Blues In The Key Of 18C

'The Right To Be A Bigot' Politics Truly Sucks

I don't mean to write a lot about politics or economics. It just ends up that way. I couldn't imagine being a real life political correspondent covering the comings and going in Canberra. I imagine it would be quite insular and tedious to begin with, but made worse by the rhetorical games and the not-answering-your-question-but-shoving-my-agenda thing that politicians do that makes bullshit out of important subjects and perhaps does more to obfuscate things rather than reveal.

The modern cadre of journo covering politics would have the added horror of having to follow politicians through social media as well as having to translate the politi-speak employed by the politicians into plain English. It's not an enviable job. Back in the day when Peter Smark, Peter Ellingsen and Alan Ramsey wrote for the Fairfax, you never got the feeling that they got too exasperated even when the going got silly or for that matter violent as it did in Tiananmen Square.

Then again, they didn't come up against the wall of bullshit that gets erected daily by our contemporary politicians. The wall of bullshit can get so high, it can get a man with no idea and no policies of merit, get voted in to become Prime Minister of the land. That's some steep bullshit.

I can't really imagine what it's like to be Katherine Murphy or Laura Tingle who have had to work the press gallery in Canberra during the Abbott Government, because some of what they've written lately betrays a quiet disillusion with government, politics and what politics can achieve in this country, given the calibre of people we've voted in. I mean, it's bad enough blogging this stuff. Doing it for work would suck.

That in a roundabout way brings me to this current brouhaha they are having down in Canberra to do with the Racial Discrimination Act part 18C. The Liberal Party claims with the highest possible ground can muster, that 18C interferes with freedom of expression. To recap, this notion exists because conservative commentator Andrew Bolt got himself into a spot of bother over vilifying somebody for not being Aboriginal enough. It's stretching things. This then gave enough impetus for the Coalition government to try and rewrite this little section that says you can't offend and humiliate people, and George Brandis infamously championed the cause of people's right to be a bigot.

If the great crusade for freedom of expression culminates with the right for people to be bigots, then you have to think maybe you took a wrong turn somewhere. Surely you'd think the moment those words left his lips, George Brandis might have thought, "hang on, maybe I'm giving ammunition to the wrong people?" After all, the first thing that sprang into my mind was the line from 'Catch-22':

"Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It's a terrible thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a nigger, kike, wop, or spic.”

If you're arguing for a special, specific spot to protect plain obnoxious assholes from the Racial Discrimination Act, maybe you're arguing too fine a point to be called 'freedom of speech'. If you want a special exemption from the RDA, and that exemption is to be allowed to offend people and humiliate them by calling them words like nigger, kike, wop/wog or spic, (or abo, boong, chink or gook too!), maybe it doesn't say much about the free press or freedom of expression in this country? After all, what kind of press is going to say, refer to Mr. Obama as a nigger and cite freedom of expression to allow it, and by extension, not to cop to the judgment and opprobrium such a description would earn them?

Maybe it just says more about George Brandis and his own tremendous, irrepressible desire to be a bigot? Is it really a win for freedom of speech if the upshot of changing this act is so that Andrew Bolt can use the bully pulpit of his radio microphone to vilify people without much of a voice in our community? Maybe this is simply too hard asking the party of "ditch-the-witch" to consider. Maybe it's just too hard for them to comprehend.

Think of all the things this government doesn't support, like a bill of rights. Or the things it chooses to censor, treating its own citizens like children. It goes after artists for fear their work might be paedophilia; it censors films that point to the corrupt nature of power, like 'Salo'; you can't argue this wowser government is doing everything it possibly can to protect freedom of expression. How can all this fixation and fuss over 18C be anything but the desire to be bigoted and not to be punished for it? One can't possibly take this bunch on their word about this principle.

So here we are, folks - a Parliament busily arguing the imagined merits of rewriting 18C. Read it and weep.

More On That Intellectual Bankruptcy

Here's An Example!

Right on cue, here's an article by Tom Switzer that illustrates my point.

It should be obvious to even primary school students that a war criminal is someone who has actually committed a war crime. More to the point, to equate a democratic leader who supported the toppling of a brutal dictatorship with the likes of the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge is a cheapening of moral language. 

One could oppose the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and still believe that Howard, like Tony Blair and George W. Bush, was motivated by good intentions. Saddam Hussein, after all, was a murderous despot who had invaded Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990 and subsequently defied about 17 United Nations resolutions. He also used chemical weapons in the murder of tens of thousands of Kurds in the north and the Shiites of southern Iraq.

Where do you start? Let's do this in order.
When the so-called 'Coalition of the Willing' invaded Iraq in 2003, it did so without a sign off from the UN Security Council. You might recall Collin Powell getting up and showing aerial reconnaissance photographs which purported showing Iraqis shuttling trucks loaded with Weapons of Mass Destruction. The UN did not say, "sure go ahead", they said, "no".

The point is, the 'Coalition of the Willing' invaded Iraq unilaterally, and for that John Howard has to wear the responsibility of co-authoring that disastrous move - a move so disastrous we're still reaping the poisoned fruits of those labours. This side of 1945, we do have an understanding that world leaders who unilaterally invade countries (no matter the goodness of intentions) are up for war crimes.

And as stupid as it is to repeat this here, this is why there is a legitimate argument to be made that George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard are war criminals by the very same ruler we use to measure such diverse people as Herman Goering, Hideki Tojo, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, and whoever else tinpot dictators in Africa we don't like. This accusation is expressly not, "cheapening of moral language" as Switzer argues; merely a logical ramification of the legal logic cast upon these other people like Herman Goering, Hideki Tojo, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic et al. To argue otherwise is an attempt to create one set of rules for the people in history we dislike, and another set of rules for leaders of English speaking nations to suit Tom Switzer's bit of sophistry.

As of the findings of the Chilcott Report earlier this year, it is no longer tenable to give the benefit of the doubt to GeorgeW. Bush and Tony Blair for their so-called "good intentions". To argue that Saddam Hussein had it coming - sans proper trial at the Hague which he did not get - and therefore his misdeeds justified the Iraq War, flies in the face of the principle of having War Criminals. If you think Saddam being Saddam justified the 2003 invasion, you're arguing that any nation can go invade another if it can form its own coalition of willing countries to participate because might and majority make their own right.

Clearly we in the Western World do not go by this thinking, and this is also why the world has such an elaborate institution as the United Nations with its Security Council to forestall such free-for-alls. You just can't have it both ways where Saddam is a War Criminal and George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard are not War Criminals, if you believe in the moral language of having war criminals in the first place. That leaves the legal defence of John Howard to the possibility that he was not part of the criminal conspiracy perpetrated by Bush and Blair, but merely a tag-along. That would make him a dangerous adventurer, which is no more admirable than a "War Criminal".

The thing that gets me is that all of this is simply logic. It's not a philosophical issue at all.It's simply the logic constructed by the types of conservatives in the past - like Winston Churchill - thought up with all this legal logic. The history altering event of 2003 was that the self-appointed leaders of the free world would throw reason together with caution to the wind and go rampaging into Iraq. To pretend otherwise is so intellectually deficient and dishonest it makes you wonder how the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald doesn't balk at it (yes you Darren Goodsir).

Anyway... Switzer decides to give himself a pat on the back - a bit unseemly but what the heck - and then goes on to say:

What Howard failed to recognise, however, was the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Toppling Saddam, as many conservative realists (such as this writer and my friends Owen Harries and John Mearsheimer) warned at the time, was also fraught with the danger of unintended consequences.

Good God. Conservative realists? Really? As opposed to ordinary realists who opposed the war on principle, the Conservative realists who opposed it on the basis of the difficulty of fulfilling the rest of the mission, once begun? If you are going to bang on the morality of language to begin with, you'd think you would argue things on the principle of it, but no. Tom Switzer wants to argue a technicality that the mission itself was difficult, and that's why it was wrong. Switzer is saying if the Iraq War worked out much cleaner, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
He's dead wrong.

On top of which, if that were the case, then he is once again arguing that Saddam had it coming, and that's good enough for him - but heaven forbid those who would argue on principle that the invasion of Iraq was a war crime. That's the height of hypocrisy.

Then there's this bit...

The objectors to the honorary doctorate also claim Howard was a racist. Never mind his post-Tampa asylum-seeker standoff policies boosted public confidence in our immigration and humanitarian refugee agenda. So much so that the rate of legal, non-discriminatory migration from four corners of the world, including Africa, doubled from 2002 to 2007. When Malcolm Turnbull praises Australia as the global role model for border protection, he is paying tribute to Howard (and his successor Tony Abbott).

Look, John Howard landed himself in much trouble in the 1987 Federal election campaign when he said there were too many asian migrants. It took him a long time to rehabilitate his image, but those words were uttered and even in 1987, it was obvious that he was playing race politics to get ahead. That would make John Howard a racialist politician. If he is not one today, it may be because he's grown to be a better man since, but the John Howard of 1987 was rightfully spotted as a racist - and proud of it. These things are not going to get forgotten. If John Howard never wanted to wear the epithet, he should have had the good sense not to stoke those fires for a few votes more. Most famous people who are not racists, never get hung with the epithet. The fact that it landed on Howard speaks volumes.

As it is, his tacit non-condemntion of One Nation in 1996 only entrenched the view that he was still a racist, even after his alleged detente with the Chinese community. There is no way known you could argue John Howard was not a racist politician. Malcolm Turnbull can praise Howard for a multi-cultural Australia all he likes, but he'd be dead wrong too - it simply wasn't the way that historic discussion went. Once again, it is intellectually dishonest for Tom Switzer to present John Howard as this amazing champion of multiculturalism in Australia. He can try it on, but it's called lying.

And this is what we have as conservative commentary. Two bits of sophistry combined with moral outrage about the "moral language" ("egadz!") and an outright attempt to rewrite the track record of a man who was an unpleasant racialist politician, if not an outright racist individual.

John Howard richly deserves the opprobrium heaped upon him. That the University of Sydney with its crappy regressive culture would want to honour John Howard with an honorary doctorate is their business. In my books, nothing is beneath them. If Switzer thinks John Howard is so deserving of this honour, that's also his business. However, complaining about those who would object to this conferring of social capital is a bit rich. The public record is what it is; John Howard knows what he did; Switzer knows what he did; we all know what Howard did. Let's not pretend for a moment that it's not contentious to hand this man an honorary doctorate and praise him. It's this kind of game-playing sophistry and hypocrisy that makes the conservatives look so intellectually vacant in this country. If Tom Switzer is the leading light of these conservative thinkers, then they've really got a problem.

Just saying.

The Passing Of Malcolm Fraser

The Missing Memory

I arrived back in Australia the month Azaria Chamberlain went missing. Previous to that, I was out of the country in the second half of the 70s, living in New York City. I was 14 and not terribly political. In short, I totally missed the high drama of 1975. The place where my family lived for short while was deepest darkest St. Ives; I went to St. Ives High School when the 1980 election took place, not long after. Malcolm Fraser's incumbent Coalition government defeated the ALP led by Bill Hayden.

The next day there was a schoolyard post-mortem of sorts and not knowing what was what, I was able to see most of the kids leaned towards the Liberals except one lanky thin kid with Buddy Holly glasses whose parents voted Labor, who was hounded across the schoolyard by muscular bullies. It was memorable; and when I think of why I dislike Tories in this country, I think of those bullying kids. But St. Ives High School was simply like that: Conservative politics, racism and bullying were just ingrained social graces where for all I knew there was widespread domestic violence, prescription drug abuse and alcoholism.

To a kid who grew up in New York City, the deep Sydney Northshore looked like a cultural wasteland. It was a beautiful tree-lined place with the ugliest of attitudes. And Malcolm Fraser was their man. That left an impression.

All of this is to say, I really didn't feel political until I was 14 and living in Sydney, and I totally missed out on the Dismissal thing so I'm effectively with the people who were too young to remember the Dismissal. So my dislike of Malcolm Fraser was more of a general rejection of the kind of backward - more like redneck - St. Ives self-image of Australia. If they liked it up in St. Ives, surely it was deeply thoroughly flawed, vulgar and detestable. In some ways, this still holds true.

St. Ives was a place where meanness was a virtue in the way that a Jeff Thompson bouncer was mean, but good. Giggles and beer. If the bouncer hit Gordon Greenidge in the head, it was cool because well, that's how you played hard and doubly pleasurable because Greenidge was a black man. More giggles and beer.  Their kids thought this was normal.

There was a graffiti on railway bridge on the lower Northshore, where it read 'Fraser', with the 's' substituted with a swastika. It was already there in 1981 when our family move down to Chatswood - an altogether more progressive area with a rather cosmopolitan school - and I recall the graffiti still being there when I was a operation personnel at the ABC in 1989. By then it was utterly anachronistic, and it wasn't long before we would see Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser make peace.

In between, Fraser lost to Hawke in '83 and shed a tear on the way out. Australia grew up a little bit out of being a parochial post-colonial backwater, although that might have felt that way simply because I was in Chatswood and not St. Ives. I've been assured St. Ives most certainly didn't change.
And that was mostly it.

All of which is to say, for a person whose political consciousness leans to the progressive, I've never been all that angry at Malcolm Fraser the person. In his years after politics, he would often step up to say the decent thing. The Liberal Party on the other hand continued to drift to the right and mostly towards the unintelligent and unintelligible.

Alan Ramsay pretty much nails it.

Whatever you thought of his politics and his seminal role in the vice regal dismissal of the Whitlam Labor government almost 40 years ago, John Malcolm Fraser was, above all else, a genuine liberal in the best sense of the word. Thus he goes to his grave appalled, surely, by the oafs, boofheads and lesser ninnies that not only control the Liberal Party and conservative politics in this country these days, but take their disgrace to the summit of running Australia too. 

How could it have come to this, J.M. Fraser must have wondered, constantly, in more recent years, as political behaviour, state and federal, from top to bottom, in our parliaments and out, and right across the three major parties in our democracy, became uglier, greedier, less inclusive, less civil, less caring, more irresponsible, more ill-mannered, more shrill, more ratbag, and wholly more venal, indeed blighted in any and every way you care to look at what is happening to national political life in this country?

Malcolm Fraser might have well wondered why and how his party became the party of illiberal, intolerant, racist, cultural imbeciles who deny scientific facts and have no eye for the future or the environment. He would have been correct to do so. If I had the opportunity to meet the man and a time machine to do some time travel, I would have shown him the schoolyard of St. Ives 1980 - the Australia in which presided over where the dastardly future was being incubated. The seeds of the eldritch horrors of an Abbott-Government Australia were all there to be seen.

The man, after leaving office was much more influential as an opinion leader. The multi-cultural Australia he espoused and gave life to with the inception of SBS stood in stark contrast to the racially tinged, accented-with-xenophobia, bigot-friendly drift to the right that the Liberal Party executed under John Howard. After the 1993 election loss the Liberal Party embarked on a lot of soul-searching and decided upon a course of lurching to the right, most precipitously.  If Fraser had been damned in 1975 of the potential for Australia to turn into some kind of Latin American military junta, then Howard tacitly pushed Australia towards the lukewarm 1984-parody in which we now reside with much praise from the big end of town. After all, there's nothing like a party you pay for, doing your bidding. All kinds of prejudices found a legitimising home in the Liberal Party of the late 90s and early 2000s. Bullies, conks, monarchists, climate change denialists, male chauvinists, xenophobes, homophobes, and the plain old rude congregated under the big tent of stupidity erected by John Howard.

For, it has to be said, those bullying xenophobic, homophobic, sexist, anti-intellectual, culturally backward bullying kids amassed on that St. Ives schoolyard are now the paid up members of the Liberal Party of Australia. Racist and proud of it, mean and proud of it, clinging to the glories of a White Australia. Stop the boats. Stop the witch. Stop the mining tax. Repeal the Carbon Tax! Stop the science funding, stop the education, stop making sense. They never grew up they just confirmed and hardened in their entirely idiotic world view. Malcolm Fraser might not have understood it, but I would have been able to show him from whence came all that crassness, avarice, and intolerance.

And so with his sad passing, well may we say God Save Malcolm Fraser for nothing will ... oh, no, let's not; let's just forget about the punchline for once.
Instead we say, vale Malcolm Fraser.

Liberal Rule Blues

A Bolt Out Of The Poo

Rightwing nutjob columnist Andrew Bolt was in the news today complaining that he was insulted by being lablled a racist by people on 'Q&A', and when the ABC issued an apology, he found it to benot good enough. At which point I think I rolled my eyes. We all know this man; he's the one who got into that court case where he claimed a woman was somehow gaming the system by pretending to be an Aborigine despite the fact she had white skin - and promptly lost that court case. Since then it's metastasised into a cause celebre for the right, with George Brandis vowing to repeal section 18C of the Anti-Descrimination act. George Brandis thinks that somehow a great impeditment to freedomeof expression in this country (the very same George Brandis who is threatening to withdraw Australia Council funding from artists who boycott the Sydney Biennale! Scum and Villainy!).

Anyway, it strikes me as somewhat odd that there is a group a of white men who really want to repeal the bit of the Anti-Descrimination Act which is written so you can't belittle people for their race. But it turns out these people have skin as thin, if not more, than the groups of people who do not want it repealed. Indeed, the various 'wogs', 'chinks', 'gooks', 'kikes', 'spics' 'abbos' and 'boongs' of Australia have asked through their community groups and organisations not to repeal 18C.  If they do repeal it, I'll be the first to congratulate these honky-cracker-skippies by calling them one. But you do get the feeling they just don't quite get it.

It's one thing for 18C to be repealed by a bunch of white men of the dominant mainstream who are taking away the sense of protection from people who aren't anywhere near mainstream in their representation in Australia. It's entirely another thing to see a white man who has a dominant position in the mainstream through his presence in the mass media complains that he is somehow done wrong by being accurately described as a racist. If you talk about people in generalities based on their perceived race and make a pile of judgment calls based on that (faulty) perception, then you deserve to be branded a racist. They're the damn rules, Andrew Bolt, you dolt!

Brain Damage

Apropos of the Ian Roberts concussion thing I've been thinking about our Dear Leader Tony Abbott, who in his youth was a pugilist. We know from reports of the time that his style was 'raging bullshit' and not much skill, just flailing away hard hoping to connect with the other guy. Mike Tyson he was not - and you'd think that as such he must have taken quite a few blows to the head, boxing that way. And you wonder what sort of brain damage he must have sustained, and perhaps that is maybe why he is the way he is. Combined with the fact that the brain of a conservative is already misshapen towards needless fear and paranoia, you get the feeling that maybe, just maybe, this country is being led by a severely deficient human being.

But then again, the total irrationality of his policy agenda would have alerted you to this fact. The real corker question is what's the rest of the Liberals doing following this madman about?