Tag Archive for 'racism'

The ultimate public-private partnership?

Published
by
Mark
4 months ago
in Economics, Energy, Indigenous, International, Poverty, Race and Religion
. 40 Comments

In the (new) tradition of rich dude saves the world, someone I’d never heard of, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest - apparently Australia’s richest man, has been putting his head together with Noel Pearson and Kevin Rudd to announce a plan to create 50 000 full time private sector jobs for Indigenous Australians. Incidentally, I’m sure Pearson is behind the phraseology of a “covenant”, which no doubt appeals to our religiously inclined Prime Minister as well. No doubt such proposals should be judged on their merits, and the whole thing appears fairly sketchy at the moment.

But it is fair, I think, to say that it’s consonant with not just corporate social responsibility agendas, but also with the broader phenomenon of the privatisation of development assistance which we see worldwide - also in the field of public health. One of the criticisms of such programs - often delivered by NGOs deriving funding from foundations owned by benefactors of great wealth - such as Bill Gates - or foundations which leverage money off showbiz or biz or even political celebrity (as in Bill Clinton’s activities) is their paternalism and the lack of an integrated and properly public focus on the true dimensions of a problem - and the tendency or at least the temptation to focus on outcomes which make for good pr. Of course, in the symbolism driven political environment in which we live, you could make equally telling criticisms of a lot of public sector programs. This proposal also obviously partakes in the notion - beloved of Noel Pearson - that work and all its associated ethical dispositions are the solution to most - if not all - social ills.

There is also an obvious line of trajectory from one if not several of the logics of the Northern Territory Intervention. Continue reading ‘The ultimate public-private partnership?’

Now that Pamela Bone is dead…

Published
by
Kim
5 months, 1 week ago
in Activism, Apocalypse, Crime, Culture, Developing world, Donation challenge, Ethics, Feminism, History, Howardia, Imperialism, International, Iraq, Masculinity, Media, Politics, Polls, Race, Religion, Sexuality, Sociology, USA, War and Women
. 46 Comments

Yeah, you might have noticed already. I’m in a Truthiness mood tonight, as Stephen Colbert might say. Remember all the loud denunciations I copped from Harry Clarke, Tim Blair et al et al etc. - all the feminists of total convenience - for not denouncing the female genital mutilation loudly enough? Coz it’s all about teh Islam and threats to Western Civ, etc., and that mob are all on the side of women’s rights, and that manly man of steel John Howard is taking us to war to free Afghani women from burqas. And George W. Bush is going to hunt those Al-Qaeda evildoers down. (And Islam is not a race, and some of my best friends… oops, hang on?) While Laura and Condi look after the oppressed women. Or something… Oh yeah, it isn’t 2003 any more… Remember that word fistula - you might not have read that on teh Blair blog - being a word of three syllables and all. And in Latin.

But I talked about it at the time. Now that Pamela Bone is dead (and God rest her soul, may she be blessed with eternal rest, and may perpetual light shine upon her), where are the voices with the loud condemn? What’s with that Australian crusade for women’s rights in benighted Islamic Middle Eastern countries? After all, we - Dolly Downer and John Howard and Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt and Planet Janet told us so - are all (post?) feminists now. It’s on the citizenship test, dude - and dudette a la 50s pinup style no doubt. (Ps - don’t use that politically correct, activist judge f-word though…)

Well, never mind. Here’s a post from The Global Sociology Blog for the benefit of anyone who wanted to continue highlighting the horrors perpetrated on women in the developing world even if there’s not a convenient culture wars damn the left angle in it. (And that’s not to say that women in the developed world don’t still cop a lot - but there’s something to celebrate about a very large majority of Australians agreeing - at least in theory when asked by pollsters - that women have rights over their own choices and bodies - even if that masks continued gender inequality in oh, so many ways…).

You can donate to Medicins San Frontieres here.

And you might be interested in the fact that rape has finally been recognised by the UN as a war crime, something I wrote about last year, but something the keyboard warriors seem to… well, gloss over is far too kind. Because the fact that women are overwhelmingly the victims of war seems to be recognised neither by the pro-war Right nor the “humanitarian intervention” so-called Left. Continue reading ‘Now that Pamela Bone is dead…’

Northern Territory Intervention one year on

Published
by
Mark
5 months, 2 weeks ago
in Education, Health, Indigenous, Parenting, Policy, Politics, Poverty and Race
. 29 Comments

Crikey is reporting today that a leaked progress report demonstrates that the Northern Territory Intervention, now just short of a year old, is “a shambles”. It’s worth reading the full story, but it’s also interesting to note that Mal “who will think of the children?” Brough has admitted that the thing was cobbled together in 48 hours, as just about everyone suspected at the time.

When Jenny Macklin announced the composition of the panel who will oversee the review of the Intervention earlier this month, commentary predictably focused on whether those appointed were “critics” or “supporters”, which seems an idiotic yet predictable angle given that the whole point of the thing is to see whether it’s attaining its actual goals, something recognised by Peter Yu who was named as the review’s chair. Most of the coverage of the Intervention has continued to be framed in ideological terms, not least from those who claim that we need to move on from ideology.

Continue reading ‘Northern Territory Intervention one year on’

Why Hillary shouldn’t be Veep

Published
by
Kim
6 months ago
in Feminism, Foreign Elections, Race, USA and Women
. 68 Comments

Hillary Clinton is right about one thing - the question is “where do we go now?”

So should she slot in at #2? I’m not convinced that there are a large number of women who supported Hillary who won’t back Obama. It’s more likely that there are quite a few white men around who… etc. Without dissing at all the women who really are concerned about the incredible wave of misogyny (much more culturally acceptable, it seems, than open racism) that hit the Clinton campaign, as with most of what’s gone on, there’s some positioning going on here from Clinton. Positioning for power and influence. Forget superdelegates for a moment - there are a whole host of ex-thises and thats and a sort of “government in exile” from Bill’s time in office who will be looking for gigs come January, if Obama defeats McCain. And Clinton needs to shore up her own power in the Senate and the party - one way the switcheroo from some Democratic establishment types to Obama can be read is an attempt to protect their power against voters, by going with voters. If Obama continues the movement aspect of his campaign, there really is the potential for a huge shakeup of the hierarchies - and it’s those same hierarchies Clinton will be trying to protect. “Bringing the party together” could well be code for locking the people out.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of her current manoeuvring is the suggestions that she’d like to be asked to be Vice-President, but would turn down any such offer. Continue reading ‘Why Hillary shouldn’t be Veep’

Obama to wrap up nomination, debate continues over race and gender

Published
by
Kim
6 months ago
in Foreign Elections, Race and Women
. 11 Comments

It’s all over bar the shouting (make mine a bourbon) for Hillary. Meanwhile, Amanda Marcotte and Katha Pollitt look at the race/gender wars in the context of this year’s primaries at the LA Times.

Pollitt has the money quote:

I can’t tell you how many reporters have interviewed me for stories about “why women are divided about Clinton.” How about a story explaining “why men are divided about John McCain”? In fact, gender as a factor in men’s voting is one of many elephants in the political room, even as male (and female) candidates slaughter innocent wildlife, sit through endless NASCAR races and profess their love of hot dogs and beer.

Remember John Kerry’s bizarre gun/hunting fest from 2004?

Continue reading ‘Obama to wrap up nomination, debate continues over race and gender’

Hillary, gender decoy

Published
by
suz
6 months, 1 week ago
in Foreign Elections, International, Race, USA and Women
. 16 Comments

A few weeks ago, a woman I know who lives in Indiana had a phone call from Hillary Clinton’s camp in the run-up to the state Democratic primary.

“I realise folks say it would be great to have an African-American president, but wouldn’t it be neat to have the first woman president in our lifetime?” Continue reading ‘Hillary, gender decoy’

Will “the great immigration debate” take place?

Published
by
Mark
6 months, 2 weeks ago
in Australiana, Climate change, Culture, Economics, Government, Howardia, Immigration, International, Media, Politics, Race and Urbanism
. 188 Comments

… Or have we already had it?

Immigration Minister Senator Chris Evans has called for a “great debate” about immigration.

Possibly because it doesn’t involve leaked emails from Malcolm Turnbull or struggling battlers on 150k losing benefits, coverage of the immigration decisions announced in the budget has been fairly sparse, with this piece by Paul Kelly something of an exception to the rule.

The long and short of it is that skilled migration and temporary working visas have been lifted to almost 300 000 a year, with more on the way. Add in international students and those on some forms of tourist visa and you have a very large boost to Australia’s workforce.

Kelly’s correct to write that Howard lifted the migration quota over his term in office, but doesn’t add that he played the politics of it through distracting attention with all sorts of “look! over there! Muslims!” scares. I’m not sure I agree with Kelly that there’s going to be a particular political risk for Labor here. I suspect that Paul Keating took the brunt of it, with his “embedding in Asia” rhetoric and his economic case for migration a long time before the perception of the need for more migration to build a skills base and competitiveness really kicked in. Opposition to the changing face of Australia washed out of the national psyche, largely, one could argue hopefully, with the receding of the Hansonite wave of protest and indignation. John Howard may have had his face turned towards the past in this regard in his last years of office.

We probably should be having a debate on the ecological consequences of increased infrastructure spending for a bigger population (among other climate change related impacts), and on the fact that while “unemployment” might be still near record lows, there are still a lot of people either underemployed or locked out of the labour market for reasons that are fairly intractable to short term policy influence, but I doubt we’ll be seeing much of either.

Continue reading ‘Will “the great immigration debate” take place?’

More complacent denigration

Published
by
tigtog
6 months, 3 weeks ago
in Health, Indigenous, Media, Politics, Poverty and Race
. 34 Comments

Last year Paul Norton wrote with some sadness and much asperity “Is David Burchell brain-dead?”

Referring to the particular column which prompted the post, Paul contrasted ex-communist Burchell’s stance with the positions taken by anti-communist Robert Manne thusly:

David Burchell’s column, by contrast, repeatedly trivialises left-liberal positions on those issues and complacently denigrates those who hold such views.

Well, Burchell appears to be at it again, holding up as if it is an entirely new concept that the panoply of social ills afflicting many indigenous communities are more a product of poverty than of racism per se, because many of the same problems afflict the non-indigenous urban poor.

It’s true that some remote Aboriginal communities, caught in a morass of isolation, neglect and joblessness, have sunk to levels of dysfunction unknown to white Australians.

Yet dysfunction is remarkably colour-blind. If, as we did until relatively recently, you put white families, preselected for their turbulent family histories, into welfare ghettoes on the fringes of the main cities, they will struggle to hold their lives together, too. And then, exactly like indigenous families, they will weave narratives of defeat and despair to console them for their marginality.

Unlike Burchell, I’m not a literary academic writing in the area of public policy, and have only a few undergraduate course credits in social studies from the early 80s under my belt, yet I’d be amazed if he could point to one, single, solitary social studies course which did not identify poverty as the primary component of social disadvantage in blackfella communities here in Australia (as well as in communities of colour amongst our immigrant population and in other nations as well). That correlation with poverty, and particularly de facto ghettoised poverty, has never been in contention. The question he studiously avoids is - why is there such a strong correlation in so many countries between socioeconomic class and the melanin content of one’s skin?
Continue reading ‘More complacent denigration’

Reverend Jeremiah Wright: Radical, crazy, unAmerican?

Published
by
Kim
7 months ago
in Foreign Elections, Race and Religion
. 19 Comments

… probably a bit of an egotist, but there’s a very interesting take on Barack Obama’s former pastor at Salon, where Sarah Posner interviews religious studies scholar Jonathan L. Walton. Walton wonders how Dr Martin Luther King would have fared under the reign of YouTube, and makes some similar points about King’s radicalism as others have - King, he suggests, was somewhat more of a radical than Wright.

I might add that I look upon Obama somewhat more favourably now that I know that he chose to join one of America’s leading liberation theology inspired churches. I suspect I’m in a very small minority though.

Continue reading ‘Reverend Jeremiah Wright: Radical, crazy, unAmerican?’

Obama on Four Corners

Published
by
Mark
7 months, 1 week ago
in Film, TV, Video etc, Foreign Elections, Race and USA
. 23 Comments

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.

Martin Luther King - the legacy

Published
by
Kim
8 months ago
in History, Industrial Relations, Poverty, Race and USA
. 16 Comments

1968 was a very eventful year, and we’re seeing a number of anniversaries which - hopefully - stimulate further reflection on some of the key personalities, cultural and political events four decades down the track. Friday the 4th of April was the fortieth anniversary of the death of Dr Martin Luther King.

There are a number of such reflections around in the blogosphere this weekend. Andrew Bartlett provides a number of valuable links, including one to Joseph Palermo at The Huffington Post who makes an interesting and important point about the difference in perceptions about King before and after his death:

Contrary to mainstream belief today, while King was alive he was never widely heralded in the media as a “savior” or a “great leader.” He was just as often denounced as a “polarizing” figure and his work was often denigrated in racist terms. As was the case with Robert F. Kennedy, the love affair with MLK only took off long after he had become a kind of martyr.

King had actually found himself at something of a crossroads in 1968 - most of the civil rights the movement had been seeking had been embodied in law - largely through LBJ’s decision to force them through a mainly reticent if not unwilling Congress. Continue reading ‘Martin Luther King - the legacy’

Planet Janet located in the midAtlantic somewhere

Published
by
Kim
8 months, 2 weeks ago
in Howardia, International, Iraq, Media, Politics and Race
. 59 Comments

I think I’ve figured out why Planet Janet is seeming increasingly irrelevant. Consider (as Paul Kelly would say) her latest column:

The leftist glitterati is justifiably upset about Mamet’s rejection of progressive beliefs.

Hundreds of words piled on top of each other about playwright David Mamet converting to Milton Friedman-ism or something. Earth to Planet: Couldn’t give a toss. Had never heard of Mamet. Don’t care what his political beliefs were or are. Don’t think a crusty old bloke’s move to the right proves some eternal truths about teh left or teh luvvies.

Aside from Planet, I don’t think anyone else in Australia has written a word about Mamet’s conversion experience.

Let me let you into the secret. Continue reading ‘Planet Janet located in the midAtlantic somewhere’

White flight

Published
by
tigtog
8 months, 4 weeks ago
in Education, Immigration, Indigenous, Parenting, Politics, Race and Relationships
. 152 Comments

That’s today’s big story in the SMH: the growing trend over the last decade, in NSW especially, whereby white parents choose not to send their kids to the local public school, particularly for high school education, meaning the public schools have become predominated by indigenous and immigrant children of Middle Eastern descent. The trend has also started to affect selective public high schools on Sydney’s North Shore with large numbers of Asian children. School principals are expressing grave concerns for the implications this trend holds for social cohesion.

One principal also made the point that it’s not only private schools that are contributing to the segregation of children:

Social cohesion was under threat, Dr Reid said, from increasing segregation in education according to race, class and academic achievement.

Public schools were becoming increasingly selective on the basis of academic achievement, sporting and artistic ability.

“We have increased segregation inside public schools into the smart and the dumb, the sports capable and the creative. It’s that crude,” Dr Reid said. “It has implications for social cohesion. What do we do if kids are no longer growing up together?”

I grew up attending several schools because my dad had a public service job that meant we moved around. My favourite school was in Newcastle, in an area of high immigrant population, where I was surrounded by a bunch of non-Anglo-Celtic Europeans, considered at the time to be very non-U. Certainly I found that those schools were better both academically and socially than several others I attended which were virtually wall-to-wall WASPs, largely because the kids came from so many different backgrounds that ethnicity became a very low-level concern: we pretty much just rubbed along. I have very little reason to believe that things would be that much different these days, even though the ethnicity of the immigrants considered most non-U has certainly changed. So why the changed perception, especially in Sydney, that if one doesn’t private educate one’s kids one mustn’t really care for their future advancement, and certainly not for their current safety?
Continue reading ‘White flight’

The Jo Hos discuss the race card over afternoon tea

Published
by
Mark
1 year ago
in Culture, Federal Elections, Film, TV, Video etc, Howardia, Immigration, Levity and Race
. 0 Comments

More John Howard Ladies’ Auxiliary goodness at Facebook.

Originally posted at LP in Exile.

Tracking The Intervention: Discarding and devaluing Aboriginal work

Published
by
tigtog
1 year ago
in Authoritarianism, Federal Elections, Government, Health, Indigenous, Law, Politics and Race
. 0 Comments

Guest Post from Lauredhel

Crossposted from Hoyden About Town and also crossposted yesterday at LP in exile, but I wasn’t able to access LP to post it here until now! You may comment over at LP in exile while comments are closed here, as we await an end to our server woes.

Jangari’s “Four Corners on the Intervention” pulls out a few key points from the other night’s Tracking The Intervention show.You can watch the show for yourself here at the ABC.

Jangari details the ways in which Aboriginal communities are being undermined, not assisted, by the invasion and recolonisation process. I’m just pulling out a couple of points:

Discarding successful women-run community-based child safety programmes:

In Maningrida, the community women operate a night-watch called the Child Safety Service. The women ensure that children are safe at night while playing, and that they go home at a reasonable hour on school-nights. The service was praised in the Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle report [PDF]:

” The Inquiry regards the [Maningrida Community Action Plan Project, including the Child Safety Service] as an extremely valuable project and one that can be utilised to both establish a Community Justice Group and help guide reform in relation to the mainstream response to child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities.”

However, the funding is about to cease, and none of the $1.3 billion spent so far on the intervention (a lot of which is going towards the extra Centrelink bureaucrats) is finding its way to helping out this group of 15 Maningrida women who are undertaking this ‘extremely valuable project’.

This is particularly hard to understand, since the purpose of the entire intervention is the protection of children, presumably, and not the scrapping of CDEP nor the quarantining of welfare payments, which are mere means to achieve this end, supposedly. It beggared our collective belief that something as closely related to the issue at the heart of the intervention as this project is, could be allowed to suffer, especially with all the investment the government is putting in.

“Transitional” slave labour:

Continue reading ‘Tracking The Intervention: Discarding and devaluing Aboriginal work’