A New Shade Of Stupidity

Et Tu Malcolm Turnbull? 

Good God. I do begroan with all. Malcolm Turnbull no less is singly madly like the rest of the conservative numbskulls. It's really hard to believe this is the man who once defended at the Spycatcher trial.

In a fiery interview on the ABC's Insiders program on Sunday morning, Mr Turnbull told host Barrie Cassidy he had "lost the plot" after a series of questions about the government's attack on the national broadcaster. 

Prime Minister Tony Abbott said last week that heads should roll after the ABC allowed Zaky Mallah into the audience to ask junior minister Steven Ciobo a question on the government's proposed citizenship laws. 

Mr Turnbull said on Sunday that allowing Mallah into the audience was a security issue because Q&A was a "very high profile target".

If you watch the video, Barrie Cassidy responds with incredulity that the ABC studio is a very high profile target and that the audience in the studio is a high profile target. Malcolm Turnbull presses on by saying allowing Zaky Mallah to even step in the studio represents a major failing in the ABC's thinking.

Barrie Cassidy to his credit asks, then how is it different to Zaky Mallah stepping into a shopping centre. Malcolm Turnbull then says that Cassidy has "lost the plot". Which, is a pertinent point. If Mallah is so dangerous and can't allowed near a TV studio and its live audience, then surely he's too dangerous to be out in public and able to wader into places with lots of unsuspecting people. Implicit in that is that Mallah is a free man - is he the kind of threat Malcolm Turnbull is making him out to be?

"Are you pulling my leg? After the Martin Place siege, you are saying to me there is no security issue with putting Zaky Mallah in a live audience?" Mr Turnbull said.
"If you can't see that, I'm sorry.

"Seriously, you've lost the plot there with all due respect. This is a high-profile audience, very high-profile target. This is a fellow that has threatened violence in the past, threatened to kill people, gone to jail for it." 

Mr Turnbull said the ABC had undermined a legitimate debate about national security and proposed citizenship laws that would see dual nationals involved in terrorism automatically lose their citizenship. 

"In any discussion of national security laws, citizenship laws, counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, there is a big debate – is the measure counterproductive, will it create more problems than it solves? That's a legitimate point," he said. 

"Why would the producers choose the least reputable, most discredited, arguably one of the most dangerous individuals to put that view? 

"The answer, I suspect, is because in a sort of undergraduate, playing at tabloid journalism style, they wanted to create the biggest shock and awe and sensation instead of running the program like a responsible current affairs program on the national broadcaster that, frankly, should do better." 

Mr Turnbull denied sending in investigators was interfering with the ABC's independence and editorial judgment. 

He said the government was entitled to ask questions about how the decision to feature Mallah was made and "who knew what, where and when".
"We are not questioning the editorial judgment in terms of free speech issues," he said.

This is what is bothering the Coalition so much? It is not what Zaky Mallah said, but the fact that he was there to ask a question in the first place because he's a security threat? Isn't the problem with the Anti-terror law that it couldn't make its charges stick with Mr. Mallah? Malcolm Turnbull is essentially arguing that where the state failed to get a conviction, the ABC should still be screening out Mr. Mallah because he was charged with threatening violence against a public official. Then he is imputing a motivation to the ABC for their failure to police this, by saying it happened because it had an undergraduate, tabloid journalist style? It doesn't even make sense.

How can he be questioning the editorial judgement in terms of free speech at the same time saying that is not what he is doing? That's doublespeak. Or rank stupidity. When you can't quite tell one from another, I think we've hit some kind of terminus of stupidity.

Maybe these Liberal Party MPs are living in some kind of weird bubble that keeps them apart from the real world and thus makes them rather incapable of understanding it. Christopher Pyne was saying only days ago that it was the ABC and its supporters that are trying to make it an issue of freedom of speech when it wasn't, but failed to explain how that was the case. Now we have Malcolm Turnbull saying the producers choosing a disreputable, discredited and potentially dangerous individual to appear in the studio is the problem because the individual might be a security risk and has nothing good to say.

Let's overlook the point I covered a couple of days ago that Mr. Mallah does not appear to be a terrorist nor a candidate for ISIL at this point in time or in the future. If the Coalition is saying he is still potentially dangerous, the onus is on them to produce the evidence, warn the ABC and all the other media outlets not to let him near a broadcast studio (because he'll do what exactly, I have no fucking idea). I mean, really, Malcolm? Is that what you've got for us? Is that all you've got for us?

It looks more like they're upset because the ABC found exactly the right person to ask exactly the right question and the MP who answered it - Steve Ciabo - looked like a total and utter dickhead caught in an ambush. And now it looks worse for the Coalition because they're now publicly shown they are upset and flustered, saying all kinds of stupid things that don't make any sense.  Thus, when Mr. Turnbull accuses Barrie Cassidy of "losing the plot", it's most probably projection on Malcolm Turnbull's part.

Fifty Shades Of Stupidity

Sedition? Is That A Moron I See Before Me?

Ever since the recent episode of 'Q&A' aired, this government has been up on its hustings denouncing the ABC as well as the show itself. At the heart of it of course is one Zaky Mallah who was on the show and made particularly pointed comment at a Federal minister. Since then it's been a bit of a free-for-all with the commentary and it's been hard to keep track of just what it all means. At the core of it is this notion that Zaky Mallah saying what he said:

"The Liberals have just justified to many Australian Muslims in the community tonight to leave and go to Syria and join ISIL because of ministers like him,"

... was a form of sedition.

Sedition is actually relatively old term, dating back to Shakespeare's time. It's the kind of crime Kings accuse of subjects who talk defiantly of the power of the throne. In a post-modern world where we recognise Freedom of Speech as normal (and normative), it is an outdated and quaint term - just as bringing it back was sort of historically retrograde. Worse still, Kim Beazley waved it through as Opposition Leader so we're stuck with these head-scratchingly stupid laws, but hey, this too is the Australia we have wrought.

If you look at Mr. Mallah's statement, he doesn't actually incite people to go join ISIL, he says should people do so, they would have justification because of ministers like Steve Ciobo. That's a description, not an incitement. Especially in light of what Mr. Ciobo was saying about revoking people's citizenship:

Queensland Liberal and panel member Steve Ciobo was unapologetic, saying he believed the only reason Mr Mallah was acquitted of terrorism was that the terrorist offences "weren't retrospective in application", and that he would be glad to see Mr Mallah sent out of the country. 

"I'd be pleased to be part of a government that would say you're out of the country," he said.

*Ugh*. That made my head hurt.
So, not only is Mr. Ciobo's understanding of human rights somewhat faulty, he can't quite hide he's a fascist who believes in a kind of unilateral vindictive justice. It's easily argued that Mr. Mallah was provoked into saying extreme things.

Be that as it may, the Stupid expanded greatly when Alex Hawke said:

"It's almost as if the ABC is engaged in some form of sedition," he said. 

"They have utterly no regard for what they are doing on this show and the people who will suffer the most is the moderate Islamic community in Australia," he said. 

"If you're going to get someone to say the citizenship laws are questionable and invalid but why would you pick someone who has threatened to kill Commonwealth officials?"

So there we have it. The whole ABC is now seditious. Really? Or is it more sensible to understand it as these conservatives just wanting to not have to face the fringe opinions of their own society? Or as Guy Rundle put it succinctly:

As soon as right-wingers are exposed to real debate they flail, ham-fists flying all over the place. Steven Ciobo should have welcomed the opportunity to enunciate his principles in the face of real challenge to them — because a challenge is an opportunity to make your ideas clearer, better, win people over. But he would have had to be competent to do that. In reality he’s just another faceless mook who’s come up through the entrenched machine of the party, which, like Labor, is a quasi-state apparatus, embedded by compulsory preferential voting and public funding.

Of course, it would not end there; They decided to play the man as well.

Playing The Man And Not The Ball

It must be one of those moments for the Coalition to feel they're be able to say, "ha! Gotcha' when they can see that a guy wearing a gold cannabis leaf on his flat-brimmed baseball cap says things that cut against the grain of government propaganda. Not only are the racial prejudices of judging the man for being "of middle-eastern appearance" (as the cops like to say), they thought they could pigeonhole him with their own cultural prejudices about what such a man might hold as an opinion.

Thus the Liberal and National Party have basically banged the drum loudly that Zaky Mallah was a convicted terrorist. Surely anybody charged of terrorism under the Anti-Terror laws must be a jihadi right?

It turns out the man's background is much more complicated than that.

Turnbull's portrayal of Zaky Mallah and his views is profoundly misleading. "He had served a term of imprisonment for threatening to kill ASIO officers," he said. 

Well actually, he served two years in solitary in the Goulburn super-max a decade ago, awaiting trial on terrorism charges for which he was acquitted. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of threatening Commonwealth officers and was sentenced to time already served. Which is not, of course, to say that he was not at the time a seriously deluded and dangerous young man. He was 19. 

More recently, Turnbull continued, as though Mallah had not changed his spots in the least, "he had travelled to Syria in the pursuit of what he described as 'jihad' ". 

Mallah did travel to Syria in 2012. The "jihad" he was interested in joining was the fight against the tyrannical government of Bashar al-Assad, and the outfit he joined for a few days – without engaging in any combat, he insists – was the Free Syrian Army. This is the force which the United States is now training and which Australia supports.
As The Australian's Adam Shand reported at the time, the former would-be suicide bomber realised "how misguided his anger towards Australian society had been...'Go to Syria where your brothers are dying for freedom, democracy and the true Islamic way, rights guaranteed in this lucky country,' he says…. 'We Muslims have so much freedom here (in Australia) yet we are causing so much trouble'." 

Since then, Mallah has been outspoken in his condemnation of Islamic State. On Channel Ten's The Project last October he said: "I'm on this program this evening to distance myself from the actions of these individuals, these idiots, these wankers, who are giving Islam and the Muslim world and the Islamic community in Australia a bad name and for those who are considering to join ISIS I hope ASIO is onto you, I hope your passport is refused and I hope you are arrested and locked up." 

In one of numerous video blogs on YouTube, Mallah calls on Australia's Salafist imams to join the fight against extremism: "You need to condemn terrorism. You need to condemn fundamentalism. You need to condemn those who are brainwashing our youth into believing that a group like ISIS is fighting for jihad. They are not fighting for jihad. They are fighting for bulls---."

This claim that the ABC put a jihadist on TV to exhort muslims to go fight for ISIL is therefore inaccurate as it is utterly lacking in substance, let alone having any nuance. Which all goes to show how deeply stupid and unreceptive this bunch of old school closet-racist, proto-fascist dickheads are, in this Abbott Government. The most damning bit from the article is the bit here:

His final, notorious comment was not a call to arms – although it's easy to see how many viewers took it that way. It was, if you watch it again, the comment of an angry young man, a born and bred Australian with no other nationality, who has been trying for some years to counter the lure of Islamic State in his own community, and who had just been told by a member of the government that ideally he should be expelled from the country by ministerial decree.

What they didn't see was a guy who was their ally in the fight against ISIL. They saw a guy who was an enemy to them precisely because of their racial and cultural prejudices - and they then ran around screaming the man shouldn't have received the forum to say what he said. Frankly, it's really rather pathetic, and unbecoming of a government.

But did it end there? No.

Because Somebody Has To Lose A Job For The PM To Be Happy

Tony Abbott decided this was the moment to go all outing attack the ABC and its Leftist sympathies. of course, anything and everything except Hitler and Mussolini would look to the left side Tony Abbott and his anachronistic view the universe, so it's not saying much of anything to be characterised as 'The Left' by Tony Abbott.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has launched a blistering attack on the ABC's Q&A program, asking "whose side are you on?" after an Australian man convicted of threatening Commonwealth officials appeared on the program. 

In comments that reignited the debate within the Coalition government about the role and responsibilities of the national broadcaster, Mr Abbott accused the ABC of effectively giving "a platform to a convicted criminal and terrorist sympathiser - they have given this individual, this disgraceful individual, a platform and in so doing, I believe the national broadcaster has badly let us down".

"I think many, many millions of Australians would feel betrayed by our national broadcaster right now, and I think that the ABC does have to have a long, hard look at itself, and to answer a question which I have posed before - whose side are you on? Whose side are you on here?" Mr Abbott said on Tuesday. 

"We all believe in free speech, but in the end we have to make judgments and I think that the ABC made a very, very serious misjudgment last night."

Well, it might look like Tony Abbott was arguing something of substance about the 'Q&A' programme if he had his facts straight about Zaky Mallah. The fact that he doesn't makes it even worse, but here it goes any way.

Even if Zaky Mallah were convicted of terrorism, he would still have the right to free speech. As it is, he was charged and the charges didn't stick - And all this is immaterial to the fact that he still has the freedom to express his opinion.  It is an opinion that stands in sharp contrast to that of Tony Abbott, but there's no law against expressing such an opinion anywhere, on air or off, on the streets, or on radio iron internet, or for that matter a discussion show like 'Q&A'. His freedom to express his opinion in this nation is Mr. Mallah's inalienable right, especially as a citizen who was born here.

That being the case, this notion that "many Australians would feel betrayed by the national broadcaster" because Mr. Mallah was there to express his opinion as is his right, does not speak for me at all. On the contrary, many Australians should and would feel betrayed that the Prime Minister of this land would seek to close down freedom of expression - while espousing it as value (perhaps as applying only to him and his wealthy, White, Anglo, peers) - and try to punish the ABC for this perceived injustice, all on the back of his own unmitigated, undiluted racial and cultural prejudice. I feel betrayed he's our Prime Minister and nobody is calling him on this shit.

All the same, totally unreflective of how misguided his position is, Tony Abbott says "heads should roll." The only metaphorical head that should be rolling is Tony Abbott's own head. And clearly Peter Dutton's seeing that he endorses this idiocy (and nice to know these guys want to add to the unemployment queue). This is a ridiculous turn of events based on one remark on one programme. how stupid does this country look right now?

It reminds me a bit of the time Charlie Sheen was totally out of control doing stupid things every day, landing himself on the news page. When asked what he thought he was doing, he replied "Winning!"
I think this government is winning in exactly the same way - deep in delusion, mired in misunderstanding, unable escape its own racial and cultural prejudices.  "Winning!"

Oh, and then there's Christopher Pyne.

Education Minister Christopher Pyne accused Mr Scott of trying to "change the debate to something it isn't", rather than "fessing up" to the ABC's mistake.
"This is typical of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation," he told Channel Nine's Today program. 

"The ABC is trying to pretend this is something to do with free speech. It isn't. It's about what's appropriate and not appropriate at the public broadcaster. 

"They did the wrong thing, they should simply fess up to it and do the right thing next time."

How about this, Mr. Pyne, the ABC did not do the wrong thing, they did the right thing; Zaky Mallah is not who your prejudices say he is; and yes, it is a freedom of speech issue. Freedom of Speech is not an issue only when it suits you. But be my guest, keep dancing in that conga-line of Stupidity.

Quick Shot - 16/Feb/2015

Celebrating Freedom Of Expression

No, I'm not going to write about the poor person shot dead in Denmark. Instead I'm just going to point at the abject idiocy of finding in an audit that Sarah Ferguson was not respectful enough in her questioning the treasurer. It strains credulity but somehow, we have these things:

While acknowledging the Ferguson-Hockey interview was "compelling television", Ms Ryan finds: "I felt that the 'tone' of the questioning in this particular interview could have been interpreted by some viewers to be a potential breach of the ABC's impartiality guidelines." 

Ms Ryan singles out three points of the interview for criticism, starting with Ms Ferguson's first question to Mr Hockey. 

"Now, you've just delivered that budget," Ms Ferguson said. "It's a budget with a new tax, with levies, with co-payments. Is it liberating for a politician to decide election promises don't matter?

Ms Ryan found the question was factually correct but said its tone made the Treasurer seem "under attack".
"In my view, the language in Ferguson's first question was emotive," she found. "I also believe that the average viewer would consider that the Treasurer was not treated with sufficient respect by the interviewer." 

Ms Ferguson later told Mr Hockey that she had asked a "yes or no question". She then said: "I don't need to teach you, Treasurer, what a tax is. You know that a co-payment, a levy and a tax are all taxes by any other name."

I mean, really? Naturally the finding has been rejected by the ABC. Well, of course it would it's so clearly stupid. Ms. Ryan felt the tone could be interpreted by some viewers to be a potential breach of the ABC's impartiality guidelines? I mean really? She feels (not thinks, perhaps vaguely or even strongly, show won't say which) that maybe some minority in the audience-land watching might be doing some interpreting in such a way that it's not impartial? And that makes it a breach? Just how stupid is this auditor? 

If I said I was impartial and made a statement 'X' (fill it in any way you like, It's hypothetical), of course I can expect somebody out there in the readership to maybe interpret that statement to be not as impartial as I say it is; but the onus is on that person to argue that case. Sarah Ferguson is right to ask the Treasurer whether election promises don't matter, after he delivers a budget that completely flies in the face of the election promises. It's a legitimate question that at least 50% of the population would like to know. 

It's not the ABC's or Sarah Ferguson's or Emma Alberici's fault or problem that the government finds itself trying to squeeze a budget through which contravenes their own election promises. If the folks in government can't handle the questions that come from such  budget, let alone consequences of their actions, maybe they're in the wrong profession. It is most certainly not the job of the press to let this kind of thing go by to the keeper. We all know this; we all know how this works; anybody watching the interview would be watching on the basis that they understand this as a fundamental tenet of the position the press holds in our democracy. So Colleen Ryan has invented a straw man, not to beat down, but to wave around and say, "this straw man right here might have missed the context! The ABC is biased". 

I mean, "hullo". 

Drawing the kind of conclusion that this Colleen Ryan has drawn is so stupid it blows my mind that she was one the editor of a newspaper. But of course she was the editor of a Murdoch rag. Surprise! Ms Ryan, try this advice for size: one might feel that the act of the ABC audit itself could be interpreted by some observers to be an abject failure at reasoning. But of course there is a lot of stupidity going around at the moment. 

The government wants to muzzle the ABC because it asks blunt questions. Yet it says Freedom of Expression is an important thing in a democracy when a terrorist shoots a cartoonist or film maker. If they hold both positions, there's a lottos cognitive dissonance going on in this government and it's not helping the electorate at all. 

The Death Penalty Thing Over In Indonesia

As the execution looms for Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumuran, you get the feeling that Australia is inexorably being dragged into a weird orbit of Indonesian legalism. Indonesia for its part is arguing the death penalty as good deterrence and that the law is the law and if the punishment is not meted out, it discredits the whole legal system. Australia is trotting out all the emotional arguments about the death penalty and amazingly seems to have forgotten the reasoning behind its own end to capital punishment in Australia. 

Personally, I am against the death penalty so it goes without saying that I do not wish to see the two men executed. But it does embarrass me greatly when I watch the arguments put forward as reasons why mercy should be shown to these two men. Surely there is a deeper point of jurisprudence that is universal and appropriate to appeal to the Indonesian government. It strikes me as very odd that we only seem to have our own personal moral objections as something that should apply to Indonesia. It's a really bad argument, and is hardly likely to succeed. 

There's got to be a better argument to be mounted. 

Also, it seems rather ironic that the former lawyer  who fronted for big tobacco and James Hardie in the asbestos trials is now the foreign minister trying to stop the execution. 

Dogs Are Better People Than Politicians

Couldn't Keep Denying

It amazes me that the Abbott government keeps limping on being the way it is. Normally, being the host nation for something like APEC or the G-20 burnishes the standing of a nation, but somehow Tony Abbott and his miserable government managed to lower the standing of Australia, simply by being their climate-change-denying selves. At the end, Tony Abbott made a speech to the effect that all the governments represented at the G-20 wanted to do something about climate change. It hardly seemed plausible given the degree of resistance mounted and shown by the same government, during the lead up to the G-20 meeting. It sure was hard not to talk about something all these guests anted to talk about it.

I guess that's the nature of summit meets. The host nation doesn't really get to control the agenda if it isn't a nuclear superpower. Tony Abbott made Australia look like an adolescent who is in denial about having to do chores, on the international stage. I'm sure the world took notice. Now that China and America have decided to do something about climate change, then it also activated Clive Palmer and the PUP's agenda of keeping an ETS. Greg Hunt might think they've mothballed the thing but it might comeback from the dead sooner than people thought. After all, the problem with Direct Action is that it is not scaleable in the same way as the ETS. The more there is to cleanup, the better it would be to simply ramp up the ETS again, and be done with it.

No Cuts To Adelaide ABC? Then Don't Make Stupid Cuts

Chris Pyne, he of the Coalition Government that came to power promising not to make any cuts to the ABC and SBS but promptly started cutting as soon as they got in, started a Chang.Org petition to stop the ABC cutting the Adelaide production facility.
Let us now count the shades of stupid in this petition and petitioner.

1. He's a freaking minister of government. He's a lot closer the to the decision making than public petitioners and their petitions. 
2. He is a freaking minister of a government that is cutting $254million to the ABC budget.
3. He is a freaking minister of a government that is cutting that $254million in the face of the ABC asking them not to make such cuts.
4. The alarming hypocrisy of a minister of a government making largely gratuitous, political cuts, on alleged economic grounds (whether true or not) can't complain about such cuts affecting their electorate. 
5. Since when does Chris Pyne care about the ABC's production capacity anywhere? If he's going to start caring about that, maybe he should be looking into the plight of the Film & TV industries a lot more carefully?

Naturally we are underwhelmed. It would be a great shame if the Adelaide unit had to close because of the cuts. It would be a shame if any production facility had to close because of the cuts, because that's the very zero-sum game this government set up. You sort of wonder if these people have any actual brains.

Hooray For Jacqui Lambie (Can't Believe I Just Typed That)

Jacqui Lambie has been going rogue for a few weeks now, over the conditions of defence personnel and something to do with their Christmas bonuses. It has gotten to the point where to refuses to pass anything of the government unless they do as she says, which is to say, she's holding the government to ransom, all on her own-some. The early net effect of this ornery statesman-ship is that the ALP has corralled her into stiffing the Coalition's plans to water down the Future of Finance Advice changes.

This is no ordinary stiffing; this is being described as a "body blow" by the SMH, but more accurately, it's the moment when it has become untenable for the Coalition Government. To date, the Coalition Government has managed to get some of their idiotic plank of policy through the Senate thanks to Clive Palmer making deals with them. Only a couple weeks ago it looks like Palmer was the idiot in letting the Direct (In)Action policy through in time for the Brisbane G-20 summit. Yet now, the rogue PUP Senator is undoing done deals.

If it's bad enough that Joe Hockey's government hasn't been able to pass its awful-awful-awful budget, six months hence from its big debut, then the PUP disintegration ought to give them pause. This might be the moment where it forces the Coalition (the No-alition) to properly think about a Double Dissolution, because they ain't getting it done now. The earliest opportunity to vote out these drongos would be most welcome.

The End Of Enlightenment

The Dark Ages Beckon Once More

I've been thinking that maybe one of the things the Abbott government wants the Federal government to do is get out of education; And as with such ideas, it always is worth asking what one might mean by 'out' and 'education'. The growing trend in Australian society since the reintroduction of fees in the early 1990s has been to measure the value of a course against the earning capacity of the graduates. Then, trying to figure out "if it is worth doing the course." Unsurprisingly, a great many courses cease to commend themselves once you apply the Return-On-Investment line of thinking and if one is truly driven by money alone, it is easy to suggest arts courses are not worthwhile. Why would somebody do Fine Arts if it were about earning capacity? How many jobs can there be, in something like curating for a gallery?

There are any number of courses for which graduates would find an inordinate amount of difficulty in placing themselves in employment in that field. Like, graduates in music or archaeology or theatre or literature or philosophy. In fact there is a vast shortage of jobs that specifically require arts education and pay well enough. The dirty secret of the stat that approximately 90% of graduates do not work in the area of their tertiary study is that the jobs simply were not there to absorb those graduates.

The great irony is that in trying to put a value on education, we've managed to destroy the worth of education. It didn't exactly start with Tony Abbott's current horror budget. It started when we started conflating vocational training with getting an education - and for that we can lay the blame at John Dawkins and his reforms where they started to hand out bachelors  degrees for test-tube washing. With the Dawkins reforms came the vast delusion of mass professionalism in the workforce when really, the politicians just wanted to keep Gen-X off the unemployment statistics.

The legacy of it is the expansion of tertiary places accompanied by the devisement of fees to off-set the expense. While it might have been the smart move at the time it commodified the education into a grand vision for vocational training for everybody. It was 'Educating Rita" on a grand scale as part of that bargain. And with it came the unfortunate other irony that you can put a price on the education through projected future earnings. It was a crock - but for some reason we all bought it. Maybe we didn't choose to look too closely lest it reveal the fundamental asymmetry that the education you get has very little to do with the money you end up making.

The thing that really stands out with this notion of  deregulating the universities so they can charge whatever they like, is that it squarely places education out of reach from people. The only way in which you can successfully assess the worthiness of a course hinges on it vocational merits. And if our society were to commit to that vision of education, then we may as well kiss the enlightenment goodbye. Of course, this would suit the fear mongers and hate mongers of the Murdoch press; They keep baying for this kind of vision that locks in inequality.

IPA Stands For 'Ideological Propaganda Agency'

If you watch 'the Drum' like I do occasionally, you'll notice they always aim to get some commentator to explain just what is good about the so-called *thinking* of the Liberal Party. They usually get some right-wing toad from this 'Think Tank' (and you would have to use the term 'think' very loosely when it comes to these people) called the Institute for Public Affairs to parrot the official line. It's often unapologetic Thatcherite pap that it makes you scream at the television set the way Sophie Mirabella used to make us scream whenever she was on TV.

The IPA is full of terrible suggestions and explanations it makes you wonder if they actually grew up on the same planet as the rest of humanity, let alone in this country. Just how crazy are these people? You should look at a sample. Walk-Off HBP was kind enough to send this link today and well... it's pretty self explanatory.

Top of their list is abolishing the 'Carbon Tax', followed by abolishing the Department of Climate Change and the Clean Energy Fund. Clearly they're climate change deniers. What other possible explanation could there be? And this is an important point. Climate Change deniers have no science to back them up except for those soul-less sell-outs in the employ of the oil lobby who cherry pick stats to make it look like the world is cooling. It's not a scientific position. So it really makes me wonder why 'The Drum' has to invite such intellectually deficient cretins to argue this kind of insane oppositional view just to make it look balanced. Especially when the same said cretins are calling for funding cuts and breaking up the ABC. Why give this bunch of Morlocks any airtime at all? Would the ABC give a Holocaust denialist or KKK member 'equal time'?

No.

Then why this mob? The only thing that makes them respectable enough to talk to is the fact that they haven't hurt anybody - yet. But if they had their way, they would hurt a whole bunch of people. If we were to follow their pan-Galactically stupid recipe, it would cause so much damage to our society we may never recover. I don't know why the rest of Australia is being made to take this cretinous collective seriously.

News That's Fit To Punt - 08/Feb/2014

Burning Hands, Burning Pants


It's been a truly crappy few weeks in politics. First there was reportage by the ABC that Royal Australian Navy personnel had burnt the hands of asylum seekers in their recent turn-back-the-boats escapade. I won't go into how fraught and awful this exercise is in of itself, because we know the politics around it are as barren as the minds that conceived it. What I do want to recount is the extraordinary sequence of events which followed.

First there was the Prime Minister slamming the ABC and accusing them of gross inaccuracy in their reporting, and that somehow the national carrier is institutionally incapable of speaking on behalf of Australia's interests. Now, this was kind of weird because Australia's interests in this instance seemed suspiciously to be interchangeable with Tony Abbott's interests as a politician. If the stretchmarks were showing, it got ugly when there was an announcement made that there would be an efficiency review of the ABC.

The Navy and the Australian government denied the allegations and have continued to deny them since they were first aired.  It has looked like for all money that the ABC journalists on the ground were too keen to couch this as a problem for the Abbott government. In essence, they're saying the ABC journos involved are liars.

Of course, taken aback by the ferocity of the criticism, the ABC made noises about being more true to the stories they are reporting, but independent of the furor, Fairfax sent a journalist to find these people who allegedly had their hands burnt. It turns out that the ABC didn't just make this stuff up, it wasn't an exaggeration of an idle claim.

This week, in the Tanjung Pinang immigration detention centre on a little island off the coast of Sumatra, that changed. Fairfax Media conducted the first extended face-to-face interview with Fasher, who says he was an eyewitness to the incident, and he told his story in unprecedented detail.

His account has been consistent from the first. He says he has no doubt that what he saw at close quarters on about January 3 was three people's hands being deliberately held to a hot exhaust pipe by Australian naval personnel to punish them for protesting, and to deter others from doing one simple thing: going to the toilet too often.

And here's the pic.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="434"] Burnt Hand of Sudanese man[/caption]

Late yesterday, the breaking news was that Defence Minister David Johnston called for an inquiry in to the ABC just about at the same time Fairfax was breaking the news corroborating the ABC's original story. This is pretty stupid stuff so I am compelled to quote here:

''I don't want to do anything that might complicate that task of stopping the boats and frankly I don't want to do anything that would cast aspersions on the professionalism of our naval and customs personnel. I have nothing but respect for them ... and I have seen nothing that credibly casts any doubts on that professionalism.''

Senator Johnston also said he was happy with assurances given to him by Defence brass.

''I have discussed this matter with senior command,'' he said. ''They have assured me that there is no substance to these allegations.''

But he refused to detail measures taken to investigate the claims, instead calling for scrutiny of the ABC.

''If ever there was an event that justified a detailed inquiry, some reform and investigation of the ABC, this is it,'' he said.

He said the navy had been "maliciously maligned" by the ABC's coverage of the matter, dismissing the public broadcaster's apology as "weasel words" by its senior management.

''I have not said much because, I have to confess, I was extremely angry. I required some time to cool off,'' he said.

When asked why his department had not answered a detailed list of questions by Fairfax Media based on a detailed eyewitness account, Senator Johnston said it was a matter for Mr Morrison because it was a ''civil public policy issue''.

''When you give me something to act upon that is more than just hearsay, innuendo and rumour, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it,'' he said.

How stupid is that? No, really, how deeply idiotic is that?

Talk about shooting the messenger. What can we glean from this? It seems David Johnston does not read the news. If he did, he would have to admit that there is much more than "hearsay, innuendo, and rumour". There's the photo above for a start. Given that there is the photo now in public with the corroborating report, I don't see how David Johnston can maintain that he is happy with the assurance given to him by the Defence brass. If he is happy, it can only because he's one of those docile morons that happily live with the cognitive dissonance of having wildly conflicting information in his head without the need to resolve them.

Be that is it may, he says he's really angry at the ABC. He still thinks - in spite of the countervailing evidence - the initial report deserves an inquiry into the ABC and not the Defence department. When asked about the blatant conflict of information going, his explanation for it was that it's a "civil public policy matter"- but he's angry with the ABC about their "weasel words".

Sorry Senator Johnson, the only person practising weasel words in this exchange is your awful, awful, awful, stupid self.

And this brings me to the usual gripe. Who puts idiots like these in charge of the Defence department? That would be the same idiots who put Tony Abbott into the lodge: that would be us, the electorate. The government has been in for only 5 months and it seems to go from one policy disaster to the next, and when they get pulled up for it by the press, they scream bias in coverage. This is so pathetic but worse still is the way it reflects on us all. Who could have thought that democracy could yield such ghastly results? The next time I meet a swinging voter who voted for this Coalition, I think I will blame them for all of this.

But Wait There's More!

I forgot to mention the bit where Fairfax asked 21 pertinent questions to Immigration Minister Scott Morrison. This bit is good too.

Here's the full text:

Scott Morrison’s response
‘‘The government does not give credibility to malicious and unfounded slurs being made against our navy personnel and rejects outright any allegations of unprofessional conduct by our people serving in Operation Sovereign Borders. If media outlets wish to give credibility by publishing such unsubstantiated claims, that is a matter for them.

I know and trust that our navy and Customs and Border Protection Service act in accordance with their training and lawful orders and would only use force where necessary and appropriate to deal with threatening and non-compliant behaviour, as appropriate.

There are clear rules and guidelines to govern their behaviour and use of force and they are well trained  to act in accordance with these rules.  I’ll back their professionalism and integrity every day over the self-serving claims of those unhappy that they were denied what the people smugglers promised them.’’

It is also not the government’s policy to give people smugglers a ‘how to guide’ on our operations by providing responses on the issues raised. To do so would put both the people who protect our borders and the operations that are successfully stopping the boats at risk.

The government is aware of reports on Tuesday, 7 January, 2014, of claims that four people may have fallen overboard from a suspected illegal entry vessel inside Australian waters.

These claims were rigorously assessed and acted on at the time they were made, and I am confident that they were not true.

It is important to note that the claimed incident occurred well before the suspected illegal entry vessel had been intercepted by Australian authorities.
For operational security reasons, the government will not go into further detail on this matter.’’

If you believe that you'll believe anything this bunch says. What's more worrying - apart from the tone of the reply as well as the brazen disregard for developing any kind of discourse on the subject let alone addressing fairly specific questions, is this notion that what the government does is legitimately covered in some secrecy and therefore above and beyond the citizenry and its desire to be informed. No matter how you look at it, it's a cynical attempt to dress up something that is shonky as good and pathetic as profound. Again, we must ask ourselves how did we get here? ... and we can only blame ourselves once again.

All the same, you do wonder about the education of these mendacious semantic lightweights posing as statesmen of our commonwealth. They're shills for special interests.

They Want You To Lose Your Shirts

If you want even more evidence that they are just shills for special interests, try this one about the changes they want to make for financial planning. Pleiades sent in this one of Bernard Keane on Crikey observed behind the paywall:

First, there was the reversal of Labor’s decision to require better record-keeping and reporting for fringe benefits tax on novated leases. Note that this wasn’t a tax rise, as widely portrayed, but merely a requirement that people currently avoiding, or possibly in some circumstances evading, tax demonstrate they are doing so for the legitimate reasons they claimed. It was designed to end a straight-out tax rort perpetrated by the parasitic salary packaging industry, at the expense of every taxpayer without a novated lease. Hockey has reinstated the rort, at a cost to the rest of us of $1.4 billion over four years.

However, that’s as nothing compared to the government’s plans to reverse Labor’s Future of Financial Advice reforms, quietly revealed right before Christmas by Assistant Treasurer Arthur Sinodinos. Sinodinos proposes to dump the "opt-in" clause for financial advice fees that requires financial planners to actually get their clients’ permission to automatically skim off fees every year for advice clients have never sought and don't want. Sinodinos also wants to get rid of requirements for advisers to reveal fees to existing clients and dramatically water down requirements designed to end the conflict of interest in which financial planners push clients into products planners stand to benefit from.

While much of the financial planning industry, large and small, is eager to move to a professional model for the financial advice that would turn away from the decades of self-interest and fee-gouging of clients, a rump of planners with close ties to the Liberals want to retain their ability to exploit the disengagement of most Australians about their superannuation in order to skim off a never-ending line of fees. The Liberals, in any event, strongly support the retail super sector of the industry, run by the big banks and AMP, which routinely underperforms the industry funds despised by the Liberals for trade union involvement.

Sinodinos’ changes may cost financial planning clients, i.e. ordinary consumers, $130 billion in lost retirement savings, which the age pension system of the future will have to help make up. It puts all other handouts by government in the shade.

At the same time, the government has also scrapped Labor’s plan to tax superannuation earnings over $100,000 a year for high-income retirees (i.e. Liberal voters) at 15% -- while dumping assistance for low-income earners to increase their super contributions (i.e. Labor voters).

This government's pretty cynical about who it helps and who it condemns. The whole process whereby they let GM close Holden's factories in Australia and let Qantas dangle in the wind tell us that they are very much interested in smashing unions by making union employees in particular, unemployed. It sure would be one way to smash the unions if you could destroy the jobs that give them strength. So even without resorting to Work Choices which was front end bludgeon against the unions, Tony Abbott and his scabbie crew can wreak havoc on the union movement through simply letting their jobs fade.

This is some radial Thatcherite shit. No doubt there's Rupert Murdoch cheering on this kind of thing although you wonder if all this ideological manoeuvering would be so aggressive if Murdoch wasn't distorting the Liberals and their base into some kind of Tea Party clone.

It's amazing that this current incarnation of the Coalition don't want to govern for all Australians, but to remake the landscape so that they only have to govern for sectional interests. Case in point is this business of giving money to Cadbury while denying a similar amount of money to SPC Ardmona. Eric Abetz - Grand nephew of NAZI Otto Abetz - was on Insiders last week (another dismal mendacious self-congratulatory and nasty-minded effort) claiming there was a world of difference between the Cadbury and SPC situation and even threw in the Carbon Pricing as a reason these companies were  struggling (*UGH*). It might just be that Australians are lot more sadomasochistic than previously imagined and this is some grand BDSM Theatre of the absurd dressed up as politics.

Well, I for one wouldn't mind whipping the dying snot out of this sorry lot.

Literary Types Only

And The Book Show Is Not Literary Enough!

I just wanted to share this lovely little open letter with you from David Musgrave to the ABC:

Dear Producer

I'm writing in my capacity as board member of Australian Poetry Limited (a not-for-profit national arts organisation), as Publisher at Puncher & Wattmann Pty Ltd (the foremost independent publisher of poetry in Australia) and as one of this country's leading poets to request that you change the name of your program to the "Non-Poetry Multinational Publisher Product Show" to accurately reflect the content of your program. I am sure that the several thousand like-minded people in Australia who are my colleagues, peers or customers would agree that the rigorous exclusion of poetry from your program, as well as the extreme difficulty an independent publisher has in having their books discussed on your program, means that the current program title "The Book Show" is misleading, implying as it does that all books are given equal consideration.

Poetry is a vital part of our literary culture, yet your program, as with most of the mainstream media, does not even pay lip-service to this important literary art-form. If changing the name of your program is more difficult than merely changing the content to include poetry, I'd be happy to talk to you about how you might go about this.

Yours sincerely,

David Musgrave

Publisher

Puncher & Wattmann

P.S. You may want to read my blog about this subject.

And if that wasn't tart enough, here's his Blog entry. The middle bit reads thusly:

Poetry is an important part of the press, but not the only part - we're publishing more literary fiction than ever, and in early 2014 we will be releasing the novels Out of Print by Julian Croft and Slush-Pile by Ian Shadwell. A small but growing press like Puncher & Wattmann has to be prepared for the long haul, and to build its readership slowly but steadily. I'm always amazed at how popular poetry readings at the Sydney Writers festival are: every one that I have been involved in has been full to capacity, and I am sure that this is not because I happen to be part of it. The thing about poetry, and interesting writing in general, is that if you present it to a captive audience, they will find it very interesting and engage with it. It's just that in this day and age it is very difficult for the average reader to seek out new and interesting work apart from the small number of titles which are pushed through the mainstream press, largely by multinational publishers. Even people with a lot of time on their hands, retirees who are interested in reading literature, often don't know what is worth reading because reviews don't necessarily help them (even if they do appear in the newspapers) when there might be, say ten books of poetry or literary fiction to choose from in any given month, and they might only really want to read one or two. That's why small presses, those that hang around for decades, are extremely important for literary culture in this country.

So, take that, boring old establishment!

On another note, it's interesting that after years of sneering at this blog for being a blog ("what the hells is a blog anyway?") David has taken to writing his own. :) So, I've added a link to it on the right.

Now. If only I could get him to return my calls...