Red Rag

Mark on Holden bogans: “Yes, yes, I realise you’ve got a small penis you’d like to show off, sport, but I’d rather not learn such intimate details about strangers. Dinner and a movie first, at least.”

The IPA’s Mike Nahan puts a reasonably good case for restricting the definition of a “charity” to exclude excessive lobbying. But I still want to know — how would this affect Amnesty International? I think it is deserving of charity status, even though all it does is lobby. That’s all it can do.

Great news — the High Court upheld a decision of the Industrial Relations Commission to subject a foreign ship to the Australian award:

The court ruled that Australian industrial tribunals could regulate the working conditions of foreign crews on foreign-registered ships in local waters.

The decision immediately affects two ships of the Canada Steamship Lines, the CSL Pacific and the CSL Stadacona. It is also expected to affect foreign ships that received 699 single-voyage permits to trade in local waters last year and hundreds of others this year.

CSL had been using foreign ships to do domestic shipping. The company took an Australian ship — the River Torrens — and renamed and reflagged it the CSL Pacific. It operated the Pacific under the Bahaman flag, thereby escaping Australian industrial laws. It paid its workers lower wages and fewer entitlements:

Australian engineers earn around $76,000 a year compared to around $34,000 for Ukranians; integrated ratings about $52,000 compared to the $19,000 the company pays its Ukranian counterparts.

And under the international agreement, crew get no super, little leave and no redundancy entitlements.

It pulled the same stunt with the Yarra, which was flagged to the Bahamas and renamed the Stadacona, and the result was poor safety standards:

A crew member on the controversial bulk carrier Stadacona – formerly the CSL Yarra – was rushed to Royal Brisbane Hospital this week after falling 15 metres into the hold of the ship.

The company has refused to let the International Transport Federation help process his compensation or give the ITF any details on the accident.

“The question is do the crew have any training on safe working conditions and if so why was the deck mechanic working suspended over an open hold?” Dave Perry says.

The most disgraceful aspect is that the Howard Government is inviting these ships into Australia. They can’t operate from domestic ports without a special permit — although lately those permits haven’t been hard to obtain. This Government has allowed an Australian ship with an Australian crew and meeting Australian standards, to rename itself, come back under the Bahaman flag with a Ukranian crew and atrocious standards.

Worse still, it has gone to the High Court to oppose the application of Australian industrial laws to the ship, and when the decision went in favour of the workers it is considering “whether it needs to be further involved.” In other words, it might change the law to reinstate exploited foreign labour on Australian domestic shipping lines. That is absolutely outrageous.

UPDATE: The good lady Carita has furnished me with this link to the MUA’s reaction to the decision; meanwhile Ken Parish notes that the High Court’s decision was unanimous.

A friend of mine was on the jury of this bizarre case.

No really — somebody fell for a Nigerian money scam. To be fair, this one was a bit more elaborate than usual, but still…

Giovanni Torre has a couple of new posts up, but not many. My guess is that he’s been preparing for his album launch, which is on tomorrow night at the Fly by Night Club:

Mungo! The Musical! This is a show not to be missed from Perth’s most ‘unfeasibly entertaining band’, The Fascist Fair Go Party, with support from euro-metal favourites, Voyager. The story so far: In 1978, The Fascist Fair Go Party looked set to rule the world. Playing their unique brand of funk-rock to packed houses across the globe and increasingly finding acceptance for their outspoken political views, it looked as if nothing could stop The Party juggernaut. Then, on one tragic night… Mungo! The Musical! tells the tale of Li’l Mungo, The Fascist Fair Go Party front man who made faecal mastication an art form, and his untimely demise. 8pm til midnight

Yes, that’s right — Fascism, faecal mastication (ie “shit chewing”) and funk. Hope some of the Perth bloggers will turn up to support them — twelve bucks for a guaranteed good time.

One of the other members of the Fascist Fair Go Party is Edward J. Grug III, who is also known for his comics. I first came across Grug’s work through Pelican, the student newspaper of the UWA Student Guild. Then I stumbled across some The Theory Of comics at 78s. They’re pretty good. So good that Grug’s The Bizarre Life of Charlie Redeye has been picked up by the online comic site, Modern Tales.

The Australian comics community is apparently pretty vibrant. The OzComics Forum has almost 400 registered users, and the quality of their work is very impressive. This proposed picture book, by Jordan Lewerissa, is awesome. So are these sketches: (page 1, page 2). This work-in-progress looks very professional, although I’m not particularly taken by the concept. I really like the idea of a sketchblog; likewise the 24 Hour Challenge. (There’s Grug’s entry, but I also really enjoyed Pipestars. Gentlemen prefer cunt has a cool web layout, and this is just bizarre.)

Remember Photoshop Tennis, in which two or more graphic artists would take turns transforming an image, the victor being decided by popular acclaim. Then there was An Exquisite Cadaver, which updates the old childrens game: each participant sees only the bottom few pixels of the previous strip, and has to add a portion to the image. Sometimes the results are excellent, while other times they appear to miss the point. Well, my favourite discovery in the Australian comics scene is the comic jam, which is along similar lines.

One artist kicks off by drawing a frame of the comic. Subsequent artists pick up and continue the story, but the idea is for each one to bring their own style to the game, often with striking results. Take this ongoing jam for example:

I’m very impressed.

Of course, “comic jam” means different things to different people. The Toronto Comic Jam is a monthly face-to-face meeting of comic creators, who collaborate and publish their work online.

No blog entry about comics would be complete without a link to Invisible Shoebox, which features regular conversations between Grumpy Girl and the Questioning Ant, often on the subject of blogging. And then there’s the famous Noah Grey, whose journal was fascinating, whose photoblog is amazing, and whose software allowed me to begin blogging in the first place. (Well, after this abortive encounter with Blogger.) Anyway, Noah is chipping away at a graphic novel.

Hmm.

That’s the trouble with rambling entries. You end up somewhere interesting, and you’ve been to lots of interesting places along the way, but you have no idea where you’re going.

So I’ll stop now.

“Meet Sharee Marris, 28, Rory O’Brien, 24, Jacinta Plazzer, 27, and Domenic Carosa, 28, faces from the … so-called Y generation born in the early 1980s“. Except that they were all born in the late 1970s.

I’ve just heard that one of the other protestors arrested during the YSAW debacle has had her charges dropped, too. Hers were way more serious, too — assaulting a police officer.

The cop claimed to have been kicked in the back and said she was bruised. If so, why isn’t she proceeding with it?

The answer is obvious: it never happened.

The tactics used by police against demonstrators are disgusting.

I’ve had the Prime Number Shitting Bear running for 4 hours and 58 minutes now. He’s shat 16 467 prime numbers so far, the most recent being 181 729.

The headline: “Children detained unlawfully, judge says”. The reality? “Justice Strickland determined there was insufficient evidence before him to decide the issue.”