Red Rag

I wrote recently about the Third Way’s so-called “community safety” agenda, which Christopher Scanlon says “triangulated both the Tories and the opponents within [Tony Blair's] own Party to fashion a politics that tracks farther right than even many Tories would countenance.”

That post expressed my concerns about Geoff Gallop’s latest “community safety” policy:

His government recently gave police new “move on” powers, which they can use to compel a person to leave an area for at least 24-hours, on pain of a $12 000 fine or twelve months in jail.

In case there was any doubt that he is lock-step with Blair, this report shows that the only difference is that the penalty in WA is twice as tough:

“Curfew zones” will be introduced, from which police may ban individuals for up to 24 hours using an anti-social behaviour order. Anyone who breaches an order faces a fine of up to £2500 ($5900) and a jail sentence.

That passage is a footnote to the main article, which says Blair has deployed the army as a “calming and pacifying influence” on late-night crowds:

[A] senior Ministry of Defence official said it was expected to put hundreds of troops on the streets. “We would think the very presence of unarmed troops will deter bad behaviour,” he said.

Is this what’s next for Western Australia?

I haven’t time to write anything substantial about the Georgiou compromise (I’ve got to finish packing for Canberra) so I’ll point you towards Andrew Bartlett, who nails it in this paragraph:

Personally, I am amazed at how limited the changes are, how misleading the portrayal of the changes have been and how even more power has been given to a Minister and Department that has been shown to be highly dysfunctional. I am irritated but not surprised at how absurdly positive the portrayal of these changes has been in the mainstream media.

In his earlier post on the deal, Bartlett was even more succinct: “The simple fact is we need a total overhaul of the system not just tinkering at the edges.”

What?

Trade Minister Mark Vaile says the Government will not “sell out” human rights issues to get a better deal on a free trade agreement with China.

Mr Vaile says Australia and China will keep the negotiations on the FTA separate to the debate over human rights issues.

If you keep human rights out of the FTA negotiations, then you’ve sold out before you’ve even started.

On Wednesday the West Australian tried to drum up a bit of homophobic hysteria with a front page article about gays infiltrating our schools. It didn’t work, though, because most people don’t have a problem when someone from Gay and Lesbian Community Services is asked to talk to a Year 12 health studies class — especially when parents were informed beforehand and given the opportunity to take their child out of that lesson.

But they decided not to give up, and went digging around for another angle. Today they’re screaming, Kindy kids told gay is OK, because the teachers’ union has reviewed a couple of books on its website.

This is why the newspaper is complaining:

One book, Sissy Duckling, written by American gay rights activist Harvey Fierstein and recommended for four to eight year-olds, is about a boy duckling who likes to bake cakes instead of building forts and put on half-time shows instead of playing baseball.

This is not a book about gay kids. It’s a book about bullying, as this page (which the journalist must have read, because they quoted from it) shows:

Yes, Elmer is a great big “sissy”, and he is laughed at and made fun of by his friends and even his family.

But when hunting season comes along, an accident delivers a surprising opportunity for Elmer to demonstrate to everyone how very special and, indeed, amazing he really is.

Kids are being taught that even if they’re picked on as a “sissy”, they can make a valuable contribution to society. Scandal!

And the other book the West Australian is scared of?

A review for The Family Book suggests that parents and teachers can use it to encourage children to talk about their families and the different kinds of families that exist.

The book’s author deals with adopted families, step-families, one-parent families and families with two parents of the same sex.

This is slightly different to what the SSTU says about the book:

Parr includes adopted families, step-families, one-parent families, and families with two parents of the same sex, as well as the traditional nuclear family.

The newspaper conveniently dropped that part of the sentence.

If there’s a kid at school who is being bullied because their classmates saw them getting picked up by, for example, two mothers, then I think it would be a dereliction of duty for the teacher to ignore it and effectively condone the bullying.

To do otherwise would compound the problem. It’s very easy for a child with gay parents to think that there is something wrong with them, and they can internalise the bullying.

The Family Book strikes me as a very sensible way to address the issue — the class will realise that there are many different families, which will hopefully make them reluctant to pick on each other.

By running this scare campaign, the West Australian is encouraging schoolyard anti-gay (and anti-”sissy”) bullying. That is a tremendously irresponsible thing to do.

Elsewhere: An American bigot suggests we should put warning labels on gay people. What, like these?

If you’re sick of these lists, blame Bahnisch the Younger…

Total number of books I’ve owned: I’ve never counted them, but somewhere around 500 I should think.

The last book I bought: Amy Spencer’s DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture. I intend to review it when I’m done, because it puts blogs into a rich historical context that I think would interest some of you.

The last book I read: Macintyre and Clark’s The History Wars. That was a while ago. I’ve been stuck part-way through a dozen books since then, but haven’t finished any; most of my study this year has been reading chapters or articles, but not whole books.

Five books that mean a lot to me:

• I can’t decide between three series: Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, Brian Jacques’s Redwall, and John Marsden’s Tomorrow, When the War Began… at different points of my youth, I was addicted to these books.

• Hugh Lunn’s Over the Top with Jim. When we first arrived in Australia, Mum & Dad used to listen to “Australia All Over” with Macca on a Sunday morning, to get a sense of this strange new country. So John Williamson’s music and this book are part of my Australian identity — it was serialised on the show, and I read it several times.

• Sartre’s Nausea. It’s about depression. I didn’t realise that at the time, but looking back, it was really helpful to realise that somebody felt the same things I was feeling. And it cemented my Godless Communism.

• PJ O’Rourke’s collection of essays and columns, Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut. I read it after Eat the Rich (better than the high school economics textbook!), and if I had to name a book that led me to blogging, this would be it. I started writing for fun after that.

• Bobbie Oliver’s War and Peace in Western Australia: The Social and Political Impact of the Great War 1914-1926. It provided the backdrop for my history honours project. At just $5.45, everyone should pick up a copy.

Pass it on to: Oh, bugger it, just do it if you want to. If you don’t have a blog, either start one or leave your answers in the comments thread.

MIT are running a survey of bloggers, “to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other. Specifically we are interested in issues of demographics, communication behaviors, experience with weblogs and other technology, and the meaning of various types of social links within the blogosphere.” Give ‘em five minutes of your time.

The latest regional grant rort: $500 000 to install pokies in a skimpy bar. John Anderson says if you complain you must be anti-country.

If there was one government department that should be a “model workplace”, showing everyone how industrial relations ought to be done, it would have to be the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations.

So if you wanted to see what the Howard Government had planned for Australian workplaces, you might start by looking at DEWR’s practices, right?

Nine months of negotiations due to deliberate stalling by management. New staff forced onto AWAs, even if they prefer the EBA… So much for “choice.”

Tim Blair’s Continuing Crisis column is a little bit slow on the uptake. Not only does he castigate John Pilger for a comment made three years ago, he also recycles a couple of blog entries from over a fortnight ago, when the report on Koran desecration at Guantanamo Bay was released.

And, as we’ve come to expect from Blair, his argument is utter bollocks:

Inmates, however, defiled the Koran on 15 occasions (including three flushing attempts). These abuses, more substantial than anything committed by guards, were downplayed in many media accounts. … It seems concern for the Koran is only limited to treatment of it by Americans.

This is truly a bizarre proposition. Let’s take the Koran out of the equation, to see if that helps Blair understand the difference between the inmates’ and the guards’ behaviour.

• A prisoner takes his meal and spills it on the floor, forcing himself to eat the dirty food or go hungry.

• A guard takes a prisoner’s meal and spills it on the floor, forcing the prisoner to eat the dirty food or go hungry.

If he’s still challenged, let’s move away from jail.

• Jimmy has a new toy. He flushes it down the toilet.

• Jimmy has a new toy. Susie flushes it down the toilet.

Do you see the difference?

If a prisoner decides to damage their Koran, then that’s no big deal (assuming there was no coercion involved). But if a guard damages a prisoner’s Koran, that’s another matter entirely. The media coverage Blair describes was entirely appropriate.

• Small Town Newspapers, digitised, archived, and available free on the internet.

• The Daily Flute, especially its call for an ASIO investigation into the Liberal Party after Sophie Panopoulos admitted it had been infiltrated by terrorists.

• Amy Spencer’s DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture.

Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen, who churn out dozens of columns but are seemingly incapable of working independently of each other, have cobbled together a muddled piece on the G7’s debt relief package.

On the one hand, they tell us that

the rest of the world should be modest in the sorts of changes it seeks to impose on sovereign nations. Lessons in governance from the Westerners who tore the heart of Africa for centuries don’t go down well.

On the other hand, “the people who run the world” have been delivering lessons in governance and that’s a good thing. Errington and Onselen say the World Bank and the IMF’s programs are administered “on condition of budget transparency” — they don’t mention other conditions, like the privatisation of water.

Tanzania was forced to privatise its water supply in exchange for debt relief. British aid money was spent on free-market propaganda from the Adam Smith Institute, which took £500 000 from poor Africans to push its agenda — including £250 000 for the slogan, “Our old industries are dry like crops and privatisation brings the rain.”

In Bolivia, the IMF’s water privatisation demands went even further — wells that were owned and run by community collectives were appropriated and handed over to Bechtel, which charged these poor communities for water they used to get for free. They even had to pay for the rain they collected in rooftop tanks!

The Government toed the IMF’s line, but the people were shafted:

for the past sixteen years Bolivia has dutifully followed the dictates of the World Bank and the I.M.F. Most of its people, however, have nothing to show for it. Poverty was never significantly reduced. This is not unusual in Latin America, where the poverty rate is higher today than it was in 1980—after a full generation of nominal democracy and ever-increasing free trade. But Bolivia, like Argentina, really put on what Thomas L. Friedman, the Times columnist, calls “the golden straitjacket” of liberalized economic policies. The predicted foreign investment materialized, but the prosperity did not. Landlocked, with a population of eight million and a wretched infrastructure, Bolivia remains the poorest country in South America.

Is it any wonder that a popular uprising drove Bechtel out? Or that the current Bolivian revolution has forced the pro-privatisation President to quit, while the people demand the renationalisation of industries sold off at the IMF’s behest?

Perhaps our columnists were right in the first place: Lessons in governance from the Westerners who tore the heart of the Global South for centuries don’t go down well at all.

Errington and Onselen are wearing ideological blinkers. They demand transparency from African governments, but want us to let “the people who run the world” push their destructive agenda without scrutiny. They say Live 8 is “pointless”, and its predicted 2 billion-strong audience is “a bunch of dopey anarchists”, but at least it’s drawing public attention to the issues.

I’m all for transparency — at every step of the way.

I’ve got to say, Louise Dodson’s column cheered me up:

Kim Beazley has resorted to a touch of class warfare, not to mention good old-fashioned populism, in a seat-by-seat campaign designed to denigrate the Government’s budget tax cuts and the Howard Government itself.

Realising that the media was running with Peter Costello’s tactics distraction, it seems Labor has finally followed through with its “continuous campaigning” rhetoric and taken its message directly to the target marginals.

It’s a good message, too, comparing the extravagant things Coalition MPs will spend their tax cuts on (like “two Qantas fares to Paris every year”) with the practical things a family could do with Labor’s alternative package (like “a one-week interstate family holiday”).

But Dodson is still playing along with Costello, and wonders whether Beazley should keep his trap shut:

He does look tougher, the differences between the Coalition and Labor have been sharpened, but has he picked the right policy to demonstrate his new pugnacious political persona?

The correct answer, of course, is yes: if he abandons the fight over tax cuts because Dodson and her press gallery friends were distracted by tactics, how will Labor be taken seriously on the economy at the next election?

Update: Andrew Leigh wonders, “Are we in a world gone mad?” He notes that Dodson’s piece is framed by conservative rhetoric.

Writing in Arena Magazine, Christopher Scanlon raised serious concerns about Tony Blair’s Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, among other aspects of New Labour’s law and order policy. He concluded:

Rather than forging a “new politics” of the centre-Left, as was his aim, Blair has triangulated both the Tories and the opponents within his own Party to fashion a politics that tracks farther right than even many Tories would countenance. …

Those who applaud New Labour’s “modernisers” in Australia, particularly in the ALP, ought to take note. For a time it was almost plausible to paint New Labour’s illiberal excesses as the regrettable — though politically expedient — price to be paid to realise a progressive politics in the contemporary era. Such an interpretation of New Labour no longer has any hint of plausibility.

Tony Blair’s good friend Geoff Gallop is disappointingly similar on so-called “community safety” — the fluffy New Labour term for law and order. His government recently gave police new “move on” powers, which they can use to compel a person to leave an area for at least 24-hours, on pain of a $12 000 fine or twelve months in jail.

Before the new powers came into effect, we were told the police would exercise them judiciously:

Those sort of powers have to be used sparingly…the police officers have been trained particularly in the use of that power… But certainly from my point of view and the district police officers here, we’ll be making sure that police officers in the Kimberley will be using it only when it’s needing to be used.

But who believes that? In less than two weeks, police have already issued more than 120 move-on notices. They are talking tough, bragging about “taking a hard line on anti-social behaviour.”

The problem with these orders is that they give total discretion to the issuing officer, and the burden of proof is disgracefully low. The only requirement is a “suspicion” that an offence might be committed in future, or a risk of a breach of the peace.

Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan explained that they would be used where behaviour “doesn’t quite become an offence” or where someone is “on the verge of causing trouble” — in other words, you can now be punished, without a day in court, for something even the police admit you haven’t done.

This means the police have the ability to pick on anybody they don’t like, perhaps for something as trivial as wearing a menacing hoodie, or being young or Aboriginal in public.

It is not hard to see these orders being used to ban legitimate, peaceful protests whenever the police feel like it. Scanlon notes that ASBOs (which are harder to issue) have been misused in Britain:

[A]n ASBO was served on a protestor for kicking up a stink about the health and safety issues at his local council. He breached it and was placed on remand at Blakenhurst prison.

If he’d been in WA, a “move on” order could be issued against this fellow before he’d even started his protest, because police “suspected” that he was “on the verge of causing trouble”.

Please email Premier Geoff Gallop, Police Minister Michelle Roberts and Attorney-General Jim McGinty to tell them what you think about these authoritarian police powers.

George Simon:

When it finally comes to looking for someone to blame the government will have a tough time looking for a place to shift it. … Of course they could try and blame the opposition except for the fact that these reforms are a gift on a silver platter for the ALP. For a party that has struggled with it’s identity for the last ten years these reforms could not have come sooner. There is no longer a need to walk a tenuous line between appeasing the masses and sticking to their ideological beliefs. Howard has created a schism that can differentiate the ALP. Finally, they can comfortably oppose the government without needing to reconcile it with a break from traditional values. The message for them is also simple: we do not want a system that openly screws Australian workers.

Fingers crossed, eh.

Update (13/6): Yay!

In one of his first significant undertakings since reclaiming the Labor leadership, Mr Beazley promised yesterday to fight for a “co-operative and progressive” system with a legitimate role for unions.

He said Labor would take key principles to the next election that included a strong independent umpire to set fair wages and conditions, and the right for workers to have union-style collective bargaining.

The Opposition Leader’s pledge means Labor will restore a large number of union-friendly conditions that are to be stripped away in Government legislation later this year after the Coalition secures a Senate majority.

Under Mr Beazley’s proposals, guaranteed minimum wages and conditions for workers would be restored to 20 or more, from the Howard Government’s list of five.

Labor would hand back to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission the power to set minimum award wages and settle disputes, and give preference to collective bargaining over non-union individual contracts.

It is unclear whether Labor would scrap altogether the Coalition’s non-union individual contracts, called Australian Workplace Agreements.

However, employers would be compelled to recognise unions in negotiations and could not force workers to accept individual contracts.

Labor would also restore the right of all workers to unfair dismissal claims, scrapping the Prime Minister’s planned exemption for businesses with up to 100 employees.

Tim Dunlop notes that the Howard Government is bullying TAFEs into moving their staff to AWAs. This strikes me as somewhat hypocritical: given the Government’s commitment to “freedom of contract”, surely the TAFEs should be free to decide how best to deal with their employees?

Considering that we are facing a skills shortage, it make no sense to slash the wages of TAFE staff. That is certainly the Government’s aim — if the AWAs contained exactly the same terms as the EBA, there would be no point. And lower wages are something AWAs achieve quite successfully (especially for women), notwithstanding the Government’s misleading rhetoric to the contrary. David Peetz has done a demolition job on IR minister Kevin Andrews on that score:

The Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest figures on earnings of workers on AWAs and collective agreements six weeks ago, but I didn’t see a press release from the Minister’s office at the time. What did they show?

In May 2004, non-managerial workers on registered individual contracts received an average of $23.40 per hour, which was 2 per cent less than workers on registered collective agreements ($23.90 per hour). As 99 per cent of workers on registered individual contracts were on AWAs in 2004 (the state systems of individual contracting having virtually withered away), we can say that AWAs paid about 2 per cent less than registered collective agreements..

For men, the difference between earnings under the two systems was not significant, but women on AWAs had hourly earnings some 11 per cent less than women on registered collective agreements. This was a pretty noteworthy figure, considering the Minister’s earlier claim that women earned 32 per cent more on AWAs than on collective agreements.

The gender pay gap was worse on AWAs: whereas women on registered collective agreements received 90 per cent of the hourly pay of men on such agreements, women on AWAs received only 80 per cent of the hourly pay of men on AWAs.

For casual workers, AWAs paid 15 per cent less that registered collective agreements. For permanent part-time workers AWAs paid 25 per cent less. Indeed, amongst permanent part-time employees even “award only” workers (those who received exactly the award rate) were earning an average of 8 per cent more than AWA workers.

For female permanent full-time workers, AWAs paid 7 per cent less than collective agreements.

The Low Pay Commission is designed to push down wages, and so are AWAs. That is the Howard Government’s agenda.

It will be interesting to see whether the Victorian CFMEU takes legal action against the Government for “coersion” because it pressured business to reject an EBA. A successful claim there would presumably open the way for the State Governments to sue over the TAFE bullying, and for universities to do likewise.