock’ was tautological.
2. Left-wingers have a basic respect for other people which we are inclined to apply even to those who ought to have forfeited it. We are egalitarians. Hurling abuse at people sounds arrogant and authoritarian. Yet this is part of what shock jocks do to increase the entertainment value of their shows.
3. We left-wingers know that the world is run by and large by the right. Anyone who manages to make it to the airwaves has had to schmooze and kiss up and fly under the radar. They know that using the ‘s’-word or even mentioning equity will get them tarred as ‘political’ or ‘biased’ whereas if they simply put the boot into ‘dole bludgers’ or ‘cashed up asylum seekers’ the comments would sound to the right utterly apolitical. SInce the ABC is supposed to be apolitical, anyone on the ABC either goes anodyne or repeats the OO line for safety, whereas those on the commercials can say what they like. Since they are selling stuff, nobody is allowed to challenge their authority. Hence, not only all shock jocks are rightwing, but even non shock jocks are right-inclined.
Can anyone else propose other explanations for the total absence of left-wing shock jocks?
NB: In the US there used to be a chap on TV called Keith Olbermann. He got punted of course, but he was as close as I’ve seen to a left-wing shock jock. He didn’t do talkback though.
I dunno Fran, I think it’s probably got to do with advertising/ sponsorship. It is, to be serious, one of the practical feed back loops which goes into making the media what it is. Sorry, to be a killjoy, but it’d be hard to imagine, someone like Lindsay Tanner switching from a discussion with an environmental protester to a Harvey Norman ad-break
You also have to imagine, how the relative size of private media moves the middle to the right in this environment, to kind of touch on a point jumpy made above. “The middle”-’s a funny and difficult concept to kind of dissect…
I’ve always thought the reason there really aren’t any left-wing shock jocks is because ‘shock jockery’ almost by definition lends itself to right-wingers.
Right-wing people are permanently outraged, often hysterically so which is all ‘shock jockery’ is, whipping up outrage in people who wish to be outraged.
I suspect that you’re right Jacques — hence my #1 and #2 above. I think VOA is an interesting structural facto in the commercials, and of course, once you learn that way of engaging, you port that in modifed form with you to even the ABC — hence Jon Faine’s performances.
oops, should be “Jon Faine-style performances”. Faine was never in commercial radio but was apparently a lawyer.
Ruxton outlived by “WitchDoctor”, “Black South Africans & Vietnamese”
Ruxton was a fierce opponent of “political correctness” and with this in mind, let me say that the world is a marginally better place for his absence from it.
Boy, Larvatus Prodeo has become a desolate place without Howard to kick around. Sticking the boot into Jon Faine and Bruce Ruxton just does not have the same frisson.
No doubt things will liven up if Abbott gets his hand on the whip. I’m tempted to wish it so, just to liven up the joint.