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Showing posts with the label Australian Politics

Farewell, Scott Morrison

 Scott Morrison has finally left the Australian Parliament. "What?" I hear you say.  "Is he still there?" Indeed, for the past year and a half he has been lurking there in the back row, keeping out of the spotlight as much as possible.  Presumably he has been looking for the right job to move on to.  Is it churlish to suggest that offers were slow in coming?  That perhaps his time as Prime Minister did serious damage to his reputation? The recent ABC documentary, Nemesis,  displaying the entrails of the nine years of Liberal/National government, doesn't exactly make him more appealing.  His various colleagues and State counterparts range from diplomatic to scathing.  Some suggest he did a good job of the pandemic response.  Some of them talk about him as decisive, hard working, committed.  Yet he is also called a bully, a misogynist, a liar and a hypocrite.  The man himself sits through his long interview, leaning uncomfortably forward in his chair, with his cha

Freedom, Only Freedom

In his writings - both his award-winning novel/memoir No Friend but the Mountains and his journalism, recently collected and analysed in Freedom, only Freedom  - Behrooz Boochani talks about what he calls the 'Kyriarchal System'.  This term is his and Omid Tofighian's translation of the Farsi term system-e hakim.   Tofighian attempts to explain the term as follows: [it] can be translated in numerous ways ... sovereign system, controlling system, ruling system, governmental system, dominating system, oppressive system, subjugating system, ruling system ... but none of these actually capture the essence of what Behrouz is saying.... Wikipedia tells us: In feminist theory, kyriarchy is a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission. The word was coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in 1992 to describe her theory of interconnected, interacting, and self-extending systems of domination and submission, in which a single

The Nine Lives of Grace Tame

( Content warning: this post discusses child sexual abuse and sexual assault.) I have to say I don't generally pay a lot of attention to the Australian of the Year award.  Often the person who receives it is someone I've never heard of, and as often as not I am none the wiser at the end of their term.  Theoretically they get to use their status to promote the work and issues which got them there in the first place.  The 2023 recipient is Taryn Brumfitt , the leader of the Body Image Movement which tries to counter the negative messages women and girls get through their lives about their bodies and build a more positive culture around our physical selves.  It sounds like a good thing, but I had to look that up just now for this article.  I was more familiar with her predecessor Dylan Alcott but I heard a lot less of him in 2022 when he was using his platform to promote disability inclusion than than I did in previous years when he was winning tennis tournaments.   I had also ne

Living Democracy

It's easy to criticise governments, but hard to be one.  How do you solve the pressing problems facing our world, in the face of powerful forces that don't want them solved and a population fed on distraction and disinformation?  This dilemma means, as I have been saying in various ways on this blog for some years now, that our problems won't be solved by electing the right government, they will only be solved by each of us working hard to change course and take our governments along with us. Sometimes this appears a forlorn hope but plenty of activists encourage us not to give in to this sort of despair.  Recently I reviewed Rebecca Solnit's lovely book, Hope in the Dark ,  in which she shows that despite what we might think, the activists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have had a surprising amount of success.  We should celebrate this success, and keep working to achieve more. Tim Hollo points us in a slightly different direction in his new book, Living Dem

The Green's Triumph

As the Labor Party gets ready to introduce its climate change legislation into Parliament next week, the myth of the 'Greens 2009 sabotage of good climate policy' is doing great service in making Labor look like persecuted saints. We're even seeing the line repeated uncritically on supposedly neutral news shows like the ABC's 7.30. It's a myth or, if you prefer, it's a lie. Don't fall for it. The 2009 CPRS was a fatally compromised piece of pro-fossil-fuel greenwash, and the 2011-12 alternative was a big improvement. What the Greens should learn from their interactions with the Rudd/Gillard government is that blocking legislation can be a good move. They prevented a bad policy and negotiated a much better one. It achieved real emissions reductions, and CEFC and ARENA were cleverly set up so that they are still doing their work despite 9 years of Coalition sabotage. They should also learn that Labor can be mightily incompetent at promoting good legislatio

Dear Scomo, Dear Albo

It rained.  And rained.  It rained more.  The river was rising.  There would be minor flooding.  It rained more.  Actually, it would be moderate.  More rain.  No, sorry, major. We moved stuff upstairs.  The lights went out.  We headed for higher ground, and there we stayed for five days.  We were lucky, we just had a couple of inches of water in the rooms we had emptied.  Our neighbours, a few metres down the hill, not so much.  The rain headed south, wreaking havoc wherever it went.   Amidst all this, along with the war in Ukraine and the ongoing global plague, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report saying how bad the impacts of climate change are, how much worse they will be, and how much we're not doing to adapt.  Tell us something we don't know.  If you listened to our politicians, you wouldn't know the report had been published.  From many of them, you wouldn't even know that its contents were being acted out in real life in communities th

Still Not Zero: Labor's 'Powering Australia' Plan and the Art of Being a Bit Less Terrible

I've been busy so this article is a bit late, the Labor Party released its climate change policy back in December.  The election hasn't happened yet but it's already clear what Labor's strategy will be.  They will be just a little bit better than the Coalition.  This is not difficult, surely they can achieve it! In some areas it just involves being a little bit more competent at doing the same thing.  They would have ordered vaccines and RATS in time (we will never know).  They voted to pass the Government's Religious Discrimination Bill with a few amendments (proposed by independent members) to make it less crap enough for the Government to withdraw it.  On asylum seekers they promise to be better at trampling on people's human rights.   Meanwhile, on climate change they will be a little bit better at concealing the fact that they don't really give a s*** about climate change as long as fossil fuel companies keep those donations flowing.  But if they promis