‘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.’
Kevin Andrews embarrasses us again.
Archive for the 'Race' Category
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.
Will the serious crime charges against the Jena 6 be dropped to something more proportionate to what actually took place?
Will the grassroots movement in Egypt against FGM make headway against entrenched traditional attitudes?
Will the mass demonstrations in Myanmar end as badly as the last mass demonstrations did in 1988?
When President Bush vetoes both the House and the Senate resolutions overturning aspects of the Global Gag Rule policy, how many “pro-lifers” will either know or care that this policy directly increases the number of abortions that occur worldwide as contraceptive services also go unfunded?
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 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.
Of most interest, probably, are the findings about the PM’s Indigenous state of emergency and trade union leaders - for the latter, there is commentary from Andrew Norton and Trevor Cormack. Here’s Christian Kerr again:
“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.
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.
In 2004, Howard ran an election campaign based on the question: “Who do you trust?� The majority, it seems, trusted Howard more than they did Latham, although I think most people agree that this was a trust in their economic, rather than moral, qualities.
But in the wake of the National Emergency plan, I think it’s worth considering the importance of trusting our leaders to be truthful and honest, to always consider the well-being of the community foremost, and to base their decisions on rational, informed assessment; in other words, to trust them to not to base decisions of national importance on things like polling, cynicism or favours for mates.
In some of the initial debate, there’s a sense that some people’s views are dismissed because “you always hated Howard�. And yes, it’s true that this is not usually the best basis on which to make a judgement. However, on some level, there is way too much evidence, research, inside knowledge and personal experience for every single one of us to make a completely rational and informed assessment. That’s why we vote for governments, as opposed to having plebiscites on every single issue. We vote for people whose judgement we trust.
For reference, here are some key transcripts relating to the State of Emergency announcement:
The Brisvegas Queer Film Festival is on at the moment. Aside from getting to be in the same spot as just about every single lesbian and queer woman in Brisbane, there are also obviously the delights associated with the re-opening of the Brisbane Powerhouse after its sad absence for six months when the Spark Bar and the performance spaces were being remodelled, rejigged and redecorated. Anyway, that’s by the by.
I went to see Nina’s Heavenly Delights tonight. Being appropriately delighted I retired to a local Indian restaurant - the film features as one of its main plot points the entry of The New Taj (Nina’s family’s Glasgow restaurant) in a Curry Cook Off on Korma TV - very reminiscent of Iron Chef - and you just couldn’t watch so much wonderfully spicy food preparation without wanting to savour some actual spice! The film is just your average Glasgow Bollywood crossover lesbian flick. (Heh.) As formulaic as can be, but it’s fun, and cute, and funny. I was interested to see what people on IMDB and critics had to say about it, not having heard of the film before I saw the BQFF program. I thought it’d be fun when I read the program blurb about it, and I’d see anything starring Laura Fraser.
That subsequent resort to the intertubes is where the story gets interesting. (Does anyone else read online reviews after they’ve seen a film?)
Continue reading ‘Film about Glasgow not as dark as Mike Leigh style flick: shock!’
In 1968, the Australian anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner had some things to say about Indigenous history in this country whose relevance I think has endured:
Stanner described this silence as ‘a cult of forgetfulness’ or ‘disremembering’ that has been ‘practised on a national scale’. Rejecting the possibility that ‘inattention on such a scale [could] be explained by absentmindedness’, he claimed that it was ‘a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape’. And, as well as there being a silence, there had been a silencing: ‘the great Australian silence’, Stanner argued, ‘reigns [over] the other side of a story’, an Aboriginal history, the telling of which, he recognised, ‘would have to be a world…away from the conventional histories of the coming and development of British civilisation’. As such, he chastised historians for ‘having given the Aborigines no place in our past except that of “a melancholy footnote”‘.
Stanner was describing this elision and this excision, this deliberate turning away from not just the Indigenous past but also the Indigenous present, a year after the 1967 referendum.
DeviousDiva, a pseudonymous British expat living and blogging in Greece, has been harassed by Greek nationalist bloggers, threatening to out her, for writing a series on the maltreatment of the Roma in Athens. Thankfully the major culprit blog has now decided to withdraw DD’s private details from the posts criticising her coverage of the issue, but the issue has drawn out more discussion of pseudonymity/anonymity/standing-by-your-words etc yet again.
Sheelzebub wrote on it at Pinko Feminist Hellcat and Pandagon, and there’s an amusing sidejourney into charges of hypocrisy from Vox Day well covered by Chris Clarke (also Pandagon).
Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise concludes:
So, thanks, racists, for calling attention to the plight of the Roma in Athens–something you were so scared the world would find out about that you tried to silence the young mother who blew the whistle.
Yep. DD was a small voice that gained some small attention. Now she’s gained a lot of attention from both traditional and new media. Will the international attention stick on the issue of the Roma? Maybe, maybe not. But thousands of people online now know about it who didn’t before because racists made threats. Jolly good own goal there, chaps.
crossposted at Hoyden About Town
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