To be fair to Morris Iemma and his bunch of clowns masquerading as a government, New South Wales isn’t alone in imposing risible and over the top security regulations for major “public events”. We’ve seen similar things in finance talkfests with Melbourne and CHOGM in Queensland saw Peter Beattie invent preventive detention for “known public nuisances”, as well as going to ludicrous lengths to prevent protest. But Iemma’s mob seem to have made it an art form, perhaps because as I’ve speculated before, their sense of authoritarianism compensates for their total ineffectuality in governing just about anything else than public events. (Compare - “public services”.) But the latest bunch of regulations for the Pope Fest really take the cake. It’s more or less private governance. Where’s the public benefit in preventing pilgrims attending World Youth Day in Sydney this month from being annoyed? Will their world really come to an end if someone hands them a condom or wears a t-shirt with an anti-homophobia message? What possible public justification does the NSW government have for denying basic rights to freedom of expression at the instance of the fragile petals in Cardinal Pell’s hierarchy?
Archive for the 'Activism' Category
The Young Liberals’ “Make Education Fair” campaign, which I wrote about a few months ago, has resulted in a Senate inquiry, one of the last legacies of the Coalition’s majority in the upper house. The terms of reference are:
Last year I wrote that Dr. Mohamed Haneef was an Australian Dreyfus. This year, Turkish trade unionist Meryem Özsögüt is a Turkish Mohamed Haneef.
Ms. Özsögut, a member of the management board of a Turkish public sector union, has been detained for six months allegedly in connection with “being a member of a terrorist organisation” and “for making propaganda in favour of the terrorist organisation”.
More on Ms. Ozsogut’s detention can be read here. A petition to request her release can be signed here.
P.S. The PSI, to which I’ve linked, is an international federation of public sector unions whose Australian affiliates include the Community & Public Sector Union, the Australian Services Union and the Communication, Electrical & Plumbing Union.
I’ve been reading Jerry F. Hough’s Changing Party Coalitions: The Mystery of the Red State-Blue State Alignment on and off over the weekend, after it arrived from Amazon on Friday. I’d been wanting to have a read for a while - after I saw this review. Part of what Hough - a long time Sovietologist and comparative politics scholar - is trying to do is to expose some of the myths that we tend to create about past political patterns and partisan alignments - based on our present understanding of voter motivation and party image. He makes the point - not in itself an unusual one but rarely developed to its full analytical potential - that the Democrats and Republicans have effectively swapped ideological sides several times, though his analysis of the Jacksonian-Jeffersonian mythos of the Democratic Party suggests that the Donkeys were never actually to the left of the GOP before FDR. It’s also highly relevant to note that Adlai Stevenson was the first “New Democrat” - adopting a “suburban strategy” that effectively turned its back on the New Deal’s economic agenda, and that JFK, although his ideas on foreign policy were quite distinct from Adlai’s, shared his economic conservatism and was effectively a do-nothing President in the domestic policy field. The fact that “left” and “right” or “liberal” and conservative” have shifted ground from the New Deal party system to a cultural focus, and that McGovernite cultural liberalism was a big part of that shift, obscures for instance the truth that Richard Nixon was arguably a moderate liberal domestically, while McGovern’s economics had more in common with Goldwater than Johnson.
Hough’s also fascinating on the contingency of racial and national identity, and although some of his own commitments are shaped by a relatively conservative developmentalist political science ideology of modernisation, his injection of a long historical perspective and a sociological toolkit into political analysis of the American scene is a very valuable contribution. Changing Party Coalitions was written in 2005, but his discussion of the dynamics of the recent “Red State-Blue State Alignment” is quite prescient - and very useful for thinking about what Barack Obama’s biggest political challenge might be, and why Hillary Clinton was able to do well as a very unlikely standard bearer of the white working class.
Continue reading ‘Beyond the red state-blue state dichotomy’
I spent the latter part of last week attending the Creating Value: Between Commons and Commerce conference organised by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. The CCi conference was here in Brisbane - at the Convention Centre over at Southbank - but it was evidently a bumper week for conferences and fora related to blogging - with Canberra hosting a Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum and PDF2008 (”Personal Democracy Forum”) taking place in New York.
I’ll be writing something up later in the week on what I gleaned from the CCi conference, but in the meantime, for anyone interested in the interfaces between citizen journalism, blogging, new media and online technologies and platforms, there is, of course, a lot of reading material available on the web. The Microsoft thing seems the least blogged - and perhaps that’s because rather oddly, political bloggers were largely left off the invite list - though I did hear that Annabel Crabb launched a memorable attack on us in absentia. Unfortunately there were no “sketch writers” present to record it. But Axel Bruns at Snurb has posted a comprehensive coverage of many of the key sessions of CCi, and Terry Flew and Jason Wilson also provide some information and commentary. Over in the Big Apple, Tim Watts from Tree of Knowledge has done a sterling job reflecting on some of the sessions he attended at PDF2008.
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…’
As a follow up to my post yesterday on the Liberals’ revived climate change denialism and the the fear campaign they’re running, I thought I’d point to a couple of interesting signs of the times. Tim Watts at Tree of Knowledge thinks the Libs have taken a leaf from the Canadian Conservatives’ book - the Tories in Canada are running a campaign against Liberal opposition leader Stephane Dion’s support for an emissions trading policy. It’s all couched in terms of “new taxes” and “driving up the price of everything” by putting a… wait for it… tax on petrol. The ads, which you can preview at this woefully designed website, are said by Watts to be going up in petrol stations.
Given Nelson’s populism/desperation on the Fuel Excise Cut, no doubt we can expect to see the same from the Coalition. There will come a time when the electoral value of climate change credentials will have to go head to head with back pocket concerns and the above is not an encouraging vision of the future. Whatever the substance of the response to the Garnaut report, the Government is going to have to engage in some pretty serious ground work in preparing the public for any adverse impacts….
Another report suggests that time may have already come. Continue reading ‘I blame Canada’
We’re a bit late to this party, for a number of reasons (no doubt including modesty, but more of that later). Trevor Cook reported last month on some research conducted by Dr Colin McLeod and presented to the MEAA’s Public Affairs Convention. The answer, according to McLeod, is yes. Over at gatewatching, Jason Wilson linked to Cook’s post with this commentary:
I seem to recall that last year that we copped a bit of stick for suggesting that Larvatus Prodeo was an influential blog. This was, of course, partly premised on Axel’s issuecrawler analysis of issue networks in the Australian blogosphere. The value of this analysis was disputed at the time, by other influential bloggers.
We’re certainly not universally popular in the blogosphere as this post indicates. But to forestall the anticipated flood of loud condemnations, it’s worth pausing to examine the nature of the claim being made in McLeod’s and Axel Bruns’ research, and what sort of “influence” they’re measuring, which I’ll do over the fold. I imagine that won’t actually forefend the loud condemnations, because there are a few folks out there who are obsessed with their big swinging hits. No names, no packdrill. They can out themselves by linking here.
I’ll also take the chance to update folks on our advertising performance and site stats for May, which was something of a bumper month for both.
Continue reading ‘Is Larvatus Prodeo Australia’s most influential political blog?’
Alison Croggon, the author of the letter to the Prime Minister regarding the Bill Henson controversy, has now posted the document online for anyone to sign. It’s here.
There’s also a “wash up” and links post at her blog which is well worth a look, as are some more thoughts at Sarsaparilla.
No comments on this post, please. Comments can be made on this thread.
A lot of the discussions about web 2.0 and the media tend to conflate citizen journalism with all sorts of other things that happen in the online media spaces. Bloggers, for instance, can be citizen journalists, but by no means all bloggers are, and perhaps a lot of bloggers occasionally are but are more often than not not… One of the traditional functions of public journalism, now rarely fulfilled in Australia, is to bring together a lot of relevant information that non-experts wouldn’t be able to find readily, contextualise that information, and relate it to issues and developments which materially affect citizens. Sometimes, still, you’ll find this done well on national issues, but at the local and even state level it seems to be almost a dying (if not dead) art. That’s why the sort of work blogger Derek Barry is doing here in Brisbane is so valuable.
LPers might remember my post a while back about the redevelopment of the old flour mill next to Albion station. At Woolly Days, Derek has done a top notch job of doing exactly what I’m characterising here as public journalism with respect to that very development, which is on his patch. I think we need to see a lot more of this. It’s a space that the MSM have left almost entirely empty, and because these sort of things are not just hugely important to citizens’ amenity but also to fostering real participation and civic capacities. Derek’s post also situates what’s happening in one inner city suburb of Brisbane within its global context - which again is something in my view that big media almost never does.
If you’re in Melbourne and have any interest in transport issues, you’ll have heard of Paul Mees. He’s a one-man headline for public transport. Formerly a lawyer, he took a job lecturing in urban planning at the University of Melbourne, where he has continued his advocacy of public transport. For what it’s worth, I reckon he does get a bit over-enthusiastic sometimes (see for instance this earlier LP post). But that hardly justifies demoting him and docking his pay, because his outspokenness has allegedly hampered the university’s ability to get state government grants:
The University of Melbourne’s reputation for upholding academic freedom has been damaged by the demotion of a senior lecturer after a complaint against him by the State Government, the tertiary union says.
The Age revealed today that Paul Mees, a senior lecturer in transport planning and a prominent public transport advocate, was told his pay would be slashed after he made a strongly worded attack on the Government over transport privatisation.
I didn’t see anything about gagging uppity academics in the Melbourne Model myself…
In discussions during the long Democratic primary I’ve heard it suggested a number of times that should Obama not win the nomination, a generation of newly-engaged voters will be disillusioned and may never vote again. While this is understandable, it’s not really a sensible criticism of the process.
Should Clinton actually steal the nomination, by somehow breaking the rules, then this may be a reasonable thing to argue, although it should be clear that if this were to happen, young people’s feelings would be the least of the Democratic Party’s worries. But should she get the nomination by, you know, winning it, frankly I don’t see why some First Time Voters’ (FTV) feelings should trump that.
If I was to be cynical, I might feel it useful to point out that we’re generally talking about acknowledging the disappointment of a group of young first-time voters (mostly male), as opposed to the disappointment of a group of older women who’ve been waiting a lifetime for the chance to see the first female nominee. I guess people figure they must be used to disappointment by now.
But ignoring for a moment the politics of why the feelings of FTV - who have a lifetime of opportunity ahead of them - should be given priority over things like party rules, democracy, electability etc; I think it’s also important to consider the importance of having one’s hopes dashed early on.
One of the old canards we’ve had a look at here before is the (typically) generationalist argument that if the kidz aren’t marching in the streets, then politics must have disappeared from contemporary culture. Here, culture is a key term because “68 thought” (to Anglicise a useful if ill-intentioned phrase from conservative French philosophers - representatives of what Dominique Lecourt calls the “mediocracy”) exploded the links between politics and culture, yet arguably dissolved itself into culture. That’s a more complex story than I have time to tell here, but I wanted to have a look at some of the afterlives of the protests against the War on Iraq that happened all across the world on February 15 2003.
It’s often argued that the protests failed to “stop the war”, and thus were fruitless. This, of course, is a rather odd criterion by which to judge them, because I’m unaware of any protests which have actually succeeded in stopping wars… So the second argument we’re normally confronted with is that the protests failed to translate into an ongoing movement. That might again be the wrong yardstick - in that the “peace movement” of the 60s had its conditions of possibility in its antecedents in the anti-nuclear struggles of the Cold War era. Possibly quite wrongly, disarmament and nuclear proliferation are no longer perceived as subjects for mobilisation because 1989 and 1991 dissolved the fear of nuclear holocaust in our social imaginary, a fear sort of displaced onto “terrorism” but largely now absent.
I think you could make an argument, though, that the anti-War concerns of 2003 translated into powerful sources of electoral change - in a number of countries - Spain, Australia being two that spring immediately to mind and now America and Britain, where the bellicose regimes of Bush and Blair/Brown are now in their final stages of dissolution for reasons closely linked to the Iraq War. It would be very interesting to map the influence in all this of what we might call Open Source Protest, and here I’m not just thinking of GetUp!, MoveOn.Org and the “netroots” but the more explicitly cultural aspects of anti-war sentiment.
Recent comments
Vee, grace pettigrew, 2 tanners, Darryl Rosin, Kim, Ben Raue [...]
FDB, jo, Robert Merkel, Grammar Nazi, John Quiggin, Kim [...]
Peterc, Adrien, mitchell porter, wilful, David, wilful [...]
John Quiggin, Katz
Phil, Mark, Bingo Bango Boingo, Mark
Robert Merkel
Helen, skepticlawyer, Adrien, Adrien, Kim, skepticlawyer [...]
Nick, Wayne Thompson, Frank Calabrese, Anna Winter, Russell, Frank Calabrese [...]
Nick, Ag, Postglobalism, Mark, Kim, Adrien [...]
Alastair, Kim, patrickg, pablo, Adrien, adrian [...]
Brian, joe2, joe2, laura, Mindy, Robert Merkel [...]
NicM, Graeme, Adrien, tigtog, laura, Liam [...]