The Best Reason to Celebrate Halloween

Letter to the Herald, reprinted verbatim:

Australia is rich with its own unique culture, customs and traditions. Why introduce Halloween, which has strong roots in paganism, witchcraft and devil worship? Our Christian heritage teaches us to have no part with the occult.

Parents, do you want your innocent children involved in dangerous evil tricks, deception and Satanism?

I'm satisfied. American or not (and it's not), Halloween has all the right enemies. Trick-or-treaters, go forth and multiply. There are gold coins at my house if you're in the neighbourhood.

Lefties Really Are Latte-Sippers

Proof, as if we needed it, that coffee is the most political drink. Buy a coffee and cast your bean into your plastic cannister of choice. It's the apex of consumerist democracy.

I'm not sure I approve of the one-coffee poll tax, but my on-the-ground (Pitt Street Mall) survey suggests that inner-city coffee drinkers are voting for Labor in a landslide. The website poll is somewhat closer, so the Libs must still have caffeine-friendly supporters who are willing to admit it in public somewhere. Howard's outer-suburb battlers, perhaps. And where are all these Democrats coming from? Aren't they supposed to be dead in the water?

Never one to pass up an opportunity to have my say, I had an iced chocolate (with cream) and voted. I now feel sick but highly enfranchised.

Dealing with Lunatics: A Libertarian Perspective

Much has been made of the Greens' refusal to respond to the Australian Christian Lobby's survey demanding to know what the parties think on a range of Christian-type issues. Naturally, I'm behind the Greens all the way. The questions are highly leading, like this:

There is community concern that society is becoming desensitised to sexually explicit and extremely violent material as film-makers test the boundaries of the interpretation of classification guidelines. Unfortunately, the current National Classification Code and Classification Guidelines allow too much discretion to the classifiers ... Would your government direct a review of the Code and Guidelines, and the Classification Act, with the intent of limiting the discretion of the classifiers on such matters?

When the ACL asks questions like that, they're not so much engaging the parties in a discussion as advancing a particular, and in my view quite scary, agenda. So the Greens had every right to tell the ACL to go to hell, and were possibly even correct to do so. Apart from anything else, I am thoroughly sick of the Rovian idea that Australian Senate candidates need to cater to some kind of monolithic Christian Vote. Leaving sectarian tensions behind was a good thing in Australian political life.

But the Liberty and Democracy Party, just as opinionated as the Greens and equally antagonistic to the ACL's agenda, took a different tack, and I think their responses are worth noting. I'm not a libertarian myself – I like gun laws, for instance, and I don't think government foreign aid is immoral. And as for the LDP's apparently straighfaced assertion that relaxing building development zoning laws is an adequate public policy approach to solving homelessness... well, frankly, that's a little nutty.

But on the whole I've always felt that Australian politics could do with a bit more reflexive libertarianism, if only to defend against the strains of wowserism that tend to affect both major parties as they clamber over each other for the Working Families/Laura Norder/lock-up-the-reffos vote. Any counterweight to the kind of overweening authoritarianism we saw during APEC has got to be a healthy thing. We need people to step up and say: This is crazy.

Besides, it can be quite funny. Witness how the LDP responded to a question about, essentially, their willingness to pander to Christians:

ACL: What are your main priorities if elected for the next term of government? What can you offer to the Christian constituency in particular?

LDP:
- Cut tax.
- Defend individual freedom of choice.
- Reduce the size of government.

Now, I am interested in neither cutting taxes nor reducing the size of government as an abstract concept, but you've gotta love their determination not to get sidetracked by the silliness of the Christian Constituency lead. They explain their reasoning in the full response:

The Liberty & Democracy Party doesn't try to offer special deals to any specific constituency, including the Christian constituency. We believe the government should treat everybody as individuals and leave them to make their own decisions to the maximum degree possible.

Fair enough.

Question after question, the LDP busily promote their own platform, rejecting silly premises left, right and centre, and seem to have quite a good time doing it. Like here:

Q: The Australia Institute and family groups have raised concerns about the premature sexualisation of children through marketing, advertising, music videos and a range of other media. What actions would you take to protect childhood?

A: The Australia Institute is a socialist organisation. Raising a child is the job of parents, not the government.

And does the LDP support the creation of a special visa to help persecuted Christians enter Australia as refugees? "No", says the LDP sternly,

persecuted Christians could apply as refugees, just like any other persecuted group. The LDP supports more immigration, which would allow a greater number of persecuted people to enter Australia.

Take that, you zany theocrats.

By the way, all the responses to the ACL's questionnaire are worth looking at, although probably not in the way the ACL themselves intend. One thing's for sure, James Baker is a climate-change-denying, homophobic white nationalist who needs to be kept out of the Senate at all costs. Queenslanders take note.

Note to Wayne Swan

Re: The ongoing Great Debate II: Attack of the Treasurers

The slogan "fair and balanced" has already been well and truly discredited. Please stop referring to your industrial relations agenda as such.

Thanks!

A concerned voter

There Is No Pain, You Are Receding...

Steve Fielding is shocked and appalled that Labor is trading preferences with those devil-children in the Greens. The main problem with this, apparently, is the Greens' immoral and damaging drug policy, which Fielding likes to characterise as "handing out free heroin" or somesuch.

Free heroin for all! It's such a sexy policy, so perfectly radical-left, that I'm surprised nobody but Fielding has picked up on it. Unfortunately for those of us who like our heroin free and our Family First politicians truthful, it's a bit of a strawman. I've been over the Greens' drug policy with a fine-tooth comb and it doesn't appear that Green control of the Senate will get me free drugs. In fact, it all sounds quite sensible. It starts with "The Australian Greens do not support the legalisation of currently illegal drugs" and lists among its principles:

- Imprisonment for personal use of illicit drugs, when not associated with other crimes, is not an appropriate solution to drug dependence.
- Information and education programs should be available to enable informed debate about the effects of all drugs, including prescription, non-prescription, legal and illegal drugs.
- Policy and programs should be adopted that are evidence-based and subject to continuous evaluation.

Evidence-based policy! Get out of here with your drug-fueled radicalism! Not content with this heresy, the Greens then go on to outline their drug policy in quite a bit of detail: bans on political donations from the tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical industries; education and counselling instead of criminal penalties for users; legalising and regulating medical marijuana; and making drug substitution treatments available on the PBS (also known as "free heroin for all").

So that's the hippy junkie approach to drug policy. What do Family First think?

In the spirit of evidence-based inquiry, I checked the Family First drug policy, and frankly it's a little weird. It's not nearly as comprehensive as the Greens', limiting itself to three actions, but it nevertheless finds room to mention "alternate therapies such as Naltrexone implants" and pin its hopes on an anti-drugs campaign involving celebrities. High-profile people such as sportspeople and singers? Sportspeople like Andrew Johns? Ben Cousins? Singers like Nick Cave? Michael Hutchence, perhaps? I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but one would hope the party has a fall-back, just in case the celebs don't quite cut it. But apart from jailing everybody who goes near something resembling a drug, it doesn't seem they have much of a plan B.

On a separate issue altogether, Family First have quite a bit of nerve chiding Labor for trading preferences with the Greens. The Greens have a substantial, entrenched role in Australian politics - at the moment they're polling around 7% of the primary vote. Family First are puny upstarts by comparison. And it's not like they're above a little preference-trading themselves, far from it: Fielding received preferences from all over the political spectrum in 2004, and he's yet to rule out preference-trading with Pauline Hanson's party. This despite the fact that Hanson is an unhinged bigot, whereas Family First, for all their quirks, are quite compassionate when it comes to their policy on asylum-seekers.

I fail to see how Labor trading preferences with the Greens represents any more of a lapse in integrity than Fielding's dealings with Hanson. But given that Family First are currently polling around 1.5%, they need all the preference trading they can get if they want to impose their petrol-tax-cutting, TV-censoring program on the rest of us. Could it be that Fielding's latest tantrum is motivated more by existential anxiety than by steadfast principle?

Keeping the Bastards Honest. No, Really.

The good folk over at GetUp have developed a nifty new tool - PromiseWatch, an election-promise wiki in which Ordinary Strayans (for which substitute internet activists) can log and look up election promises categorised by policy area and political party. Go on, release your inner election-campaign vigilante!*

Obviously, anything we can do to make politicians accountable for what they say during an election campaign has got to be a healthy thing. But I worry that it might be too little, too late. The credibility gap seems to have grown to a point where playing fast and loose with the truth is accepted, because people think "politicians all lie". Hence the electorate's inability to muster much fury at the revelations of Howard government dishonesty, time and time again. In an ideal world, the children overboard affair would be enough to bring down a government. In Australian political life, too many people don't notice, not enough people get disgusted, the rancorous divide between Howard's battlers and the bleeding heart brigade grows ever deeper, and everyone is poorer for the experience. And a dangerous precedent is set: lie all you want. If people don't find out, it could win you an election, and if they do, they will merely shrug.

So people who want to see more honesty in political life are fighting against the low expectations of the Australian public, cultivated through many years of government mendacity. They are also fighting another, less localised bias: people believe what they want to. The children overboard photos got so much traction because they appeared to confirm what a lot of people were kind of hoping: these queue-jumpers aren't good people, they are amoral opportunists, and our ethical duty to them is adjusted accordingly. Grant them asylum? We should be shooting the bastards.

Likewise, anyone with a passing acquaintance with economics knew in 2004 that Howard could not guarantee that he would keep interest rates low. Some of us - the Reserve Bank, Ross Gittins, various newspaper editorials, and a good chunk of Labor voters - were saying it all along, loudly, but people were not listening. When you're mortgaged to the eyeballs, it's comforting when someone powerful says it's going to be all right. So the battlers voted for Howard on an empty promise, and only now is Howard's recklessness coming back to haunt him. Which looks like a belated victory for truth over lies, except that it took five interest rate rises to drum the message in, when it shouldn't have taken any. Howard never controlled interest rates. People accusing Howard of breaking his promise now are missing the point: the promise was never tenable in the first place.

With this track record, my thinking is there ought to be at least a few promises this time around that are already obvious furphies. Which are they? First correct response gets a new highway over the Great Dividing Range.

************

*Disclaimer: my friend skipped pub trivia last week to code furiously for this, so it had better get some mileage.

Fringe Watch

From the SMH:

Pauline Hanson... is not faring well in her attempt to recapture attention. Standing under the banner of Pauline's United Australia Party, one poll has her getting just 7.5 per cent support, somewhat short of the 14.3 per cent required to win a Queensland Senate seat.

Good.

Meanwhile some of the men Hanson left behind are marching stoically onwards. The state president of One Nation NSW, Jim Cassidy, said the party would field three Senate candidates and eight lower house candidates.

Without Hanson as a figurehead, it has been difficult for One Nation to get publicity, but in recent weeks the party has tackled the issue of non-indigenous bananas devastating the indigenous crop, and opposed John Howard's Aboriginal referendum proposal on the grounds that it would divide Australia into indigenous and non-indigenous people.

When all else fails, turn to banana populism. An excellent jibe from the Herald, too.

Kyoto Dreaming

Interesting opinion piece about the Kyoto Protocol by Paul Kelly in today's Australian. His broad political point is one I agree with fully: Howard's stubborn position on Kyoto has damaged him needlessly. When attacked on the matter, Howard likes to remind us that Australia has met the targets Kyoto would've imposed on us. Which is true, and brings us to the question: why, then, can we not ratify it, if only as a symbolic gesture? The idea that ratifying Kyoto would have turned Australia into an economic basket case is patently ridiculous. Our targets under Kyoto were not cumbersome; we have met them anyway; and refusing to ratify the protocol merely makes us look selfish, and provides a sliver of an excuse for the US to go on justifying its own Kyoto-stonewalling.

And domestically, Howard's stance makes no sense whatsoever: it's unpopular, and has allowed Kevin Rudd to paint himself as the climate-change messiah of prime ministerial candidates. Malcolm Turnbull, for one, is said to be furious with Howard's pointless intransigence on the subject, given the delicate environmental sensibilities of the voters in his marginal electorate. Kelly is magnificently clear in pointing out Howard's folly:

Consider Howard's position. Should he ratify a protocol that is vastly popular and whose terms, as they apply to Australia, he is determined to honour and uphold? And his answer: absolutely not.

Typically, Kelly does not let Rudd off lightly, either. Labor's policy on climate change is somewhat amorphous at the moment. Rudd loves the big-picture stuff – sign Kyoto! 60% reduction by 2050! – but is shakier on the finer detail, like interim targets, or the exact form a national emissions trading scheme would take.

And then there's Rudd's claims that he would fully embrace a new protocol that set binding targets for developing countries. Fine, so would we all, but the fact is that the developing world is currently resisting such binding targets, pointing out, with some justification, that it was the Western countries that made the mess in the first place - shouldn't they be responsible for cleaning it up? It's going to take more than Australian acquiescence to shift them on the matter, and meantime Rudd needs a clear policy on how he intends to proceed if binding targets for the developing world continue as a sticking point.

But I still think Kelly is being too hard on Rudd over his answer to the question: "what will signing Kyoto achieve?" Here's Rudd's answer, which Kelly says is "vague and elusive":

it will show we are serious and want to help forge a global solution

So what should Rudd have said? What is the benefit of ratifying Kyoto, Mr Kelly?

Kyoto has a universal standing as a goodwill gesture. It has the perfect image of wanting a better, cleaner world, with its opponents clinging to an older, polluted world. The power of such images cannot be denied.

Showing we want to help forge a global solution versus a goodwill gesture. Seems like a distinction without a difference to me.

The Real Contest: Worm vs the Libs

That didn't take long. It seems the election campaign, never destined to be an entirely high-minded affair, has already come down with a severe case of the sillies. The substantive issues discussed in Sunday's debate have now been well and truly overshadowed - even internationally - by Wormgate. Censorship or breach of agreement? Liberal Party/Glenn Milne conspiracy? What does it all mean? Could it be that the Worm is ... Union?

It would be one thing if Wormgate and commentary thereon were confined to the understimulated bloggers among us. But it's not, not by a long shot. I understand why the journalists are playing along - the subeditors get a simple binary choice between "Can of Worms" and "The Worm Turns" - but people with actual responsibilities are joining in the fun. Worm favourite Kevin Rudd prudently refused to enter the fray, contenting himself with a jokey "I have not interviewed the worm. I'll leave debate about the worm to others."

But the Health Minister, Tony Abbott, has no such qualms. Loyal to a fault, and incensed at the way the Worm treated his beloved boss, Abbott has being doing his bit to advance the anti-worm agenda. He's not saying the Worm is union, exactly, but there's definitely something suspicious going on:

To me, it is pretty clear that that was an audience that had already made up its mind who it was in favour of, and I wonder how that audience was selected. I don't think the worm was a fair reflection.

Get back to work!

Meanwhile, Howard biographer Peter van Onselen is calling the debate for Howard, although just barely. Fine; but what are we to make of this rationale?

Kevin Rudd ... underperformed. He wants Australians to throw out a largely successful government, whatever disagreements people might have with aspects of their policies.

I beg your pardon. Those "disagreements" are not trivial quibbles. They are exactly why so many of us - not just Rudd - want to throw out Howard's government. Are we to admire the mere fact of Howard's 11 years in government despite believing that much of what he did during that time was immoral and damaging?

That's really what the Libs and their most ardent supporters would have us do. Which, incidentally, is one reason they're still performing so poorly in the polls - people are suddenly sick of "vote for us, you always have before!" Perhaps van Onselen's time would be better employed devising a new strategy for Howard, rather than lamenting the "perception" that Rudd won the debate.

Rudd versus Howard: The Debate Reconsidered

So that was an interesting experience. It was good this morning having a record of my thought process as I went back and read all the coverage. More thoughts on the debate:

Kevin Rudd kicks

He was sharp, he was mostly positive, he was occasionally jovial, he had a good grasp of finer policy detail, and he didn't allow himself to be derailed by any of Howard's sniping. Most surprisingly, he sounded downright left-wing at times, and the sky didn't fall or anything. I was nervous before the debate, because it seemed like a good chance for some of the Rudd gloss to come off, if he wasn't fully prepared. But Rudd did his homework, like any good schoolboy debater. I am both relieved and impressed.

John Howard has moved left out of desperation

If it turns out Kevin Rudd doesn't get himself elected PM this time around, he will at least have succeeded in forcing Howard to drop the ideological neocon routine in a last-ditch attempt to save his behind. Reconciliation? A national emissions trading scheme? Workers' rights? Recognising the Pakistani Muslim victims of a suicide bombing? Can anyone imagine this happening three years ago? Granted, Rudd spent quite a bit of time defending his credentials as an "economic conservative", but it's striking how much of the policy agenda was Labor's, and how much softer Howard's rhetoric is this time around, his tired-but-forceful anti-unionism notwithstanding.

Paul Kelly is tough

Jeez man, Kevin Rudd is not the one to have fallen desperately behind on climate change. Lighten the hell up! Kevin said he will have his interim targets by June. That's downright rushed for him. Besides, Howard only came around to accepting climate change as an important policy issue this year.

Peter Hartcher is thoughtful

We knew that already. He seemed a bit nervous, but his questions were probably the best-considered, for my money.

Taking on the Worm is one of the worst things Howard could do

Seriously, when the incumbent conservative government manages to get the Nine Network - of all channels! - offside, you have to wonder where their heads are at. The Worm clearly displayed Rudd favouritism, but cutting off Channel Nine's feed was just spiteful. And letting Ray Martin grandstand about free speech is not the kind of distraction Howard needs right now.

There are lots of people with girl-crushes on Annabel Crabb

See Larvatus Prodeo's live-blog

Australians can debate like grownups, occasionally

Okay, there was probably more macroeconomic policy than anyone really needed, but here are some things that never got a mention last night: abortion, gay people, God, the French, stem cell research, clashes of civilisations, torture, bombing Iran. The death penalty came up, but only in the context of how best to make Australia's feelings on it known overseas. There was no Australian flag in sight. The jostling over the OECD report on education funding was the silliest it got, and even that was more like a quibble between two feuding academics than a truly personal stoush. Sometimes I am very grateful to live here.