On your bike

by Economics, politics • Tags: , , , , , ,

When I was young I lived in a kind of cloud of family history. My father had migrated to Australia, my mother had come with her parents when the whole family migrated – they were “to work on farms in Australia – Salvation Army family scheme in operation”, leaving England for the good of the Empire. My mother’s family, who I lived with, felt very much exiled in Australia. They had escaped the coal mines of northern England, and sickness, looking for a positive economic future, and good health, but ran into the Great Depression, which arrived in Australia when they did. So hard times, made worse when the settler scheme in the south west of WA was found to be totally impractical for inexperienced farmers with no capital. And all of that made worse by the lack of a support network of family and friends in a strange country with an inhospitable climate.

So they tended to live in the past, which was another country. England.

No internet of course, effectively no phones or air travel, letters that took weeks to reach a destination and get a reply. Communications with “Home” in the 1930s were little different to what they had been for any migrants to Australia in the previous 100 years. And so they peopled their world with the people that they had left behind. Made do with whatever scraps of information came by letter in order to refresh the old stories, endlessly told, about what happened to young Harry, and life on the Home Farm, and what my great grandfather said on his death bed, and how my great grandmother managed to raise 8 children on her own, and playing cricket, and digging allotments, and learning the piano, and how sister Sally’s boys were doing, and what was happening in their old street. In effect they created a virtual world of family and friends which made the difficulties of life in 1930s WA a little easier to bear. And I moved around a house peopled not just with the living but with the dead and distant, though vividly alive, friends and family from the old country, and would have been unsurprised to find, say, great grandmother Annie sitting in our lounge room, or Aunt Harriet in our garden.

I understood all this instinctively I think, but I can see that many of those taking part in the “asylum seekers debate” have never had any experience with the reality of immigration, or, if they have, lock it away in some compartment of the brain, unexamined for decades. All of the discussion about “illegal immigrants” is to do with the economics – jobs, infrastructure, health and education – and the practicalities – of queues and interception and internment and processing. There is on the one side a dehumanising description of “human cargo” and on the other a belief that building more houses and railway lines will solve any problems that might arise. I have rarely heard any discussion about the emotional and social needs of the refugees. And yet to see those images of men sitting, all the same posture in regular lines of equal spacing, on the decks of navy ships, is to see people who have been stripped of context. Will be further stripped in detention centres.

They have all left behind, somewhere, villages, friends, neighbours, families, jobs, landscape, sounds, colours, may even know that all of that has been destroyed by war or disaster, have found themselves in a place where their minds and emotional needs are fenced off from the world around them. And, as if they were living in 1930 not 2010, great difficulty in even having enough communications to refresh a virtual emotional landscape when they create one. Think of all that when a politician says “no family reunion” immigration.

I left home, forced to by circumstances in continuing a university education, and travelled from Perth to Melbourne. In doing so I suddenly gained a deeper understanding of what my family had been through, as I left behind family, friends, pets, house I had grown up in, familiar surroundings, neighbours, sporting teams and all the rest. I finished up living in a flat by myself, feeling totally alone and depressed and not functioning very well. Took me several years to recover my equilibrium, rebuild circles of friends, redevelop family connections.

I was reminded of that part of my history during the election campaign when both major parties were blithely talking about forcing (one way or another) people to move to, say, the mining areas of WA, from anywhere in Australia. No more trying to find a job in your own town – no, it’s on your bike and on your way. Remember some time ago the outrage by conservatives, and the media echo chamber, about some unemployed people daring to try to find a job they were suited for, qualified for, could progress in? Enough of that nonsense, you would take whatever was offered of any kind or we would starve you into submission. It all comes down to the modern concept that people exist merely to serve the economy, not the reverse.

So now, not only will you not be permitted to make any attempt to choose your work, but you will be forced to move to wherever the economy says – not just new arrivals, who can be forced as a matter of course, but anyone in this Brave New Australia. This is essentially a work system of slavery with wages.

And like most neoconservative theories this enforced mobility takes absolutely no account of the social cost of having individuals and nuclear families stripped of their support circle of family and friends, and the stresses this will cause to relationships and mental health and to children’s development. We look like becoming a nation of immigrants in every sense, with upheaval of families and communities in the interests of business, the norm not the exception. And business won’t be paying for the resultant social and individual traumas, the broader society will have to do that.

Takes a village to raise a child? Yes indeed, and takes a village to support a family.

Talking to you

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by politics • Tags: , , , , , ,

The beginning of the fall of Kevin Rudd has been confidently assigned to the abandoning of the CPRS. Considerable truth in the proposition, as the rise in the Green vote shows, but it is certainly not the whole truth.

The first failure of Rudd was in the aftermath of the 2020 Summit. Remember it? Seems like another world now. The new prime minister called together a conference of experts and others to come up with ideas across the whole spectrum of society culture and environment. The concept promised a great symbolic and actual break with the Howard years of know-nothingism. And it was the equivalent of Barack Obama’s break with the Bush years “change you can believe in”. There were many photo opportunities at the Summit, impassioned debates, white boards filled with ideas, and new Labor ministers sitting, among equals, in the relevant workshops. And there was Kevin himself. In shirt sleeves, sitting humbly on the floor, leaning against a wall, seriously taking notes. There was, rather like the Copenhagen conference still to come, a time limit to reach consensus, and there were furious discussions among splinter groups, bringing resolutions and summaries back to the main groups, and then the triumphant, just finished in time, presentations by celebrities, and others, of the main conclusions and ideas. Kevin Rudd took them gratefully.

The reason this all seemed like the start of a whole new age of enlightenment in Australian politics is that it was such a contrast with the previous 11 years. John Howard himself had little interest in anything except the creation, by deregulation and Work Choices and a GST, of an environment in which the wealth gap between rich and poor individuals and large and small businesses could widen considerably. Oh, and cricket. Anything else was political correctness, and only the concern of a few basket weavers in Balmain, of no interest to Howard’s battlers. One of Howard’s ministers, a certain T. Abbott, made it explicit that he had no interest in hearing from experts, but all of them behaved in the same way – no need for expertise when your ideology tells you exactly what to do. As a result there was a build up of flawed approaches, and ignored research, in a whole range of issues – health, education, environment, indigenous issues, social issues, culture – a backlog of frustration for the thousands of people who knew the Howard approach to issue X was wrong but had no means of contributing to a different solution.

And then suddenly there was Mr Rudd, here to help, and all of that pent up frustration poured out in a wave of goodwill and hope at the 2020 summit, just as it was to do during the Barack Obama campaign the following year.

The Summit was over, the contributors went home, and waited for the actions that would certainly follow. Expertise was valued again in the brave new world of Kevin07, and things would be put right. Ministers would be phoning them. Draft legislation would appear, boards composed of experts would be established, action would ensue, probably before Christmas. Certainly before New Year 2008.

Only it didn’t. None of that happened. Watched phones never rang, letters from the Prime Minister’s department never appeared in mailboxes. It had all been for nothing. This was the first inkling that Rudd was just another politician, that the Summit had all been for show, a kind of election campaign stunt held after the election. That ideology was still firmly in the saddle, just a different ideology. Labor was, in many cases, simply continuing Howard government non-expert-based policies, and where it wasn’t it was full steam ahead in different directions, also without the help of experts.

And back home the Summiteers began muttering to their circles of friends, and disillusion with the Rudd approach grew and grew. The abandoning of any attempt to deal with climate change was just the most obvious of the consequences of the failure to absorb expertise into the work of government. The 2020 summit was the first, and the start of the downhill ride that was to culminate in a massive Green vote and Bob Katter with the balance of power; and both Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama, who similarly and spectacularly has failed to live up to apparent promise, have suffered similar falls from grace in the opinion polls.

They say you should never, in politics, ask a question you don’t know the answer to. The other side of this is that if you don’t know the answer to something (and politicians never do) then ask an expert.

And Kevin Rudd has shown that you should never ask an expert a question if you are not going to act on their recommendations.

What will the next PM do?

The government it deserves

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by politics • Tags: , , , , , ,

One of the memories I have from handing out how to vote cards (apart from the bitterly cold morning) is the young chap who hurried through, waving aside all how to vote cards, announcing, proudly, “I am voting informal”. Let me translate for you, that means “I care so little about the culture and society and economy and environment of the community and country and world I live in, and am so stupid, that I have decided to let other people decide what government Australia will have for the next three years”. I mean these were people who seemed to be following Mark Latham’s advice – yes, really – to put in a blank vote in order to … Well, in order to what wasn’t clear. Punish the politicians? Show them who was boss by withdrawing your own voting privilege? It was all a bit like another frequent comment when refusing the proffered ‘How to Vote’ pamphlet – “No, you save it”. “Save it for what?” I wanted to reply “They are already printed, here they are, in my hand, ready to help you in the voting process, what do you imagine will be done with them if not used?” But I don’t, having been brought up to be polite. It is the same principle as voting “informal” with a blank paper. What do you imagine that achieves? The election is on, would you rather we didn’t have elections but a dictatorship? The candidates are there, the voting papers are ready, electoral officials ready to start counting. If your paper goes, blank, into a bin, instead of onto a pile, what do you imagine that message is, to anybody?

A general memory of the day is the same behaviour that Maxine McKew observed in Bennelong. In 2007 there was a buzz among the voters, an enjoyment of the act of voting, a feeling of being part of an expectation, a likely achievement, a change for the better. This time, among Liberal, Labor and Green voters alike, there was a glumness, a lack of enthusiasm, a sense of an unwanted task being undertaken, a feeling, I think, that the votes were going to mean nothing, that whatever the outcome, there was nothing to look forward to. In its most extreme form this was another reason for someone throwing a blank voting paper in the face of all those believers in and fighters for democracy over hundreds of years. You often hear it “Oh, none of them are any good, won’t vote for any of them”. “Really?”, I might say, if I wasn’t so polite, “you have checked all the candidates out, read their policies, considered their qualifications and experience and personality? And out of all the candidates, with political philosophies ranging from far right to far left, all different ages, backgrounds, occupations, you can’t find a single one that you even dislike slightly less than the others? Really?” This kind of negativity festers as a mindless nihilism, a no-nothingism, do-nothingism. A refusal to be part of a family, a village, a society, a country, a refusal to contribute, cooperate, work toward a better future.

As I write this I don’t yet know the details of result, but if I had to guess I would say the likely outcome is a conservative government led by Mr Abbott with the support of the three conservative independents. I doubt that this will make even the people who voted for conservative happy. Not only did Abbott run a negative campaign (yes, I know) but his party stands for purely negative policies – no broadband, no return of excess mining profits to the public, no refugees, no reduction in greenhouse gases, no protection of fish stocks (or Cape York), no support for public schools or public health. Abbott conservatives, even more than Howard conservatives, believe in government that might be small enough to drown in a bathtub but is kept dry in order to ensure that big profits for big companies get bigger and bigger. There is no other function of government except to organise military operations in coordination with the US, and regulate the morality of its citizens. No wonder even conservative voters looked glum at the prospect of “winning”. I bet they are all muttering to themselves this morning “One more such victory and we are lost”.

Gillard I think, by contrast, does have a positive view of the function of government, that it is to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. The tragedy of the 2010 election is that she was so poorly advised that she was totally unable to sell a positive vision for the future of Australia and fell back on negativity and easily parodied slogans. It was a caricature of a campaign, and those responsible should be taken out and drowned in a bathtub if Maxine hasn’t already done that.

And the Greens? Well their slow climb up the percentage ladder continues. But the Senate success means little with a conservative government in power. A lot of negativity can be achieved in the 9 months before the new Senate sits. And even once it does, the Greens are reduced to trying to block excessive lurches to the Right, and be therefore seen as mere spoilers; and any initiatives they try to take themselves will be blocked by Liberal and Labor working together, determined to let them take no credit.

Still, I might wake up tomorrow, and discover this election was just another bad dream of the kind I keep getting since I started taking handfuls of tablets to prevent a broken heart. I mean, we don’t deserve a result like this.

Do we? That would be heartbreaking.

Versus Sarah Palin

by politics • Tags: , , , , , , ,

My friends from outside Australia can relax soon – just two more sleeps before the election and then it is over. I will write, as soon as the result is clear (which may not be on Saturday night, this may well be the closest election, as I predicted first, see below, since 1961, when Menzies won by just one seat and that one decided by a handful of votes. He wrote to the successful Liberal candidate, James Killen, a telegram which just said “You are magnificent”. I wonder if Julia Gillard will be writing an email to, say, Mike Kelly, to tell him he was magnificent for saving her government) something about the significance. But I hold out no great hopes – in American terms this election is the rough equivalent of Barack Obama versus Sarah Palin, but with the sexes reversed. I feel about it all, as I do about a trip to the dentist – don’t tell me what is going to happen, don’t tell me what is happening, just tell me when it’s over.

Anyway, nearly over, and then we can return to non-parochial issues. I have just written something on refugees, and I received a nice one from constant reader Bob Hawkins from Tasmania which I hereby pass on. If any of my loyal readers have written posts they think other loyal readers might like, please let me know and I will highlight them here. Will make a change from always reading my prose.

Oh and another bit of news – my chapter in the Australian Book of Atheism is to appear, Hooray. The book is due out in December.

And speaking of my prose, I am still adding to my biographical material under the “Dream” tab at the top of this window. There is now an index of chapters at the start so you can keep track of what you have seen, but I also keep adding new photos to older ones, so have a bit of a trawl from time to time. I now have in place all the fundamental family building blocks of the story, and it only (!) remains to add the half a dozen or so major individual stories to make it complete. Oh and take the story to the start of 1967, which is where I will stop.

Happy Voting Day

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by politics • Tags: , , , , ,

Well, on the day, I’ll be handing out How to Vote cards yet again. I enjoy it, although it’s hard work, at my age, staying on your feet for hours (all day last time) with the occasional sprint to give someone a card at a different gate. People would be a bit surprised I think to learn that people handing out cards for the major parties – Labor, Libs, Greens, Nationals, Democrats, generally speaking get along pretty well on the day (though there are one or two of the minor parties, if there, that I will do no more than say good morning to – I’m no saint). Oh maybe a bit of cheek, bit of a joke about someone else’s leader, but usually just a good chat about life and the universe, about the election campaign, about the weather (please, don’t let it be a miserable wet day on Saturday), about hobbies, farming life, whatever.

We don’t, as in some countries, hate each other, draw knives, guns, bombs, scream abuse. Oh it’s not that the policy differences, philosophical differences, personality differences, aren’t important, of course they are, and we all take our politics very seriously (otherwise we wouldn’t be standing on a windy footpath doing this). We believe in throwing out the old government, or supporting the old government for another term; are anxious about climate change, or education, or health, or infrastructure, and have different ideas on how to address those issues. But we also believe in our Australianess, our shared humanity, our shared general goals and ideals; and we believe in those qualities in the general population, and their consequent ability to make a good decision, freely.

And we are there to celebrate a very healthy democracy, one in which we can hand out how to vote cards good-naturedly side by side. One where the campaign is over and now it just remains to count the votes. And because everyone in the population is voting the whole thing becomes a carnival, a celebration of being Australian, a kind of combination Australia Day, Anzac Day, Xmas Day, Melbourne Cup Day. Having it take place in school buildings also adds to the occasion, weaves it all into the fabric of our society; and the children that turn up to hang around while their parents vote are learning a lesson about our society that is as valuable as any they learn in their formal schooling. We should go for fixed terms, always have it on the same day, make it a real festival of our democracy. Could greet each other with a cheery “Happy Voting Day”.

So when you see the people handing out How to Votes on Saturday, take one of each, say good morning with a smile, help to celebrate the wonder that is Australian democracy.

And anyway, one of them might be me!

Happy Voting Day.

Postscript I wrote this about a week ago when discussing where I would be handing out how to vote cards, and feeling something of a warm nostalgic glow from my last effort in 2007. Since then, in the last few days, we have seen a Green candidate in a coastal town being very nastily verbally abused and narrowly escaping a physical beating for daring to be in favour of trying to stop fish species going extinct. And we have seen a Liberal supporter physically attacking a Labor supporter in Queensland. It seems that the Right, as in America in recent years, and many other countries in the past, are back in the business of physically intimidating and trying to silence the Left in Australia. I am now less optimistic about the political process than I was a week ago.

Signs for the times

by Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

If you had to pick one image, one “iconic image”, to represent the Iraq war what would it be? No contest, really, the one that would come to mind is the pulling down of Saddam Hussein’s statue. The Americans were presenting the war as a liberation, not an invasion, their soldiers would be greeted by flowers, said one war architect. Memories of the Americans riding into Paris in 1944 were being invoked. The Americans riding into Baghdad were the same as those GI Joes riding into Paris on their jeeps, pretty girls rushing out to kiss them, old women and children throwing rose petals, everywhere cheering crowds, and, all over Paris, citizens smashing, pulling down, destroying, symbols of the occupation. This is what they were, in Iraq, liberators, and they wanted to eliminate any possible comparison with the columns of German tanks driving into Paris in 1940, met by sullen and stony faced crowds, some of whom would soon form the Resistance.

So, liberation, not invasion, and liberated people would, naturally, pull down the Saddam Hussein statue, that’s what liberated people do. And so down it came, in slow motion, cheering people around it. And the world saw and registered the iconic image as proof of the legitimacy of American action.

Trouble was, of course, as became quickly known, unlike 1944 Paris, this was all a stage managed fake. The statue was pulled down by American soldiers, the cheering “crowd’ was tiny, just a few people gathered around the base, as became evident when the original close up film released by the US was compared to a wide angle shot of the square. And the small crowd were essentially a rent-a-crowd, Iraqis in exile who had quickly been brought in by the Americans as the invasion succeeded. There were no crowds throwing flowers at the American soldiers.

Didn’t matter. The fake iconic image was reality. It established a truth the Americans were creating. Sadly the lie was quickly overtaken by reality as a resistance movement rapidly formed to resist the occupation troops. But didn’t really matter because the icon had three advantages. It was cheap to create – a few soldiers, and an army vehicle, a length of chain, half a dozen Iraqi performers. It matched public expectations of reality, and so was accepted as being so even when the construction of the image was exposed. And it was short and sweet, a convenient chunk of an image which would sit in the libraries of television channels all round the world, a short sequence which could provide wallpaper vision behind any news item on the Iraq war. Would still be used in this way seven years later, by which time there would be few people in the west who hadn’t been exposed to it, overtly or subliminally, hundreds of times over those seven years. And every exposure would harden the view that this was the way things were, this virtual reality, of liberating Americans and a grateful Iraqi public, would replace actual reality.

Reminded me of a sequence of events in Perth recently. The government announces that it intends to take a proportion of the grossly inflated profits of mining companies. Instant protests, and threats, from the heads of mining companies. But not really a good look, grotesquely rich mining chiefs complaining that they have to pay more tax when they are already worth billions of dollars. Hard to get sympathy from anyone except Tony Abbott when you have already personally extracted billions of dollars from the soil of Australia, soil, in theory at least, owned by us all. So campaign not going well. What to do? Get Mitch Hooke to scowl at everyone? Get Clive Palmer to accuse Rudd of being a communist? Nah, people just laugh at you. Need an iconic image.

Ah ha, got it. A demonstration, the people take to the streets, protests by the public against big brother in Canberra, ordinary men and women of Australia trying to turn back the creeping tide of Rudd socialism, hold on to their jobs. And so there was a demonstration, on the evening news bulletins. “People protest against new mining tax”. “Good heavens”, the viewer would say, “the people are revolting. This isn’t just a matter of Tony and his rich mates, this is grass roots concern, whatever has the Labor Party come to when it punishes the workers?”

Well, that was what the casual viewer would say, but a political junkie, wondering what was going on here, paid a bit more attention. And suddenly realised that this piece of iconic film might not be what it seemed. First of all there were Gina and Twiggy, clearly wondering how they too were going to put bread on their tables, just like the horny handed sons of the mines. And there were Iron Bar and Julie, marching it seemed, to the Internationale for the first time. And speaking of sons of the mines, didn’t these people in their suits and ties look rather more like office workers than miners? Then you became aware that with one, I think, exception, the signs these people were holding up were rather too neat. All the same size, all neatly mounted on poles, all PRINTED. There was none of the hastily written, in crayon or variously coloured paints, in the white hot rage of class warfare, made up slogans scribbled, and misspelt, and barely fitting on the sign so the last few letters of “unite” had to be written very small, signs of real demonstrations by uni students or people trying to save koalas. No, all beautifully printed on a machine in uniform font, nicely centred.

And finally you realised that it was a little odd that these people were packed closely together, tightly shoulder to shoulder, rather like a school class photo, or tourists on a bus trip. And even odder that the filming was being done just a few metres from the front row, carefully avoiding any wide angled context shots rather in the way that the fall of Saddam’s statue was filmed. You wondered, if the whole population of WA had arisen in revolution and were filling the Esplanade, why only one tiny part of these masses was being filmed. The next night all of these puzzles were apparently solved when one tv reporter (the only one I saw do this) suggested that the demonstration had been organised by the publicity company that works for miners, and that most of the demonstrators were office staff from the company, bused down a couple of streets from where they were working, handed the beautifully prepared signs, and told to look photogenic and chant a bit. Well, of course he might say so but I couldn’t possibly comment.

Anyway, whoever these people were (and I don’t know, for sure, that there wasn’t a real miner in there somewhere), however many of them there were, and whoever had organised proceedings and printed the signs and marked the spot where the cameras should be set up, didn’t matter. The television networks had a piece of footage that could be run as wallpaper behind any news item on the new tax, and, to match the footage, some mention would need to be made of the mass public protests, the grass roots resistance. Didn’t matter if cynical old fellas like me had considerable skepticism about how the “demonstration” was constructed, there it was. And there it continued to be, on every channel, on every occasion where negotiations were underway, right up to Julia’s recent visit to the West. The state, naturally, where there was “public outrage”, cue footage of massed protesters and printed signs again, where, as a result, Labor was in big trouble. Footage that undoubtedly will continue to be run right up to the election. Footage which, for a very small outlay in the cost of some cardboard and poles and a printer, and a small bus, resulted in thousands of votes going back to the Liberals, and billions of dollars going back to the mining executives.

Powerful things, icons, but cheap.

Reality election

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Well, what to say, what to say? One day I think we are replaying the 1961 election, another day I think 1975 or perhaps 1983, then I bounce to 1993, then 2001 comes to mind, and certainly the DNA of all those is in this one. But, just as a child may show resemblances to any number of ancestors and still have unique features all of its own, so the 2010 federal election is already unique in the annals of the forty or so elections we have had since federation.

“Unique because of former leaders hanging around?”, I hear you ask, plaintively. No they hang around in every election, old warhorses sniffing the smell of battle from afar and neighing triumphantly to the wind. Unique because of promises made or not made, spending commitments foreshadowed, authoritarian policies unveiled, the viciousness of the negative advertising? Nah, been there, done that, seen it all before. Unique because one of the two major leaders is a woman? Well, yeees, but the fact seems strangely irrelevant to either the style or content of Labor campaigning. Because one of the two leaders is an atheist? Nah, done that before too, and in any case Julia is behaving more like a convert than an atheist. One overtly religious leader? No, two last time.

Give up? It’s the active role the television networks are playing in not just reporting but shaping the election – all pretense of being impartial observers gone, television reporters and presenters and analysts are now as actively involved as the candidates. More involved, and certainly with more power. The Latham incident – turning him into a “reporter” and then having him confront Gillard so that he was creating the story he was supposedly reporting – was just the most obvious and symbolic event. Before that there was Laurie Oakes and the “leaks”. Before that, and continuing, is the massaging of the poll results. First Rudd was “in trouble” in the polls, then he was dumped as a result, then he is said to be popular, the dumping inexplicable. The media reports “2 party preferred” or “preferred leader” or “satisfaction” or “primary vote”, whichever can be said to go up or down to suit the narrative they have developed. They give no error margin so a one point shift can be said to be “significant”.

They decide which images of the day to present, which things are “newsworthy” (usually some mindless stunt or photo event), and provide misleading summaries of debates (which they organise and frame and provide the audience for and decide the winner of) or speeches. One reporter plaintively said that Labor was losing steam because of the re-emergence of Kevin Rudd preventing the Labor policies being heard. No sense of irony there – no recognition that the tv networks were the ones who decided that Rudd walking around a shopping mall was more important than anything Gillard or any other Labor figure was doing. Decided there would be no context for policies. No examination of issues. Rather like the filtering of news from the outside world that occurs in Big Brother.

Everything you see and hear about the election on news and current affairs is being determined by television network owners and executives. More so in 2010 than ever before.

But in the ballot box everyone gets just one vote – no television cameras there thank goodness, you are not in the big brother household – use it wisely by making up your own mind.

In out, out in

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by politics • Tags: ,

The recent mass killer in Cumbria, England, had been a licensed gun owner for 20 years. He had a .22 rifle with a telescopic sight and a shotgun. The rifle was later described by a witness as “this absolutely huge sniper rifle”, although it may have understandably grown in size through the magnifying glass of terror. Calls for even more stringent gun controls in the UK, already strict, fell, predictably, on the deaf conservative ears of the new government. It wasn’t known that he was going to be a mass murderer in advance, therefore he had gun licenses, what was the problem?

Let me go on a detour from the death-dealing arms industry to the life-dealing organ transplant industry. Most countries have an “opt-in” provision for potential organ donors. That is you have to actually specify, swear, demand, make a Will written in blood, that you want to donate organs should you die suddenly. The result is, most of us not spending much thought on dying suddenly and having our bodies divided up for the benefit of others, and not having, in our own minds, really finished using the organs, don’t get around to agreeing to organ donation until, well, too late. As a result many victims of kidney, lung, heart, liver diseases live lives that are needlessly painful and short. Only Spain, I think, has an “Opt out” system. That is it is assumed that your organs are available for removal and transplant unless you have (through, presumably, some misguided sense of needing them after death) specified that they are not. There is still some consultation with grieving relatives, but generally speaking this system means that many more organs are potentially available to relieve suffering.

And so back to Cumbria, back from the detour to the leafy British country lanes where elderly women with shopping bags were shot in the back of the head, a footballer fixing a fence was killed with no more thought than a rabbit. The issue, it seems to me, and I am sure I will be corrected if I am wrong, is that gun ownership, even in the UK, is like the opt-out provision for organ donors. That is it is assumed that every one can desire, buy, own, use a gun unless there is some reason (eg mass murdering potential) for them not to. And therefore, when something triggers an apparently quiet ordinary man to unleash murder and mayhem he picks up his legally owned guns and heads into tombstone territory to start killing brothers, friends, workmates. Too late then to take away the license.

So I reckon civilized countries should have an opt-in system – that is it is assumed that you will not be given approval to own a gun unless there is a very good reason to do so (and I wouldn’t include “I like to kill animals on weekends” as a good reason, in fact the reverse). This would enormously reduce gun ownership, and the potential for mild mannered men to start shooting. So – one system for life giving organ transplants, the opposite system for death giving guns. That makes it easier to remember, doesn’t it?

Happy to help design legislation for any interested country with a problem with gun deaths.

Deliver da letter

by Climate Change, politics • Tags: , , ,

My Dear Julia
Forgive the familiarity – I haven’t written to a PM before and I am sure there are elements of protocol I don’t know. But we are living in desperate times and they call for a certain kind of measure. Look I think you are well-intentioned, working hard, doing your best on all kinds of worthy and important issues. But I have two words for you – Climate Change. I know you thought you had fixed that, or at least made it go away for a while so you didn’t have to hear, ever again, Tony squawking “Big new tax. Big new tax”. Or have the coal miners and energy companies weighing in with their own anti-carbon-tax ad campaign. And you had probably had enough of Martin and Penny bashing away at each other in Cabinet, and I wonder how hard Kevin really fought for light and air against the dark satanic mines. So, what to do? A big conference, that’s the ticket, bring together the good honest yeomanry (and presumably yeowomanry) of Australia, whose general commonsense and intelligence and decency you apparently admire (although the evidence you are basing this on doesn’t seem at all clear), and get them to sort out what they think we should do about climate change.

It seems to match the way you like to do business, get people round a table, have a chat, make compromises, get a consensus, get a deal, move on to next issue. And on the kind of ground you are familiar with, public health or public education policy for example, aged care and preschool needs, infrastructure development, this is a perfectly valid approach. Oh you also need expertise, but these are areas that the public, being heavily involved, can quite reasonably be asked to decide on priorities and approaches.

Now I’m guessing that you haven’t done much reading on climate change. Oh sure, the odd briefing paper from Penny and your staff, some dot points to give you a summary, but this really won’t have given you any feel for what has been going on at all in the last few years. Can I suggest that you take an hour or two one night, get on the internet, check out some relevant web sites (A general blog like ABC Unleashed and Australian climate change sites like Skeptical Science, Deltoid, Climate Shifts), read some articles, and, even more importantly, read the responses in the following threads. Then sit back with a good stiff drink and contemplate while staring into the flames of a good log fire for inspiration.

The picture you will begin to see is the likely presence, in large numbers among your 150 good honest citizens, of those irrational deniers who keep popping up on climate change threads, to repeat, over and over, whatever the climate saying of the week is, as told to them by denier blogs or shock jocks. Each one of these people is the kind of jury member, one of 12, who, faced with cast iron evidence and a confession of guilt, steadfastly refuses to convict a criminal in spite of the increasingly desperate appeals from the other eleven, until, after endless argument, the judge is forced to declare a hung jury and a mistrial. These people are not scientists, they are not acting in good faith, and they will undoubtedly wreck any summit of the kind you contemplate.

And that’s not all. Within, it seemed, minutes of your announcement, there was the Grocery Council demanding that retailers be included among the 150, be part of the debate. I have no doubt that if you were to definitely go ahead with this conference there would be loud bangs on your office door as coal miners, and energy companies, and car makers, and aluminium smelters, and agribusiness owners, all demanded seats at the table as well. All, you understand, in the interests of balance. In fact in the interests, aided by the shrieks of the deniers, of preventing any action on climate change. Oh and I have no doubt that the shock jocks of print and radio, expertise in climate change garnered from right wing think tanks and denier web sites, would also demand a say in order to represent the common people, their listeners and readers. And then the right wing think tanks would also want to nominate participants.

See the problem now?

Time to do a Tony Abbott. Say, like he does on Work Choices, that you have been listening to the people (don’t have to say it’s just me, that will be our secret) and you have changed your mind. Have decided this is one of those topics where good honest yeomen simply don’t have sufficient knowledge, and where groups with financial interests have too much power, and you are calling in the scientists. Get in a group of Australia’s world class climate scientists. Get them to fully brief you.

Then announce that, like John Kennedy, you have a dream. No, not a trip to Mars. You have a dream of creating, before the end of the next decade, an Australia that produces zero emissions. So you have tasked CSIRO to supervise the achievement of zero emissions for Australia by 2020. You will tell the public that Australia, with its limitless potential solar, wind, geothermal, tidal and wave power energy sources is ideally placed to achieve this goal. You will also note the enormous benefits if Australia can release itself from the need to use (and in some cases import) fossil fuels (reducing direct pollution, reducing mining damage, exporting renewable energy technology and products, achieving certainty of supply and settled pricing). And you will note that Australia, as one of the countries to face the most damage from climate change, has a major interest in setting an example so that the rest of the world can also get moving soon. You will be an inspired leader on this issue.

Want to look forward Julia? How about looking forward to 20 July 2019 (a neat and symbolic 50 years from the first moon landing) to complete the transition to a zero emissions Australian economy?

You will be hailed as an inspired and visionary leader around the world – signing Kyoto would be as nothing to this.

And leave a legacy which Australians for generations to come will thank you for.

Yours optimistically etc
David Horton

No more camouflage

by Uncategorized • Tags: , , ,

Okay. Had several potential posts backed up while I tried to see whether they could also appear to a bigger audience as well as my lovely loyal audience here. But, sadly, two other blogs declined my generous offers (yes, impossible to believe but really true), and I have finally decided, after much mulling and cogitating, that being a Huffington Post contributor was no longer something of which I could be proud, given the change in direction of that site in the last year or so. And, to spur me along, there were those fabulous church leaders George Pell and Jim Wallace pleading with me to get some new material on line before the election. “The people need moral leadership” they cried, wandering in the desert, “where is the Watermelon to quench our thirst?”.

Well, they didn’t really say that in so many words, but I can read between the lines, George, Jim. When Jim Wallace said I had avoided showing my hand “to Christians on a whole range of issues, such as euthanasia, abortion, prayer in Parliament, funding of schools, marriage, surrogacy … a whole range of issues” I took it as a call to write more and more. When George said I was “anti-Christian and opposed to the notion of family” a “Stalinist supporting Soviet oppression” and that “For those who value our present way of life, the Greens are sweet camouflaged poison” I could only nod my head in agreement and vow to stop the camouflage.

So, thanks to Jim and George, a number of slices of watermelon are coming your way in short succession. If you disagree with a couple of online editors (who shall remain nameless) and think they deserve wider circulation, much wider circulation, please spread the word. Go tell it on the mountain, preach it in the wilderness. After all George Pell supports me (“One wing of the Greens are like watermelons – green outside and red inside” he said – didn’t actually say “Go read it on the Watermelon Blog” but he didn’t need to, did he?).

Oh and by the way the Julie Bishop has also suggested you read about the Bold and the Beautiful under my “Dream” tab at the top of this blog. Well, not actually suggested, you understand, because she hasn’t actually read any of the days of my lives (added to every week), but when she does I’m sure she will go ahead and publicise it all over the new low speed network they are going to get Bill Gates to build.