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.
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’
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 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:
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.
Please visit Jim’s blog Rage and Enthusiasm for a fully hyperlinked version should you wish to refer to any of the sources.
Immigration Minister, Kevin Andrews, is simply not to be trusted on serious matters relating to human and legal rights. Indeed, the collective effort of politicians and public officers in the Haneef case was to deny Dr Haneef his rights as an Australian resident. And the Australian public has every right to be cynical about the performance of all the federal players in this case.
It’s a while since we’ve discussed this, and as an issue it’s largely being pushed to the sidelines by our very own presidential-style election campaign. However, Mal Brough getting heckled by the indigenous community in Darwin seems as good a hook as any to hang some general discussion on.
Perhaps it was describing their visiting relatives as “blow-ins” who cause social problems that made them so hostile.
Another part of that story that raised my eyebrows:
Mr Brough also announced $6 million from the Aboriginal Benefit Account to fund a crocodile farming business and a business development zone at the remote community of Ramingining in East Arnhem Land.
“This is about creating real jobs and real wealth from the Northern Territory’s natural assets,” he said.
“It is part of a new way of thinking that can allow remote Aboriginal communities to make a real contribution to the Northern Territory economy.”
Because my first question certainly is: who is going to own this crocodile farm and business zone?
It seems like naked asset grabbing to take money from the Aboriginal Benefit Account unless the local indigenous communities are going to own it.
‘Not too many black refugees thanks, especially if they’re Muslims and need trauma counselling. We’ve heard stories at the corner shop about their unAustralian ways and how they don’t fit in.’
There’s a lot of stuff going on about which I wish I knew enough to substantively blog, but in the meantime will have to wait until I can read someone with more specialist knowledge.
Addendum: since I drafted this last night, the situation in Myanmar has moved from a mooted crackdown to an actual crackdown, and the first fatality/fatalities have been reported.
I’ve long thought that the procreation fetish beloved of Duumvir $weetie the Subprime Minister had a certain resonance with older narratives of “breed ye women of Australia, lest we commit race suicide!”… So I’d like to point to a very interesting post from Arleeshar at stoush, occasioned by Family First’s new “policy” of a ten grand uberbonus for a third kiddie (should they be renamed “Family Third?). Arleeshar traces the history of such payments in Australia:
Many people may be unaware that Australia in fact introduced an earlier form of maternity payment in 1912, which was abolished only in 1978. The payment spanned and then outlived a time when the Eugenics movement had achieved considerable popularity, pre-Hitler, and the policy was originally explicitly framed as a ‘keep Australia white’ initiative.
The maternity payment was for a ‘viable’ child - a live birth - and was payable only to women who were not ‘asiatics’ or ‘aboriginal natives’ of Australia.
She traces the evolution of the policy over time, and the contemporary resonances of its resurrection:
The current baby bonus isn’t really that much different to its predecessor. In the interests of compassion, and as a nod to the notion that it is ‘instead of’ maternity leave, the baby bonus still applies to stillborn children. However, it is unashamedly about demographics, in the “one for the nation� style so famously espoused by our treasurer - not tied to work or aimed at supporting women’s equality.
It is still about race; values; but it has shifted the debate to new and more subtle ground, away from undesirable ‘race’ and toward desirable and undesirable ‘culture’. It espouses the idea that it is far more ‘valuable’ to achieve population stability through birth rather than immigration.
I had intended to do what I did after the first week of the Indigenous emergency, and put up a comprehensive links post, but time got away from me a little, and there is a lot less to link to now. To its credit in this instance, The Australian continues to report on what’s occurring in the NT, and to cover (some of) the debate. But for most news outlets, in the absence of a political angle, it’s just too difficult, and perhaps too depressing, to report on a daily basis on Indigenous problems and proposed solutions to them. That’s a great pity, as the government was right that these issues ought to be at the forefront of media and public attention, no matter what you think of their motivation. It’s good to see bloggers continuing to write on them - in particular Andrew Bartlett, lauredhel at Hoyden and Gary Sauer-Thompson at his various blogs. I’d be grateful if commenters wanted to publish any links here, and thanks to steve in comments on another post for a link to a very interesting Brisbane Times article on the basis for Noel Pearson’s own welfare experiments, a topic I’m pursuing, as I said last week, for an article I’m writing for New Matilda (which has also been exemplary in its coverage). In the meantime, I wanted to give people the heads up to the fact that Four Corners is discussing the Cape York experience tonight, and the space to discuss the programme, and anything else relevant about the ongoing issues.
I expect we might hear some Newspoll numbers tonight, so that’s polls plural. The Galaxy poll [pdf] is out today, and it shows Labor recovering 2 points on the 2PP and 2 on primaries, for a 55-45 lead after preferences. As Christian Kerr observes:
Galaxy have learned their lesson after the controversy surrounding their questions last month. Their latest efforts are absolutely plain vanilla.
“Do you think Prime Minister John Howard is addressing problems in Aboriginal communities because of the upcoming federal election or because he really cares about the problem?” Galaxy have asked.
We appear to be a cynical bunch. 58% of respondents said it was because of the federal election. The PM might have regained control of the agenda, but Galaxy suggests that we’re unimpressed.
Lauredhel at Hoyden has a great links post up, and I’m also going to post some links supplied by some of our commenters in the various threads we’ve had going since Howard announced his NT plan. Go round to Hoyden to read more about the reaction from the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the ACT Human Rights Commissioner, and importantly from Rex Wild QC, one of the authors of the NT report which sparked the declaration of a state of emergency.
It’s astonishing that people can be denounced so vociferously for being cynical about the Federal Government’s motivations, when you read a week after the announcement was made that Indigenous employment programmes in WA dealing with the welfare of children, domestic violence and alcholism are being closed down due to Commonwealth funding cuts this weekend. Alan Carpenter also points out this is a “work to welfare” transition orchestrated by the Federal government. In this instance, it seems to be one policy conflicting with the aims of another - a sign of Federal incompetence, failure to understand “whole of government” approaches, and general confusion, complacency and bloody mindedness.
Evidently, as pointed out by derrida derrider, I was in a much too forgiving mood on Thursday night when I mused that Howard might have been snookered into providing funding for serious long terms solutions rather than short term PR fixes (and how soon the media gets tired of highlighting what’s actually going on in the Territory is an important variable in how this all plays out).
It’s possible, I think, that Federal Ministers will rue the day they orchestrated such a heightened state of interest in their state of emergency. Although media coverage has, for most of the last few days, bordered on the supine, it was heartening to see Kerry O’Brien put Mal Brough under real pressure not just to justify the Federal Government’s blame game of “inaction on the part of the territory” but also to explain what the measures actually involve. Brough appeared barely able to explain what actions would actually be taken, and his retreat into partisan talking points was embarrassing. It’s becoming much more evident that a real attempt to prevent further child abuse (Brough’s stated aim) will involve serious commitment of funds and resources and Howard has promised whatever it takes. It’s also becoming more evident that the claims that there are no successful programs countering child abuse are false, and indeed that’s now being admitted sotte voce by some Ministers. If media attention continues to focus on the on the ground implementation of the plan, and if the pressure for a real not a cosmetic fix is kept up, then perhaps there will be a positive outcome for Indigenous Australians. If Howard has boxed himself into a commitment to working towards ending child sexual abuse, which I think everyone agrees is urgent and desirable, perhaps media and parliamentary scrutiny will successfully hold him to account. In particular, I’d like to see serious questions asked if Parliament is recalled about the alleged necessity of abrogating property rights and compulsory leases. We’ll see. But I suspect that they just won’t get away, now that we’ve moved from debate to scrutiny of the implementation, with a PR strategy sketched out on the back of an envelope.
Noel Pearson has described opposition - and constructive criticism - of the Indigenous state of emergency as “a form of madness”. Yet, as pointed out here yesterday, there is in fact no one arguing that there should not be an urgent response to the crisis - just that, as is becoming increasingly evident, what’s being proposed is an ill thought out quick fix (compared to the recommendations of Wild/Anderson which I support), for which the necessary “infrastructure and personnel elements simply don’t exist”, as tigtog says. The coalition of Indigenous and community organisations who’ve written [pdf] to Mal Brough warn that long term and properly resourced measures addressing unemployment, education and housing are essential to removing the causes of child abuse.
There are two other important angles to the response to the “state of emergency”. The first is that those with actual expertise in child protection are being ignored. There are a couple of comments about that here at LP, which I’d urge you to read, and we’d be interested in hearing more from people with frontline experience and expertise. One of the experts who’s been critical is Professor Dorothy Scott from UniSa, a consultant to the NT report authors.
Scott goes on to make another point, which I think is equally important.
One of the aspects of the Howard emergency that most deserves some dispassionate analysis is the way in which it’s been presented as something “above politics”. Aside from the obvious angle of disabling and smearing criticism and critics, which has had the practical effect of completely obscuring the actual recommendations of the NT Wild/Anderson report (whose properly resourced implementation with an appropriate sense of urgency I would continue to support as a rational and effective response to the dire problems which are evident), it begs the question - what are our political institutions actually for?
The classic instance of a “state of emergency” in the Westminster system is Lloyd George’s formation of a Coalition government during the Great War excluding the followers of the party leader who had actually won the 1910 election, H. H. Asquith. This “national government” was followed by a “Khaki election” in 1918, comprehensively won by the effectively non-party PM in large part through the issuing of “coupons” by the Tory whips to preferred candidates from all parliamentary parties. The implication was that the behaviour of MPs who’d continued in opposition was in effect treasonous. A precedent was set which would later be revived in the Great Depression and the Second World War.
Howard’s emergency is, of course, not on the scale of the Great War (though the bizarre comparison with Hurricane Katrina deserves its own analysis). But it’s worth noting that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, during the Second World War, was careful to insist that political opposition to his administration was legitimate, and that the values of democracy the US was fighting for included the right to freedom of political speech and the maturity to conduct election campaigning during a national emergency.
There are two ways I’d like to approach this whole question.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
I think I’ve figured out why Planet Janet is seeming increasingly irrelevant. Consider (as Paul Kelly would say) her latest column:
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