Joe Biden needs to go, and the Democrats need a Presidential nominee who can win the electorate over at this stage. I know just the candidate.
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
If the government doesn’t provide leadership, then what’s the point of having a government?
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has
already shown a tin ear when it comes to the devastating fires affecting Australia
this bushfire season. As we moved from spring to the height of the summer
bushfire season – and with bushfires already having devastated large parts of
northern New South Wales, destroying hundreds of homes, and smoke choking
cities along the east coast – he went on holidays to Hawaii, compounding his
ignorance of the requirements of high office by having his staff spend several
days lying about his being on holiday and seeming to blame his kids for his
absence at a time of national crisis; that the trip was in order to keep a promise he made to his
children.
But just as it was becoming painfully
apparent that Morrison just doesn’t get it when it came to the need for strong
leadership in the face of the unprecedented bushfire disaster, he started to
get it less.
Not a good look
Posted on 01 May 2018
by Nico Bell
• 0 Comments
Australian Greens Australian politics Feminism Media NSW Greens NSW Politics Politics Sexual abuse
Australian Greens Australian politics Feminism Media NSW Greens NSW Politics Politics Sexual abuse
I felt annoyed, kinda disgusted and above all, tired when I saw this photo of NSW Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham at a Greens trivia fundraiser. But I was just plain furious in the aftermath.
Devine and Bolt bravely fight The Real Fascists
Posted on 11 September 2017
by Nico Bell
• 0 Comments
2017 SSM Plebiscite Australia LGBTQ Rights Media Moral Panic Politics
2017 SSM Plebiscite Australia LGBTQ Rights Media Moral Panic Politics
When the far right declare anti-bigots The Real Fascists, they sound like OJ vowing to find The Real Killer.
I used to be (more) racist.
I used to be racist.
Oh, not the overt sort of racist. I didn't call people the n word or think black people were inferior or anything. In fact, I thought everyone was the same and we should all be treated equally. I was the good sort of racist! One that doesn't think they are racist at all.
When the first season of Australian Idol aired in 2003, with several of the contestants being people of colour, I thought "why are there so many non-Australians on it?"
When Aboriginal boy TJ Hickey died in 2004 when he crashed into a fence whilst fleeing from police on his bike, I thought "well, that's very sad, but if he hadn't been running away he wouldn't have died."
When I heard of high rates of disadvantage among Aboriginal people, I thought "well, that's very sad, but there are so many programs to help them".
When I first heard of white privilege, I got very indignant. I thought "how dare you, my life has been anything but privileged".
Yep, I was racist. I had a lot of learning to do.
Some of it came when I moved from Newcastle to inner Sydney. Newcastle is overwhelmingly white, and if you turned on the TV, all you saw was white faces. (This is slowly getting better - it's now far more common to see, for example, people of Asian heritage in commercials, where their being Asian isn't the point). In Sydney I could see the real face of Australia, one that isn't always white. Eventually it got to where, when folks back home spoke of playing "spot the Aussie" in Sydney, I could say "they're all Aussies, mate". And that it wasn't fair that people whose families had been here for generations had their Austrailianness questioned, when I - who wasn't even born here - did not.
A huge bunch of learning came when I enrolled in a youth work course at TAFE, with classmates from backgrounds all over the world, and the most wonderful teacher. I learned, from her and others, and visits to community centres in Redfern, of the appalling police harassment of Aboriginal people, the false accusations, the beatings, the seizure of people's legally owned property. TJ Hickey was fleeing from that, and no wonder. I thought that was all in the past. And it's people's belief that it's all in the past that allows this shocking treatment to continue.
I learned to listen to the voices of people affected by all this casual and institutional racism. That the lived reality for Aboriginal parents is pervaded by fear; fear their young children will be taken away, fear their older children will be targeted by police.
I learned that white privilege does not mean I personally, am privileged. It means that, all else being equal, my white skin has made life easier for me than it would have been otherwise. I turn on the TV and see people who look like me (well, they're thinner, but we'll leave that be). I have never been turned down for a job or a rental property because of my race. I've never had a customer refuse to be served by me because of my race. (For a better explanation of this, check out this piece, "explaining white privilege to a broke person".
I know I still have so far to go. I know I can't fully appreciate the lived experience of racism in this country. But it's still going on, appallingly. Aboriginal people are still incarcerated at astonishing rates, disadvantaged, their children removed, their life expectancy lower. And if you really believe that "we're all the same", then it's difficult to attribute this to anything other than entrenched racism. It was extremely difficult to watch the footage of Ms Du, who died in jail after the disgusting treatment by staff, who refused to believe her cries of pain; failing to seek treatment until she died from staphylococcal septicaemia and pneumonia.
And she was in jail for unpaid fines. Compare this, if you will, to Kristina Hampel, convicted of cocaine trafficking, who avoided any jail time because it would "embarrass her family", her father being a retired Supreme Court judge.
These are not isolated cases. See the brutal images that defined 2016 for Aboriginal Australians.
Let's stop pretending we're all equal. Some of us are a lot more equal than others. Yeah, I was annoyed and embarrassed when first challenged on my racism. I'm sure I still have a tonne of views that need changing. But we all have work to do here. We need to admit we have a problem, then we can fix it.
And she was in jail for unpaid fines. Compare this, if you will, to Kristina Hampel, convicted of cocaine trafficking, who avoided any jail time because it would "embarrass her family", her father being a retired Supreme Court judge.
These are not isolated cases. See the brutal images that defined 2016 for Aboriginal Australians.
Let's stop pretending we're all equal. Some of us are a lot more equal than others. Yeah, I was annoyed and embarrassed when first challenged on my racism. I'm sure I still have a tonne of views that need changing. But we all have work to do here. We need to admit we have a problem, then we can fix it.
Nothing Edgy in Opposing Safe Spaces
I read the account of Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who had to walk out of an address given at he Brisbane Writers Festival by Lionel Shriver, who mocked the concept of identity. Shriver, author of We Need To Talk About Kevin amongst other books, proudly declares herself anti-authoritarian and a scandalising provocateur; she recently appeared at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas to peddle her notion of breaking a rule a day.
Sure, we can get rid of safe spaces, just as long as we start having a long, serious conversation about covert racism, street harassment, state-funded homophobia, and other attacks on human rights, and the harm they cause, and we condemn them whenever we see them in society. And in the mean time, if these alt right types really want a place where they can stand for the rights of straight white men with other straight white men and their allies, they can always join the Liberal party.
But there's nothing dangerous about mocking safe spaces, trauma, PC culture or triggers. Everyone who who wants to appear "edgy" or show their version of "common sense", is posting on their blogs and Facebook pages, mocking safe spaces and microaggressions, and finding the whole thing hilarious. Tacos are cultural appropriation! Getting PTSD from Tumblr! I'm a straight white male, where's my safe space? (Shroedinger's shitlord: denigrates safe spaces whilst wanting one for themselves).
It's an extremely simplistic view of extremely complicated matters. As Dameyon Bunson, a Mangarayi and Torres Strait Islander man, said in his acceptance speech for the 2016 Dr Yunipingu Award for Human Rights, "“When I hear about the suicides and I see the devastation that it leads behind, somewhere in that person’s history is an act of racism. Whether it’s because they don’t have appropriate housing, or access to healthcare. We’re not talking about racism because someone won’t sit next to you on a bus. We're talking about entrenched, systemic racism that is keeping our mob sick, and it’s killing them."
Too many people still think racism means a simple dictionary definition. They think they, themselves, would have no problems sitting next to an Aboriginal person, or a person of any other colour, on the bus - and therefore they cannot possibly be racist. But racism is so much more complicated than that.
It's an extremely simplistic view of extremely complicated matters. As Dameyon Bunson, a Mangarayi and Torres Strait Islander man, said in his acceptance speech for the 2016 Dr Yunipingu Award for Human Rights, "“When I hear about the suicides and I see the devastation that it leads behind, somewhere in that person’s history is an act of racism. Whether it’s because they don’t have appropriate housing, or access to healthcare. We’re not talking about racism because someone won’t sit next to you on a bus. We're talking about entrenched, systemic racism that is keeping our mob sick, and it’s killing them."
Too many people still think racism means a simple dictionary definition. They think they, themselves, would have no problems sitting next to an Aboriginal person, or a person of any other colour, on the bus - and therefore they cannot possibly be racist. But racism is so much more complicated than that.
When you know better you do better. We know now, for example, that blaming bad behaviour on a bad childhood is not simply a matter of making excuses; experiences of abuse, neglect and trauma and early childhood fundamentally alter brain development; neural connections that regulate emotions, attachment, impulse control, are impaired. And we know racism hurts. Homophobia hurts. Harassment hurts. Being made to feel lesser for who you are hurts.
When you are secure in your identity, when you know society places a value on who you are, it is extremely hard to comprehend not feeling that way. No wonder it's easy to sneer at "identity politics", at attempts to reclaim what has been taken from you and repackaged for white consumption.
When you are secure in your identity, when you know society places a value on who you are, it is extremely hard to comprehend not feeling that way. No wonder it's easy to sneer at "identity politics", at attempts to reclaim what has been taken from you and repackaged for white consumption.
Because why would one need a safe space? What are they seeking safety from? Safe spaces are not intended to provide safety from "challenging ideas" or "alternative points of view". They are safety from hurt. From harm, from risk. Real hurt, because just toughening up on the outside shreds people to pieces on the inside. The damage may be hidden, but it's there.
People in vulnerable groups learn to automatically perform risk assessment, and it subconsciously informs our behaviour, if I get on a train at night, I'll automatically sit near another women, not near the guys who seem to have been drinking. Because I've been harassed on public transport more times than I can count, I've automatically tried to create my own safe space. If you've never been hassled, harrassed, or groped on a train, I'm sure you would think female only carriages are tokenism at best, bigotry at worst. Sexual harassment is all I have to fear. I don't have the fear that at any moment, someone could start to attack me for using my own language, wearing a symbol of my religion, or simply for my skin colour. It must be horrifying. Jesus I would like safety from that. Solange Knowles is one of many people of colour to have shared experiences of threats they face - in this case, herself and her son being pelted with garbage - simply for being in a predominantly white space. And heavens to Murgatroid, imagine being a scared and confused same sex attracted young person in the lead up to the marriage plebiscite.
So...when straight white men, or any other group in a position of privilege, demand a safe space of their very own, I say safe spaces are safety from threats, not ideas, and what threats are you seeking safety from?
Maybe instead of denigrating universities for offering safe spaces we should see them, as so often in life, as pioneers. Perhaps my perspective of this is slightly skewed because, despite being a undergraduate student myself (although I finally graduate soon!) I am not really part of university life; I can no longer pretend my fellow students are "just a few years younger"; they are a different generation, with different cultural references, different attitudes, and thanks to technology, different ways of connecting to the world - and can I just say, I think the millennials are great? By and large, they're more aware, thoughtful, plugged in to the world and respectful than my generation ever were.
I fear this mindset will have trouble taking off though. In an era of Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump, everyone from Lionel Shriver to Andrew Bolt to the University of Chicago can get themselves some publicity by misunderstanding, mocking and banning safe spaces. The ironic thing is, if you want to see someone get hurt and offended by challenging ideas, mention white privilege to an alt-right type and watch them lose their minds. See this hilarious video on white fragility in the workplace:
People in vulnerable groups learn to automatically perform risk assessment, and it subconsciously informs our behaviour, if I get on a train at night, I'll automatically sit near another women, not near the guys who seem to have been drinking. Because I've been harassed on public transport more times than I can count, I've automatically tried to create my own safe space. If you've never been hassled, harrassed, or groped on a train, I'm sure you would think female only carriages are tokenism at best, bigotry at worst. Sexual harassment is all I have to fear. I don't have the fear that at any moment, someone could start to attack me for using my own language, wearing a symbol of my religion, or simply for my skin colour. It must be horrifying. Jesus I would like safety from that. Solange Knowles is one of many people of colour to have shared experiences of threats they face - in this case, herself and her son being pelted with garbage - simply for being in a predominantly white space. And heavens to Murgatroid, imagine being a scared and confused same sex attracted young person in the lead up to the marriage plebiscite.
So...when straight white men, or any other group in a position of privilege, demand a safe space of their very own, I say safe spaces are safety from threats, not ideas, and what threats are you seeking safety from?
Maybe instead of denigrating universities for offering safe spaces we should see them, as so often in life, as pioneers. Perhaps my perspective of this is slightly skewed because, despite being a undergraduate student myself (although I finally graduate soon!) I am not really part of university life; I can no longer pretend my fellow students are "just a few years younger"; they are a different generation, with different cultural references, different attitudes, and thanks to technology, different ways of connecting to the world - and can I just say, I think the millennials are great? By and large, they're more aware, thoughtful, plugged in to the world and respectful than my generation ever were.
I fear this mindset will have trouble taking off though. In an era of Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump, everyone from Lionel Shriver to Andrew Bolt to the University of Chicago can get themselves some publicity by misunderstanding, mocking and banning safe spaces. The ironic thing is, if you want to see someone get hurt and offended by challenging ideas, mention white privilege to an alt-right type and watch them lose their minds. See this hilarious video on white fragility in the workplace:
Sure, we can get rid of safe spaces, just as long as we start having a long, serious conversation about covert racism, street harassment, state-funded homophobia, and other attacks on human rights, and the harm they cause, and we condemn them whenever we see them in society. And in the mean time, if these alt right types really want a place where they can stand for the rights of straight white men with other straight white men and their allies, they can always join the Liberal party.
Who Are The Trolls?
There's a video doing the rounds of immigration minister Scott Morrison referring to our ludicrous border protection policy, Operation Sovereign Borders, as "operation sovereign murders" before hastily correcting himself. It's telling - why would he have described it thus if he had not already done so, likely jokingly, in private conversation?
Anyway, the Australian Greens posted the video on their Facebook page; I added my two cents worth and went on my way. Until I found myself flooded with notifications. My unspectacular comment couldn't be getting that many likes from Greens supporters, I thought, and it wasn't. The notifications were replies from Greens opponents. Trolls. People who signed up to the Facebook page of a party they professed to hate and posted about how awful the Greens were, a bunch of inner city lefties who needed to get out into the real world, why didn't we want the boats stopped, we were responsible for 1200 deaths at sea, why didn't we invite asylum seekers to live at our houses...you get the drift. We've already come across opinions like these, it's no surprise that they're out there, but what I noticed in this thread was it was the same handful of people who were posting these things over and over again. One guy left scores of comments over an eight hour period; there were others not far behind. Why would they do that? What did they hope to achieve? Who are these people?
I had a look at their Facebook profiles to find out, and the pattern was obvious. They were all white (of course). All but one of them were male. None mentioned any education beyond high school, which made sense considering the semi-literate nature of their comments. Most claimed to be self-employed (unemployed possibly? One described himself as "Self Employed at CEO of my life"). For an urbanised nation like Australia, an incredibly high proportion lived in regional areas. And to judge from their photos, which featured a bunch of kids but very few apparent partners, a lot of them seemed to be single dads.
In other words, these people are about as disenfranchised and powerless as a white skin allows you to get in Australia. They're angry, and justifiably so. The pity is they're angry at all the wrong people. Malcolm X once said "If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”. These people are above all the victims of economic rationalism; it has destroyed the foundations of the blue collar Aussie male's world; secure employment, home ownership, family security, a comfortably modest future to look forward to. Yet they have been brainwashed, through a steady stream of News Ltd tabloids and talk back radio, into blaming asylum seekers, feminists, greenies, do-gooders, and people who don't smack their kids for their plight. And they turn up on election day and vote into power the party which is the biggest proponent of the policies which have left them so disempowered, so unlikely to find secure employment, their future so bleak. (Not that I'm excusing Labor in all this; it was Paul Keating who was the initial champion of the Friedman economics in Australia, selling public assets, removing tariffs and destroying industry).
They've been played like pianos, these people; deluded into thinking that a man who hacks murdered kid's phones is a benign influence on our nation, and that when he says a man who is the epitome of the inner Sydney elite is a nice Aussie family bloke like them, he's telling the truth. They've been fooled into believing that business is on their side against the evils of government and the unions, and that if there is a clash between what's best for them, ordinary Australians, and what's best for big business, Abbott will side with his pal the true Aussie bloke. I feel sorry for them, even though they hate me; I really do. They know not what they hate, the party and groups which offer alternative commentaries on the system which has so betrayed them. They think, with a Liberal government and a voice in the comments of Andrew Bolt's blog, they have some power, when they don't; they're completely disposable to the people they've put in power. That's why there will never be a revolution in Australia. The elites tell the battlers "we're on your side", and they so desperately want to believe it, they ignore the truth and focus their enormous, justifiable rage on all the wrong targets.
Update: it's now 30 hours since the thread started. All the lefties have long since abandoned it. But the same Lib trolls are still there, trading insults back and forth, an endless right wing echo chamber. Maybe they are in the end just nuts.
Anyway, the Australian Greens posted the video on their Facebook page; I added my two cents worth and went on my way. Until I found myself flooded with notifications. My unspectacular comment couldn't be getting that many likes from Greens supporters, I thought, and it wasn't. The notifications were replies from Greens opponents. Trolls. People who signed up to the Facebook page of a party they professed to hate and posted about how awful the Greens were, a bunch of inner city lefties who needed to get out into the real world, why didn't we want the boats stopped, we were responsible for 1200 deaths at sea, why didn't we invite asylum seekers to live at our houses...you get the drift. We've already come across opinions like these, it's no surprise that they're out there, but what I noticed in this thread was it was the same handful of people who were posting these things over and over again. One guy left scores of comments over an eight hour period; there were others not far behind. Why would they do that? What did they hope to achieve? Who are these people?
I had a look at their Facebook profiles to find out, and the pattern was obvious. They were all white (of course). All but one of them were male. None mentioned any education beyond high school, which made sense considering the semi-literate nature of their comments. Most claimed to be self-employed (unemployed possibly? One described himself as "Self Employed at CEO of my life"). For an urbanised nation like Australia, an incredibly high proportion lived in regional areas. And to judge from their photos, which featured a bunch of kids but very few apparent partners, a lot of them seemed to be single dads.
In other words, these people are about as disenfranchised and powerless as a white skin allows you to get in Australia. They're angry, and justifiably so. The pity is they're angry at all the wrong people. Malcolm X once said "If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”. These people are above all the victims of economic rationalism; it has destroyed the foundations of the blue collar Aussie male's world; secure employment, home ownership, family security, a comfortably modest future to look forward to. Yet they have been brainwashed, through a steady stream of News Ltd tabloids and talk back radio, into blaming asylum seekers, feminists, greenies, do-gooders, and people who don't smack their kids for their plight. And they turn up on election day and vote into power the party which is the biggest proponent of the policies which have left them so disempowered, so unlikely to find secure employment, their future so bleak. (Not that I'm excusing Labor in all this; it was Paul Keating who was the initial champion of the Friedman economics in Australia, selling public assets, removing tariffs and destroying industry).
They've been played like pianos, these people; deluded into thinking that a man who hacks murdered kid's phones is a benign influence on our nation, and that when he says a man who is the epitome of the inner Sydney elite is a nice Aussie family bloke like them, he's telling the truth. They've been fooled into believing that business is on their side against the evils of government and the unions, and that if there is a clash between what's best for them, ordinary Australians, and what's best for big business, Abbott will side with his pal the true Aussie bloke. I feel sorry for them, even though they hate me; I really do. They know not what they hate, the party and groups which offer alternative commentaries on the system which has so betrayed them. They think, with a Liberal government and a voice in the comments of Andrew Bolt's blog, they have some power, when they don't; they're completely disposable to the people they've put in power. That's why there will never be a revolution in Australia. The elites tell the battlers "we're on your side", and they so desperately want to believe it, they ignore the truth and focus their enormous, justifiable rage on all the wrong targets.
Update: it's now 30 hours since the thread started. All the lefties have long since abandoned it. But the same Lib trolls are still there, trading insults back and forth, an endless right wing echo chamber. Maybe they are in the end just nuts.
The ABC Isn't Lefty Indoctrination - This Is Lefty Indoctrination
Ah, the poor old ABC. Seems like no matter what they do, people aren't happy. From the anguish of the left that Howard era hawk Peter Reith features so prominently on political panel show The Drum, to the eternal accusations that the national broadcaster has a leftist bias. Now they're in power, Rupert Murdoch and his cronies will stop at nothing to crush the ABC, culminating in the bizarre accusation this week by that frothing love child of Andrew Bolt and a particularly ravishing cane toad, Piers Akerman, that the harmless darling of preschool programming, Peppa Pig, pushes a weird feminist agenda.
Accusations that the ABC has a secret plot to indoctrinate kids with a socialist line are nothing new. We all know Jemima from Playschool is a lesbian - she wears overalls, after all - and what about the Bananas in Pyjamas? Obviously an unemployed homosexual couple; they never get out of the pyjamas and go to work. And let's not even think about all the coming down the stairs.
Look, it's true that in Peppa Pig women have jobs. They even go to a recycling centre - run by a woman. And whilst right wingers may think that kind of thing makes Baby Jesus cry, it's not actually lefty indoctrination. Having a two year old, I see many, many hours of ABC 4 Kids, and none of it looks like lefty indoctrination to me. And I should know. Because I am trying to indoctrinate my child.
Baby G, at age two, has marched (or ridden in an ergo carrier) against coal loaders, to show support for climate action, against mandatory detention, for pay rises for community sector workers. He has listened to his parents explain, to someone queueing up to vote and grumbling what a waste of time it is, why voting is a right to be cherished. He has been to Greens party events. He has been refused permission to carry a Liberal party balloon and been dressed in a t shirt saying THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE. He has overheard hundreds of dinner table conversations about lefty issues. He's even met Bob Brown whilst still in utero (okay maybe that one doesn't count, but I will proudly tell him about it when he's old enough to know nevertheless). We will continue to explain to him why we believe locking up asylum seekers is wrong, and why same sex marriage should be legalised, and why the original inhabitants of this land should be recognised in the constitution, and that as a white male in a rich country he is in a privileged position, and he has a duty to help those less fortunate. And I suppose we have to brace for a possible adolescent rebellion where he joins an evangelical church and the Young Liberals, but I hope not. I hope he grows up with real values and an urge to take action to make the world a better place. And this is what imbuing a child with lefty values looks like. Not an animated rabbit who happens to be female, driving a truck.
If you disagree with raising a child this way, that's fine; I don't recommend it for your child. I suppose if you're a paranoid conservative, everything seems like left wing bias. But can I say to the right wing commetariat that I know what leftist indoctrination of a child looks like, because I'm doing so. And ABC children's programming isn't it.
Accusations that the ABC has a secret plot to indoctrinate kids with a socialist line are nothing new. We all know Jemima from Playschool is a lesbian - she wears overalls, after all - and what about the Bananas in Pyjamas? Obviously an unemployed homosexual couple; they never get out of the pyjamas and go to work. And let's not even think about all the coming down the stairs.
Look, it's true that in Peppa Pig women have jobs. They even go to a recycling centre - run by a woman. And whilst right wingers may think that kind of thing makes Baby Jesus cry, it's not actually lefty indoctrination. Having a two year old, I see many, many hours of ABC 4 Kids, and none of it looks like lefty indoctrination to me. And I should know. Because I am trying to indoctrinate my child.
Baby G, at age two, has marched (or ridden in an ergo carrier) against coal loaders, to show support for climate action, against mandatory detention, for pay rises for community sector workers. He has listened to his parents explain, to someone queueing up to vote and grumbling what a waste of time it is, why voting is a right to be cherished. He has been to Greens party events. He has been refused permission to carry a Liberal party balloon and been dressed in a t shirt saying THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE. He has overheard hundreds of dinner table conversations about lefty issues. He's even met Bob Brown whilst still in utero (okay maybe that one doesn't count, but I will proudly tell him about it when he's old enough to know nevertheless). We will continue to explain to him why we believe locking up asylum seekers is wrong, and why same sex marriage should be legalised, and why the original inhabitants of this land should be recognised in the constitution, and that as a white male in a rich country he is in a privileged position, and he has a duty to help those less fortunate. And I suppose we have to brace for a possible adolescent rebellion where he joins an evangelical church and the Young Liberals, but I hope not. I hope he grows up with real values and an urge to take action to make the world a better place. And this is what imbuing a child with lefty values looks like. Not an animated rabbit who happens to be female, driving a truck.
If you disagree with raising a child this way, that's fine; I don't recommend it for your child. I suppose if you're a paranoid conservative, everything seems like left wing bias. But can I say to the right wing commetariat that I know what leftist indoctrination of a child looks like, because I'm doing so. And ABC children's programming isn't it.
A user friendly ramble on neolibs and economic rationalism
Doing the household finances with DH, and realising that there was too much Christmas coming for our slender budget, we discussed how we were going to fix this. "Well", I said, "there's plenty of opportunity in this society for someone who's not afraid of a bit of hard work". And we both had a good laugh over that.
The thing is with society, we're always hearing how it's broken down. To scroll through a Facebook news feed or listen to a taxi driver, children are running out of control, young people are binge drinking, the economy is a mess, there's no respect and crime is rampant. And who or what is the culprit? Variously feminism, permissive parenting, asylum seekers, the Greens (who manage to be both irrelevant and control the country at the same time...). Well if society is going to hell in a Kardashian handbag, we never hear of blame being assigned to the real culprit - economic rationalism.
Economic rationalism - the notion that corporations and government alike must be run to maximise short term profits above all else - has destroyed society devastatingly and simply, by destroying the basic social contract - that if you work hard and are a good person, good things will happen to you. The basic premise of capitalism for the average working Joe (or Jose, or Johanna) was that by working diligently and budgeting carefully, you'd be able to make slow but steady progress up the career ladder, buy a home, raise a family, pay for school fees and holidays and sports, make a comfortable life for yourself.
In an economy dominated by economic rationalism, this is no longer the case. The idea of job security is gone; at any moment, no matter how hard you work or how well your department is doing, you can be called in to a meeting, told your position or division is no longer needed, that it's being sent offshore, replaced with a machine. And even though customers might hate it, and service levels and safety fall, and in the long term profitability of the company suffer, the efficiency boffins who made the decision won't be around to see it; short term profits will rise, and they'll be rewarded with their next contract. Meanwhile you, you poor sap, are forced to look for work in am economy that's saturated with this mindset of economic rationalism. Employees of three years service on casual contracts that can see them dismissed for any reason at all with one hour's notice. Fear and lack of certainty. Stretches of unemployment, with unemployment insurance to pay the bills if you were lucky (and whilst you were working, few insurers would have touched you if you were a casual), or Newstart Allowance if you're not.
No such thing as choosing a career in public service for safety, either. Witness the thousands of nursing and teaching graduates forced into years of casual employment because budgetary restraints prevent them from gaining the permanent roles they need to build their professional skills and personal lives. Children dying because there aren't enough community services workers to return the calls reporting signs of abuse. Schemes, departments, programs axed because they are not "efficient", human services be damned.
And it affects the housing market too. In the drive to maximise profit, investors have so saturated the housing market that is almost impossible for first home buyers to join the market, especially if employed as a casual or on contract, preventing them from getting a home loan. So we huge numbers of people in insecure employment and insecure housing. No wonder they are angry.
They choose the wrong targets for their rage. It's fair to say that in a rationalised economy, opportunities for working class, more poorly educated men are particularly limited; the men know this, and there's a branch of the men's rights movement dedicated to blaming feminism for this. But it's economic rationalism. We get mad at the offshore call centre employees with semi-coherent English for taking Australian jobs, but it's an Australian CEO who made the decision to cut a huge chunk of their Australian workers. We blame bleeding heart do-gooders who won't let us smack our kids for kids running wild, when it is still legal to smack, and as many parents do as ever, and kids aren't idiots and pick up on their parents' anxieties and they are scared and worried too and scared and worried kids are more likely to act out.
Of course the people who stand to profit from this ethos-of-profit above all else don't want you to think about it, don't want you to question it. So they use their newspapers and TV hosts to whip up fear of asylum seekers, creating the impression that boat people are stealing jobs; they demonise the Greens for questioning the profit motive and not taking donations from corporations; they have all but destroyed the union movement, knowing that workers united was their greatest threat; they respond to any questioning of the doctrine of unrestrained capitalism by proclaiming "socialism!", socialism being such a slur at to shut down all questioning immediately.
It wasn't always thus. In the early days of the Australian Liberal Party under Menzies - much idealised by modern conservatives - social as well as economic liberals were welcome in the party; nation building was seen as a lofty goal, tax rates were high and no one wet themselves with fear that high taxes would cause everyone to quit work and go on the dole. If only it had remained thus. But economic rationalism took over - championed by Labor under Hawke and Keating, as well as the Liberals - and now we have timid, parsimonious governments that have left us with third rate, run down infrastructure. Can you imagine the Sydney Opera House, for example, being built under economic rationalism? It would never, ever happen. Editorials in the Daily Telegraph and callers to 2GB would bristle with anger. "Why should I have to pay for some inner city elites to watch opera?" We'd have the Opera Hut and the Sydney Harbour Punt. People are surprised that 44 years after the moon landing, we've never attempted anything so ambitious again and couldn't even go back to the moon now if we wanted. I'm not. Economic rationalism first came in in the early 1970s, right as the space program would have been making progress. Space exploration is insanely expensive, and sure it might have huge long term benefits for society, but where's the instant profit? Of course it was a bust.
As it is, the new Coalition government have quickly moved to curtail the building of the national broadband network, forcing the nation to run a 21st Century economy on a decayed century old copper phone network. "Who is going to pay for it?", they ask their critics.
I'd like to know who is going to pay for all that we lose. We've lost the very foundations western society was built on - hard work, family, achievement - with all that entails. And yet we are still being sold a lie, that the economic rationalist brand of capitalism is fair, and rewards hard work, and if you fall behind you only have yourself to blame. Dissent, be it Occupy Wall Street Protesters or columns in the Guardian - is quickly shut down, dismissed, vilified as the views of a lunatic fringe who want us all to live in communal mud huts. Well I don't (the thought of living communally breaks me out in a cold sweat). I'd just like to know that if I get a job, the company can't dismiss me as long as I'm working hard and the division is turning a profit. I'd like to see corporations and mining companies put up or shut up when they say higher taxes will force them to leave Australia (the corporations are already leaving...and maybe Gina Rineheart plans to bury her bauxite sin another country so she can mine it there). I'd like to see restraints on destroying farmland that has been in families for generations, and sacred to the Indigenous inhabitants for milennia more, to create mines with a working life of seven years. I'd like to not be faced with a choice of waiting years for surgery or paying thousands to get it done right away, when I need the surgery before I can work to earn that money. I'd like to see all this without giving up home WiFi, and I'm sure there is a way as an economy and a society we can do it. It may not be perfect but anything has to be better than the lie we are being fed now.
The thing is with society, we're always hearing how it's broken down. To scroll through a Facebook news feed or listen to a taxi driver, children are running out of control, young people are binge drinking, the economy is a mess, there's no respect and crime is rampant. And who or what is the culprit? Variously feminism, permissive parenting, asylum seekers, the Greens (who manage to be both irrelevant and control the country at the same time...). Well if society is going to hell in a Kardashian handbag, we never hear of blame being assigned to the real culprit - economic rationalism.
Economic rationalism - the notion that corporations and government alike must be run to maximise short term profits above all else - has destroyed society devastatingly and simply, by destroying the basic social contract - that if you work hard and are a good person, good things will happen to you. The basic premise of capitalism for the average working Joe (or Jose, or Johanna) was that by working diligently and budgeting carefully, you'd be able to make slow but steady progress up the career ladder, buy a home, raise a family, pay for school fees and holidays and sports, make a comfortable life for yourself.
In an economy dominated by economic rationalism, this is no longer the case. The idea of job security is gone; at any moment, no matter how hard you work or how well your department is doing, you can be called in to a meeting, told your position or division is no longer needed, that it's being sent offshore, replaced with a machine. And even though customers might hate it, and service levels and safety fall, and in the long term profitability of the company suffer, the efficiency boffins who made the decision won't be around to see it; short term profits will rise, and they'll be rewarded with their next contract. Meanwhile you, you poor sap, are forced to look for work in am economy that's saturated with this mindset of economic rationalism. Employees of three years service on casual contracts that can see them dismissed for any reason at all with one hour's notice. Fear and lack of certainty. Stretches of unemployment, with unemployment insurance to pay the bills if you were lucky (and whilst you were working, few insurers would have touched you if you were a casual), or Newstart Allowance if you're not.
No such thing as choosing a career in public service for safety, either. Witness the thousands of nursing and teaching graduates forced into years of casual employment because budgetary restraints prevent them from gaining the permanent roles they need to build their professional skills and personal lives. Children dying because there aren't enough community services workers to return the calls reporting signs of abuse. Schemes, departments, programs axed because they are not "efficient", human services be damned.
And it affects the housing market too. In the drive to maximise profit, investors have so saturated the housing market that is almost impossible for first home buyers to join the market, especially if employed as a casual or on contract, preventing them from getting a home loan. So we huge numbers of people in insecure employment and insecure housing. No wonder they are angry.
They choose the wrong targets for their rage. It's fair to say that in a rationalised economy, opportunities for working class, more poorly educated men are particularly limited; the men know this, and there's a branch of the men's rights movement dedicated to blaming feminism for this. But it's economic rationalism. We get mad at the offshore call centre employees with semi-coherent English for taking Australian jobs, but it's an Australian CEO who made the decision to cut a huge chunk of their Australian workers. We blame bleeding heart do-gooders who won't let us smack our kids for kids running wild, when it is still legal to smack, and as many parents do as ever, and kids aren't idiots and pick up on their parents' anxieties and they are scared and worried too and scared and worried kids are more likely to act out.
Of course the people who stand to profit from this ethos-of-profit above all else don't want you to think about it, don't want you to question it. So they use their newspapers and TV hosts to whip up fear of asylum seekers, creating the impression that boat people are stealing jobs; they demonise the Greens for questioning the profit motive and not taking donations from corporations; they have all but destroyed the union movement, knowing that workers united was their greatest threat; they respond to any questioning of the doctrine of unrestrained capitalism by proclaiming "socialism!", socialism being such a slur at to shut down all questioning immediately.
It wasn't always thus. In the early days of the Australian Liberal Party under Menzies - much idealised by modern conservatives - social as well as economic liberals were welcome in the party; nation building was seen as a lofty goal, tax rates were high and no one wet themselves with fear that high taxes would cause everyone to quit work and go on the dole. If only it had remained thus. But economic rationalism took over - championed by Labor under Hawke and Keating, as well as the Liberals - and now we have timid, parsimonious governments that have left us with third rate, run down infrastructure. Can you imagine the Sydney Opera House, for example, being built under economic rationalism? It would never, ever happen. Editorials in the Daily Telegraph and callers to 2GB would bristle with anger. "Why should I have to pay for some inner city elites to watch opera?" We'd have the Opera Hut and the Sydney Harbour Punt. People are surprised that 44 years after the moon landing, we've never attempted anything so ambitious again and couldn't even go back to the moon now if we wanted. I'm not. Economic rationalism first came in in the early 1970s, right as the space program would have been making progress. Space exploration is insanely expensive, and sure it might have huge long term benefits for society, but where's the instant profit? Of course it was a bust.
As it is, the new Coalition government have quickly moved to curtail the building of the national broadband network, forcing the nation to run a 21st Century economy on a decayed century old copper phone network. "Who is going to pay for it?", they ask their critics.
I'd like to know who is going to pay for all that we lose. We've lost the very foundations western society was built on - hard work, family, achievement - with all that entails. And yet we are still being sold a lie, that the economic rationalist brand of capitalism is fair, and rewards hard work, and if you fall behind you only have yourself to blame. Dissent, be it Occupy Wall Street Protesters or columns in the Guardian - is quickly shut down, dismissed, vilified as the views of a lunatic fringe who want us all to live in communal mud huts. Well I don't (the thought of living communally breaks me out in a cold sweat). I'd just like to know that if I get a job, the company can't dismiss me as long as I'm working hard and the division is turning a profit. I'd like to see corporations and mining companies put up or shut up when they say higher taxes will force them to leave Australia (the corporations are already leaving...and maybe Gina Rineheart plans to bury her bauxite sin another country so she can mine it there). I'd like to see restraints on destroying farmland that has been in families for generations, and sacred to the Indigenous inhabitants for milennia more, to create mines with a working life of seven years. I'd like to not be faced with a choice of waiting years for surgery or paying thousands to get it done right away, when I need the surgery before I can work to earn that money. I'd like to see all this without giving up home WiFi, and I'm sure there is a way as an economy and a society we can do it. It may not be perfect but anything has to be better than the lie we are being fed now.
Fires, Politics and The Right Time To Discuss Climate Change
Terrible, horrible, very sad week as monstrous bushfires swept eastern NSW. The worst damage occurred in the Blue Mountains - hundreds of homes lost there, it seems, the emotional damage incalculable - and there were also dreadful fires ringing Newcastle. We're in a heavily built up area of inner Newcastle with no bushfire danger, but only a short distance to the north and south fires were threatening places I've known most of my life - Nords Wharf where I lived as a child for a few months; Caves Beach, our go-to beach in high school; at one stage fire came close to the fuel tanks at Newcastle airport. The sky was thick with smoke, the sun a creepy red, and we all spent a restless, worried night following Twitter for news of friends who were being evacuated.
And the one thought we all had was "my God, if the bushfires are like this in October, what the hell are they going to be like by February?". For we don't have fires like this in NSW in October, halfway through spring. We simply haven't had the horrific combination of a warm dry winter, high winds and 30 degree plus temperatures that have seen these kinds of fires before. Everyone thought grimly, this is climate change, up close and personal, this is what it does and we can't deny it any more. Australia's only Greens federal lower house MP and my second sexiest politician (after the delightful and effervescent Helen Coonan, of course), Adam Bandt, posted this quite reasonable observation on Twitter:
And brought a slew of criticism from the opportunistic right, declaring that it was "opportunistic" to politicise the fires this way. Mr Bandt has been in politics long enough to foresee such a reaction, so it was a gutsy thing to say. The results of climate change were all around us, yet newly minted PM Tony Abbott is planning to make us the only nation to repeal carbon pricing, because along with 6% of the population and 3% of climate scientists, he believes climate change is "crap". So Abbott's plan to remove us from international efforts to combat climate change is putting us at risk. Blame the Greens for politicising the fires? I blame those who have made climate change a political issue in the first place. It shouldn't be. The future of the planet is at stake here, but the right would rather score points to differentiate themselves from the left, than take steps to secure a future for their grandchildren (this, from the side of politics who say they represent "family values").
When is the right time to discuss the causes of the fires, anyway? How long after a tragic road accident before it's okay to discuss the state of the road? Climate change deniers dismiss the most terrible climate change predictions as "scaremongering", then when the most terrible things happen, they say now is not the time to talk about it. They'd rather wait till months down the track when everyone is lulled back into a sense f security. Or they blame anything else - including The Greens for banning backburning. Here is the Greens official policy on hazard reduction, taken from the NSW Greens website:
[S]trategically planned hazard reduction, including controlled burning, where and when climatic conditions allow it to be done safely and where it is consistent with maintaining the ecosystem.
If anyone says Greens policy is to ban backburning, they are lying. We have always had bush fires in Australia. We always will. But this is a horrific new reality in Australia - 30 degree plus temperatures for six or more months a year is not something we've seen before in eastern NSW. And this will lead to more, more intense and destructive fires. To pretend otherwise is dangerous nonsense, and the hysterical reaction of climate change deniers when fires and climate change are linked brings to mind the gun lobby inv the U.S. following the all too frequent gun massacres there. Obfuscation, denial, counter claim - but soul searching, thought, responsibility - never.
I'm proud of Adam Bandt for saying what he said, proud to be Greens (more now than ever after seeing new Labor leader Bill Shorten join the "now is not the time to discuss this" chorus). We need to talk about this now and I'm proud to be on the right side of this battle.
And the one thought we all had was "my God, if the bushfires are like this in October, what the hell are they going to be like by February?". For we don't have fires like this in NSW in October, halfway through spring. We simply haven't had the horrific combination of a warm dry winter, high winds and 30 degree plus temperatures that have seen these kinds of fires before. Everyone thought grimly, this is climate change, up close and personal, this is what it does and we can't deny it any more. Australia's only Greens federal lower house MP and my second sexiest politician (after the delightful and effervescent Helen Coonan, of course), Adam Bandt, posted this quite reasonable observation on Twitter:
And brought a slew of criticism from the opportunistic right, declaring that it was "opportunistic" to politicise the fires this way. Mr Bandt has been in politics long enough to foresee such a reaction, so it was a gutsy thing to say. The results of climate change were all around us, yet newly minted PM Tony Abbott is planning to make us the only nation to repeal carbon pricing, because along with 6% of the population and 3% of climate scientists, he believes climate change is "crap". So Abbott's plan to remove us from international efforts to combat climate change is putting us at risk. Blame the Greens for politicising the fires? I blame those who have made climate change a political issue in the first place. It shouldn't be. The future of the planet is at stake here, but the right would rather score points to differentiate themselves from the left, than take steps to secure a future for their grandchildren (this, from the side of politics who say they represent "family values").
When is the right time to discuss the causes of the fires, anyway? How long after a tragic road accident before it's okay to discuss the state of the road? Climate change deniers dismiss the most terrible climate change predictions as "scaremongering", then when the most terrible things happen, they say now is not the time to talk about it. They'd rather wait till months down the track when everyone is lulled back into a sense f security. Or they blame anything else - including The Greens for banning backburning. Here is the Greens official policy on hazard reduction, taken from the NSW Greens website:
[S]trategically planned hazard reduction, including controlled burning, where and when climatic conditions allow it to be done safely and where it is consistent with maintaining the ecosystem.
If anyone says Greens policy is to ban backburning, they are lying. We have always had bush fires in Australia. We always will. But this is a horrific new reality in Australia - 30 degree plus temperatures for six or more months a year is not something we've seen before in eastern NSW. And this will lead to more, more intense and destructive fires. To pretend otherwise is dangerous nonsense, and the hysterical reaction of climate change deniers when fires and climate change are linked brings to mind the gun lobby inv the U.S. following the all too frequent gun massacres there. Obfuscation, denial, counter claim - but soul searching, thought, responsibility - never.
I'm proud of Adam Bandt for saying what he said, proud to be Greens (more now than ever after seeing new Labor leader Bill Shorten join the "now is not the time to discuss this" chorus). We need to talk about this now and I'm proud to be on the right side of this battle.
