APEC-by-the-Sea

Has the Iemma Government shown a bit of unexpected entrepreneurial flair and started renting out its vast store of security fencing acquired for APEC? It appears so:

People attending Schoolies Week celebrations on the Gold Coast this year will be fenced off from the general public.

And just like APEC, it’s tough working out who is being protected from whom.

I wonder if we’ve hired out the water cannon too? That would really give the night time frolicking a buzz.

Making war an election issue

At last, somebody has asked John Howard how he feels about starting World War 3 by attacking Iran. And although one can never take anything he says at face value, his response appears to be reasonably unequivocal:

“We in Australia believe that Iran’s challenges and Iran’s transgressions should be dealt with diplomatically,” he said.

“We’re not looking at pre-emptive strikes, we’re not encouraging pre-emptive strikes, we’re against them and we want diplomacy to continue.”

It’s extremely pleasing to read that, given that a few weeks ago Brendan Nelson was doing his best to whip up anti-Iranian feeling by adopting the same dishonest tactics that the Bush Administration has been using.

This is, however, only the first step. Howard is quite capable of arguing in future that Australia should support the USA if it decides to attack Iran even though he personally would not have done it. He’s made it clear that he regards the maintenance of American global prestige as being central to Australian interests and has a proven track record of changing his position to accommodate the endless inept shifts in US foreign policy. So I hope journalists continue to press him on the issues, asking questions such as:

• Will he guarantee that no Australian military or intelligence assistance will be given to a US attack on Iran?
• Is his government making strong representations to the Bush Administration urging it to cease its bellicose posturing and make serious efforts to work co-operatively with Iran in developing an exit strategy of occupying forces from Iraq?

Questions like these are more important than interest rates or pensioners’ utility allowances or any of the other matters that are pre-occupying the media. When the US President openly talks about the possibility of World War 3, it’s time to take foreign policy very seriously indeed. Iran didn’t even rate a mention during the tedious debate last Sunday night but there’s a month of election campaign still to go. Is it too much to ask that at least one media outlet turn attention to the potential deaths of millions more people in another misguided exercise in American imperialism, and the role that Australia should play in it?

Revisionist history

Howard was at it again in the Big Debate tonight, rabbiting on about how we should be teaching kids a ‘narrative’ of what a wonderful country we are.

It reminded me of something he said 10 days ago:

The Battle of Long Tan was the first significant engagement of the Vietnam War. It has come to be considered a defining event in Australia’s history.

I’m prepared to overlook the sloppy drafting in the first sentence and assume he meant ‘first significant engagement involving Australians‘, but I doubt any Americans who read it would be so forgiving, let alone any Vietnamese.

More importantly however, and no disrespect to the comparative handful of Australian troops involved, but the second sentence about it being ‘a defining event’ is complete rubbish. I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean. What did the Battle of Long Tan define? Its impact on the course of either the Vietnam War or Australian history was three fifths of five eighths of SFA.

It illustrates perfectly why so many people are deeply suspicious of Howard when he drapes himself in the flag, wanders into a photo op with a bunch of men in uniform, and starts talking about the importance of teaching the right kind of history. He doesn’t want to teach history at all. He does indeed want to get kids to accept a ‘narrative’, which in this case is a piece of creative writing that takes real events and interprets them to suit John Howard’s simplistic jingoism … and which he can then, of course, use as a club to beat a range of political opponents including just about anyone in the public school sector, or on ‘the left’, or from a state Labor government, or in a university, or any of the other pet Howard hates.

Like so many unsettling things about Howard, he resorts constantly to the rhetoric, the mentality and the manipulative tools that authoritarian governments have used down the ages. Of course the wingnuts would twist my argument so they could trot out the usual nonsense about the left claiming Howard=Hitler or some such. The truth is that Howard’s mob have so far taken limited, albeit significant, steps towards authoritarian government in this country. But it’s not much use sitting watching with bright-eyed curiousity to see how far they’ll go. It’s the attitudes that are important, and these blokes’ attitudes are a definite worry. They need to be questioned and pulled into line at every opportunity.

Long Tan a ‘defining event’ indeed. What bullshit. The whole Vietnam disaster was the defining moment - and one that brought great discredit to Australia. That’s what we should be teaching kids in school, so they are less likely to support new Liberal adventures in support of our Great and Powerful Friend.

A new great and powerful friend?

One of my favourite blogs is Tofu Notes, written by a young (by my standards) Australian bloke named Damian who’s living in Nias. Hat tip to him for putting me on to an Indonesian blog Indonesia Matters, which like blogs written by people in Iraq and Iran and sundry other places, offers a different perspective on events in these countries from the one you get reading the mainstream media.

A recent post in Indonesia Matters by ‘new columnist Achmad Sudarsono’ begins:

Australia’s defeat in the Rugby World Cup at the hands of Britain on October 6th was more than a humiliation. It was a sign of a culture that is failing on every level and won’t admit it.

Oi!

It’s a funny post - intentionally I think but like lots of clever humour it’s hard to be completely sure - and I was kind of with Achmad’s argument for a lot of the time - I mean who can deny that the Wallabies were a joke at the World Cup - but he lost me when he wrote

After all, Rugby is really a contest of which team has the thickest skulls and fewest brain cells. (It has none of the subtleties of sepak takraw or badminton).

Well OK, I can go along with sepak takraw requiring quite a bit of skill, but badminton (or ’shuttlecock’ as we Aussies call it)? Come on dude … honestly.

Cycling schmykling

Today was Ride to Work Day. Easy for me, I work at home most of the time now.

I wouldn’t have liked to get on a pushie to ride to work when I lived in Sydney though. Even if I survived the homicidal maniacs who love to fly up the kerbside lane doing 50 ks more than the rest of the traffic, there are too many hills in Sydney. And I sweat a lot. Cycling in a suit for half an hour in summer would have had me arriving at work with unsightly wet patches all over the place. And don’t start on this crap about employers providing showers at work. You seriously think someone’s going to cycle to work, cool off, have a shower and get changed into their work clothes every morning? And is the employer going to provide an instant dry-cleaning service too? I don’t think my Ermenegildo Zegna suit with matching silk shirt and tie would have scrubbed up too well after being jammed into a back pack for an hour.

Then every evening the poor bloody workers are expected to repeat the process in reverse. Great fun if one of those refreshing spring thunderstorms has blown up during the afternoon. I’m cycling in the rain … I’m cycling in the rain …

Maybe it’s all a plot to convince workers that the trip to and from work is too much trouble. That way they might stay in the office all week and just make occasional trips home at weekends to check on the kids.

Fortunately when I do have to travel these days, I can rely on my trusty Cowasaki.

Beyond satire

One of the most common observations made about the Bush Administration is the extent to which it has concentrated power in the executive government. Bush, Cheney and their cabinet members have conducted the affairs of the nation with scant reference to anybody else. Congress has been defied or ignored. Bill after bill presented for signature has been endorsed by Bush with a ’signing statement’, which amounts to a declaration that the President will interpret the law to mean whatever he wishes it to mean. Administration officials have refused to appear before Congress, or if they do appear they treat the proceedings with contempt. Judicial decisions have been ignored pending interminable appeals and promises to introduce new legislation. Bush has authorised invasive surveillance of US citizens’ private affairs and steered laws through Congress that allow citizens to be detained at the President’s pleasure. Worst of all, he has ignored the clear wishes of the American people and the Congress to end the occupation of Iraq, airily proclaiming that it is the President’s prerogative to make foreign policy. In the remaining months of his administration, Bush seems determined to commit his country to a war with Iran, despite overwhelming opposition from his fellow Americans.

In short, under the Bush administration the US presidency has become a law unto itself, exercising unprecedented power without accountability to anyone.

So it was staggering to read today that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has had the unbelievable gall to scold the Russians for allowing too much power to accrue to the presidency.

“In any country, if you don’t have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development,” Rice told reporters after meeting with human-rights activists.

“I think there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. I have told the Russians that. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma,” said Rice, referring to the Russian parliament.

How she could say all this with a straight face is beyond me, but I guess Condi’s never been known for her sense of humour. But let’s run it again with a few words changed:

“In any country, if you don’t have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development,” Lavrov told reporters after meeting with human-rights activists.

“I think there is too much concentration of power in the White House. I have told the Americans that. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Congress,” said Lavrov, referring to the American parliament.

Which passage rings truer, do you reckon? And if you’re having trouble making up your mind, remember that Vladimir Putin is seriously considering running for the Russian parliament after his term as president finishes. Presumably he doesn’t see the prime ministership as a powerless office. But it’s difficult to imagine Bush running for Congress in 2008, even if the constitution allowed it.

Moreover, imagine the offended outrage if a visiting foreign minister dared to address American ‘human rights activists’ in the terms in which Rice spoke to the Russians. The neo-cons would be apoplectic that anyone would be so impertinent. Yet none of them seems to have batted an eyelid at the thought of their own secretary of state lecturing another major power in such a patronising (and stupid) manner.

It’s incidents like this that make me despair of the USA. Its rulers from all sides seem to have swallowed their own bullshit about American exceptionalism so comprehensively that they are incapable of perceptive self-knowledge, or of seeing themselves as the rest of the world sees them.They appear destined to blunder from one contretemps to another, all the while patting themselves on the back for their unique virtue and whining about how misunderstood they are by the other 95% of the global population.

I like a lot of things about the USA but they have the smell of terminal self-destruction about them. It’s well past time for Australia to disentangle itself from the joined-at-the-hip relationship successive governments have got us into. Unfortunately, no matter which party wins on 24 November, I can’t see that disengagement starting any time soon.

Frauds for Jesus

I was raised as a good little Christian boy. I remember being mightily impressed with the Christian virtues. However, I couldn’t have been more than 10 or 11 years old before the truth hit home (starting with my own family) that none of the Christians I knew behaved in anything like the way their ostensible beliefs required them to.

I blame this for a deep cynicism about religions and other superstitions that has dogged me all my life.

Anyway recent events have reminded me of this gaping chasm between what Christians say they believe and how they act. Moreover, they seem curiously unaware of this disconnect between ideology and action. It’s a real-time, live case study of cognitive dissonance.

Prime Minister John Winston Howard is a Christian. So is Leader of the Opposition Kevin Rudd. They admit it themselves so it must be true. Yet neither of them pays the slightest heed to one of the fundamental tenets of Christianity.

I’m talking of course about Jesus’ exhortation in Matthew 5:44:

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you

The trouble with this, from the point of view of Messrs Howard and Rudd (and those Christians I knew all those years ago) is that it goes against human nature. It’s revolutionary stuff. Jesus was a radical and most Australian Christians don’t get radical. They leave that kind of stuff to the excitable Latins and Africans. No, the attitude around here is basically that Christian principles = the British common law. Stuff about doing good to them that hate you doesn’t fit into their world-view so poof! It’s air-brushed from their version of the faith.

The reason I was thinking again about this is the reaction during the week to the suggestion that the Bali bombers might avoid execution. My, didn’t the faux Christians have a field day spitting their outrage! Yet Jesus couldn’t have been clearer: ‘Love your enemies’. You don’t usually go on national television urging that people you love be put before a firing squad.

I’d love to see Messrs Rudd and Howard and Costello and any of the other professed Christians in politics cross-examined about how they reconcile their religious beliefs with their behaviour. Not that it will ever happen of course. One of the quaint conventions of Australian politics is that a politician is free to flaunt their self-proclaimed faith without fear of being questioned about its actual meaning.

In contrast to the Christians’ blood lust directed against those they’re supposed to love was the behaviour of the infidel from the north. Yes to add insult to injury, not only are the Indonesians contemplating a reprieve from the death sentence for the Bali bombers, they actually had some of them over for a meal. Or ‘a party’, as the Australian media described it. Well more accurately it was an occasion to break the Ramadan fast and pray but it’s much more shocking if you describe it as a party.

What’s really outrageous is the response of the Indonesians when angry Australians confronted them with their behaviour.

Brigadier-General Dharma said the gathering was part of a strategy to win over terrorists.

“We approach the terrorists with a pure heart,” he said. “We are all Muslims. We make them our brothers, not our enemy.”

Great goddlemighty, the dumbass sounds like he’s on Planet Jesus! Next thing he’ll be saying he wants to do good to them that despitefully use him.

The thing is, the Christians are all phonies. Their religion means nothing to them really. They just co-opt the useful bits and wear them like a magic spell when it suits, and ignore the bits they don’t agree with. Somehow this convinces them that they occupy a moral peak infinitely superior to anyone else.

Muslims, on the other hand, actually take their religion seriously, including the bits that it holds in common with Christianity. Christians find this highly offensive; they regard Muslims as crazy fanatics.

Me, I shake my head at all religions. It’s beyond me how any otherwise intelligent person can take all the superstition and authoritarianism seriously. But I have to say that at least I can respect Muslims. They are prepared to live by their principles, no matter how misguided I might consider those principles to be. It’s hard to respect most of the self-proclaimed Christians. They just come across as totally expedient hypocrites.

Business and education

For as long as I can remember, people have been whining about the poor quality of the local education system. I think it was Harry Messel back in the 1950s who started it all by complaining that his physics undergraduates were functionally illiterate. These days it’s more likely to be employers - or the anonymous ‘business’ - who make regular pronouncements that the education system isn’t producing people with the qualities needed to live an intellectually rewarding life create surplus value for capital.

Yesterday saw the most recent of these regular occurrences.

A new report has recommended making skills like communication and problem-solving a mandatory and assessable part of university degrees.

The Federal Government-commissioned report has found employers are generally happy with the technical skills of graduates, but are concerned about the level of employability skills.

Now as someone who teaches in the field, let me give a bit of free human resource management advice to employers. It’s the kind of thing that we teach in introductory courses for first year undergrads. If you are unhappy with the capabilities of your staff, you should adopt one of the following two courses of action:

1. Amend your recruitment and selection procedures so that you only employ people in future who have the capabilities that you require, or alternatively
2. Introduce training and development programs under which your employees will acquire the desired capabilities.

Not rocket science, is it? So why don’t Australian employers like either of these solutions? Well because they are market-based. And despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, Australian employers hate free markets. When it comes to expecting welfare assistance from the state, business has almost as great a culture of entitlement as the so-called self-funded retirees.

Any employer that called for expressions of interest from the dozens of Australian business schools to deliver courses in ‘communication and problem-solving’ would be knocked over in the rush. As long, of course, as the employer was prepared to pay for it. And there’s the rub - by and large, employers aren’t prepared to pay for the cost of developing their staff. They expect universities to do it for them using our taxes.

The trouble with this approach is that universities have been forced to become market-oriented, and guess who the customers are? That’s right - students. Not employers. Universities live and die by their ability to attract and retain students. Students want to enrol in courses that will get them good jobs. Quite obviously at the moment, these courses don’t include communication and problem-solving, otherwise students would be clamouring to do them.

So if business wants universities to teach different capabilities, the answer is in their own hands. There’s no use issuing reports or making public statements about the shortcomings of higher education. Just insist that you won’t employ anyone in future unless they have an accredited qualification in communication and problem-solving. Then sit back and watch students beating down the doors of business schools demanding that these courses be taught, and watch the university managements leap to accommodate the demand.

But if business doesn’t want to do this, but prefers to make plaintive calls for universities to change their courses, then they can expect things to stay much the same in future as they are now. I know some employers are reluctant to acknowledge the truth, but markets really do work sometimes.

BTW a government-commissioned report to try to impose some top-down changes on higher education … honestly. Hasn’t this mob learnt anything from the failures of the Hawke/Keating Governments?

Some deaths are more equal than others

I’m thoroughly bemused by the ‘anger’ of a family who have been offered a gift of ‘only’ $16,000 by the government (link). In my simple moral universe, a gift is something to appreciate and be grateful for, not a reason to snarl that you’re ‘entitled’ to something better.

The gift in question has been offered by the Australian government to the family of Vicki Rigg-McEwen, who was killed in Turkey six years ago. The money is intended to defray the cost of bringing Vicki’s body home. Yet the family isn’t happy:

Mrs Rigg-McEwen, who is preparing to mark Amanda’s birthday on Friday, said the offer came only after a report about the family’s situation appeared in the Herald in August and the Opposition spokesman on foreign affairs, Robert McClelland, made enquiries into the case. “I felt like it was shut-up money … I just feel they have said, We’ll give you this and go away.”

She said the $16,000 would only cover the cost of bringing her daughter’s body home, not the cost of flights to be by her bedside, or that of her funeral.

I haven’t looked for any data but I think it’s a fair bet that of the million or so Australians who are overseas at any given time, a few die every now and then. I wasn’t aware that the Australian government put its hand in my pocket to pay for the cost of flying the bodies home. In fact I venture to suggest that it does no such thing. And if one of those Australian families gets ill or injured, the government doesn’t fork out the cost of an airfare for a relative to fly across the world to be at their bedside. So what makes the Rigg-McEwen family so upset? It seems to me they’re getting a good deal with the $16,000.

Even more puzzling, what’s with this stuff about the government not covering the cost of Vicki’s funeral? Why TF would it even think about doing that? People die suddenly and tragically all the time. The bereaved families don’t head off to the government and suggest that the taxpayer might like to pay for the funeral. Why should it make any difference that the death occurred overseas?

Well the answer is in the cause of death. Vicki was killed in a terrorist attack.

Vicki Rigg-McEwen, whose daughter Amanda Rigg, 22, died in a suicide bombing in Turkey on September 10, 2001, the day before the attacks in the US, said her family had been treated appallingly by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and deserved an apology from the Foreign Affairs Minister.

The idiotic hysteria that Howard’s mob have tried to whip up about the War on Terror has created unanticipated consequences. Suddenly an Australian who gets killed in a terrorist attack is in a different category altogether to an Australian who gets killed in a road accident or contracts a fatal illness or gets mugged by a homicidal lunatic. The families of all these ordinary people can make their own arrangements about bodies and funerals and so on but the victims of terrorism are special.

And who can blame the Rigg-McEwen family for feeling this way? They’ve been watching the government make political mileage out of terrorism for six years. They’ve seen the ritual ceremonies honouring the victims of September 11 and the London Underground and wondered why their daughter doesn’t rate a mention. The answer of course is that these ceremonies are not to honour the dead but to help the political fortunes of the living. Why just today a Labor front-bencher is in a shit-load of trouble for daring to state ALP policy about the death penalty in public, just because it was approaching the five year anniversary of the first Bali bombing. The ALP is against the death penalty but not sufficiently against it to actually make a case in support of its position, or so it would seem.

So who can blame the Rigg-McEwens for engaging in what otherwise might appear to be something of a tawdry gold-digging exercise? If it’s good enough for the politicians to try to get political advantage out of terrorist acts, it’s surely good enough for private individuals to try to gain some financial benefit (and yes I do feel sympathy for the family’s bereavement but that’s quite a separate issue from giving them money. Does somebody really want to argue that increasing the size of the gift will somehow ease their grief?)

Mrs Rigg-McEwen summed the issue up nicely:

“This whole thing is about every Australian being treated the same: [that if] you’ve got an Australian passport that it means something to the Australian Government.”

I couldn’t agree more. Every Australian should be treated the same. So if families are to be granted financial assistance to cover the costs associated with deaths occurring overseas, let the rules be transparent and apply equally to everyone, regardless of the cause of death. Let’s not fall mindlessly into Howard’s trap of pretending that we’re actually engaged in a real war, and that the victims of terrorist acts are some kind of war casualties deserving of privileged treatment. They’re people whose lives have ended tragically but their deaths are no more - or less - significant than those of any other Australians.

Problems with trouser snakes?

Two adjacent stories on the ABC news feed. One headline reads:

Man injures penis in botched initiation ceremony

The other:

Cops call for back up in stand off with slithery serpent

Disappointingly, the stories were not related.