Barnaby's A Bit Slow

Is There Any Other Way To Put It?

Maybe it's because he insists on being on the outer reaches of ideological extremism, it's easy to confuse Barnaby Joyce with somebody who might have a clue about what is good for the country. He's convinced he's a good man, trying to good by his country but his skewed ideology takes him to places where stupid cohabitates with insanity. 

That's really all there is to it. 

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Christian Porter's Spot of Bother, Part 2

He's Most Probably Guilty

So a few days ago Christian Porter one on the offensive and claimed he didn't commit an act of rape and he's only met the woman when she was 16 and he was 17. He made a few other ambit claims which at the time seemed neither here nor there so in my naiveté I thought it was prudent to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. 

All of that was predicated on not having read what the actual allegations are, and if we were being strictly principled about it, we would not form opinions without knowing what the allegations were. Quite simply he had denied the rape and then pointed to the presumption of innocence that is standard in the court of law. 

Well, Crikey has come out with an article overnight which details a good deal of what the allegations are, and how they might relate to Christian Porter. The article was penned before Porter's presser so the minister is referred to as 'John Doe'. The woman is described as Jane Doe. Here is a section that contradicts Christian Porter's press conference comments. 

The pair first met in 1986 and again in 1987 in Adelaide when Jane was 15 at a national school competition. The group of students travelling together became close friends, socialising, dancing and studying together.

While the group was close, one friend told Crikey that John Doe had an “arrogant” side to him and as competitions intensified he would become mean.

“[Jane] talked about how she was shocked because she’d imagine that everyone was friendly, and yet the way that [John] was behaving towards it was not as a friend would behave,” she said.

“I think that was the first inkling she had that he was not what she had thought that he was.”

John would make callous remarks at women, Jane wrote. She recalled him saying she didn’t “have the tits” to wear a bikini, and joking that the alfalfa sprouts on her salad made it look like she was “eating sperm”.

But later he would flatter Jane, complimenting her — and himself. According to Jane’s statement, he asked her to iron a shirt he wanted to wear.

“You would make a wonderful wife one day,” he said. He called her “so smart and so pretty”, capable of doing “all the good housewife things”.

At the press conference, Porter made it out that he only met the woman once at the debating competition. He explained that the line comes from the fact that this 'Jane Doe' knew how to iron a shirt and he didn't. It's interesting how he used his own inept male chauvinism at 17 as his defence there, - but it contradicted greatly by what is being described. He knew her, he liked her more than just friends. He knew her enough that he wanted to marry her, - which is to say he wanted to have sexual relations with her - at least that's what is being related. Chalk that one up to motive. 

After dancing in Kings Cross, Jane — who said she was in a dissociative state — agreed to a non-penetrative sex act propositioned by John. Jane wrote that she agreed to the act because she had been hurt by John’s comments about her body. 

He then allegedly violently forced Jane into performing oral sex on him despite her saying no. Jane said he kicked her to the ground and wrapped his hands around her neck.
Later, she said he bathed her thoroughly, dressed her and comforted her as she fell asleep telling her it was “all a bad dream”. 

She said she woke to John anally raping her. He allegedly raped her twice without a condom.
“The only thing that I remember [John] saying to me was that was ‘I don’t want to get you pregnant’,” Jane wrote. 

The next day, Jane said John joked about how the night “might have been different” if he had a condom before referring to his “good Catholic girlfriend” back home.

Great. So he had access to this woman, and therefore the means. This allegation also completely contradicts Porter's own press conference statement where he denied he knew her any more than the realm of the debating competition.   

The description in this allegation is is like something out of 'American Psycho'. It's completely alien to most people with common sense and judgment. 17 year olds with common sense and judgment don't go around getting women drunk and anally raping them. Porter essentially made an appeal to the empathy of most people to imagine themselves at 17, not even remotely likely to rape, and then asked them to take their good judgment and common sense as his own. It's so sickening that he would run that manipulation on the people of this country. 

You can't be asking for presumption of innocence at the same time running a gaslighting operation. We're not taking about what we would have done. We're talking about what he most likely did. 

The crux of it comes down to the believability of the allegation. 

Jane lived with the allegation for 30 years. Feelings of shame and guilt are common in survivors; 57% of victims experience anxiety and fear in the year after the assault.

One male friend, who met her around six months after the alleged assault said Jane spoke about experiencing a “serious and traumatic event” which he assumed to be a form of sexual assault.

“For many years, we’ve had many discussions around many aspects of her being assaulted and the damage that it did without her identifying who it was,” he said.

“At no occasion did she ever contradict herself or was she ever inconsistent.”

Jane had been a high achiever. School captain. Dux. She was incredibly smart, being accepted to school teams earlier than most students and was the “brightest star” out of the school team, friends said.

But Jane struggled, suffering from mental illness and substance abuse which intensified as she went into university. In one study, 45% of survivors of sexual assault reported having a drinking problem in the year before the survey.

“She did go on to experience real challenges with her mental health,” one friend said. They added that Jane believed her mental health issues were linked to her alleged assault. While Jane still worked and studied, friends say she never had a career of longevity or finished her PhD.

After seeking counselling from both a psychologist and a psychiatrist in 2019, Jane decided to make her allegations public. She reached out to friends who were around her in 1988. These messages, sent between 2018 and 2019, have been seen by Crikey. The three friends Crikey spoke to reject the idea that the memory could be false.

“The level of ancillary detail … the sidebars and the interpersonal things that she commented on, some of them I know to be true and some of them ring very true,” one friend said.

The three friends Crikey spoke to said Jane was determined and resolved in telling her story. Her parents reportedly only found out about the allegation in 2019 and they do not believe that it is true.

For what it is worth, I believe her. I completely believe this account. If it's Christian Porter's words against the words of this woman, I take the latter. And I do not take kindly to Porter's intimation that her account was not right because somehow she suffered a mental health issue (all while himself begged off work for a couple of weeks to regain his mental health ... p'uh-lease!). That was a cheap shot. 

I think Porter's press conference was good enough to buy a few days' worth of grace while we processed what was being discussed. What has come out contradicts Porter's own statements so greatly, one has to wonder if there's any truth to the denial itself. I kind of think he perjured himself in the court of public opinion by feigning that he hardly knew the woman. This was simply not true by the account of not just the woman, but the people who knew them back then. One can't lie about this fact and then make one's denial stand. 

My opinions here don't really matter. It doesn't affect anything. I just blog to keep track of my own thinking on things. All the same if you're asking me what I think, I think he did it. 

What Now?

As I said in my last entry, ministers have lost their jobs for less. If one is in the Prime Minster's shoes l- hate him or loathe him - he has no choice but to jettison this toxic mess. This is doubly so when there is the other business of Brittany Higgins going on, ensnaring Linda Reynolds with her 'Lying Cow' remark. When you think about it, Reynolds is not the rapist, merely the boss of the victim, who tried to minimise the allegation for political reasons - and she is in as deep trouble as she is. Porter's position is worse in that he is the accused perpetrator of a crime who cannot come close to proving his innocence; worse still, the more we learn of the allegations, the more we're convinced he likely did rape the woman when he was 17. Can Scott Morrison really countenance having this man as his top law official? 

The problem of course is the Morrison is sitting on a one seat majority, with the departure of climate-change-denying-Anti-vax-Anti-mask-Trumpist-nutjob Craig Kelly from the Liberal Party. The election that brought this sorry government back was May 2019, so we're looking at latest May 2021 as the election date. Presumably Morrison's play is to make it to later this year and use the COVID-19 vaccine and management of the pandemic in Australia as his ticket for reelection but you have to wonder if he's going to make it that far. So like it or not we're marching into an election year with a lot to process. A lot of it is exactly the women problem the Liberal Party has.

If you conducted a vox pop on any street in Australia today, how many people would be able to tell you the name of Australia’s Minister for Women? Just about nobody. Because Marise Payne has done just about nothing. Move on. Zap. Forget.

Even after these torrid and shocking weeks with accusations of rape against a Liberal staff member and a Liberal cabinet minister, senior Liberal men do not think their grip on power is under threat. These controversies might increase the Labor Party’s winning margins in seats they already hold, but are not powerful enough to cost the Coalition any of their seats, they assert.

This has the whiff of hubris. It’s true that Scott Morrison’s approval rating is strong, in the 60s. This is a result of his handling of the pandemic and the recession. But it’s also true that nothing has budged the critical measure – voting intentions.

The voting intentions have not moved. The electorate is split roughly 50-50. So maybe Morrison intends to just ride it all out, pretend nothing's happened. Except right now, Morrison seems to be presiding over a Land of Rape. Things are absolutely, decidedly totally not fine - the house is on fire when it comes to topic of women's safety, and right now the fire is burning down the authority in the House of Representatives. If he doesn't do anything, Morrison may as well be anointing himself rapist-in-chief. 

The thing is, as of now, Christian Porter can just fuck off. There's no upside to the man in terms of policy, politics or legislature. There's no coming back from this allegation. He can't have moral authority as the top law official of Australia while the allegation remains - and it will remain by dint of the woman's suicide. Luckily for Porter he won't see the inside of Prison. 

So he's done. The only questions are how soon will Scomo wake up to this dire reality and how far will he be punting Porter. 

The Unfair Society

Is Fair Worth Fighting For?

After writing about this business of Christian Porter, I got to be thinking about what was disturbing me so much about the press conference. On the one hand if we are being fair to the person who accused the Attorney General, we have to be fair towards her and ask the questions. On the other hand if we're living in a society with due process, the manner in which we ask the question should have a bit more epistemological precision than a heated presser to get towards justified, true, belief on the matter. It would be unfair to everybody in society if we judged guilt on rumour and innuendo. 

Which got me thinking, I guess I'm a sucker for this notion of 'fair'. 

I saw a number of people going off on social media today saying Porter was merely denying it like Bart Simpson - "I didn't do it, you didn't see me do it, you can't prove anything" - which, to be fair is true as well, but if his denials are not sufficient from making your negative judgements, then doesn't that mean this really needs to go to court? 

If you were being accused rightly or wrongly, you'd want your day in court instead of just a presser. Yet because the would-be plaintiff is dead, there can't be a court date. It is entirely unfair to be judged on the letter. That's Porter's point. Thus fairness seemed to be one of the nodes on which this process was buckling.

This brings about the next question:

Do We Live In A Fair Society?

We value fairness in Australia. Everyday Australia's journalists describe our society as egalitarian. This is probably not quite right. I can say that it used to be egalitarian but years and years of Coalition rule has ensured a lot of privileges have been baked in as advantages for wealthy people. Going back 30 years to the year Paul Keating ousted Bob Hawke from the Prime Minister's office, there have been 11 years of ALP rule and the rest belong to the Coalition. They won a lot over the years, some times in the most dodgy manner (which I won't bother going into here) and the ALP for its part has found numerous ways to hobble itself over the years. And each time the ALP hobbled itself, that was an opportunity lost. 

Fairness has been slipping in the socio-economic sense for 3 decades. We are far less equal now than we were in 1991. Year after year we find economic inequality has risen and that the gap with the indigenous community has not closed. Opportunities are less, the economy is far less diverse, and labour conditions are more precarious for far more people. It turned out this way because successive governments have been undertaking the Neo-liberal social experiment where governments no longer look to achieve full employment, they try and cut taxes instead and hope private enterprise pulls it weight. It has not. 

A simple analysis of GDP spread tells a simple picture of unequal spread of wealth. It was pointed out by an academic to me that 8% of Australia's GDP is derived from the surrounding blocks of Wynyard and Town Hall stations in Sydney. Melbourne similarly has 2 stations that provide a similar amount, and Brisbane has one that provides about 5. If you add it up, 1/5 of Australia's GDP rests on 5 suburbs out of all the suburbs in this wide country. This skewering is partly the result of public infrastructure policy (or absence thereof) but also an expression of the unequal opportunities present in our society. 

There are whole swathes of the country physically cut off from the opportunities that are available in concentrated spots in the middle of these urban centres. Australia's unemployed numbers 700,000 and upwards. In any given week there are job listings that number about 200,000, most of which are closely tied to these GDP engine sites. In any given week there are 500,000 people who need a job, are actively looking and cannot get the economic opportunity to better themselves as per the conservative Liberal National Party prescription for self-betterment. There's no rhetorical device to cover over the plain fact that the Coalition government can't even deliver on its own stated policy. It just can't work the way they say it does, thanks to the tyranny of distance. We live in a country that if you live in the wrong place, your odds at success get very long.

So no, we do not live in a society that is in any way fair; we have a government that has made it its stated policy to keep it unfair; and unfairness is celebrated by this ruling party at just about every turn. 

Therefore, it has to be asked how is it fair that the Attorney General of the party of unfairness, presiding over a government that enacts policies to bolster enduring unfairness, that spreads the unfairness and celebrates the unfairness it creates and sustains, complain when he is not being treated fairly? Can Christian Porter really complain about all this being unfair? What has fairness got to do with his party, his government, his life experience of wealth and privilege and his pursuit of said unfairness over his entire political career? 

What, fair? Christian Porter wants fairness? Due process? Who is he trying to kid? We don't get fairness from him or his government, why should that old expectation for egalitarian, democratic fairness still stand? He's getting exactly what's coming to him exactly because of the many many actions of his life apart from his possible rape that put him in a position to look like a rape suspect. It's extraordinary in some ways that a man's life in the law and politics has led him to being utterly unbelievable when he himself is accused of a heinous crime - but that's all on him. 

You Know What's Weird About The Date?

January of 1988. 

I keep looking at the date of the alleged rape and keep thinking it's peculiar. What is peculiar about it is that it's roughly the time of Australia celebrating its Bicentenary. I remember the event. On Australia Day that year I was down in Blues Point Park with my friends to see the fireworks which, for the first time were mounted from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Then they announced they would become incorporated into New Year Celebrations and the rest is history. The jingle went "Celebration of a Nation, lend us a hand," so we spent the year making jokes about hand jobs. It's hard to forget. It was typically a Hawke-Keating kind of Green-and-Gold Australia looking fo an identity to hang its celebrations upon, and much less the Southern-Cross-and-Union-Jack kind of Australiana preferred by John Howard.

All the same Australia Day remains hotly contested, with Porter's own party doing the defending of the day of invasion for the indigenous people of Australia. It's the ultimate day of unfairness that his party insists we keep as the day to celebrate our nation-hood. I'm pretty sure Christian Porter is also one of those guys who don't think we should move the date. It seems incredibly emblematic that around the time of the most unfair moment being celebrated was when the alleged events took place. 

And he wants fairness. Let that sink in. 

A Bit of Kafka, A Bit of Kant

I guess a part of me is still wedded to fairness. If one were to give Porter the benefit of the doubt, then it must be harrowing to wake up one day and be accused of a heinous crime 33 years ago when you were a teen. It's like something straight out of Kafka (or Philip K Dick). Like Kafka's 'The Trial', the allegation sticks, but he can't get to a courtroom to challenge his accuser or clear his name. Or maybe it is more like 'The Metamorphosis' where he woke up one day as a beetle (I have often wanted to wake up one day as a Beatle but that is another story). Instead of a beetle, Porter has woken up to find he is an alleged rapist.

It doesn't end well for Josef K. or Gregor Samsa the protagonists in Kafka's stories. It's hard to imagine this ends well for Christian Porter. He might not like it but his only shot at clearing his name is the independent inquiry being tossed around.

Immanuel Kant made a point in his book 'Critique of Pure Reason' that there are any number of things in the universe one could discuss but because of the way we are constructed, there is no way of knowing. For instance we cannot know if there is an afterlife because we can't die and come back. So any discussion of the afterlife cannot be sensibly made because nobody knows what they're talking about. Similarly, if we're careful about what we can know and what we can't know, the range of subjects we can discuss sensibly becomes self evident (or words to that effect, it's been a decade since I read the big fat turgid book). When applied to the situation of Christian Porter, it becomes self evident we can't talk about this case in any sensible way, given the circumstances. 

People are going to try anyway because it's their job to commentate, but keep in mind what Kant had to say about the limits of what we can know and whether sensible judgements can be made. They can have the independent inquiry but they might come up with bupkis. Is this fair? Is this fair on the woman? Is any of it fair? Like I said, I'm a sucker for fairness, but we're talking about a guy who tried to make fairness obsolete, asking for fairness. By all means have the independent inquiry but I can hear Kafka and Kant laughing from the grave. 

Whatever the outcome, it sucks to be you, Christian Porter. But it's no worse than the life of the disadvantaged in this country - a disadvantage your career was spent in trying to sustain.

Christian Porter's Spot of Bother

 How Awkward Was That, Shtraya?

That was a really uncomfortable press conference. I can't recall a press conference that was more awkward than that one including the one where Bill Clinton wagged his finger and told us he "did not have sex with that woman". And we know how that one turned out. Christian Porter's press conference was much more drawn out and filled with bewilderment and pointed, accusatory questions. 

You can see parts of it for yourself here.

All of it is here.

It's pretty gruelling to watch.

I Hate Christian Porter But...

It goes without saying but by dint of him being on the infernal side of politics, I don't like Christian Porter. I don't much like the smug smirk and condescension that he usually throws around, and as for this notion that he might be a future Prime Minister, well, if Scomo can be our PM a monkey's ass can do it too. When we all started playing the game of"who-is-the-rapist-minister?" his name was the slam dunk favourite. And your name doesn't become the front-runner in those stakes if you weren't some kind of entitled fuckwit that invites that judgement - more on that later.

I really can't stand the guy; but I have to say that I'm inclined to believe him based on that interview. We might quibble with the way he played politics at the edge by bringing up allegations against Bill Shorten some years ago, and implied that the press were part of the public lynch mob. I mean, come on, if it were the other way around you know he would be using the press to drum up the very same lynch mob. So the pleading for politics didn't really elicit my sympathy. 

What did get my attention was the scenario. It was January 1988. He and 3 other students were in Sydney for a debating competition. He as 17, she was 16 when the alleged rape took place. And it took 32+ years for this to surface as a case. Keeping in mind the man was in the Western Australian state government Assembly since 2008. The woman accusing him of the rape committed suicide late lats year, having battled mental illness. They're the facts as presented to us. 

Look, I'll be honest with you - Porter didn't look like a guy who got found out for a transgression from years ago. He looked like he was bewildered that the rumour mill had found him as the target of a wild allegation. Believe me, there are not that many people who would love to see him go down more than me, but I couldn't bring myself to think he was the perpetrator as described, based on how he presented himself at the presser. 

People are going to believe the accuser and that's fair enough. I was on their side right up to the point I sat through that miserable, nerve-shattering press conference. 

Maybe In The Confirmation Bias Wheelhouse?

If we were to nominate one cabinet minister out of Scomo's veritable lineup of misery-makers, Porter fits the bill like no other. Most of the prominent men in Scomo's cabinet look like Incels. Porter alone looks like he can play the player and maybe get laid in a way that is beyond say Greg Hunt, Josh Frydenberg or Peter Dutton. If you had to pull a name out of that bunch as the likely culprit, Porter would have been at the top of a lot of people's lists, not just mine. 

He's the obvious person to think the worst of, and just maybe there's a problem in that. Just because we think he's the odds-on favourite to be the one to do it, doesn't mean he did it. As much as I would like to believe out of malice and schadenfreude that Porter was the likeliest to be a teen rapist, that doesn't mean he was a teen rapist. It's not a matter to be left to conjecture or random judgments of character. Belief alone isn't going to get you anywhere meaningful. This isn't some joke about figuring out who farted in the lift. It's as grave an allegation as grave allegations come. 

Worse still, we're not going to get to the bottom of this because the accuser is now deceased. No court case can be brought, no investigation can really be completed. The people calling for an independent inquiry are on principle correct to do so, but in light of the circumstances it is doubtful meaningful answers can be gained. And by meaningful, I mean those that stand up to some kind of epistemological interrogation, with conclusions that are justified and true.  

As it is, it's left in the world of he-said, she-said. The allegations are just going to sit in the half-light of social media and mainstream media without ever seeing the inside of a court. If anything the press conference drew the line under the need for presumption innocence especially in such murky circumstances. 

Making Sense of The Bits That We Were Told

Porter had the look of a man who wanted to say "look, I am an arsehole and you can think me a tremendous, awful, entitled, arsehole but I am not that arsehole." 

It reminded me of the Nixon adage "let the bastard deny it". Or the fart joke "He who denied it supplied it." If you're out in front of the press denying something, you look guilty any way. Which is to say, that right there is the court of public opinion running wild, independent of any real court or rule of law. It's not that I don't believe the allegation or that I believe Porter is a more reliable human being than the accuser or any of that. No. None of that. It's just that right up to seeing the press conference, I was smugly convinced he was the rapist and he should go down regardless of the circumstances. 

What I discovered in the process of watching his press conference was that I got squeamish. I realised I would much rather this whole business went through courts and got litigated and contested by eminent, studied, venerable lawyers. Except it can't because the accuser is dead. This stuff of journalists hurling loaded questions - the "when did you stop beating your wife?" variety of questions, did not make me feel any closer to the truth or a just outcome. And Porter looked just as frustrated as we were in that what he was being asked to do was to prove a negative in a court of public opinion and anything less should mean his job and career. He's certainly correct to see it that way. 

In turn, I had to ask myself am I happy being a juror in a kangaroo court? You know me, I hate jury duty even in real life. Sure I'd love to see him gone, but he'd only be replaced by the next entitled jerk-off Tory, so what would be the point of a gratuitous send-off in real world terms? Meanwhile Porter can't even name his accuser in the press conference defending his name. A wag pointed out even his surname rhyming with daughter is going to kill him at the next election: "would you trust your daughter with Christian Porter?" It's a circus of malice and innuendo.

This is so murky and awful that if the ALP ran with it against the Coalition, they too would suffer a tremendous blow to their own prestige and integrity. They would never be able to argue anything from principle in Parliament again. That's how toxic this scandal has become. It's one thing for this sorry government to cover up the Brittany Higgins rape. That's terrible enough and the government deserves to be castigated. Yet I thoroughly understand the government's perplexed aporia about this allegation. I guess that's why they sent him out to face the press today. 

  

 

There's No Money

There's Never Any Money

Some time after those terrible fires, it got to rebuilding, and affected people went looking around for reconstruction/support money from the government. At the time, announcements were made that there was 2 billion dollars to go around but months later it was found out that there was no such fund as announced. People found it impossible to navigate the bureaucracy to be heard by the Federal Government. Arguably, the Federal Government put in wear plugs and sat in the maze in order to make it inaccessible A little like Major Major Major Major in Catch-22 when he says he will only take meetings when he is not in his office.  

People affected by the fires went into the winter of 2020 with the pandemic going, without having rebuilt anything. It should have been a bigger scandal but of course this Covid-19 pandemic has been such a monster of sorts it ate up all the airspace for the message to get out. 

I kind of imagine that Scomo, having been snubbed pretty hard in his attempt to PR and Spin his way out of the deep ditch he had dug himself, decided these people would get punished through the power of bureaucracy. The ABC was reporting people still living in tents in the middle of winter. This is a terrible state of affairs. 

All of which got me thinking that we do terrible things to one another. I didn't vote in this terrible government but somebody did, and those people knew full well what kind of crackpot policies would be put into place or left to die through inaction and omission. And now that people in the south end of the continent were facing this terrible plight, there were people in Queensland who were quite smug that they got the government for which they had hoped. The absence of empathy is psychopathic. It's a horrible thought, really when part of the populace abandons another to depredation and neglect. We used to be better than this. Really, we were, once upon a long time ago. 

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