Red Rag

So, the Howard Government is playing student politics again. The reason for their opposition to student guilds is clear — it’s harder to push regressive reforms on universities if students are organised. Rhetoric about “freedom of association” is nothing but a thin veil to hide the Government’s real goal, which is to destroy student representative organisations.

In my view, “voluntary student unionism” is code for closing down student representative bodies. On the other hand, “universal student membership” should be a goal rather than a legislated reality. If I got to set the policy in this area, these would be the main features:

• All students would be required to pay an amenities and services fee.

• By default, the money would go to the relevant campus student organisation.

• Alternatively, each student could opt to pay the money to the university, which would be required to use the funds for student services.

• Unlike the current WA model, there would be no 50% floor of funds for guilds.

• The student organisations would have to open their books for inspection every year.

• The maximum fee would be set by legislation at, say, $200 per year, adjusted for inflation.

• Part-time, external and regional students would pay a lower fee according to an appropriate formula.

• The fee, as a compulsory levy, would be added to students’ HECS bill.

I think this model strikes the right balance between freedom of association, provision of non-academic services, and the need to shield low-income students from an unfair up-front cost burden. Student guilds would be accountable for their spending, and would be in competition with the university for the right to run those services. That would improve their performance.

The two activists who painted “No War” on a sail of the Opera House argued that they had acted to defend the lives of innocent Iraqis who were bombed by the invading forces. It came as no surprise that their argument was rejected by the court, because the link between their high profile graffiti and the machinery that caused the innocent deaths is so remote.

But on the other side of the world, five Irish activists (including one Irish Australian, Ciaron O’Reilly) are running the same line of defence, with a much greater prospect of success.

Read the rest of this entry…

The West Australian’s new “investigations editor,” Natalie O’Brien, was thoroughly done over by Media Watch last night. What an embarrassment. Oh, and the West admitted another report was wrong, but made no effort to correct the mistake.

Manas and I are going to see Ben Folds perform with the WA Symphony Orchestra tonight. It’s at Kings Park, and it’s a picnic — so I’m glad Anthony and Toni are going too!

Comedy gold: “I need to confirm — am I the only person who saw the above photo in this article from The Australian and thought ‘My God — Costello is actually pleasuring himself and aiming right for John Howard’s back!’”

John Howard is right to say that we should not “sneer at young Australians who work for Hungry Jack’s”. But he’d do well to explain why the Commonwealth is subsidising these jobs under a scheme that was designed to boost trade apprenticeships. I wasn’t aware that burger flippers were so hard to find, or that their special skills need public funding.

The more I read the comments threads at Troppo, the angrier I get. Not because of people like observa saying homosexuality is a perversion, no different to bestiality or paedophilia — you get that from time to time, and you learn to read past it.

No, I get angry about Ken Parish’s insistence that gay teachers don’t “flaunt” their sexuality by having a five-minute discussion about their partner (and there is no evidence that sex was actually discussed) when the students instigate it. I’ll avoid the posts where Ken uses terms like “brainwashed,” because he had obviously become exasperated by that stage. I think his argument is fairly summed up by this extract from one of his earlier comments:

There is a critical distinction between a class teacher discussing the existence of different sexualities in the abstract in sex education classes for primary age children, while being careful not to express any view as to the morality of any such behaviour, and discussing it in very concrete terms after the children have seen the teacher with her partner. The latter unavoidably conveys the value that this is a perfectly acceptable lifestyle choice no different from any other. Like it or not, that is a highly socially-contested value. You and I may agree with it, but many Australians don’t and they have every right to object to you and I inflicting our values on their children. If you don’t accept that restriction on the freedom of your words and behaviour while in the presence of the children you teach, then you shouldn’t be a teacher at all.

Ken argues that because there is widespread (but, according to the report he cites, shrinking) opposition to homosexuality in the Australian community, gay teachers should avoid discussing their personal lives with their students. Heterosexual teachers, on the other hand, have a free rein. This is because “no-one ever gave [gay teachers] a democratic mandate for it”.

Nuts to that. We don’t elect teachers, we elect members of parliament. It is up to them, through the relevant Minister, to set education policy. If parents aren’t happy with what is being taught in schools, they should vote for a party that runs a different line. And while John Howard likes to rail about the influence of PC unionists in schools, the people keep electing Labor governments to run the schools.

Meanwhile, I’d like to see Ken respond properly to the “miscegenation” analogy. Yellowvinyl put forward this suggestion:

I put to you, Ken, that it doesn’t matter a fuck if a parent thinks being gay is morally wrong. maybe 50 years ago in the States parents in the South thought it was morally wrong for black and white people to marry. thus they wanted segregation in schools. it was clearly ethically right for the US supreme court and LBJ to desegregate schools, because their values were based on *PREJUDICE*.

After some prodding, Ken responded:

yellowvinyl’s analogy is a false one. Requiring that people may not discriminate by conduct (e.g. by dictating what school they can attend or who they can marry) is qualitatively different from telling them what they must think, and ensuring that the next generation subscribes to YOUR preferred views by brainwashing their kids against the wishes of the parents.

To a certain extent, he’s right that the analogy is false, but it doesn’t take a massive leap to fix it. Let me try.

Some people believe that homosexuality is unnatural and abominable. They would prefer it was punished according to God’s will, but because they live in a secular, pluralist nation they are prepared to compromise. They think gay people should just keep themselves to themselves and stop foisting their horrible sexual practices on our children. One of the most insidious ways that they do this is by discussing their disgusting homosexual relationship in class as if it was normal.

Similarly, some people believe that miscegenation is unnatural and abominable. They would prefer it was punished according to God’s will, but because they live in a secular, pluralist nation they are prepared to compromise. They think race-mixers should just keep themselves to themselves and stop foisting their horrible sexual practices on our children. One of the most insidious ways that they do this is by discussing their disgusting mixed-race relationship in class as if it was normal.

In both cases, assume that the majority of the school community is opposed to the sexual abomination in question.

Now imagine that the students see a black man collect their teacher after school. They prod her to talk about it, and a five-minute conversation ensues: “Yes, my husband is black. Sure, lots of people have black husbands. Oh, your aunty is married to a black man? That’s nice dear.”

Should we immediately characterise this conversation as sexual (marriage is, after all, a proxy for sexual activity), and should we reprimand the teacher for brainwashing the children and defying the parents’ democratic right to inculcate their children with bigotry?

Disclosure: I do know a gay teacher, but I don’t have children. This is relevant because if I had children I would apparently become scared that they might catch gay from him.

Update: Don’t miss Mark Bahnisch’s excellent history of the closet, which picks up a theme of my previous post but puts it in context and argues it more eloquently and forcefully:

The significance of the closet is that queer people were meant to be complicit in their own subordination. By being unable to speak their truth, or the truth of their desires, they were taught to despise themselves as dirty and unnatural beings. Even now, the rhetoric of “discretion” … speaks powerfully to the desire to repress, and render silent.

Also worth reading is National Party MP Adrian Piccoli’s explanation of how he killed a man through homophobic prejudice.

Looks like Crikey’s in the shit again, on the eve of the handover to new owners. Media monitors Rehame are suing over a piece that did not name the company, but which outlined some dodgy practices that are allegedly going on in that industry.

Christian Kerr is apparently going to be personally sued, even though he was not involved at all in publishing the piece.

I’ll back Crikey to the hilt on this one. It’s funny that the law suit comes just after the sale, now that there are deeper pockets to pursue (on the other hand, pursuing Christian seems to be shameless bullying).

The case also has serious implications for anyone who publishes their thoughts — which is to say, bloggers. Thankfully, Crikey appears ready to fight.

Read the rest of this entry…

The debate about homosexuality and homophobia in schools is quite heated over at Troppo Armadillo. Mark Bahnisch is (rightly) outraged that a female student teacher was sacked for answering students’ questions about the woman who picked her up after school. The difficulty appears to be that the two women were in a lesbian relationship, and some parents would prefer their kids did not know that lesbians exist, or at least that they don’t do things like give each other lifts home from work.

Some commenters agree with the parents. For instance, Kevin Donnelly thinks that student teachers innocently answering pupils’ questions must be “PC cultural warriors … undermining heterosexuality.” He points to an op-ed he wrote for The Australian, in which he trotted out the familiar lines — post-modernism is evil, homosexuals are a minority and therefore disordered, and everything can be pinned on the Australian Education Union which is “a strong advocate of a politically correct approach to gender”. Unfortunately for Donnelly’s paint-by-numbers respones, the AEU has backed the principal against the woman.

Sophie Masson attempted to change tack and move the debate to the panic about sexual abuse of students. Unfortunately, her choice of words made it very difficult to move on. Suddenly the student teacher concerned was “swagger[ing] about sexual rights” by mentioning that the person who picked her up after school was her partner. Though Sophie insists that both queer and straight teachers should be “discreet,” it is not clear whether the same ludicrous leap would have been made in the case of a heterosexual. The word “discreet” set off alarm bells when I read it.

For many years, a requirement of sexual “discretion” was used by the Australian courts to reject the claims of homosexual asylum seekers who fled from horrific persecution. In my view, that requirement made Australia complicit in the hate crimes these men and women sought to escape. For example, in the case of a Sri Lankan man who was ostracised by his friends, family and community due to his homosexuality, the Refugee Review Tribunal accepted that his fear of persecution was genuine. However, it also considered that “provided that he does not openly proclaim himself to be a homosexual or parade his sexual expression in public” he could “function as a normal [!] member of society” and rejected his claim. That decision was upheld by the Full Court of the Federal Court.

The problem is that the burden falls more heavily on queer people; while a straight man caught “proclaiming or flaunting his sexual preferences” might be frowned upon, he would not face systematic persecution (and in fact “macho” displays of sexuality might be rewarded). In fact, the burden is so great that the RRT has even suggested that it would not be unreasonable to expect Nepalese homosexuals to enter sham marriages to hide their true sexual orientation!

Thankfully, in the Bangladeshi Couple case, the High Court recently rejected the “discretion” requirement (albeit by a slim majority) as illogical and offensive because it effectively endorses the wishes of the persecutors. McHugh and Kirby JJ put the objection succinctly at 40:

persecution does not cease to be persecution for the purpose of the Convention because those persecuted can eliminate the harm by taking avoiding action within the country of nationality. The Convention would give no protection from persecution for reasons of religion or political opinion if it was a condition of protection that the person affected must take steps — reasonable or otherwise — to avoid offending the wishes of the persecutors. Nor would it give protection to membership of many a “particular social group” if it were a condition of protection that its members hide their membership or modify some attribute or characteristic of the group to avoid persecution. Similarly, it would often fail to give protection to people who are persecuted for reasons of race or nationality if it was a condition of protection that they should take steps to conceal their race or nationality.

Now, the student teacher’s sacking is certainly not on the same scale as that, but the principle is the same. A heterosexual teacher who answered the same questions in the same terms would be guilty of indiscretion, but I doubt any of the parents would have batted an eyelid, and she certainly wouldn’t have been sacked.

Having said that, I think there is something to Sophie’s argument that the sacking was the result of the principal’s fears “about [parents and students] branding teachers as child molesters, ruining lives and dragging people through the mud, conducting horrible witchunts”, but I reckon there’s an unhealthy dose of homophobia involved, too. If the woman had said, “Oh, that was my husband,” there would be no suggestion that her discussion with the class was in any way sexual. Cohabitation only becomes sexual when there’s a lesbian involved. Homosexuals are considered to be an inherent sexual threat to the children in their care, for no reason but bigotry.

This is where I’m most disappointed by the principal’s behaviour. Instead of telling the parents that there is no reason to fear the student teacher, he acquiesced to the mob’s demands and sacked her. In doing so, he reinforced the view that homosexuality can be linked to paedophilia, and he fed the community’s panic about these issues. As the woman’s university supervisor told The Age,

the damage was done. Not just to the student, but the kind of message that was being given to the kids at the school is just appalling, that they think they actually have this kind of power over a teacher who comes out as lesbian or gay.

This is where I’m confused by Sophie’s position. She outlines a number of very serious negative results of the irrational fears of parents about the sexual safety of their children, yet when a school principal effectively endorses those fears by joining in, Sophie backs the principal!

Another column from Greg Sheridan glorifying the murderous Ataturk, this time comparing him to Abraham Lincoln (albeit thinly veiled by architecture).

In the first of what is now a series of Turkish Government-sponsored columns, Sheridan claimed, “Turkey has already undertaken a raft of reforms [including] freedom of the press and political rights”. Freedom of the press apparently includes being jailed for 15 months for “insulting the memory of Ataturk.” An academic currently faces a three year stretch for “insulting the military” in articles he wrote ten years ago.

And political rights?

Yes, the Turkish police are beating an unarmed woman with their truncheons.

Yes, she was beaten for exercising her right to stage a peaceful demonstration against the family violence that up to half of all Turkish women suffer:

Riot police Sunday used truncheons and tear gas to break up a group of leftist demonstrators who refused to disperse during an unauthorized demonstration marking the upcoming World Women’s Day.

Police were seen chasing and beating demonstrators with clubs. One woman demonstrator was knocked to the ground by police officers, then kicked in the face by another officer.

Policemen in gas masks could also be seen spraying tear gas directly onto demonstrators’ faces.

But it’s okay, because as Sheridan tells us, sometimes Turkish women don’t wear headscarves.

Today is Labour Day in Western Australia, in celebration of the achievement of the Eight Hour Day. As I understand it, Labour Day was moved to March during the Cold War for fear that the union movement would be associated with Communism if it was celebrated on 1 May, which was (and is) the traditional, global labour holiday. It should be moved back.

Tomorrow is another labour movement commemoration. International Women’s Day mourns the deaths of 140 women in the Triangle Factory Fire in New York in 1911. It also celebrates the surviving women’s courage in establishing a trade union in the following years. It is a celebration of equal rights for women.

And if tomorrow is IWD, then tomorrow must be my birthday.

I took the Commonly Confused Words Test, and this was my score:

Beginner: 100%
Intermediate: 100%
Advanced: 93%
Expert: 72%

Not happy. The answers will be available soon.

Melbourne is preparing to quarantine graffiti to out-of-the-way back alleys. This is most unwelcome news, because like Aaron and Tony, I quite like street art. I don’t mean some loser scribbling their name on a wall or scratching it into a window; I’m talking about real artists, who invest time, effort and meaning in their works.

In my view, removing graffiti from the more public areas of a city does not “ensure the city maintains its image as clean, safe and welcoming,” as Councillor Wilson claims. Rather, it ensures that graffiti art is wrongfully associated with violent crime and danger. It forces genuine artists to either put their art out of the way where nobody can see it, or in a sterile gallery that destroys its essential public, organic nature. As John says, “Canvas is where stencils go to die.”

Melbourne’s street art is beautiful and awesome. I really enjoy just wandering around the city, trying to recognise the styles of different artists, appreciating the new layer of meaning they bring to the streetscape. (Perth’s got some interesting works around the place, but it would be better if certain people got out there more.) I hope the council doesn’t kill one of the best things about the city.

Manas and I started Lindy Hop lessons tonight. Good fun.

Greg Sheridan’s interesting piece on Turkey’s entry to the EU is marred by this disgraceful introduction:

The main drag of Ankara, Turkey’s capital at the centre of the vast Anatolian plain, is called, naturally enough, Ataturk Boulevard. Kemal Ataturk was the founder of modern Turkey who determined, 80 years ago, that his country would modernise, Westernise and secularise. You can see the fruits of his historic vision in the boulevard that bears his name.

Ugh. Ataturk’s “historic vision” was built on the mass slaughter and deportation of the Armenians. It was the first modern genocide, and Hitler referred to it in defending his policies towards the Jews in a later period. The Young Turks commenced this work during World War I; Ataturk completed it.

Given that Sheridan’s columns are often written after trips abroad sponsored by various governments, I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. The Turkish Government continues to deny the Armenian Genocide, and “insulting the memory of Ataturk” is an offence punishable by up to three years in jail. This isn’t some long-forgotten statute gathering dust in the archives; last year a reporter was jailed for 15 months for reminding people that Ataturk was “buried without funeral prayers.”

Only a few nations officially deny the Armenian genocide, notably Turkey, Israel, and the US. The last is particularly disturbing given that US newspapers reported on and were outraged by the genocide as it occurred. Then again, as Sheridan points out, Turkey has for quite some time been “a member in good standing of NATO,” and it’s only fair that we turn a blind eye to the crimes of our Cold War friends.

Sheridan’s probably right that Ataturk’s vision is celebrated by Ataturk Boulevard. But we shouldn’t forget that its victims are mourned by dozens of memorials around the world.