Freedom '08

The Herald has an exclusive today about the New South Wales Government's plan to enact emergency laws during next years World Youth Day conference. Leaving aside the religious aspect, I have to say I'm getting a little sick of having my civil liberties periodically restricted just because I have the hide to live in a temperate, good-looking city. I'm all for encouraging tourism, but not if that entails John Watkins acting like Pervez Musharraf every time a big event comes to town. Emergency laws? Excuse me, but an appearance by a leading religious figure does not constitute an emergency.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of all this is the muted response laws like this seem to generate. Oh, sure, people grumble, in much the same way people grumble about their local council cracking down on overhanging branches. But the potential for abuse - and the precedent set by the government enacting new, authoritarian legislation whenever they feel like it - doesn't really seem to hit home.

I'm not trying to pull a Naomi Wolf here. I don't really think Supreme Leader Watkins is about to start sending in the army every time someone stages a protest, and heaven knows Iemma has neither the drive nor the competence to do so. But people are getting so accustomed to having this or that event invoked as a pretext for upping the city's Laura Norder quotient, one begins to suspect that such an action would barely raise an eyebrow. It's sad, and it's dangerous. Remember these images? They're out of place in any democracy, let alone one with a supposedly proud anti-authoritarian tradition.

Of course, the NSW Opposition, many of whom would be quite happy as members of Generalissimo Franco's goon squad, didn't object to the laws per se, at least not as the bill was being debated (to their credit, the Legislative Review Committee did raise serious objections). Instead, the Libs' Jonathan O'Dea took the opportunity to provide a few helpful suggestions of his own:

In light of the recent APEC experience, I particularly urge the Government to consider better ways of dealing with the ABC Chaser team. The boys are quick and imaginative in their endeavours to amuse television audiences. Asking them to sign a post-APEC good behaviour bond would only set their minds in overdrive. I therefore suggest that the New South Wales Government provide funding to get them out of Australia for the week. How about sending them to the Kalahari Desert to investigate humour in 45 degrees heat or to Russia for lessons on how to behave solemnly? Perhaps they could be sent to China and India, as Premier Iemma was before the recent Federal election to save Kevin Rudd from further embarrassment.

Quite. The Chaser provided the only moment of sanity of the entire APEC saga. It cannot be allowed to happen again.

Doris Lessing's War on Everything

So Doris Lessing has used her Nobel Prize acceptance speech to hit out at the internet. The internet! What is behind this? Could it be a simple case of viewing one lolcat too many? Or was Doris, like so many of us, just annoyed to have found herself spending an hour idly clicking around Wikipedia, touring through the pages on salamander and mercantilism and Bobby Darin only to lose track of her original purpose?


Oh no. Lessing is worried that the internet is leading us to our ruin, specifically by dumbing us down. We are turning into a society of ignorant, barely literate, jaded automatons. People specialise in one thing - computers, most gratingly - and don't stray from their field of expertise. Nobody reads anymore. Young people know nothing, and also quite probably chew with their mouths open, although Lessing doesn't find time to mention it.

Could she be right? I think, if anything, I read more - and more widely - than I would if the internet had not been invented. Here is a snapshot of browser windows I had open when I chanced upon the Lessing article. (Please note it was a quiet-ish day at work.)


1. The Sydney Morning Herald - "Net dumbs us down"


Even without the internet, I would almost certainly read a print newspaper every day. I always used to. But equally certainly, I would read different stuff. The article on Lessing would probably never have reached me, hidden as it was in the Tech section, which is generally of no interest to me, and gets thrown out every Saturday, when I do buy the print Herald. In fact, in eradicating the physical barriers between interest sections, the online version probably leads to more branching out of one's interest area, not less. What's more, when I buy the print Herald, I read it on the bus, which takes away time I would normally spend... reading a book.


On the other hand, when I have the paper in hard copy, I always end up doing the cryptic crossword, which I don't like online. It's too hard to mark up, and too easy to cheat.


2. The Guardian, A Hunger for Books


The full text of Lessing's speech, which I googled on reading the article to ensure she wasn't misquoted or taken out of context by the Herald. Checking the context seemed like the fair thing to do. One hardly needs to point out... oh, go on then: this would not have been possible without the internet.


3. The New Yorker, None of the Above, by Malcolm Gladwell


A neat summary of a debate about the statistical IQ gap between races and its implications, with particular reference to the Flynn Effect. I have been following this issue with some interest, although without any scientific expertise. See, it all started when Slate published a series of articles by William Saletan in which he argued that the racial IQ gap was genetic and immutable. This did the rounds of the blogs, including Matthew Yglesias, where I was alerted to it, and naturally sparked a great number of fiery arguments, particularly when it turned out that Saletan's reportage was informed largely by fruity white supremacists. (Duh.)


Being kind of a tosser, I can easily imagine that I would spend perfectly good caipirinha money on the print New Yorker in the absence of an online version. So I would've read Gladwell's article. But I would have had no context outside what the article provides - I wouldn't have read Saletan, nor would I have any idea of the uproar his work had caused. I could have guessed, but I wouldn't have experienced it myself. Also: it was reading Gladwell's blog, as well as the Freakonomics blog, that convinced me to buy his books "The Tipping Point" and "Blink". Do we still think the internet discourages reading?


4. 150 UK pounds in Euros


This is actually for work. I am the office converter of pounds to Euro, miles to kilometres, etc. I keep trying to tell my colleagues about Google Conversions, but they insist that I "do it quicker". This is quite possibly the result of belonging to a generation that has never had cause to doubt that the answer is at our fingertips. If something unfamiliar - a place, a person - comes on the news, someone immediately goes to the computer (that would be the spare computer, beside the television) to find out about it.


How can this mean we know less? We might retain less arcana, because we know we can always retrieve it later. But I even doubt that part, because the internet lends itself to broadening the search, so that each piece of trivia eventually gets a context, something to link it to all the other stuff we've found out about. There's no better way to remember something than to relate it to what you already know. I read that online somewhere.


5. The Economist, Defeat for Hugo Chávez


Like the New Yorker, the Economist is something I can imagine reading in print... or half-reading in print, and then leaving, crumpled, under the passenger seat of my car along with the half-read, crumpled New Yorker. (This is slightly more than just an educated guess. I hereby apologise to the old-growth forests of Tasmania that have died for my sins.) The refined classical liberals at the Economist take a dim view of Mr Chávez, but that's okay, because John Pilger thinks he's God's gift to poor people, and I saw Pilger's film too. It's all about balance.


6. Programme for International Student Assessment, 2006 results


I was led to this through an Economist article outlining the educational attainment of various countries. I wanted to check how Australia measured up. Not too badly, it turns out - our achievement band contains some reassuringly Scandinavian countries, as well as some Asian New Economies. Our performance in reading is slipping, though. Must be all that internet surfing.


7. Crikey: Brendan Nelson: Rat, coward or liar... you decide, Guy Rundle


Crikey is irreverent, contrarian, openly non-objective, and obsessed with the insiders' world of politics and media. It publishes contributions from Gerard Henderson and Robert Manne and GetUp and David Flint. It gets down and dirty with polling-by-electorate data and publishes anonymous "Tips and Rumours" from deep within Canberra's bowels. Its readers - who can and do comment on each story - are sometimes morons and often astoundingly well-informed. In short, Crikey epitomises much of the internet's effect on political discourse. Would we be better off without it? Like hell we would. Consider the Lie Matrix in the Rundle article I linked, showing the rather unpalatable choice of interpretations one has regarding Brendan Nelson's backflip over "never voting Liberal":

You don't get that in Doris Lessing books.

* * * * * * * * * * *

It's probably too easy to take an 88-year-old to task over her views of the internet. It's certainly easy to wax nostalgic about books, and I share her wish that more people would read more literature. But this notion of a past populated by erudite book-readers is at best overly romantic, and saying the internet is dumbing people down is erring dangerously close to grumpy-old-lady knee jerking. People still read. People still read books. As for the internet, it is what you make it: there's a lot of crap out there, but there's a lot of useful things, too. We need to spend less time bitching about Yoof These Days and more time teaching people the difference.

Rich Businesswoman

I was googling for other examples of rich businesswomen married to successful pollies, and, well:

Women's Business

Much is being made of the fact that the Deputy Prime Minister is suddenly OMG a woman and that her opposite number, a Tory for chrissake, is also of the female persuasion. Kevin Rudd is also rather proud of the fact that there are four women in the Labor cabinet - Gillard, Jenny Macklin, Nicola Roxon and Penny Wong - which tops the female count of even Howard's most feminine cabinet.

It's a brave new world. One would expect nothing less from a man who, apropos his wife's dodgy industrial relations practices, proudly asserted that his wife was no appendage of her husband. Nosir, although she did subsequently sell her multi-million dollar business in deference to her husband's political career, apparently content to spend the next God knows how long obsessing over curtains à la her Lodge predecessor. Oh, well. I suppose if manchester doesn't prove fulfilling she can always fill the time planning her Hillary manoeuvre.

Nor, when you think about it, is four women in a cabinet of twenty much to write home about. Forty years since the Second Wave, and we're only at 20%? Germaine Greer will be outraged, if she ever snaps out of her current Oz-dissing, young-boy-admiring daze.

I'd like to think we've progressed beyond the stage where a leader has to explicitly state that he didn't choose women for his cabinet just for the hell of it. But the fact is, however much we may snigger at the Coalition MPs who've suddenly discovered the joys of family life after all these years, politics is damned unfriendly to those who want any kind of balance in life. The hours are ridiculous, the job stressful, the travel requirements strenuous. I think that, more than, say, a lack of ambition or qualifications on the part of women, or sexism on the part of men, is the reason for the current gender imbalance in politics. Until the paradigm shifts to a point where women and men actually do share the business of child-rearing equally, women are going to be underrepresented in Cabinet, in the outer ministry, in Parliament.

Brendan NELSON?

I guess they thought Malcolm Turnbull's policy agenda was just far too likely to be well-received for the modern Liberal Party to take on board. Turnbull has all these crazy ideas about republics and reconciliation and signing Kyoto and failing to hate on brown people. It's Just Not On. Not what liberalism's About. Just ask Miranda Devine. I'm not saying Nelson is a right-wing maniac - I don't think he is - but his election as Liberal leader, with the support of the Liberal right faction, is a clear sign that the Liberals have no intention of learning from their mistakes.

As a matter of fact, the Libs have gone insane. Contrary to current conservative wishful thinking, this election was about more than a repudiation of John Howard, the man; witness Turnbull's results in Wentworth and Petro Georgiou's in Kooyong versus the debacle in, say, Bennelong or Lindsay. Hard right doesn't work; moderate liberalism does. It's what people want. But to admit as much would be to take on much of Rudd's centrist agenda, thus, in the view of some Libs, depriving the party of its raison d'etre. I get that, but turning right just for the sake of opposition isn't going to get them elected. It'll just turn them into a bigger version of the NSW Libs. And then there's Tony Abbott's dark warning that he might challenge for the leadership at a later date. For a Howard man, he doesn't seem to place much stock in leadership stability.

Serious questions about the future of the opposition aside, though, this existential crisis they're going through is highly entertaining, wets vs. dries vs. crazy uglies; my personal favourite moment was when Tony Abbott declared (with, one pictures, a hand over his heart): "I always regarded myself as the honorary president of the John Howard fan club." Aww. True believers can be so cute sometimes.

Oh Happy Day

Democracy works. It really does. I have never experienced such a jubilant mood, post-election: our Don's Party, nervous at the outset, quickly gave way to a mess of cheering, dancing, heckling, bloodthirsty speculation over the Liberal Party leadership, referring to one another as "comrade", and drinking penalties every time one's local member was spotted on the TV (much to the distress of the lone Joe Hockey constituent in the room; it seems the man cannot bear to be offscreen for more than a few seconds at a time).

Some thoughts:

- Maxine McKew mightn't be a seasoned politician, but she has star quality by the bucketload. Charming, articulate, natural. Her infectious speech on Saturday was the best moment of the evening. Guy Rundle summed it up in Crikey: "If the real deal happens, and John Howard is replaced by a FEMALE, LABOR, ABC JOURNALIST, how could you not see, in her sparkling eyes, a reflection of the light on the hill?"

- By contrast, we got bored and turned the music back up in the middle of Rudd's acceptance speech. He might be Third Way, but Tony Blair he ain't.

- If I say I'm glad Turnbull survived the bloodbath, do I get stripped of my True Believer credentials? I just think we need all the socially moderate Libs we can get right now, so we can forget that Howard's culture war years ever happened. The last thing this country needs is a hard-right, God-bothering opposition.

- For the same reason, Tony Abbott cannot be allowed within 500 metres of the Liberal leadership. He'll rewrite the party charter to include excerpts from the Book of Revelations and run on a platform of banning condom sales and instituting Compulsory Mass for the Dole.

- Quote from a "senior Liberal", post-Bennelong debacle: "f-cking Chinese". Dearie me: have they learned nothing?

- The Queensland electorate of Leichhardt topped off a highly entertaining six weeks by posting the biggest swing to Labor in the country. A bravura performance all round. But the title of most entertaining seat this time around must go to Wentworth. It had everything: silvertail businessman Malcolm Turnbull versus human rights lawyer George Newhouse, the political retaliation of an embittered ex, anti-Zionist campaign managers, the accipurpose revelation that Turnbull had sworn at the PM over Kyoto, an illegitimate candidacy and subsequent suppression of vital documents, the "girl talk"/political interference intrigue of Caroline Overington versus Danielle Ecuyer, and the soap operatic culmination on polling day, when Overington actually slapped Newhouse. Ah, the eastern suburbs.

- The talk is all about the Liberal implosion, but a secondary question - whither the Nats? - is equally salient considering Saturday's primary vote.

- One gets the impression Alan Ramsey has been waiting a long time to file this piece.

- Ditto Paul Keating.

- Between the seat losses and the leadership quitting, we have quite the star-studded death list: Howard, Costello, Vaile, Brough… hate to sound greedy, but couldn't we have squeezed Danna Vale in somewhere?

- Interesting times: the balance of power in the Senate will likely be shared among independent South Australian Nick Xenophon, Family First's Steve Fielding, and his mortal enemy, the Greens. God only knows what kind of under-the-table legislative deals we'll see this term.

- I know you're probably as worried as I was about how David "The Australian people are too smart to throw Howard out" Flint was handling the electoral heartbreak. Worry no more: apparently he survived.

- The young NSW quasi-fascist Alex Hawke is now a federal MP. He's an unashamed critic of the small-l liberal faction of his party and is said to have been instrumental in the downfall of John Brogden as NSW opposition leader. Be very afraid.

- Primary vote in Lindsay, home of the leaflet scandal: 38% Liberal, 52% Labor. Combined elected representatives of Pauline Hanson's party, One Nation, and the Muslim-bashing Christian Democrats: 0. We're getting there.

- In what may be an early sign that Rudd's prime ministership will, indeed, restore some compassion to the electorate, I actually feel a little sorry for Peter Costello right now. But I'm sure it will pass.

Holy Crap

Er, that would be the DAILY Telegraph.

Ala Akba

Apart from anything else, a leaflet taking on the voice of Islamic activists is rendered somewhat less convincing when the signature rallying cry is misspelled. Upon reflection, it was probably a deliberate style choice, but that doesn't make it any less dumb.

Amusingly, Howard's in damage control mode, condemning the leaflets as racist, which is just a bit rich for my delicate sensibilities at this hour of the morning. After all, the man is not above encouraging bigoted fringe groups himself when he gets a spare moment, and both his policies and his past rhetoric leave him open to the charge of race-baiting. It's just the execution of the leaflets that was a bit off. He's condemning the blackface while upholding Jim Crow.

This episode has made front-page news out of a long-existing fact: there are some scary folk in the hard right faction of the Libs. Sometimes I wonder how they can coexist with a man of evident conscience like Petro Georgiou. Fine, it's a big tent, but surely there are limits? Is a middle-class upbringing and a heartfelt devotion to cutting taxes really enough to keep these people together?

I'm not entirely sure it is. If the Libs lose office, the post-election fallout is going to be vairy interesting. Stay tuned!

Race for the Bottom

For those of us who like to make a big deal out of our triennial accountability moments, the Senate group voting tickets are available online. Read. Research. Vote below the line. Truly, it's exhilirating.

I know roughly how my preferences are going to go, but I'm yet to work out the final details, in particular, who will win the coveted spot at the very bottom of my ballot paper. In the race:

The Christian Democratic Party

Fred Nile's disciples want a moratorium on "Islamic immigration", citing a highly scientific Daily Telegraph online poll which claims 99% community support for the initiative. Then, hilariously, they claim in the very next paragraph of their leaflet that "the Christian Democratic Party stands for religious freedom in Australia and worldwide". Religious freedom as long as you're, you know, Christian.

To me personally, this is all the more injurious because one of their candidates, Paul Green, is from Nowra. Indeed, he's the Deputy Mayor of the Shoalhaven City Council, where he no doubt introduces a certain godly je ne sais quoi to the quotidian business of bypasses, garbage collection, and development approvals.

Also, there are grammatical errors in their leaflets.

The Citizens' Electoral Council

These people are beyond bizarre. Allow me to demonstrate:



The CEC are affiliated with the anti-Semitic LaRouche Organisation. They have also likened the scientific consensus on global warming to "Hitler-Nazi race science". I'd explain the link between global warming and eugenics, but I think you have to be a conspiracy theorist to understand it. Sorry, folks.

Pauline Hanson's United Australia Party

Evidently think "Pauline: You Know Where She Stands" is a good thing. Well, the rest of Australia might've forgotten how much damage Pauline did in her pre-Dancing days, but I haven't. Onto the list she goes!

In a touching concession to its likely visitor stream, her website asks rhetorically "Did you know that the Senate can say 'No' and overrule the government?" Actually, I did, in common with most of my primary-educated counterparts, but thanks for asking.

So there you have it. Pauline Hanson: #1 representative for people without a goddamn clue.

One Nation

It's just not the same without Pauline, is it? Still, according to One Nation's own website, we should vote for them because that way... they can do exactly the same stuff Howard's been doing without them anyway! Well, the race-baiting stuff, anyway. As calls to action go, it seems somewhat lacking to my ear, but then I am probably not One Nation's target audience.

Clicking on "The Principles and Objectives of One Nation" will get you a 404 Not Found, which I thought was vaguely amusing.

The Nats

Just cos I'm mean, and it would be funny.

******

With so many genuinely bad-crazy candidates to choose from, it looks like the garden-variety or single-issue right wingers - Family First, the Libs, the Shooters, et al - are not even in the running. (Neither are the Nats, if I'm being completely honest.) It's really a pity when they work so hard at being objectionable. But hey, there's always next election.

Avendanos versus Andrews

Another distressing story from the dark corners of the immigration department. After everything - the wrongful detention of Cornelia Rau, the deportation of Vivian Alvarez, the impassive response to hunger strikes by Baxter detainees, the cancellation of Mohammed Haneef's visa on 'character' grounds, the seven-year limbo of the stateless asylum seeker Ahmed Al-Kateb, and so on, and so on - it should come as no surprise to anyone to discover yet another instance of merciless bureaucratic stonewalling. But it angers nonetheless. This family has lived here for 23 years. Their son, Rainiel, an Australian resident, is a 19-year-old with an intellectual disability. Because of the refusal of immigration ministers - first Vanstone, then Andrews - to intervene on behalf of the Avendanos, Rainiel faces the choice of moving to the Philippines with his family, or staying in his country of birth without them.

This is profoundly wrong. Whatever interest Australia has in securing its borders, however strong a 'message' it wants to send out to would-be illegal immigrants, there is no justification for such cavalier treatment of any human being – let alone a family that has resided here peacefully for almost as long as I have been alive.

Kevin Andrews hasn't had long as Minister for Immigration, but in his short tenure he has proven himself quite Amanda Vanstone's equal as far as embarrassing Immigration portfolio incidents are concerned. My friends and I sometimes play a sort of parlour game: which Howard cabinet member would you get rid of, given the chance? I've always been an Abbott girl myself, and Abbott's performance of the last few weeks hasn’t done a great deal to dissuade me. But if I were playing the game with a completely open mind, minister for minister, Andrews is as good a reason as any to vote the Howard government out on Saturday. Unfortunately, his is a safe Liberal seat - but an Andrews on the Opposition benches is infinitely preferable to Andrews as Immigration Minister.