More than you bargained for, McCain?

The McCain camp’s audacity of pinching Obama’s “Change” concept might at a glance appear laughable, an indication of poor imagination and a confirmation that the Republican Party think the American people are just as stupid and ignorant as the rest of the world does. However, a closer look reveals that a promise of change from the McCain/Palin duo isn’t that funny after all.

 

As Gary Kamiya writes on Salon.com, Sarah Palin’s entry to the presidential election campaign brought more than the vessel for gender McCain was hoping for. Although Palin’s ‘hockey mum’-image reportedly convinced a few white middleclass wives and mothers, the talk of the nation has, according to Kamiya, been centred around Palin’s bedroom appeal. “McCain’s Palin Pinup Ploy was a masterstroke — no pun intended.”, Kamiya wittingly observes. Under normal circumstances this is where this text would have turned on Kamiya. But due the last month’s development in the American presidential campaign, statements like this one is more likely to provoke a hesitant smile than a Wollstonecraft quote. I have little respect for anyone taking the vice-precedency of America and in extension, democracy, so lightly as Palin, with all her inexperience, did when accepting the role as running mate. Indeed, one can only imagine how democratic the American people will think the choice was, would McCain kick the bucket. ‘There’s your president folks, the Pinup vessel of gender that the old guy needed to secure the western states.’

 

Serving in the U.S. Senate on and off since 1982, the word ‘change’ does not really have that much punch to it coming from John McCain. One must wonder though, how serious this threat is coming from a ‘hockey mum’ with rifle in hand. Changes Sarah Palin style might not be what Obama, the American people, or even John McCain implied.

 

Sarah Palin’s ‘Changes-to-make-when-in-Washington’-list is likely to look a little something like this:

 

• Dig in to the Bush administrations slack approach to the abortion issue and criminalise once and for all.

 

• Immediately end any costly environmental projects in America since man made global warming is a hoax.

 

• Make a federal issue of the right to bear firearm with Texas as model. (I.e. federally legalise shooting and killing of trespassers on private property.)

 

• Make ‘Abstinence only’ sexual education compulsory.

 

• Halt the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, since this war is God’s plan and one in which we should participate for as long as it takes to convert the Muslims to Christianity.

 

A tip for the Obama camp, as the gloves are coming off, is to refer to an AP article reporting that Palin’s husband, Todd, was registered under the Alaskan Independence Party until 2002. The Party, which wishes to be separated from America, held a convention this year with Sarah Palin as a keynote speaker. If Palin’s version of change doesn’t put voters off, this actually could. In America, not even the greatest of racks can make up for lack of patriotism.

Not the kind of action we had in mind, Mr Rudd

 

Who's side are you on, Kevin?

Back from Beijing and a few days before holding a speech on the government’s vision for the future, Kevin must have picked up on a growing frustration from Australians. The times when the Labor party could blame slow process on poor heritage from the Liberals are long gone. As are the days when we thought that fluency in Mandarin was charming. Australians want action from the Rudd government and they want it now. Regrettably Mr Rudd’s response is the five minute politics of the new welfare quarantine for parents whose children fail to attend school on a regular basis.

 

Even though not exclusively targeting indigenous communities, these areas would no doubt be most affected by the policy. To freeze welfare payments for parents for not managing to get their teenagers to drag their bums to the classroom would have been a stupid idea coming from John Howard. From the offices of the Labor party it is both stupid and surprising.

 

One does not have to go all politically correct on the issue of indigenous affairs to see that in any community in Australia such an idea would cause more problems than it would resolve. Depending on welfare support might not be textbook parenting, but should these parents’, and indeed the whole families’, economies be on the shoulders of slack teenagers?

 

No matter what the government claims, the scheme is clearly designed with Aboriginal communities in mind. Here, according to Kevin Rudd it seems, parents have no interest in their children’s future and wouldn’t encourage school attendance if money wasn’t on the line. But behind the prejudices, we must still acknowledge the problems that this type of plan could cause in indigenous communities. Violence, especially domestic, is indeed a serious problem in many of these communities (as indeed in many other places in Australia), and as Dan Harrison points out in his article in The Age, there is a risk of “teachers and school administrators being subjected to violence from angry parents.” School staff may be at risk of violence, but that risk is even greater for the children. After all, it is they who have the power to strip their families of their only source of income. These children run a risk of going hungry or turning to crime as a result of the welfare quarantine. We must ask ourselves if there isn’t a better way to make education attractive.

 

We might have wished for, and expected, a bit more action from the Rudd government nine months in to office. But Labor action Mr Rudd, reasonable action. Not the kind kicking those already down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gold to Colin in race for headlines

As the 2008 Beijing Olympics are coming to an end, we can conclude that the games nearly managed to stay clear of competition in media coverage. If it wasn’t for the unfortunate event of Russia attempting to redraw the borders of Eastern Europe, the only disruption to Olympic reporting came in the shape of an abandoned baby humpback whale.

 

Australian news reporting could over the past two weeks easily be mistaken for a two week long episode of Channel Seven’s ‘Animal Rescue RSPCA’. As crikey.com.au reports, Colin got over three times as much air-time on radio, and over 17 times as much broadcasting on TV, as did the upcoming WA election.

 

After all, cute animal stories are always safe bets for ratings, especially on TV where viewers can visually follow the little(?) creature helplessly cuddling up to boats, mistaking them for his mother. And such images can make anyone forget what the Daily Telegraph’s Piers Akerman points out, that “…if we are really concerned about wild life we should be doing all we can to help our native creatures all the time, and not just when a photogenic species washes up.” Such images can also tempt us to support interference with nature and the final termination of Colin, even though this is the best news Japanese whalers could hope for. Carrying out scientific studies on Colin’s body now makes us as hypocritical  as the Japanese are inhumane.

 

But anyone who followed international news in the past few days might also have noticed the story of Claudio the baby gorilla. His passing in a Berlin zoo last weekend made headlines all over the world. Just like Colin, Claudio is thought to have died as a result of neglect by his mother, Gana.

 

And then there is Ruby the kelpie who helped save her owners life by sharing her body-heat as the pair got lost while hiking on Mount Toolebewong. While the story of Ruby had a happier ending than those of Colin and Claudio, the mystery of animal air-time remains.

 

Is it the Olympic fever that has skewed our view of what sufficient news reporting is, or has the Beijing games given us a rare opportunity to consciously zone out and choose to get involved in gorillas and whales rather than the usual depressing updates on the state of the world?

 

Brendan Nelson should be grateful though. He has Colin, Claudio and Ruby to thank for a week refreshingly free of criticism. Of any media coverage at all, that is.

 

Colin

New abortion law exposes old preconceptions

The state parliament of Victoria is this week expected to vote on a change in the legislation that currently crimimnalises abortion. The Victorian Law Reform Commission has supplied the Brumby government with three models for reform, ranging from continuous outlawing to a very liberal model where abortion would be legal throughout the pregnancy. An in-between model, suggesting legalisation up until the 24th week of pregnancy, is the one expected to be voted on by the government. But while John Brumby as well as Ted Baillieu and his deputy, Louise Asher, are all expected to support the change, a handful of politicians, not surprisingly predominantly male, are still opposing de-criminalisation. 

While the new legislation, if introduced, would be historical, it would hardly be radical. The issue of abortion in Victoria is at the moment surrounded by quasi-legislation, in theory making abortion criminal while in practise silently supporting around 20 000 abortions every year. From a law enforcement point of view, problems are likely to arise whenever quasi-laws, such as the current law on abortion, are put to the test by courts. Judges are often forced to rule in favour of written legislation, even if this legislation opposes common believes held not only by the judiciary, but by the majority of the population. 

Interestingly, few areas of the legislation are as ambiguous as the ones concerning conscious termination of human life. In many countries, including Sweden, suicide is ironically a crime in the eyes of the law (so far this one has proved hard to implement). Few countries, Switzerland being one exception, have legalised euthanasia (assisted suicide) even if such a change is largely supported by terminally sick people and their families in many European countries.  

As if implemented to guide our moral and ethical believes rather than our actions there is a sense of fear behind all these regulations. An underlying feeling that if we were left without their guidance, we might instantly loose our perception of right and wrong, the idea of a super-ego being merely a Freudian fallacy.

In preparation for the possible law reform John Brumby asked the Victorian Law Reform Commission for advice on how to modernise the law to successfully make it legally accessible without increasing the number of abortions carried out in the state. This worry of Mr Brumby’s unfortunately reflects the perception of countless of (predominantly male) Victorians both inside and outside parliament. The worry that women allowed to terminate a foetus in the case of an unwelcomed pregnancy will choose abortion as the preferred contraceptive method. This is a repulsive idea revealing preconceptions not only about women in general but especially about the type of women that chooses to have an abortion. The request indicates the presumption that abortion is the choice of the teenage girl who couldn’t be bothered asking her partner to use a condom, since the choice of abortion was always there. 

As the whole abortion discussion is surrounded by taboos it is hard to acquire comprehensible information regarding who chooses to have an abortion. One can assume though, that out of 20 000 annually, we are not exclusively talking about the teenage girls to lasy to get on the pill. We are talking about women already experiencing the beauty of motherhood but who cannot afford to feed another child. We are talking about the victims of rape and incest, the women who were left by their partner in early stages of pregnancy who just don’t want to go through with it alone. 

There are so many reasons why criminalising abortion is counter productive and morally wrong. It is not only a matter of a woman’s right to decide over her own body and her future (even though this is naturally one of the most important points in this whole discussion), but it is also a matter of having a legislation that mirrors the general view of the people, inside and outside the courts. Laws that are not implemented are unnecessary laws, and laws that discriminate women and reveals how little trust our elected leaders put in us as moral, ethical human beings, are just plain disgusting.    

Will the Brumby strategy bring us down?

When a poll presented in the Age recently asked Victorians whether they thought the states population was growing too rapidly, 77 per cent answered “Yes”. With Mercer and other statistics- and consulting firms starting to collect data for the 2009 “most liveable cities” ranking, does Mr Brumby have reasons to worry?

When John Brumby took office as Premier of Victoria, just over a year ago, he presented Victorians with a “skilled migration strategy”, which was to ensure a growth of highly skilled workers in the state from 26.8 to 28.5 percent in 2008 to 2011. One year on, it is clear that migration from overseas as well as from other parts of the country has forced Victorians, and especially Melbournians, to adapt to a new way of life.

Melbourne was ranked the 17^th most liveable city in the world last year in the annual rating presented by consulting firm Mercer. Taken into account for the evaluation are categories like housing, transportation and natural environment.

The situation in the housing category almost certainly influenced many of the 77 per cent who ticked the “Yes” box in the Age’s poll. According to REIV (Real Estate Institute Victoria) rental vacancies hit an all time low this May with availability down to 0.3 per cent for properties within 4 km of Melbourne CBD. The overpopulation revealed by the rental crisis naturally affects the second category, transportation. Ironically the Brumby government chooses to tackle this problem in a way that affects the third category, the natural environment, by the expansion of Melbourne’s road network.

Peter Hodge’s opinion piece in the Age today paints a horrible picture of a future Melbourne where parklands in the northern suburbs would be destroyed, would the controversial tunnel project linking the Eastern Freeway and Tullamarine get underway. Melbourne businesses has also been affected with shopping districts turned into clearways in able to manage a growing number of vehicles on the roads.   

As we all want to live in a vibrant metropolitan community and we all want a solution to transportation problems, the criticism of an expanding city could easily be written off as “not in my backyard” mentality. But it is in Mr Brumby’s interest to keep Melbourne in the top 20, and time will surely tell whether a strategy that compromises the natural environment and creates rental crisis will keep us there.            

All those boys…

As former Liberal Party Senator Noel Crichton-Browne observes on Crikey.com.au today, the resignation of WA Opposition Leader Troy Buswell marks the beginning of yet another uncomfortable week for the Liberal Party. 

To me though, what is far more uncomfortable than chair-sniffing and bra-strap-snapping, is Crichton-Browne’s description of these events as “school boy misbehavior”. Even a fellow Liberal like yourself Mr Crichton-Browne must admit that when a senior politician carries out actions which are not only highly inappropriate and embarrassing, but also legally questionable, the likening to a misbehaving school boy seams a bit out of place.

I suppose it can not be expected of any politicians, especially members of the Liberal Party, to use any of the adjectives that comes to my mind (pathetic and chauvinistic to name a couple) but when is anyone, regardless of political ideology, going to look beyond the insecure little man that is Troy Buswell to the underlying social structures that allows men like him to hold high positions in Australia?

It is easy to place blame on the women that chose not to push sexual harassment charges against Mr Buswell. One could argue that their lack of action is a tacit consent of the alpha-male culture in which we unfortunately still live. But when even the fourth estate feeds us the values of characters like Sam Newman and Andrew Bolt, we can no longer leave scrutinising at an individual level. It is easy enough to write all of them off as misbehaving school boys but the truth is that just like all naughty bullies, they each have a pack of less outspoken, but nevertheless obedient, followers (you can find most of them on Channel Nine on Thursday nights).  

Someone once voted for Troy Buswell, some people still manage to read Andrew Bolt and Sam Newman still draws enough crowds to the Footy Show for Channel Nine to move the goalposts for what is morally acceptable. Unfortunately they are merely the spokesmen for a significant number of misbehaving school boys out there.

 This time Mr Buswell was given the right to review himself and decide on his future in politics. Next time chair-sniffing bullies should be expelled before having the chance to do so.  

 

 

Troy Buswell