'Conscience vote'

To use what might be considered an unfortunate expression, I have no dog in this fight. I'm a straight woman in her late 50s with no interest in marriage. (Been there, done that, threw up on the t-shirt.)

However.

I think the people who say the ALP's national conference is being hijacked by the 'unimportant' issue of gay marriage aren't thinking hard enough about what importance is, or indeed about what politics is. To my mind this goes to two absolutely fundamental issues in politics: the quality of ordinary people's daily lives, and the question of who has power over whom, and to what end.

So the idea that it has anything whatever to do with Person A's 'conscience' when Person B and Person C decide that they would like to formally and legally celebrate their commitment to each other in the manner in which such commitment is most usually celebrated in our society is really just a case of a power struggle being dressed up to look like something nicer.

For whatever sense does it make, really, that Person A should wrestle with his or her own better angels about something that Persons B and C might want to do? No sense, that's what. Person A, if she or he genuinely believes this to be a matter of his or her own conscience, needs a bit of a lesson in how to recognise his or her own beeswax. And everyone knows that the Prime Minister's taking of the 'conscience vote' road is a totally cynical move in any case. And I can't be alone in finding something particularly rank and icky about dressing up a bit of pragmatic and strategic political gamesmanship as an issue of individual conscience.

Gotcha

In which the very savvy Mr Benjamin Law takes a screen shot of SA Liberal MP Michael Pengilly's Tweet this morning in response to one from journalist David Penberthy (Twitter is a bottom-up read) on the subject of the Government's response to the resignation of Harry Jenkins as Speaker.

Because, of course, any minute now someone's going to let Pengilly know that he wasn't having a private conversation, and that his opinion of the Prime Minister is there for all the world to see, and then he's gonna take it down. Much too late. Hah.

UPDATE, 2.07 PM: Yep, he's taken it down. Hee Hee.

Abbott promises to spill bodily fluids, Wong says 'Ew'

What on earth does the Leader of Her Maj's Opposition think he means by 'blood pledge'? Doesn't he know that Talk Like A Pirate Day was last month?

Of course they bloody do

Michelle Grattan's piece in the Age today is not only disingenuous but even perhaps a tad hypocritical, reporting today from well up in the high moral ground that the Federal Labor MPs all have cheat sheets, media questions, for the answering of.

Because as if the very best efforts of Craig Thomson were not enough to bring the party crashing down around his ears and usher in the era of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who if he falls over will be replaced by Prime Minister Julie Bishop, some unidentified (a) total doofus or (b) rat in the ranks (tick one) has left his or her notes lying around on a chair where, of course, the meeja just happened by and picked them up.

Whether it was done by accident or design, you can only imagine what Julia Gillard is thinking this morning. When you've been forced by circumstance to make a fateful lose-lose decision about leading your party, fought an election, exercised your stunning negotiating skills to form government, kept it all together for over a year despite some truly frightful attempts to oust you, and made a few appalling mistakes all by yourself, who needs a rabid, grubby Opposition, a hostile media, a big smear of misogyny right across the national board (Opposition, media, electorate, one's own party, you name it) when you've got one f*ckwit who can't keep either his credit card or the other thing in his pants, and now another who is too absent-minded, or treacherous*, to avoid leaving this kind of thing lying around?

But here's the thing. Of course they've got a bloody cheat sheet. No sensible person who has anything at all to do with media questions would be without one. Because most, not all but most, journalists in our country in its current incarnation seem to think that journalism is about nagging, needling, asking hostile, mindless gotcha questions (50 extra points if you make someone cry or lose his/her temper) and then putting as sensational a spin as possible on whatever the answer was in order to sell more papers. Even Michelle Grattan, who used to be the gold standard.

Or about taking some perfectly ordinary fact, like, say, that MPs have had media training and have paid attention to the advice they were given, and blowing it up with the rhetorical equivalent of a few acronyms and punctuation marks, as here, where the invisible OMGs and exclamation marks are thick on the ground. Get real, Michelle. If the media were doing a good job of reporting neutrally and truthfully on the facts, just the facts, about the way the country's actually being run, people wouldn't nead cheat sheets to help with the Augean-stables task of resisting being tormented and misrepresented by the ladies and gentlemen of the press. As it is, WTF do you expect?

*I'm going with 'treacherous'. You don't 'inadvertently' leave your notes 'on an Opposition seat in Parliament'.

Fact v. opinion: surely not even Tony Abbott can be that dumb

From The Age online this morning:

An IT consultant challenged Mr Abbott over bagging climate scientists and economists, asking: 'Who would you listen to out of the experts?'

'The public,' Mr Abbott said. 'In a democracy in the end the people are sovereign.'

Either he really does think science is a democracy – in which case, well, you know – or he is *gasp* LYING.

This story reminded me of something I heard on ABC radio yesterday: a baby journalist interviewing another baby journalist -- for this is what passes in these benighted days as news -- about the Prime Minister's Press Club speech. 'Ms Gillard said she thought journalists were getting facts confused with opinions,' said the young woman. 'Do you agree with that, Peter?'

The rice pudding of life

British journalist John Grimond in The Economist has, like Bill Bryson, swept into Australia for five or six weeks and taken it upon himself on the strength of that to write about the country for the Poms back home to snigger at. I'm going to write a longer post about this but just one quick observation first: one of his remarks is to the effect that the current crop of Australian politicians 'couldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding.'

In this, I fear he may be quite correct. Can't see Hockey able to do it, though he might just eat the whole thing skin and all. Abbott is plenty forceful but wouldn't be able to work out which bit was the skin. The Prime Minister (and most of the rest of Labor) would have to check what the Howard Government's rice-pudding policy had been, and then ask western Sydney if it minded. Julie Bishop would subject the rice pudding skin to the death stare and the playground insult and wonder why that wasn't working.

But I can think of one Australian politician who could and would pull the skin off a rice pudding immediately, delicately, elegantly, without asking anyone's permission and with no visible effort. Tragically, he is on the wrong side.

In which Lindsay Tanner's argument is amply demonstrated

Last night on 7.30, Lindsay Tanner broke the hearts all over again of people who couldn't for the life of them understand, back in 2003, why the ALP anointed Mark Latham as leader instead of him, no doubt for stupid faction mateship blah blah blah reasons. Imagine how different this country might have been, and might be.

Tanner was calm in the face of Leigh Sales' attempts to demonstrate the very point of his argument by putting on an attack-dog persona and trying to trap him into trashing the party 'because our viewers expect it', which translated probably means 'The suits in management are on my back to be more like a bloke.' She's not very good at it, because you can see her heart's not really in either aggression or stupid gotcha questions, and she repeatedly, quite shockingly and unacceptably, let Tanner make his case, develop his argument, stick to his point and finish what he was saying. Which means that apart from her opening question, the most suitable answer to which would have been 'Well, der', this interview is actually worth watching and listening to from start to finish.

"Abbott a hero"

Mr Abbott drank shots with fly-in, fly-out workers, played pool with the navy and got a loud cheer when he told a blonde perched at the bar that she was "better looking than Julia".

Yep, that's the definition of a hero, all right. Stay classy, Tony.

I mean, why belittle just one woman when you can belittle two at one blow, like the tailor and the flies in the fairy tale? Full story here. Try not to look at the photo; Mr Rabid has managed to get himself photographed nekkid again and I'm here to tell you it's not a pretty sight, though the underwater distortion is an improvement. I'm sure the blonde perched at the bar was better looking.

Can you imagine Malcolm Turnbull being this misogynist and naff and crass? Joe Hockey? Brendan Nelson? John, God help us all, Howard?

No, neither can I.

This man might be our next Prime Minister. Move to New Zealand? I'll swim to New Zealand.

The facts, ma'am, just the facts

"People have not got over her knifing of Kevin Rudd"

No, and they won't, either, for as long as formerly respectable and responsible journalists like Michelle Grattan continue to use flamboyantly loaded language like this in what is supposed to be a reporting of facts.

Grattan is not a fool and she is a very experienced journalist, so the only conclusion it's possible to come to is that she is being disingenuous, pretending to report the facts in a neutral fashion while at the same time reinforcing prejudices and preconceptions with grossly prejudicial language like that.

I'm very ticked off with Gillard myself at the moment, but I am also actually a bit shocked by this shoddy bit of journalism. I used to expect better from The Age, and I still do expect better from Michelle Grattan.

In which Tony Abbott falls on his ass but doesn't get a special cookie from his mommy

In the Senate, Labor's Doug Cameron said he was concerned about "the disintegration of the Liberal Party". "The barbarians are at the gate of the Liberal Party," he said. "Who are these barbarians? They are extremists. They are Tea Party imitators. They are the remnants of Pauline Hanson's One Nation. They are the radio and newspaper bullies whose ignorance is in direct proportion to their pay packet. If you get close enough, you can smell the fear of the Liberal Party moderates as Mr Abbott leads them down the dry well of fear and ignorance."

Tea Party imitators? Members, more like. Did you see the spelling on some of those signs? I don't mean the basic illiteracy, I mean 'mom' for 'mum' and 'ass' for 'arse'.

Who wrote those signs and at whose behest? Who were the people carrying them? Were they actual Americans, or did they copy them boilerplate-style from some lunatic-fringe website?

Also, is that the Doug Cameron with the charming Scottish accent who quite some years back used to be a scone-hot rabble-rousing unionist extremist annoying the bejesus out of parliamentarians by running rings around them in arguments? I kind of liked him back then, too, but I like him even more now.

Quotation from here; more on the subject at Loon Pond; and Margaret Simon on the way The Australian, in contrast with The Age, is pretending this morning that none of it ever happened. Which in itself is telling; even The Australian has disowned this mob this morning.

A message from my computer

'The file “768208-rally-abbott.jpg” could not be opened because it is empty.'

Truer word was never spoken.

Meanwhile, check out this photo. Classy, no?

You can't see her in the photo, but Pauline Hanson was there. I bet Mr Rabbit was very, very careful not to go anywhere near a moving bus.

Yes, that will help a lot

Julie Bishop was on the radio last night blithering about how the government, which has chartered a special Qantas flight out of Cairo for stranded Australians, wasn't doing enough and was 'too slow' to react. I would have found this marginally less irritating if I thought either she or her leader could organise themselves out of a paper bag, much less hundreds of countrymen out of Cairo.

Whenever anyone says anything like this there's always a chorus of 'Oh but the job of the Opposition is to oppose!' Is it? Is it really? Is that its only job? And if it is, what kind of idiotic half-arsed world are we living in, where all society-regulating structures are oppositional and adversarial (the justice system gives me the heebs in this respect as well) and that is deemed only good and right? Is it really the Opposition's job to obstruct and whinge and quibble about every single thing a government tries to do, even something at this level of detail and transience? If they're going to oppose, why don't they oppose, say, the choice of budget sacrifices to the levee levy (no argument from me on the levy as such), nearly all of which seem to be to do with climate ch-- Oh, wait.

Kevin Rudd's in the paper (I wonder when we'll stop saying 'the paper' about something we read online)  this morning defending the government's actions on Cairo. Talking to the media about this stuff in response to Bishop's self-righteous whingeing took up time he could have spent doing something actually useful, and I bet nobody's more aware of this than Rudd himself.

Why We Still Need Feminism, Part #1,908

Have you noticed that whenever The Australian wants to publish another piece of vicious, moronic, sexist crapola about Julia Gillard, they nearly always get a woman to write it? Kate Legge on earlobes, Glenda Korporaal on handbags, Planet Janet on pretty much anything you care to name, and now yesterday we have this pile of really stinking ordure by another such female OO journalist [sic] with Form in this respect, namely former adviser to Peter Costello and John Howard (about what, one wonders. Women's affairs? Nah) Niki Savva.

Greg Jericho at Grog's Gamut reckons that of all such poisonous tripe published by the OO thus far in a naked attempt to sway the stupid, this Savva piece takes the biscuit. Which is saying a lot.

Why do they do it? I think it's because they're so ignorant of feminism that when someone says 'Oi, this is vicious, moronic, sexist crapola,' they can reply 'No it isn't, because it was written by a woman.' And I really do think that they really do think that that constitutes some sort of answer.

This can't be right, can it? Or can it?

From the ABC website's report on the bill being introduced in Parliament tonight by the Greens' Adam Bandt in support of same-sex marriage:

Philip Ruddock, who was attorney-general in 2004 when a law was passed to define marriage as being "between a man and a woman", said marriage should be limited to those who could procreate.

So: does Ruddock think that not just gays and lesbians, but no women past childbearing age, and nobody of either sex who was born or has been rendered infertile, should be allowed to get married? And to take his remark to its logical conclusion, does he think that any existing marriage in which either partner has become unable to 'procreate' should be dissolved? Including, presumably, his own?

This man held important portfolios in the Howard government for eleven years, and is now on the front bench of an Opposition that came within the width of the fabric of a silk georgette hanky of getting back into government. If it's true that we get the politicians we deserve, then we have all been very bad, and if they are a reflection of us then clearly we have all been very bonkers as well.

Why We Still Need Feminism, Part #1,763

If ever you were tempted to think that women in Australia or indeed in the West generally had finally gained some sort of equality in public life, ask yourself this simple question.

Can you imagine how it would have gone down with Australia's (these days) almost uniformly conservative MSM journalists -- and, alas, with the bulk of the populace -- if Julia Gillard rather than Tony Abbott had been photographed in Afghanistan firing an automatic rifle?

They'd be blithering and drooling for weeks. They'd start with Hanoi Jane, and they'd go downwards from there. And in the meantime, Abbott's petulant whingeing about being made to look silly is dominating the papers, most of which are ignoring Abbott's puerile narcissism and instead using this massive non-event to attack what he's calling (and calling, and calling, and calling -- if there's one thing Abbott does love, it's a bit of repetition, a bit of repetition) Gillard's 'low bastardry'.

See, it's okay for the Leader of the Opposition to call the Prime Minister a low bastard, publicly and repeatedly, but it's not okay for a woman to shoot a gun.

The rules are baroque and Byzantine, Grasshopper, and nor do they make any sense, but you break them at your peril.

More on Grog's Gamut

 Margaret Simons has a must-read post up at The Content Makers on the ethics of journalist James Massola's outing in The Australian of the blogger formerly known as Grog's Gamut, including a crystalline bit of analysis by Swinburne lecturer in media ethics Denis Muller.

Among other excellent points, he makes this one:

... there is another public-interest consideration to be taken into account here, and that is the public interest in having a plurality of voices in the public space or, as John Milton called it, the marketplace of ideas.  If, as a result of the outing, Mr Jericho withdraws from the public space, the Australian polity will be the poorer; it will have been harmed.  The harm would be negligible, certainly, but the principle is not negligible.  Ethical reporting requires that such possible consequences be identified and an honest rationale be developed to justify causing them.

Shock, horror: atheist witches not hypocrites

In what parallel universe does it qualify as "news" that the Prime Minister and the Governor-General didn't go to church?

Can you imagine how the joyful, nay, orgasmic cries of 'Hypocrite' would have rung round the walls of The Australian's offices if Julia Gillard, who once, when asked by some journalist, readily agreed that yes she was indeed an atheist, had fronted up at church? They must have been really disappointed that she wasn't there.

What next, a trial? As Kate Grenville once said, the test is, if they drown. And if they don't drown, then that proves that they are indeed witches, and you get to burn them at the stake instead.

What a surprise

This is as close to rage meltdown as I think I've ever seen the Prime Minister come, which is to say not very, but you can see it churning away there under the pastels. She's clearly not happy, and if I were Tony Abbott I wouldn't want to run into her on a dark night. He could have put Mark Latham on his arse fairly easily, but I don't like his chances with an enraged Gillard one bit.

I assume that as we speak he's gleefully dancing around giving Crabbe and Goyle and the rest of the Slytherins high fives, like the schoolyard bully he is.

Surely, though, she can't be surprised. It's not as if there's no precedent, from that quarter, for weathervane behaviour, spoiler behaviour, plotting, scheming, lying and deception.

Seeing the future

Listening to first Tony Windsor and then Rob Oakeshott deliver their verdicts in this afternoon's press conference was a really interesting experience. I was driving home, so heard it on the radio rather than watching the teeve, of which I'm now glad, because I gather from various online commentary thus far that the media pack behaved like a bunch of hyenas: restless, noisy and disrespectful. And like them, and like, I'm sure, the rest of the country, I spent the first two or three minutes of Tony Windsor's speech champing at the bit thinking Oh for God's sake get on with it already.

Then it dawned on me slowly that this really was a fairly historic moment in the history of Australian parliamentary democracy; it deserved its little bit of theatre. More, the Independents deserved to be allowed to explain themselves in detail -- not least because they know they will be carved up by the Murdoch-dominated press and filleted by their own electorates.

Windsor probably drew the long straw; speaking first, he had the luxury of being able to announce his decision halfway through his speech, knowing the press and the country would have no choice but to keep listening. It was harder for Oakeshott, who knew that the minute he announced his decision they would all stop listening to him and he therefore had no real choice but to leave it till the end. Which was, anyway, the only possible choice, given the degree of theatre the occasion deserved and got.

In terms of one's own personal development (and the more I see of certain people in their 70s and 80s, the more determined I become never to abandon the effort to be Better), what I found very educational was my own childish impatience for instant gratification. As Windsor got into his stride, I began to ask myself exactly why I just wanted him to hurry up, when what he was saying was actually content-rich and very interesting. I seemed to myself to be a toddler squalling for her dummy. I began to be a bit ashamed, and switched to Mindfulness mode.

Which stood me in good stead when it came to Oakeshott, who set Mindfulness a bit of a test. But I don't know why a certain sort of commentator (on the Crikey liveblog, for a start) is whingeing about there being no substance to his speech. There appeared to me to be plenty.

My dad will be ropeable about this result, but then he is permanently ropeable about everything these days, so it would be hard to tell. It saddens me that I won't be able to make him see the single biggest miracle in all this, grounded in the fact that as time rolls itself out, things happen that you could never have seen coming, and sometimes they are things that change the shape of what you thought were life certainties.

Via him, I come from a family that farmed barley, wheat and sheep on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula for four generations, and lived on that farm myself till I was twelve. I was very moved by Tony Windsor's clear statement that the two things he thought would benefit rural and regional Australia most were advances with broadband and climate-change policy, because I could imagine the people I went to primary school with, and their children and grandchildren, living in that landscape I know so well, having the benefit -- not just with regard to business, but also with regard to education and health -- of the NBN, and living in a country not in denial about climate conditions under which they will be among the first to suffer ruinously.

Climate change and the internet are two things that my father's generation - indeed, my generation -- could never in a million years have seen coming. Action on both issues is currently down to the (comparatively speaking) progressives, who are, historically, anathema to the bush. But they are what will help to save it, if anything can, and Windsor and Oakeshott have had the vision to see that and the courage to act on it.

Why everyone loves Antony Green

Dude knows his stuff, is why.

I was directed to this magnificently clear and thorough explanation of the current and possible future Canberra scenarios by the equally excellent Bernice, who blogs here.