Red Rag

Tim Blair’s Quadrant dinner: “Last night’s speech went surprisingly well.” It went well? That is a surprise.

Miranda Devine’s latest column is good — she takes to task those dickheads who move into a neighbourhood, complain about the noise, and suck the life out of it — but she just can’t resist a cheap shot at Simon Crean, and she sound like an idiot:

Because he’s not from Sydney, Simon Crean probably hasn’t a clue what hit him this week in all the furore about where to put the airport. As a Melburnian, the Opposition Leader can’t be expected to understand the peculiar Sydney malady that allows arriviste noise nazis to rule the roost.

Crean fucked up with the airport thing, sure. But his being from Melbourne as the root cause? You’ve got to be kidding. People in cities all over Australia (and, presumably, the world) have,

instead of adapting to their funky new surroundings, … set about rearranging the furniture, complaining to councils, police and the EPA about noises from enterprises that were operating before their own homes were a twinkle in a developer’s eye.

In accusing Crean of being oblivious to anything outside Melbourne, Devine has revealed that she’s oblivious to anything outside Sydney.

Twit.

In what is good news to me, but will no doubt be upsetting to some, all charges against me have now been dropped. I still have to front at court on Tuesday, but the prosecution have indicated that they won’t be proceeding.

For those who don’t remember, I was arrested at a Youth and Students Against War march that got a bit out of control. At the time, I didn’t want to say much about it, but now that it’s over I might as well fill in the details.
Read the rest of this entry…

Ken Parish: “Then there’s the wonderful Don Arthur, whom I won’t delete because I refuse to accept that his retirement from blogging is permanent.” I can’t remove him from my bookmarks, either.

Blogging will be light for the next who-knows-how-long owing to an ever-growing inbox.

My primary focus will be study — trawling through the archives of the Battye Library. At present I’m trying to work out how serious was the Albany District Council’s threat to secede from the Australian Labor Federation in 1915. They weren’t happy that Joe Swebleses was removed as a trustee of the Metropolitan Council for being allegedly pro-German. In his Esplanade orations, he dared to question the veracity of some of the tales of German atrocities against French and Belgian civilians. He also hinted that every army committed atrocities. But worst of all, he mentioned that he didn’t like the King, and referred to the Union Jack as “the —— flag.” Those old debates are so very familiar…

I’ve also got work, preparations for my trip to Brisbane and Melbourne, and a court appearance next Tuesday. The police still haven’t provided any information to my lawyer, despite several months having elapsed since the alleged offence. I’m going to view the police video tomorrow (assuming they get their shit together).

Oh, and I’m also playing Grand Theft Auto 3 (I like New York better than Miami, so Vice City seemed pointless) on my PC, and NBA Live 2003 on Gamecube.

This sounds interesting:

A black leader wants a portion of some Aboriginal families’ welfare money redirected to schools to provide meals and books for children whose parents don’t budget properly.

This is a key proposal in atough-minded approach on indigenous issues being promoted by Lionel Quartermaine, a candidate for the deputy chairmanship of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. The post has been vacated by “Sugar” Ray Robinson, for years a powerful and controversial figure in ATSIC, who is before a court.

Quartermaine says siphoning off some of the payment would tackle the problem of children who don’t get fed properly because their parents drink away their money or spend it on drugs. At least this way the children would get one good meal a day, he says. Social workers would need to decide when children were being neglected. He wants ATSIC to take up the idea.

Early this year I was having a beer with a couple of friends of mine, Matt and Lindsay. Matt suggested that at least a portion of people’s Centrelink payments should be in the form of food stamps, for this very reason — that the parents of alcoholics and junkies don’t feed their kids. Lindsay and I both argued that food stamps stigmatise the poor and suggest that they are in that situation due to their own economic incompetence. That is undoubtedly true for a small proportion of welfare recipients, but to imply that they all neglect their children is unfair. Matt challenged us to come up with a better solution to the problem, and after some frustration Lindsay finally suggested a school breakfast program.

That type of scheme has been successfully implemented in several WA schools on an ad hoc basis. The Looma community of the Kimberley region is one example, as is this award-winning program to assist the Wongai people at Laverton. There is also a long list of NSW schools that offer breakfasts.

I think there is potential for this scheme to be universalised. Every child at every government school (and possibly at every private school, too) could be offered a free breakfast. This could be funded by a slight reduction in the Parenting Payment, in recognition of the reduced financial burden on the parents. As most schools have canteens that are open before school, the cost of setting things up would be minimal, while the food is cheaper to buy in bulk than it is for individual families. That means the public will get a better welfare outcome for the money it spends.

I don’t see this as a radical policy. A school lunch program has been running in the US for over fifty years. It’s about time we caught up. If these are the policies the “new ATSIC” will be pushing, then things are looking up.

Interesting: “Clearly more people consume porn than are fans of reality television.” So why did Tempation Island rate so badly?

With regard to the alleged missing money at ALSF, my informant tells me, “No money has gone missing. It is a typical Crikey inaccuracy.”

Secret GOP memo: “It is only through the unity of the Republican Party that the unity of the whole nation can be achieved, and it is only through the unity of the whole nation that the enemy can be defeated and the American conservative revolution accomplished.” Hee!

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Publication of graphic death photographs causes outrage — not the Husseins, not in Iraq.

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From the pages of the Westralian Worker comes this entertaining gem. In 1914, the paper’s regular column, “Cleopatra’s Needles: A Column of Points for Women,” published this letter from one of its readers:

WE OPPOSE POCKETS FOR WOMEN.

1. Because pockets are not a natural right.

2. Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did, they would have them.

3. Because whenever women have had pockets they have not used them.

4. Because women are expected to carry enough things as it is without the additional burden of pockets.

5. Because it would make dissension between husband and wife as to whose pockets were to be filled.

6. Because it would destroy man’s chivalry towards woman if he did not carry all her things in his pockets.

7. Because men are men and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature.

    –”Public.”

It struck me as interesting because the column was typified by a passion for the Suffragettes. No editorial remarks accompanied the letter, but I suspect that it was a sarcastic commentary on the issue of woman suffrage — try replacing the word “pockets” with “votes”. (Of course, if I were a follower of Windschuttle such an inference would be entirely inappropriate — we must accept unquestioningly the written record.)

For the record, I’m a big supporter of pockets for women. I’m happy to do my chivalrous duty by carrying Carita’s keys or phone, but I find it disturbing that while they insist on carrying a bag with them wherever they go, women still have stuff left over. Weirdos.

Crikey! “The big news from the provisional wing of the Liberal Party, the Australian Liberal Students Federation, and their national conference in Adelaide, has been the discovery that $10,000 has gone missing from federation funds.” Perhaps local ALSF heavyweight and sometime Mentalspace reader Jeremy Sher can elaborate?

Ken Parish rightly criticises me for bringing my “good work undone by including what I regard as an irresponsible and immature incitement to the Indymedia types to demonstrate outside Alexander Downer’s house. He even lists Alexander’s home address.” It was a snarky addition to the post, and totally unwarranted, so I have removed it. It’s a bit much, though, to describe it as “a pointless squandering of political capital and democratic legitimacy.” It was one sentence in a post on a blog, for chrissakes. Let’s not blow things out of proportion.

In general, I think protesting against immigration policies is best done outside the Immigration Department, or outside the Minister’s electorate office. Likewise for other portfolios. In this case, I was under the impression that protestors would attempt to surround Philip Ruddock’s private home in barbed wire, thus symbolically demonstrating to the Minister that what is just work to him is somebody else’s everyday existence. It is a deeply personal issue, and such a protest would have been, in my opinion, entirely appropriate.

In the end, the protestors made no such attempt, opting instead for the march/chants/speeches format of every other rally. This wouldn’t have raised as much media attention if it had been done outside an office block in the CBD, but doing it outside the Minister’s home added nothing to it. It was just another boring, “marching in circles” protest that achieved little (which is why the out-of-proportion, sensationalised media coverage pissed me off so much).

In cases like this, conventions are valuable. As Ken points out, we need to balance the right to protest with the right to a quiet Sunday morning. In most cases, we can do this by protesting somewhere else than a suburban street. I reckon this convention should be maintained unless there is some compelling reason to break it — like an action that relies on pushing at the boundaries of public/private space in order to make its point (like the barbed-wire proposal). Otherwise, don’t bother.

(Incidentally, I once lived in Thornleigh, remarkably close to the dead-man-walking.)