Red Rag

Last week The West Australian made a disgraceful suggestion that Labor MP John Quigley is having an affair (Quigley is getting married today). He was rightfully indignant. The editor of The West, Paul Armstrong, threatened to end Quigley’s career unless he apologised for criticising the rag. Quigley organised a “sting”, inviting the Sunday Times to photograph a bizarre deal Armstrong set up with Quigley. Confused? Me too. And if someone can explain what John Kizon, the Coffin Cheaters and a Liberal front-bencher have to do with it, please fill me in.

David Broadbent paints a picture of harmony between John Howard and Dean Mighell:

What, apart from a love of rugby league, do Prime Minister John Howard and Victoria’s radical Electrical Trades Union boss Dean Mighell have in common?

Not much, one imagines, except for their strongly shared belief that we are facing a critical shortage of apprentices and that our education systems … have for too long overlooked the needs of skilled trades.

The ETU has been campaigning hard on the issue for a couple of years, warning of a looming crisis of skill shortages.

It’s a view Howard has also held for some time and one he expressed in his main election speech when he promised a boost for technical education, and more assistance for apprentices.

Opponents, and some pundits, lampooned the idea that handing new apprentices a nice box of tools amounted to substantial structural reform.

From this, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Dean Mighell and the ETU endorsed Howard’s toolbox plan. The headline even suggested they had formed an “unholy union over skills”.

But here’s what the union actually said about the Coalition’s skills policies:

The government’s tears about the lack of skilled workers are a smoke screen for an attack on our trade. Fancy offering young people a tool box to encourage them to take up a trade! They already get an allowance for a tool box.

This isn’t the way to address the exodus — 134,900 apprentices between 2000 and 2003 — from apprenticeship courses. The real solution lies in treating apprentices as the highly skilled tradespeople they will become, and paying them accordingly. Instead of doing that, John Howard wants to throw money at private training colleges offering two year courses which will be used to smash our national training standards and offer competition from semi skilled casual workers. Did you notice that in his national party launch John Howard didn’t once mention electricians or plumbers? That’s why we and the plumbers have placed a joint an advertisement in Wednesday’s Herald Sun.

You know what they say about statistics? Try this. Less than a third of the 400,000 apprenticeships the Howard Government claims it is currently supporting are actual trade apprenticeships. Official Government data shows there are only 133,376 traditional apprentices in training. The Liberal Party is dishonestly inflating its figures by including short-term trainees such as kitchen-hands in fast food outlets in apprentice numbers.

If John Howard’s claims about his love of Australia were fair dinkum he’d be telling the foreign owned power companies to follow the ETU’s lead and embrace the employment of apprentices. The ETU’s campaign for apprentices will go on. Hopefully Howard won’t be in the Lodge to see it.

Wow, what a ringing endorsement.

Update: Those crazy ETU officials just can’t stop endorsing John Howard:

The Howard Government has cut funding to 11 utilities and electro-technology trades courses in NSW, denying employers incentives to train young Australians.

[...]

ETU state secretary Bernie Riordan said the cuts show that the Howard Government is not serious about increasing the number of apprentices.

“We have a government that is actively undermining the trades by removing funding from trades courses.

“These cuts represent the stripping $1200 per apprentice paid to employers who are prepared to undertake the task of training our future skilled trades.

“A free tool box might deliver a headline, but the real news is what this government is doing to the national apprentice system.”

Chris Clark: “The lower floor of a double-decker party bus is redundant. Since everybody wants to ride on the top floor, they should just make regular buses really tall.”

Today’s Age carries two stories that show the inadequacy of penalties for negligent employers that cause their workers’ deaths.

In the first case:

[A] machine operator who lost an index finger had not done the job before, was not given exact instructions or training and had not completed a daily safety checklist.

The company, Metcon, paid a $20 000 fine.

In the second case:

Darren Moon, 29, died from head injuries after he was pulled into the [paper-making] machine’s rollers at [Amcor]’s Fairfield paper mill in March last year.

The County Court heard that the large machine, used to create paper from liquid pulp, had been in operation since 1966 and had “little or no guard”.

The company paid a $120 000 fine.

Darren Moon’s life is worth six fingers.

Six fingers.

I was hit by a wave of spam today. On Raena’s recommendation, I had Kitten’s Spam Words running, so the spam wasn’t visible on the blog, but I still had to log in and delete it all from the moderation queue.

Pain in the arse.

So I went looking for other solutions, and two struck me as good ideas. Three Strikes because it’s a smart way to detect spam comments, and Spammer TarPit, because it’s a nice way of slowing down the spammers. But you can’t run both simultaneously, so I decided to mash the two plugins together.

I’m using Three Strikes to detect spam, TarPit to slow spammers down, and I’ve added an explanation for legitimate commenters who are blocked.

1. Download the plugin file: threestrikestarpit.txt (phps)

2. Open it in your text editor, and change the options if you like:

   • A lower $SpamThreshold will block comments more aggressively.

   • $tarpit determines how many seconds the commenter should have to wait (I keep it fairly low as a courtesy to any false positives).

   • Set $send_email to false if you don’t want a notification when comments are blocked.

3. Change the file extension. It should be threestrikestarpit.php.

4. Upload it to your wp-content/plugins/ folder.

5. Activate it from within your Wordpress plugin control panel.

It should be that simple. Works for me (which is surprising, since I have no idea how PHP works…).

Update: Raena’s got some great ideas which are forcing me hard against the learning curve… so this plugin is likely to change over the next couple of days.

Update: Actually, the more I think about it the more I think what’s posted here is a complete waste of time. Hmm.

Nicholas Kristof:

I understand the painful ethical choices of Abdelrahim’s family, of Hassan and of the international aid agencies. But what I can’t fathom is our own moral choice, our decision to acquiesce in genocide.

Americans could save kids such as Abdelrahim and Muhammad. This wouldn’t require troops, just a bit of gumption to declare a flight exclusion zone, to press our Western allies and nearby Arab and African states, to impose an arms embargo and other targeted sanctions, to push a meaningful UN resolution even at the risk of a Chinese veto, and to insist upon the deployment of a larger African force.

Instead, President George Bush’s policy is to chide Sudan and send aid. That’s much better than nothing and has led Sudan to kill fewer children and to kill more humanely: Sudan now mostly allows kids in Darfur like Abdelrahim to die of starvation, instead of heaving them onto bonfires. But fundamentally, US policy seems to be to “manage” the genocide rather than to act decisively to stop it.

The lackadaisical international response has already permitted the deaths of about 100,000 people in Darfur, and up to 10,000 more are dying each month. We should look Abdelrahim and Muhammad in the eye and feel deeply ashamed.

It won’t stop the genocide, but you can support the Sudanese by coming along to the Flying Scotsman on Saturday night. And bringing your friends, and telling them why they should care.

A couple of new Shadow Ministers are really testing my commitment to the ALP, and the review isn’t really off the ground yet.

Perth Blognite went well, I think. Cons: I spoke for too long, another speaker defended comment spam. Pros: new faces, excellent speakers, Anthony cooked. Also penisface. For more meatspace fun, sign up to Meetup.

It’s something of a tradition that, in the run-up to a state election, The West Australian drums up a phony law and order campaign. Today, they’ve decided that parole is the issue they’re going to run on.

Under the headline, “Most criminals are given parole” (p4), Sean Cowan tells us:

Only 37 adult prisoners serving a sentence of more than one year were refused parole last financial year, while 894 fellow inmates were set free, according to figures from the WA Parole Board.

But these figures are disgracefully misleading.

It’s only five paragraphs later that we learn the truth:

But 1070 prisoners had their parole release deferred for a variety of reasons, which can include unsuitable accommodation plans, bad behaviour and a range of psychological issues.

So when you look at the statistics in an honest way, you’ve got 894 prisoners granted parole, while 1107 had their parole denied or deferred. How on earth does The West conclude that “most criminals are given parole”?

The answer is in the article:

The figures are sure to fuel the debate over WA’s parole system…

That’s the only reason The West is running them. It’s not trying to report the truth, it’s running a scare campaign against the Labor Government.

PS: A cut-down version of the article is available online.

Dennis Glover is right — Labor does need some new public intellectuals. And they “should turn their guns on Howard and redirect their attention to making the values of the left fresh, relevant and appealing”. But on the question of how that is to be done? Well, let’s just say that Glover’s billing as “a former speechwriter to Kim Beazley, Simon Crean and Mark Latham” — that gang of winners! — doesn’t inspire confidence.

If you’re going to send an email to a .com address, make sure you double-check it before you hit send. Especially if your opponents own the .org address, and your email admits illegal activity…

Chris Sheil and Tim Dunlop both backflipped on the New Matilda — Chris says it’s “more black coffee than latte”. I agree, and duly forked over my cash this morning.

My tiny, amateur effort at putting an old newspaper online pales into significance compared with the Brooklyn Public Library’s decision to put the Brooklyn Daily Eagle online. Full text, searchable, from 1841-1902. Awesome.

You’ve read the book, now see the movie: The O’Sexxxy Factor. (From the producer of Outfoxed.)

Honestly, why do they let Gerard Henderson have a whole column every week? He rarely makes any sense at all. This week’s effort is a piss-weak attack on Arundathi Roy, which is debunked by Henderson himself.

The crux of his argument is that “[i]n her Enough Rope interview, Roy did not choose to qualify her statement that ‘we have to throw our weight behind the resistance’ in Iraq”, and therefore she does not deserve a peace prize.

The trouble is, she did qualify that statement. Henderson even quoted the qualification! Two paragraphs earlier, he wrote:

She then commented, with respect to Iraq, that “we don’t have to support the Mahdi Army (that is, Sheikh Muqtada al-Sadr’s militant Shiite group) but we have to become the Iraqi resistance”.

In other words, Henderson would have us believe that when Roy says we don’t have to support certain resistance groups, she really means we must support all resistance groups without qualification.

Okay, then.