Red Rag

So Crean pulled the pin. Now we’ve got a choice between Beazley, Latham and Rudd. Interestingly, the internet polls have Latham marginally in front, but it’s neck and neck. The Age has Beazley/Latham/Rudd at 32/34/33 per cent, and the SMH puts it at 20/22/19%.

Personally, I like Rudd. Not because I think he’s some kind of saviour, but because I don’t like Beazley and I loathe Latham. However as he’s the only one left that hasn’t announced his candidacy, so that may not even be an option. He’s certainly the underdog.

If it’s Latham or Beazley, I’ll be very pissed off.

UPDATE: Rudd’s out, and it looks like Beazley’s got the numbers. There are obvious problems with Beazley returning to the leadership, including the fact that Latham previously resigned to the back benches rather than serve under him. On second thoughts, that’s probably a good thing. The less influence Latham has on policy, the better. On balance, I think Beazley’s more likeable, he’s better in the media, and he argued against Latham’s “tax cuts for the rich” calls earlier this month.

Tim Dunlop (among others) recently noted that the FBI is treating protestors as if they were terror suspects — notwithstanding the fact that the Bureau “possesses no information indicating that violent or terrorist activities are being planned as part of these protests”. Such heinous crimes as raising money to pay for lawyers and using the internet to recruit supporters were discussed, and people who attempted to videotape arrests were accused of trying to “intimidate” police officers. If they are intimidated by the prospect of having their actions scrutinised publicly, then one must ask serious questions about police tactics. The memo also mentioned protestors’ “training camps”, a term that connotes terrorist activity, while the reality, as described by Jason Raimondo, is “a bunch of hippies playing touchy-feely games with each other and training in techniques designed to minimise violence.”

In recent months massive paramilitary operations targetting protestors in Australia and England have been justified on the grounds that mass demonstrations could provide cover for a terrorist attack on George W Bush; in other words, a mythical threat requires people exercising their fundamental democratic rights to be treated as the worst kind of criminal. Meanwhile, the biggest link between protestors and terrorists/enemies of the state was drawn by the Miami authorities preparing for protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Of the $87 billion budget passed to pay for the US’s increasingly shambolic war on Iraq, $8.5 million was spent on police in Miami. You would be forgiven for thinking Saddam had been spotted sunbaking, but that’s not what it was for — it was to equip a massive paramilitary force to deal with Americans exercising their constitutional freedoms of assembly and speech. Exactly how they jeapordised the Iraq war has not been made clear.
Read the rest of this entry…

Now listening to: Lagwagon, “Kids in America”, “Brown Eyed Girl”, “Mission Impossible Theme”; The Ramones, “Spiderman Theme”; Dropkick Murphys, “Finnegan’s Wake”; Bodyjar, “Land Down Under”, etc. Yep, punk covers are cool. And then to mix things up, Guster’s rendition of “Killing in the Name.” Which is also cool, in a bizarre, lame kind of way.

I’ve finally finished. (Hmm. How else does one finish?)

Sitting on the Rail: The Westralian Worker’s response to wartime issues

The Westralian Worker occupies a privileged place in Western Australia’s labour history, as the working class movement’s official organ. This study seeks to understand how the paper dealt with its conflicting roles as reflector and projector of labour movement opinion—the observer-agent dichotomy. It does so by analysing the Worker’s response to some of the major issues facing labour during World War I. The peace movement, anti-German attitudes, the persecution of the IWW, and the conscription debates are considered. It will be argued that the Worker attempted to accommodate a wide range of views, but as organised labour’s divisions grew deeper, this position became untenable; ultimately the Westralian Worker was captured by the anti-conscriptionists.

Read the whole thing: PDF.

UPDATE: It’s now in the library.

Uncle’s the king of all conspiracy theorists: he won’t even visit his own blog without an anonymiser.

Procrastination makes the world go round, so here’s another instalment of Uncle Watch.

Linking to an ABC story about wild Kangaroos in Paris, he complains that “A real kangaroo expert would know [they eat] ‘buds, leaves, and roots’.” It’s a pretty weak indictment of the ABC as it is, but when you realise it’s a wire story that was News Ltd as well, it becomes even weaker.

He also whines that Radio National is “not left enough”. I guess it’s pretty hard to prove left-wing bias at the ABC when the ABC is so determined to include right-wing opinions…

Coverage of David Hicks vs coverage of Wang Jianping also perplexes him. Noting that the two Australian citizens have been locked in foreign prisons, he’s not happy that Fairfax and the ABC disproportionately reported on David Hicks’ plight. Interestingly, he ignores News Ltd’s Hicks:Jianping ratio, presumably because it’s very similar. I guess it’s more newsworthy when the great and benevolent United States uses an offshore detention camp to subvert human rights, than when a dictatorship locks up a suspected spy. At least China pretended to give Jianping a trial. America still hasn’t charged Hicks, but it has signalled that he’ll go to a dodgy military tribunal like the one in China.

And he takes a cheap shot at Justice Michael Kirby, who “hasn’t declared his right to escape from lawful Chinese custody”. If he had to rattle off a list of every degrading hellhole in the world, the High Court would have transacted very little business in the last week. He did mention Cambodia, though, so let’s not pretend Kirby’s complaint was Guantanamo-specific.

Robert McClelland — Channel 9, 9 November 2003:

But what we’ve got to look at is the future, and in particular Amanda Vanstone has effectively said by excising the islands, the target now becomes Australia’s mainland? In this case about another two hours sailing would have got them to Darwin or its vicinity.

Amanda Vanstone — JJJ, 18 November 2003:

I think it’s a fair thing to say, if you want to make a claim to stay in Australia, you’ve got to make it to the mainland.

Two hours’ sailing.

Aargh. I need to lop off about 2000 words, and then write another three. Lunchtime at the latest. I hope.

Have you seen those ads on telly that show a car bursting through the wall of a house as the family eats breakfast inside? Well, it happened to a friend of a friend of mine.

That’s my friend Sarah’s sister’s house. The car smashed through the wall next to their front door, and did substantial structural damage to the building. The house will have to be demolished, but thankfully nobody (in the house, at least) was hurt.

The right wing’s favorite pitch these days is that those of us on the left are irrationally consumed with blind hatred for [John Howard].

From [Tim Blair] to [Gareth Parker] to [Steve Edwards] all the way to [John Ray] (who knows a thing or two about hating), the rightwing pundits have been scratching their pits about this seemingly unsolvable riddle.

It’s not exactly Fermat’s Theorem.

Let’s see. Where to begin?

Well, there’s the [Tampa-based] election, for starters.

Then there’s the trashing of the [refugee] and Kyoto treaties.

And the tax cuts for the rich. And the deregulation of corporations.

And the [fridge magnets], Guantanamo Bay, and the imprisoning without trial of [Australian] citizens.

Of course, there’s this reckless, illegal war in Iraq that [Howard joined], using a pile of dry lies as fuel.

And then there was last week’s [attack on gay marriage], with [George Pell] grinning behind the [Prime Minister's] ear.

That should be enough to solve the puzzle.

But now comes [Norman Hanscombe] of [Cassandra's Cave], writing … that the left is now “frothing” as much as conservatives did when [Keating] was [Prime Minister]. …

The article was by the great columnist Molly Ivins, who wrote, in her concluding section: “It’s not necessary to hate [John W. Howard] to think he’s a bad [Prime Minister]. Grownups do that, you know. You can decide someone’s policies are a miserable failure without lying awake at night consumed with hatred.”

What she hates are [Howard's] miserable policies. She concludes her essay by saying, “If that makes me a [Howard]-hater, then sign me up.”

I’m with Molly. [Howard] may be an affable guy, but he’s a dangerous, disastrous [Prime Minister].

[With apologies to Matthew Rothschild.]

I’m in the final stages of my honours dissertation. Preliminary feedback from my supervisor indicates that I’m not overlooking anything important, and that “there are no major structural flaws.” That’s a good thing.

Apart from the usual cosmetic changes that need to be made in the drafting process, I’ve got to shrink it. It’s at about 26 000 words right now, and needs to lose over a fifth. That shouldn’t be too much trouble, though — there’s a couple of sections that need to be considerably reduced, which will improve the overall flow of the paper.

Tomorrow I’m meeting my supervisor to discuss some specific changes, and I hope to have a draft in the vicinity of the target length by tomorrow night. (Mind you, tomorrow night’s State Executive meeting is preselecting a good many candidates, so that might be pushed back to Tuesday morning.) Then it’s fiddling with phrases and footnotes for the rest of the week.

Is Paris Hilton a raccoon?

At last, Uncle has stopped picking his navel lint and posted something substantial about the ABC. Unfortunately, his idea of “substantial” means selectively quoting from Senate Estimates Committee Hansard (pdf, p120 on). He has four points to discuss.

1. Media Watch and Alston’s whinging

There are two parts to Uncle’s complaints here.

First, he suggests that Media Watch should not ask questions about the political motivations behind Senator Alston’s complaints. He doesn’t explain why it shouldn’t do so, but believes the investigations were not fruitful:

Having failed to prove that the Jews were behind Minister Alston’s complaints, Media Watch slammed Alston because, they claimed, no-one was behind him!

That’s an interesting take on the report, because I seem to recall a strongly-made point about exactly who was behind Alston:

So evidence of the groundswell amounted to this: a number of unlogged telephone calls and nine letters.

There was a tenth that actually named AM, its presenter Linda Mottram and a morning of reports that would provoke ten of those 68 complaints.

But that letter came not from a member of the general public, but the Federal Director of the Liberal Party, Brian Loughnane…

It was not the public complaining, it was the party and the government – a government with a war to fight and a war to sell.

Media Watch followed up leads, made FOI requests, and found out where Alston’s complaints were coming from. Good job.

The second part of Uncle’s complaint is that Media Watch didn’t “deal with the substance of the bias detected in the AM program, and why Auntie’s Complaints Review Executive (one of Biffer’s underlings) couldn’t find it?” The problem is, it did, as David Marr announced at the end of the report: “Our detailed analysis of the panel’s findings … can be found on our website”.

The document (Word) expands on the points raised by the TV report; primarily that the ICRP did not give journalists a right of reply, even though it gave Alston the right to submit a new, secret and extended dossier of complaints.

2. Mottram should be spanked

Uncle points out that Linda Mottram has not been asked to change her habits. As I’ve pointed out before, the ICRP’s findings of “serious bias” are laughable. A couple of words out of hundreds of hours of work, and she’s supposed to change the way she works? Get real. Anyway, I noticed this farewell on Crikey recently:

Meanwhile, good luck to Linda Mottram who signed off from AM this morning and heads to London with her partner.

I guess the ABC has better things to do than cracking a whip over a departing presenter.

3. Balding stumbles in an answer

Here’s Uncle, in full:

And now for something really finite.

Senator TCHEN—How far do you think the independence should go in the organisation? How far down the line?

Mr Balding—That is a very hard question. How long is a piece of string? It depends on the issue itself, but independence is independence. It is a finite item. You are either independent or you are not independent, so it is very hard to talk about how far independence should go.

I’m not sure what his point is, except that Balding gave a slightly confused answer. Considering Senator Tchen’s attacking questions — at one point he had a go at Balding because Balding was kept waiting for several hours by the Committee — it is not surprising that the ABC chief might fumble.

4. Balding takes questions on notice

Uncle is under the bizarre misconception that because Balding is pretty senior in the ABC, he will be intimate with every word ever spoken by every reporter on every TV show. Apparently it is inappropriate for him to make a note of Senators’ concerns and agree to get back to them later.

But perhaps more interesting is what Uncle chose not to mention. Like this discussion:

Senator MACKAY — Let me give you an example. On the day that the Telstra sale bill was defeated, the abc.net.au article included quotes from Minister Williams, Senator Minchin, Mr Anderson and Senator Shayne Murphy. There was no quote from Labor. I am just attempting to counter some of this, so that is the first thing I would say. Inside Business has, as I understand it, interviewed the coalition communications minister three times in a row, but, sadly, there has been no interview with Mr Lindsay Tanner. Also, Alan Kohler’s soft interview of Daryl Williams last Sunday, when Alan Kohler effectively provided a dorothy dixer about the government being the owner and regulator of Telstra, was, one could say, evidence of ABC bias.

Senator SANTORO — All you are doing is adding to my litany of complaints and bias. I thank you for your support.

Senator MACKAY — The ABC kept a story on Simon Crean’s leadership on the Internet politics site for weeks before the opposition rang up and asked for it to be removed because it was not news. I think it would be true to say that this kind of attack, this sort of McCarthyism that is being shown here, is starting to have an impact, from our perspective, on the independence of the ABC. I am not necessarily blaming the ABC; I am blaming this mob over here on my left.

Mr Balding — I am more than happy to have a look at those instances, but I would be very disappointed if that was the case.

Bias at the ABC goes both ways. If they’re pissing off both sides of the legislative chambers, then they’re probably striking a reasonable balance. If only Uncle would realise it, he’d save us both some time.

Introducing Davide Melia, an expert on Russian literature and a newcomer to Ozplogistan.

The Australian: “The first point is that too many Australian’s are leaving school without a strong foundation in the basics of reading, writing and numeracy.” To quote Paul Watson, “Quite.”