Online counselling service for people with mental health issues

LBL Charitable Foundation is a charity that provides counselling services to people in the broader community who are having mental health problems. With 50 staff across Australia – in South Australia as well as Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne – LBL Philanthropy offers clients counselling via Skype, Zoom, or Teams depending on beneficiary needs. The organisation can also, if required, do counselling via telephone. 

They deliver services in multiple languages. 

“We have over 30 beneficiaries per week,” Lily B. Luong told me in December last year via email. They hope to be soon operating in 14 Asian countries, taking over 14 beneficiaries per country.

LBL Charitable Foundation finds people direct and also takes referrals from other charities. “We find most beneficiaries through other charities,” Lily told me.

“I describe myself as ambitious, driven and helpful,” she told me in an email. “I have volunteered and worked for a number of [not-for-profit] organizations, with a passion to heal people both mentally and emotionally.”

Her mother lives with a mental illness, so it is personal for Lily.

“I have a mother that suffers from mental illness and poverty so I understand the hardship and pain. Thus, I started LBL Philanthropy to reach out to millions and millions of people.”

“My mother suffers from depression and delusional disorder. She is still capable of looking after herself and is on medication so she doesn’t show too many signs of hallucination. She is mainly withdrawn, has sleep difficulties, and is moody. She does have paranoid thoughts then acts in an unusual way.”

Lily also had a friend who committed suicide aged 18. “This experience makes me feel more motivated to help those suffering from a mental illness or who lose a loved one due to suicide.”

LBL Charitable Foundation reports to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission. They raise funds from government as well as through donations and Lily is the only paid member of staff. All the rest are volunteers, who mainly offer to commit time to the organisation in order to gain experience to find paid jobs. “I have students volunteering to gain practical experience in teaching and counselling. We mainly do phone screening first then [face-to-face] interviews or Zoom [meetings] to find the right people. Qualifications are important mainly for counselling and teaching roles.” 

LBL Charitable Foundation is also looking for mentors. “We mainly find people who will act as good role models,” Lily told me.

Children living in rural areas mainly around Asia Pacific regions with lack of food and clean water are a priority, says Lily. “Children with a mental illness both overseas and in Australia are a growing concern so we try to aid them ASAP.”

LBL Charitable Foundation is setting up an emergency relief service. “We provide funding for low- and no-income families so they can use it to buy food and pay bills etcetera. There are certain criteria, for example you are unemployed or on Centrelink [benefits].”

A technology support program they are setting up aims to provide children and young people with laptops and computers to enable them to avail themselves of online counselling as well as use mentoring and teaching services. “I am trying to cooperate with tech companies to see if they are willing to donate computers and laptops to help people.” 

Lily says the government is not as important in her area of expertise as charities. “I think large charities such as Beyond Blue or Wesley Mission are doing much more than the government. We look to large charities hoping that one day we will be as successful as them.” 

LBL Charitable Foundation’s counselling and mentoring services can help the homeless improve their living conditions. “I don’t think homelessness is just about not having anything tangible such as money or a house. It is also an emotional trauma to be homeless so healing people through counselling and mentoring is just as good as giving them money.”

If you would like to volunteer to be a part of the LBL Charitable Foundation team, or if you’d like to donate equipment or money, or be a mentor, counsellor, or teacher you can contact LBL Charitable Foundation on www.lblcharitablefoundation.org.

China and Russia form new Axis of Evil

It had to happen. In fact I’d been waiting for this development, and the election of Joe Biden as US president only hastened it. 

You get what you ask for. George W Bush signposted an “Axis of Evil” back half a generation ago and in the absence – the raid on the Capitol just being the icing on the cake – of the dictator’s friend in the form of the Orange Liability, a new bloc has sprung up to threaten democracies everywhere. They’ve been busy in recent years. They promise, now, to be busier.

The development is serious, and its ramifications will need a long time to work themselves out. Be prepared for plenty of argy-bargy in the domestic public sphere as the political parties jockey for position. In a way this news is good for the Liberal-National coalition as they are traditionally perceived as the protectors of borders and wagers of war. 

The international policemen, if you prefer. Like little Johnny Howard being Dubya’s “deputy”, “Man of Steel,” “lapdog” – choose your preferred epithet. You do, after all, choose who governs you so why shouldn’t you choose what you call your leaders? You have far more freedom than a man or woman living in Beijing or in Moscow.

For its part, the Labor Party in Australia – the country from which I write – will be disappointed by the moves of its old conferes (China and Russia, harbingers and fellow-travellers in past times of revolution) to rachet up the global security stakes. 

Winners will be defence contractors, arms manufacturers, and the military. Spy agencies will also use this as a pretext to seek additional funding due to the predilection of agents working for foreign powers to try to influence politics in target countries, and to steal intellectual property that can then be used in the new Cold War. Soft skills will be in demand, as well, due to the use of virtual attacks on infrastructure, and the infiltration of important government websites as cybercriminals working for different governments try to steal information, secrets, and defence plans.

Joe Biden has to be careful to be seen to be tough on demagogues, and if he’s smart he’ll link Trump with Putin. If I were his PR director I’d be pushing out stories with this theme, and getting allied organisations to do the same. 

It’s important for America – like Russia and China – to be on the front foot. Linking Trump with kleptocratic fascist states like China and Russia can only, in the long term, do the Democrats good, especially if they stick to their guns and push a consistent line over a long period of time. 

To the barricades!

Intolerance of diversity by people on the political left

I sat on a draft of this post for most of this month before finally deciding to post it, so no-one can accuse me of dashing it off in the heat of the moment. And as I note in what follows, I’ve been thinking about this issue for a good deal of time. In fact, I started writing on the blog about the ways that people use social media in the middle of 2017.

This episode started when the Christopher Hitchens account put a quote up on Sunday 11 August and it was retweeted by a Twitter contact of mine (we both follow each other), a man who used to be a Greens municipal councillor: "Every time you silence someone you make yourself a prisoner of your own actions because you deny yourself the right to hear something." The writer is dead now but quotes of his come from this account from time to time.

On the same day, I saw a tweet from a person who, like me, writes book reviews. She doesn't follow me but I follower her. Her tweet contained a link to an old story about Kashmir by a journalist named Matthew Clayfield, who used to be a Twitter contact of mine (at one time we both followed each other). I checked Matthew's profile and saw that he had blocked me. For the life of me I could not imagine what might have convinced him that blocking me was necessary. I will only disconnect from people if they use bad language or do something antisocial, and that isn’t my way of behaving on social media.

This episode underlined for me how bad social media is for the conduct of interpersonal relations. There is no time for nuance and people usually go in hard, using all their rhetorical skills to prosecute an argument, rather than modulating their language in order to remain within the bounds of reason or politeness. And there are no secondary markers available, as there are, for example, in face-to-face conversations: body language, vocalised inflection, facial expressions, pauses, and the kind of deliberate hedging that people use when they are with someone, even if they disagree with that person's ideas on a specific issue.

I don't see why it's necessary for people to have 100% of their views consoning with everyone they encounter online. Surely, we can tolerate diversity. And it's generally people on the left, like Matthew, who are least likely to tolerate diversity. They want everyone to think the same way as them and if they find someone who thinks differently, they often block.

Having lost Matthew, I then did a search for another journalist from whom I hadn’t seen much in recent weeks, who is named Royce Kurmelovs. He had written a couple of books and I now found that although he was mentioned a number of times on Twitter his account had disappeared. Then I checked for the account of Kurt Johnson, who I knew from university and a poetry circle that had been active there a decade earlier. Kurt had been visible from time to time at poetry readings around the traps in Sydney. I was relieved to see that Kurt still had his account active and that he had not blocked me, although, as previously, he wasn’t following me.

To do something positive for diversity, I decided to send a friend request on Facebook to a person I had unfriended some months before. This woman had actually been unnecessarily rude, which is why I made the decision I made. The night before, on 17 August, I had had a dinner party at my place to which a mutual friend had come, so the friend request was timely.

I had been thinking about these things for some time. In fact, I had even started a new post about how people on the left often recommend something, a book, say, along with an assertion that “everyone” should read it. For example, on 1 August at 1.13pm someone retweeted a tweet from a self-identified academic with 14,634 followers that read, “This is a powerful article, every Australian should read.” The tweet contained a link to a story on the website of the progressive magazine The Monthly titled, “The terrible truth of climate change.”

Let’s leave aside the scientific consensus about climate change: that it is real and that it is caused by human activity. But you see at play on the left all the time the kind of unhealthy homogenising instinct this person displayed. It links with the idea that part of the community – the part that self-identifies as being on the left – is ahead of history on a range of issues. The thinking goes that due to the successes of the post-war counterculture – the generation their parents had grown up in, or even that they, themselves, had grown up in – in terms of improvements in human rights everything that they, today, think, will therefore be an inevitable result of history (still, paradoxically, unfolding of course). For such people, the phrase “being on the right side of history” links in with this way of thinking. Hence the intolerance. They consider that because people in the future will inevitably think the same way as they do now, then your objection to something they say is a complete nonsense and not worth giving time to considering.

The thing that was so galling about what Matthew had done was his vaunted dedication to diversity. He had been busy travelling for as long as he had been a freelance journalist. Travelling to parts of the world that most people ignore and avoid, such as Kashmir. In fact, visiting hotspots had become a leitmotiv in his production, presumably on the basis that he thinks it incumbent on a white, Anglo journalist from a wealthy country to give attention to people the world usually ignores. How much more progressive can a journalist be than this? So, the lack of tolerance for diversity of opinion that is expressed by people like this is not merely ironic, it is profoundly hypocritical.

But it is typical for the political left. They have any amount of time to dedicate to listening to people who are different from themselves but none at all for people like themselves. How much more racist can you get than to say, “I will give time to people less fortunate than myself but I won’t give the time of day to my equals”? Well-meaning paternalism like this is behind the same selfish impulse that makes progressives unthinkingly criticise Israel and give blanket support to Palestinians.

Some people also think that in developing countries the governments alone are corrupt. If the people were given their own head, they think, then everyone would be honest and government would be run in the interests of the common people. But nothing could be further from the truth. Governments are made up of people, and the same corrupt institutions that operate today in places like China or Egypt would operate in the same way if you switched out all the personnel tomorrow and replaced them with fresh faces.

Progressives who harbour fantasies about the goodness of the common folk are infantilising the people they pretend to support. If you want good results you have to at least treat people like adults who are capable of deciding their own future. If you treat adults like children they will think you are insane and at the very least take advantage of your misplaced goodwill.

Rereading this post I am mindful that it is a bit of a grab-bag of things. But it’s not just a case of sour grapes (although there is an element of that). In fact, I have been meaning for a long time to write a post on this subject. The incident with Matthew was just the last straw. 

The left and its disconnect from the mainstream

One of the reasons the world is hard to understand these days, and this might be one reason for the rise of parties like One Nation, is that there seems to be a radical disconnect between the progressive left and the mainstream. People on the left get themselves all exercised about minuscule issues that they invest themselves heavily in, such as black-face comedy or veganism, which the mainstream deems unimportant.

If you take a plane and go overseas, furthermore, as more and more Australians are doing, you find more of a disconnect between the progressive left and reality. In some places I visited recently on my Middle East trip they don't have pedestrian crossings on major roads or even clean drinking water. So the minute concerns of a Greens voter living in Newtown actually have no basis in reality beyond the applause that holding those views elicits from his or her friends when they go out to the Bank Hotel on a Friday night to down a few schooners of 4 Pines pale ale.

In so many countries (countries whence refugees come) people have no right to vote, do not read anything approximating the truth in the newspapers, and face all sorts of problems because of general corruption and a culture of untruth that permeates the social fabric from the top to the bottom. But if you point out to a person on the progressive left that there is a democratic deficit in the countries where refugees come from, and that something should be done about fixing that situation, they will more likely than not think that you are a racist.

There is plenty of support for refugees among people on the progressive left, but none of them seems to worry much about the actual living conditions of the people they think they are supporting. Helping refugees resettle in a country like the US or Australia is important for them, but making sure that their families back home in Guatemala or Afghanistan can get to work safely, earn a living, drink clean water, or vote, is considered peripheral.

The left is adrift on a sea made from its own tears that normal people never touch. The harebrained concerns of a sociology professor specialising in transsexualism, a graphic designer with a cavoodle named Jasper, or a computer programmer with an interest in Star Trek sequels – people who populate the progressive left in developed countries – are so remote from those of normal people living in places like Turkey or Jordan that it is as though they inhabit different planets. And the mainstream in the developed world knows this and treats their compatriots as though they were insane. For its part, the left wonders why it keeps losing elections, blames the electorate for making the wrong decision when it does, and starts reading stories in the Guardian that ask whether Communism should be reintroduced.

Given this kind of disconnect from the mainstream, it's no wonder that Pauline Hanson poo-poohs every comment made in public by Richard Di Natale. The fact is that the left has lost its moorings. It should be getting exercised about Hong Kong, but instead it dicks around with little details that mean nothing to anyone apart from itself.

Young people and how they see the world

Young people have a particular way of viewing the world. To a large degree they see other people and other things as coextensive with themselves. In their minds there is little separating themselves and other people.

This phenomenon starts in infancy, when the mother is the centre of the world for the child, who doesn't even see him- or herself as separate from her. When children grow up somewhat and see their own reflection they begin to see themselves as individuals. But the ties that link young people to the world so strongly continue into adolescence and even beyond it.

Young people see someone walking down the street and if they don't get a positive feeling from that person, who might just be minding their own business, and “don’t like the look” of that person, they might throw a bottle to the ground to frighten him. They might see a piece of clothing that the person is wearing and think that this requires comment from them, and call out rudely, frightening the innocent pedestrian. They might do this in order to cement their place in the group they are with, in order to fix their status with the collective.

Young people sit on trains conversing in loud voices and joking and laughing and singing without regard for the feelings of other passengers because to do so makes them feel good. They need that solid connection with their peers and they need the positive affect of a smile, just like a baby craves her mother's smile. The brains of young people are not mature and the part of the brain that controls impulses is immature until the age of 25, so young people aren’t able to suppress feelings that make them react without thinking to external stimuli.

This became even more clear to me this month when I had a conversation on Twitter with someone who was complaining about "selfish" people aged over 50 compared to youth. I remonstrated with this person (I couldn’t work out if they were a man or a woman because it was an anonymous account) and asked what made them think older people are selfish. I said that older people certainly have the ability to control their impulses and to consider the consequences of their actions. The person called me "patronising". I told them about the human brain and also that there are special psychiatrists for children (people aged under 18) because they have special needs.

All the while this exchange was ongoing, the egging episode in Albury was playing out online. It reminded me of the Fraser Anning egging (that guy was, what, 17?) but it was ironic how what had just happened in southern NSW buttressed my argument in a very graphic and emphatic way. I had to block the person I was talking with in the end because of bad language. And SMH reporter Judith Ireland later said that the woman who threw the egg at the PM was aged 25. She proved my point precisely.

In Wim Wenders' 1987 film, a personified angel walks through a train but he is invisible to the passengers. He sits down next to some of them and listens to their thoughts. They are all sad and troubled, as if that was the reality in real life. But this is a young man's film (Wenders was in his early 40s when the film was made) because it is axiomatic to the director that a person sitting alone on a train who has no expression on his or her face must be troubled, when they might in actual fact be thinking about any number of things.

This desire for positive affect influences us at all times, and is the reason why some people smile when they meet someone for the first time. It is a way to suppress aggression, and aggression is the most natural impulse motivating humans at all times. Young people especially need that smile, that positive affect, or else they can easily lash out violently, since in its absence they see a threat to their own safety or to the cohesion of the group they are with.

The Greens, One Nation and the dynamics of reaction

People are getting incensed on Twitter about the idea the Liberals are advancing of One Nation being an obverse of the Greens, as though to do so were somehow illegitimate, but in fact they are 100-percent right although most of them would not know what the actual delineations of the process was that resulted in the emergence of One Nation in Queensland.

The origins of both parties lies in the post-WWII settlement and the dynamic that regulated their appearance is the usual one of action and reaction, a law that seems to apply equally well to both the physical world and the world of politics.

The war ended and with it ended a long period of economic stagnation. The causes of the war are complex but they mainly boil down to stupidities that were allowed to fester at the beginning of the century and that resulted in the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s. Once that monster had been put back in its cage, world leaders set up a number of large organisations that were intended to prevent a repetition of the disaster. In Australia one of them was the Reserve Bank of Australia but there are plenty of them and they still operate globally.

At the same time, the economies of the western world started growing at a staggering rate and to service ours the Australian government set up a number of new universities that were designed to produce graduates with qualifications in such disciplines as engineering and accounting. Because of the way universities work, there were suddenly also a lot more humanities graduates and this changed the country in a number of ways.

Another thing that changed at the same time was the way immigration was handled, and this would have major repercussions further down the track. Because of the realities of post-war immigration the Liberal government in the 1960s started to take apart the White Australia Policy that had controlled immigration in the country since the start of the century. The process was accelerated by Labor in 1974 and when they got back in power in 1975 the Liberals kept the momentum up by embracing multiculturalism as official policy.

One of the ways the emergence of new universities changed the country was to provide a base for the Australian Greens, which was formed in 1992 as a result of the success of a particularly militant part of the union movement called the Builders Labourers Federation. The BLF had taken a lot of progressive ideas from the universities in the 1970s and had made them union policy, including Aboriginal land rights and feminism. They were also very strong on what was then called the ecology, but which we now refer to as the environment. They went down in flames because of their aggressive use of work bans (the so-called "Green Bans") and were stopped from operating by apparatchiks from interstate egged on by construction industry bosses.

Even if you don’t acknowledge the success of the BLF in the emergence of the Greens, it was matched by that of a Tasmanian anti-development movement that led in the 1970s to protests against plans to dam Lake Pedder. This was later galvanised by a plan to dam the Gordon River, which resulted in protests in the early 1980s. What both the NSW and Tasmanian movements had in common was the participation of educated, young, urban residents who were listening to the new language coming out of the universities. Words like “the greenhouse effect” and “climate change” began to appear more frequently in the 1980s and to modify public debate around things like the economy, and transportation and energy policy.

The 80s also saw the rise of xenophobia of a brand that Pauline Hanson made popular in 1996 when she was put on the federal Liberal ticket in Queensland. One of its first exponents was a conservative historian named Geoffrey Blainey who in 1984 voiced anti-Asian sentiments during an address at a Rotary conference in the Victorian city of Warrnambool. The same man was also vigorously exercised by the environmental movement. He couldn’t understand how so many young people could object to the rise of technology in the post-war era of cheap energy. How could you object to indoor toilets, private transport, domestic appliances, petrochemicals (a completely new industry, that didn’t exist before the war), pharmaceuticals, soaring highways, and high-rise living? He even wrote a book about this phenomenon, titled ‘The Great Seesaw’, which came out in 1988 and which attempts to establish the case for a theory where, at certain times in the course of a civilisation, anti-intellectual forces threaten the wellbeing of the community. He saw environmentalism as just this sort of force.

When anti-intellectualism did appear along with the Liberal preselection of Pauline Hanson for the federal seat of Oxley, he might have been surprised to see his own ideas reflected by words used in her campaign statements. Although I’m not sure. He might in fact have been unsurprised. He might indeed have been flattered. Some gun postgraduate student can go into the archives to find out what Blainey said when Hanson appeared. He must have said something. (It should be noted for the record that Blainey is still alive, and the conservative media still seeks out his input from time to time.)

So, Hanson wasn't the first to complain about Asian immigration but when she entered politics as an independent MP she galvanised parts of the community who had felt the influence of progressive ideas in the mainstream and who resented it. University graduates, naturally, supported the government’s immigration policies because they thought that they conformed to an ethos they believed in that was based on what were considered in the era of the post-war counter-culture to be universal human rights.

Hanson, like Trump, viscerally distrusts such ideas and so her emergence marks the appearance of the mirror-image of the Greens. She’s the supreme anti-intellectual, the face of white-bread, conservative, suburban Anglos in the same way that Greens leaders like Bob Brown are the face of educated, inner-city, progressive elites. If you offer people something that is objectively good for everyone some of them will naturally (though perversely) think that it is bad for them personally. And if you add the rise of neoliberalism, which cruelled the spread of new wealth that appeared in the wake of the war, an ideology which threatened to keep many people poor who might otherwise have aspired to belong to a growing middle class, then you give people even more of a motive to hate.

The Greens and One Nation are two sides of the same coin and it puzzles me why some people object to the comparison. Perhaps they think that 15 percent of Queenslanders are not racist dullards? (Note: I lived in regional Queensland for five-and-a-half years.)

Toxic masculinity and “having fun”

As more stories emerge about what goes on in university residential colleges, we are faced with facts about toxic masculinity that have been known personally by many people but rarely spoken about aloud in public. Another aspect of the same malaise that infects the culture is the kind of violence that led to the lockout laws that so many young people still complain about, which have turned Kings Cross into a haven for baby boomers where once it was a popular resort for young people intent on “having fun”.

In a story in Domain on the weekend, we learn that the southern end of the shopping centre in the Cross, which had been full of strip clubs and drinking establishments, both of which were designed for use by young men, has changed in the four years that the lockout laws have been in place. There are more eateries now, and less of the types of places people go to when they want to "have fun".

These stories sum up feelings I have when, a rare occasion, I happen to go out late at night on a weekend. I was down in the casino's food court and it was about eleven o'clock at night on the Sunday before the Labour Day public holiday. I was buying something to eat and needed to use the lavatory. But most of the stalls were filthy. In one the seat had been saturated with urine. One was full of toilet paper that wouldn't flush away. One was covered in dark-red vomit. I eventually found one that was clean and used it. When I exited the stall I saw a cleaner with a mop coming into the room. He had evidently been called on to do something to clean up the mess made by people "having fun".

But earlier in the day I had been exposed to another aspect of toxic Australian masculinity. At Central Station in the middle of the afternoon as I was going up the escalators with a friend, a casually-dressed young man stopped the flow of people walking up on the right-hand side of the machine. He was standing near us and then from further down in the queue of people could be heard a big, male voice calling out loudly, “Go the chooks!” Everyone was suddenly on alert at this display of raw physicality, and most of the people around us there were unhappy as a result. You could have cut the air with a knife. My friend, who is a woman, got fed up with the display and edged past the young man standing on the escalator, heading up to the street level. I followed her. From below as we went up the same man who had called out earlier shouted “Dropkicks!” in an effort to shame us for our lack of appreciation for the brilliance of the Eastern Suburbs Rugby League team. At the next set of escalators, near the grand Concourse, two more fans were walking with their mates. They were dressed in a shirt with the team’s familiar red, white and blue: the colours of the nation’s flag.

We know that domestic violence complaints are more frequent at grand final time because of the toxic mixture of alcohol and the kinds of emotions that are inspired in men by spectator sports. But this kind of behaviour is everywhere encouraged. On bus stops at the moment there is an ad for a brand of rum, that takes its name from a town in Queensland, which displays a famous photo of two rugby league players, a short man and a very tall man, who are covered in mud after playing a game in wet weather. The word that is associated with both the photo and the beverage is “mateship”, as though both of the things being shown in the poster – the drink and the football players – are emblematic of something central to the culture. This kind of license to behave badly is all around us and we need to crack down on it if we want to change the toxic male culture that we inhabit.

Political correctness and the overreach of the radical left

Some battles get put aside in the face of a defeat, like the plans the Liberal Party has to privatise the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Too hard right now? Let’s try again down the track.

On the left, one battle has just been lost but will undoubtedly be revisited again in the future at a more opportune time. The crisis happened when The Saturday Paper decided to disqualify writers submitting essays for the Horne Prize, for which it organises the judging, where they were writing about issues important to minorities but where the writer was not a part of the minority in question. The conditions the outlet had put on the prize had made Anna Funder, an Australian author who had been asked to judge entries for the prize, retire from the judging panel. Then journalist David Marr, who was also a judge, retired as well. The paper then backflipped.

But the issue is not going away. The episode underscores an ugly tendency on the left to reward political correctness at the expense of true enquiry or scholarship. But it’s completely nonsensical. If it’s fine for people living, say, on the subcontinent to enjoy the benefits of science and democracy – both of which were innovations that emerged in Europe at specific moments in history for specific reasons at specific points in time – then it should be fine for an Anglo to celebrate the birth of Krishna in the southern spring alongside any other person who chooses this form of religion. What’s wrong with practicing yoga if you are from a Greek background? Who’s to say what you should or should not do if it hurts no-one and is good for you?

But the PC brigade are immune to reason, and only see what already agrees with their views. You cannot argue with them, especially not on social media, where the extreme views get all the attention, hollowing out the middle and making it impossible for reasonable ideas to flourish. And the overreach of the left is hurting its chances of convincing those with opposing views. The more solidly they back their jaded nags in the stale races they run online the more likely others, with different views, will be to take polar-opposite positions. A stalemate ensues.

The judging episode however points to a disturbing contemporary trend in the public sphere, where different groups of people try to quarantine issues against criticism, and only acknowledge the validity of opinions from people who they judge to be qualified to comment on them. In this kind of environment, competition between ideas is jettisoned as too confronting as people insist on a limited version of reality that belongs to them in a personal way. They resent any attempt by people outside the tent to make comments about select issues, and ignore what they say if it goes against cherished notions.

But this is the new normal, which is why it’s more important than ever to keep the ABC free for the user, and ad-free. The ABC at least functions as some sort of clearing house for the truth.

Japan would be advised to adopt multiculturalism

The other week on the way to the shopping centre near my home in Sydney to get my hair cut I passed a large group of children and adults in Wentworth Park who were having an "undoukai" (a sports day).

As I walked along the concrete path with green grass stretching away on both sides of it, I heard a public address system being used to count the number of beanbags that had been collected in two laundry baskets I could see from where I was on the path: one for the red team and one for the white team. A man was counting "ni-juu ichi, ni-juu ni, ni-juu san" ("twenty one, twenty two, twenty three") and other men were grabbing beanbags from the baskets and throwing them on the ground in a rhythm to match the counting. Two teams of children compete in this activity, trying to throw beanbags into baskets that are hard to reach, being placed on poles, and the team that ends up with the most beanbags in its basket wins the event.

Sports days like this are held every year in Japan. The children I saw were of primary-school age and they had little caps (red and white) on their heads to show which team they belonged to. On the way back home after eating lunch and the haircut I heard the guy on the PA system declaring the red team the winner in whatever event it was they were running at the time. All the kids with red caps stood up and cheered. This kind of socialisation of children is popular in Japan, and the ability to get along in groups is emphasised from a very early age.

But this event I witnessed was not so much Japanese as Australian. Our former prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, liked to say that Australia is the most successful multicultural nation in the world. This view is predicated partly on the lack of mass terror events here. There have been two attacks on civilians in recent times that could be classified as Islamic terrorism, but not the kinds of events that they have had in Europe where many people have been killed.

But it has taken a long time to get where we are. Australia adopted multiculturalism in 1974 during the years of the Whitlam Labor government, becoming just the second country in the world to do so (after Canada), and the succeeding Fraser Liberal (conservative) government kept the policy in place. Now, over half of the population has at least one parent who was born overseas. The population is growing at a rate of 1.7 percent annually, which is over twice the rate as that which applies in the US. As of July, Australia had the fifth-strongest growing population of all OECD countries. Australia has not had a recession for something like 26 years.

In Japan, things are not looking so promising. The population is shrinking and the country’s sovereign debt is over twice the amount of its annual gross domestic product. But even people who have close associations with foreigners think that immigration is not a good idea. The Japanese are drowning in a morass resulting from their own xenophobia.

The recent US Open tennis competition win of Naomi Osaka, a mixed-race Japanese player throws these debates into high relief. Tokyo-based journalist Jake Adelstein wrote about the issues surrounding Osaka in a recent story. Osaka will probably eventually end up jettisoning her Japanese citizenship because otherwise she’ll have to give up her American citizenship, and she has lived in the US since she was a toddler. She also speaks very basic Japanese but is fluent in English.

The law in Japan that says that you have to choose which citizenship you want to keep is typical of the kind of unfriendly regulations that abound in Japan when it comes to foreigners. It is virtually impossible to get Japanese citizenship and foreign names cannot be used on the household certificate that the prefecture office holds for each family, meaning that fathers from overseas who live in Japan have to go onto their wives’ document as a dependant. If you are a holder of a permanent residency visa and you leave Japan and your passport expires, you cannot move the visa to the new passport unless you are still living in Japan, so effectively you can lose your PR. These kinds of rule will have to change if Japan wants to be able to pay for the care of its ageing baby boomers, but the very people who might make the necessary changes are dead set against them. It’s a Mexican stand-off.

Unfettered capitalism is suboptimal

I find people who stick to a rigid party line tiresome. People on the left are mostly gung-ho about redistribution of wealth through taxation and welfare. People on the right are mostly gung-ho about the wisdom of free markets. But I think there is a third way. In fact, most successful countries use this third way to run their operations.

The title of this blogpost should remind people of the sermon given by Bishop Michael Curry at Prince Harry’s wedding to Meghan Markle, that took place back in May.

In my family, there are the seeds of both free-market and redistributive traditions close to the surface. My mum’s dad, Harry Dean, was a card-carrying Communist. He would say if asked that Communism was “living Christianity” and spent his life giving things to people, including the love he gave to his daughter, who adored him. She married a man who would vote Liberal all his life and who said that his family was his “favourite charity”. I’ve written about my father on this blog on a number of occasions. I’m a bit of a chameleon when it comes to ideas about economics and inequality. I prefer to take the best words from the lexicons used by people on both sides of the political fence. My background means that I am more flexible than many other commentators who participate in debates in public.

Capitalism is good at distributing resources for the purpose of feeding the community but unfettered capitalism is suboptimal. A rational quantity of government intervention enables the community to find the coherence it needs for all members to thrive. We all benefit from living in healthy communities that are free of crime and pollution, so regulation of behaviour, either by corporations or individuals, is necessary to ensure the wellbeing of all people who live in them. None of us can survive alone, so quarantining all wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of the many is dangerous because it is not only unfair, it incites people to break the law.

We all need clean water, clean air, and safe streets to be able to enjoy the freedoms that the earth and human ingenuity embodied in technology and democracy have bequeathed to us over generations. These things can only be provided through government and taxation. But we know from experience that centrally-planned production systems absent private enterprise cannot compete with free markets. Texas has a population about the same size as Australia’s, but its economy is measurably larger. But to what purpose? We need the best of both worlds in order to live good lives.

There are many religions but we all worship for the same reason

As a species, humans everywhere are consistent in their need for religion in order to ensure the strength of their societies. Humans are communal animals and need societies in order to survive. We are also descended from apes, which are hierarchical animals. Apes live in small groups that are led by a dominant male.

In his 2009 book on democracy, Sydney University academic John Keane points to the pantheism of Mesopotamia to find the origins of the dominant political structure of today. In those ancient cities, which were built next to rivers and were surrounded by fields filled with ripening crops and healthy cattle, people worshipped a family of gods and they used the stories that arose from the interactions between the family members to animate their daily lives, give form to their thoughts, and regulate their societies.

In the absence of a deity that all people in the community can worship, people tend to become homicidally competitive. They need a god or a set of gods at the top of the hierarchy in order that all men (and of course women) can live as equals.

The religions of the book, which were monotheistic, took the idea of cosmogonical justification to a new level. Starting with Judaism, the beliefs and moral codes of the group were codified, regularised, and written down so that they could be easily transported and spread to other groups that the original group might trade with. Writing was another invention of the Mesopotamians that allowed this to occur. The stories that the Jews told each other about the origins of the earth, their tribal histories, and the stories of their leaders and notable community members formed the basis for the new books.

Christianity and, later, Islam, drew upon this influence in order to make a claim for the dominance of their own cosmology in the face of the pantheism of Rome, which however adopted Christianity as its state religion in about 300AD. Stories continued to be told to children in order to educate them in the ways that a man (or woman) should live in society. The books also helped communities enact the symbolic rites that they relied on to periodically underscore their shared interests. When Europeans arrived in Australia they saw Aboriginals conducting corroborees that constituted their own communal rites, although they did not take the time to sit down and learn about the stories the original inhabitants of the land were telling each other during those dances.

In short, religion is the sharing of stories to form a community that sustains lives. It has a critical function in every society on earth because of the advantages and difficulties of people living in communities. We need to live together, but we also need something to enable us to treat each other as equals. Religion is a species habit of human beings, a type of cognitive artefact that in different forms is common to all of us, wherever we came from and wherever we live. Where people form a community they will naturally establish stories of origins that enable them to flourish together, and thus be strong in the world. In modern times, in the absence of a revealed religion, people often rely on such things as nationalism to buttress the fabric of their communities.

Happy birthday to the friend of the worker

It’s strange to contemplate the reaction of the chattering classes in the West to the birth year of Karl Marx because in the main it has been roundly ignored. From China we heard the premier, Xi Jingping, celebrate the arrival of the philosopher’s birthday through the official news agency, Xinhua. Which is ironic because it was father Deng Xiaoping who changed the direction of China toward embracing capitalism, a change that altered the face of the country forever. As far as I know there has been no mention of Marx’s birthday out of Russia, which started the whole existential threat thing back in 1917. (I reviewed a history of the October Revolution on 20 October last year.)

When you go to a food court you can see how things have changed for most people. On every side as you walk down the aisle there are refrigerated display cases filled to capacity with food to buy for a reasonable amount of money. There are salads, rolls of sushi rice with fillings, sandwiches filled with meats, containers of curries, bowls of fillings for Turkish pizzas, plates containing hamburgers, and paper cups stuffed with chips. Out of every kitchen in the place emanate the sounds of industry. We have more people on the earth than at any other time in history and still the earth is being convinced to give up enough to feed everyone.

Yet problems persist. Inequality is worse than it has been for a century and the situation is deteriorating. While automaker Ferrari is planning to open up three more showrooms this year in Australia, more people than ever before are suffering from rental stress, where more than 30 percent of their earnings are spent on accommodation. Clearly, capitalism doesn’t work properly when it is entirely left to itself. The market is not ideal and perfectly self-regulating.

In New Zealand, the 2017 national election threw up an unconvincing result and because of the way their system works Winston Peters of the NZ First party was given the task of choosing who the next prime minister would be. He chose the Labour Party to lead the country for the same reasons I have outlined. One of Jacinda Ardern’s first major policy announcements has been to promise to house all homeless people living in the country.

In Australia, the Labor Party is the GOP, the “grand old party”. The opinion polls have shown that undeniably the forecast result in the 2019 federal election will be a win for the ALP. People are fed up with inequality and want the government to do something to make it easier for everyone to profit from the unprecedented gains that mankind has reaped from capitalism.

What Marx did above everything else was give people new tools that they could use to talk about the world. Born in the same year that Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ was published, Marx was the begetter of a thousand new books, to use an artistic formulation of the benefit that we all have reaped from his work. You may not agree with everything that the people who came after him did, but you can at least agree that we are better off for having new ways to talk about ourselves.

Concepts such as alienation and reification stem from Marx’s works. We can talk about the “means of production” and “surplus value”, even without having read a word of Marx in the original. We are richer for the creativity of this extraordinary man. And we should also never forget that he did most of his creative work while living in England, because of the freedoms that had been secured for its residents from time immemorial.

I should note for the record that while my father was a Liberal voter all his life, mum’s father was a Communist, so I can appreciate both sides of the argument.

Finally we vote for marriage equality

On 17 April 2013 New Zealand's Parliament voted to allow people of the same sex to marry. When the law was passed people in the public gallery stood up and spontaneously sang a waiata, a traditional Maori song of celebration, 'Pokarekare Ana', which is said to date from the time of WWI. It is a love song. Today, in Parliament, as soon as the clerk proclaimed the new law passed, people in the public gallery stood up and sang the chorus from 'I Am Australian', a song of The Seekers:

We are one, but we are many
And from all the lands on earth we come
We'll share a dream and sing with one voice
"I am, you are, we are Australian"

The words reflect what the prime minister had said just before the law was passed in the day's final division (which saw a mere four members voting 'No'). But the selection of this song is certainly striking because the places that responded strongly 'No' in the postal survey that led up to today's vote were places where the concentration of new migrants is the highest, notably in western Sydney, as I outlined in a blogpost last month.

Remembering the October Revolution

Tonight’s guest of the Search Foundation was Bea Campbell who talked about the importance of the 1917 October Revolution in today’s world. Other speakers were Melanie Fernandez, the deputy CEO of the NSW Council of Social Service, David McKnight, associate professor, Journalism and Media Research Centre, UNSW, Winton Higgins, who teaches at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Meredith Burgmann, an author and ex-politician.

Campbell’s parents were British Bolsheviks who became Bolsheviks after WWII. Her British father met her mother in occupied Holland. She moved from Rotterdam to a village without electricity near the Scottish border. They became Bolsheviks at the end of the 40s and beginning of the 50s. Campbell said that Bolshevism was the terrain on which all of her family’s arguments were argued, especially after 1968. Her parents had an unshakable loyalty to the Soviet project. They hoped the Communist project could be redeemed from Stalinism.

She said, “You have to be astounded if you look at the history of 1917.” The people were taking power only for second time in human history, she went on. In the beginning with WWI raging there was an insistence on bread. There were endless cues of women. Then there was an insistence on peace and the communalisation of land. Then a nasty fellow took over, she said. She asked what it means for a society to become saturated in blood. The villages were feminised because of the war. She asked what it meant to be a Russian after the three wars, in the 1920s. They had to make a new class: the working class. Out of that emerge political formulations that have become problematic. Khrushchev was for her family the face of "cuddly Communism". She pointed to the way in which politics was militarised by the experience of war after war after war.

Higgins and McKnight talked about the problems currently being encountered by neoliberalism in the West. Higgins pointed to the Washington Consensus but remarked that economic liberalism arose in the 1840s. He pointed to the rise of the neoliberal hegemony in the 1970s. The left, he said, has been kept in a state of hiatus. Neoliberalism impoverishes communities and individuals. It generates soaring inequalities. McKnight said he is working on a new book on neoliberalism and inequality.

Above: Bea Campbell at the lectern with, seated, Winton Higgins and David McKnight.

Not all the people of Toowoomba are redneck hicks

Ok, bear with me. I know it sounds like just another inner-city attack on rural Australia, but there's a point to this headline. It stems from the Q&A the ABC screened from the Empire Theatre in Toowoomba, southern Queensland, and a question from the audience that emerged about halfway through the show. The questioner in the audience wanted to ask the mayor of Toowoomba about strategies to help the town's share of the mooted 12,000 Syrian refugees Australia recently elected to accept "assist [them] in adapting to our [Australia's] democratic laws and system of government, and what is being done to ensure that they contribute positively to the social cohesion of Toowoomba and to the economic growth of the city, rather than become welfare dependent."

The person the question was directed to, Paul Antonio, started by using the word "assimilate" in his long response to the questioner, so you didn't have to wait long to see the redneck impulse raise itself up in the crowd. Given that the question was designed to whistle up the racist impulse in any case. But it didn't stop with the mayor. Next up to talk was Katie Noonan, a singer and a political progressive, who also used the word to describe the process whereby refugees are included in the society. It went on, too. Compere Tom Ballard used it, then quickly changed his word choice - possibly realising that the official policy of assimilation had been ditched by the Whitlam government in 1973, and replaced with multiculturalism - from "assimilate" to "resettle", a far less loaded word.

Then Jan Thomas, the VC of Southern Queensland University, also used the word "assimilation" in her peroration on the benefits of learning English and of getting a tertiary qualification in order to become a contributing participant in the local economy. Thomas did, however, change that term to "helping people acclimatise" later in her answer. And even the Labor Party pollie, Joel Fitzgibbon, used the term in his response.

None of these people released that what they were doing using the word "assimilate" - which the original questioner did not use even though he had certain racist designs in mind when framing his question - was taking the debate back to the 1950s when assimilation was official government policy. They didn't clock to the fact that they were perpetuating the myth belonging to the redneck hick that migrants just congregate in the big cities and bludge off the public purse (and vote Labor).

But it's this kind of almost-unconscious backsliding that is going to do us in in the end. We have to realise that diversity and tolerance are the best ways to move forward. All of us do. And especially those in southern Queensland. All of Australia still remembers Joh Bjelke-Petersen who had his political base in the Darling Downs. And Queensland itself cannot forget, which is why the last LNP government of Campbell Newman only lasted one term. Anything ... Anything at all to avoid the endemic evil of that era ever occurring again.

Researchers distance themselves from government brochure

While the rest of the country was attacking a brochure produced by the government to help schools identify young people who might be becoming radicalised, an Adelaide freelance journalist took his questions to the researchers whose work sits behind the offending literature.

Royce Kurmelovs today published in Vice magazine a story about the researchers behind the brochure, who are keen to distance themselves from it. Kurmelovs spoke with one of the researchers, Professor Luke Howie, deputy director of Monash University's Global Terrorism Research Centre. He also spoke with Dr Anne Aly from Curtin University, who also works in the field.

Howie told Kurmelovs: "When we talk about violent extremism, we're talking about people trying to kill people. I've never thought of someone like Karen in that way. I personally have never equated someone like Karen with extremism," he said. "If anyone took away from that report that environmental activism is in the same bucket as ISIS that would be a real problem."

And Aly told him: "History has told us that profiles don't work," she said. "The problem that I have with giving individual cases like that out of context is that I could give you 100 different cases and they'll all be different. There is no singular pathway to extremism. There is no model because they are all different. So having these case studies could backfire."

When I spoke to Kurmelovs on Twitter I suggested that the brochure appeared to be a bit of "sexing up" of the research for ideological purposes but he demurred. "I'm not so certain," he wrote. "If anything I feel it's a very conservative interpretation of many years of research.

"And I imagine in the eyes of the authors they made a real effort to balanced," Kurmelovs continued.

But the timing of the release was problematic. "[I]t came at a time just after Abbott attempted to declare [war] on green groups with the lawfare thing. Awkward context."

Awkward is the right word, I thought to myself. I said to Kurmelovs that the way the researchers and authors behind it were running for cover reminded me of David Kelly, the British weapons expert whose reports had been manipulated by the British government in order to justify going to war against Iraq. Kelly suicided in 2003.

"Judging by the hashtag most [people] have already made up their minds [about] the motives for the offending case study," I wrote.

"And rightly so, really," wrote Kurmelovs. "Putting any sort of profile out to the community like that is useless and potentially harmful."

Why has Phil Walsh's son Cy just disappeared from view?

It has been almost a month since the coach of the Adelaide AFL team was allegedly stabbed to death by his son Cy but we have heard nothing about the young man's whereabouts since the day of the tragic events, on 7 July. We heard that Cy had been taken into protective custody in a secure ward of a hospital facility somewhere but that's all we know. We have heard nothing about further interviews with the suspect in the crime but it appears clear that Cy was a person living with schizophrenia who finally gave way to the messages he was exposed to in his mind. In the absence of any other information, that's how I read the situation anyway.

It's curious how softly the authorities are handling the case of Cy Walsh. Other deranged murder suspects have not been so fortunate. But on the other hand it feels like Cy has simply disappeared into a black hole of authoritative ministration, like someone embraced by a dark cloud of ectoplasm and subsequently hidden from view completely. It's almost unaccountable.

It's not as if the public has nothing to compare this case to. Most notably there was the case of the 2009 stabbing of art dealer Nick Waterlow by his son Anthony in Sydney's eastern suburbs. A book on the murders - Nick's daughter Chloe was also killed in the same incident - appeared in 2013. We have plenty of information about this terrible disease and the things it sometimes makes people do. If Cy - and subsequently his father - is another victim of it, then surely the public has a right to know so that we can better deal with the disease. But just dropping the poor man off the side of the universe into the bottom of an administrative gunny sack is not the way it should be done.

To me the notoriety gained by people who work as football coaches is somewhat unaccountable, but surely this is an opportunity to raise the profile of a terrible disease that many people in the community live with every day. Not in a bloodthirsty and unthinking way, but in a way that allows us to come to grips with it and so deal with it better. The silence surrounding Cy Walsh is in my mind just another example of the stigma that always still surrounds mental illness, and that prevents people from talking about it openly, which is what we need to be doing in order to better deal with it as a community. Only by facing what it means together can we effectively manage it, and hopefully help to improve the lives of many people who - heroically and unseen - live permanently with mental illness.

Problems for Rohingya to get worse before they improve

I have a friend who is from Myanmar although she's not living in that country at the moment. A doctor, she is currently animated by the issue of the minority Rohingya for whom Myanmar has been home since time immemorial. In fact "animated" might be inadequate to describe the level of agitation that the problem inspires in her, and I think that there are many Myanmar nationals who find themselves in the same situation. Even Aung Sang Suu Kyi can't escape the problem; in a video my friend provided a link to, ASSK - as she is known widely - blamed porous borders and refused to blame the Myanmar government for the persecution of this minority even though the government has a terrible record with many of its minorities, which it persecutes throughout the country using the military.

("Burma", the former name for the country in question, is actually an appellation only adequate for describing one of the ethnic groups in the country, the largest. Because of this fact the word "Myanmar" - which means "quick" - is actually a more accurate appellation for the entire nation of 80 million people.)

For Australians the issue of the Rohingya is also a cause for animation because a number of southeast Asian nations where boats full of Rohingya refugees have been trying to land have started turning the boats back out to sea. The reason why this policy is animating for Australians is because turning boats back has been a policy of the Australian government - which was elected in September 2013 - among a range of policies designed to stop boat arrivals of refugees. It's hardly surprising that southeast Asian politicians have taken this leaf out of the book of the Australian government because its range of refugee policies have, indeed, stopped the boats arriving. During the recent UK election those same policies were held up as models by some contenders for office during the pre-poll debates. It probably doesn't need to be emphasised that the people in the UK who admire the Australian government's policies are politically on the right of the ideological spectrum (as is the current Australian government).

So here we have scenes of emaciated, desperate, dark-skinned refugees in boats holding up their children for the media's cameras to capture images of. The one good thing about this scenario is that the media are there to see what is going on. In Myanmar's western province of Rakhine, where the Rohingya live, there are no western media to observe what is happening on a daily basis. And so people like ASSK can with impunity spin the same line about "stateless Rohingya" as the Myanmar government and nobody in the US or Australia or wherever bats an eye. We just take it for granted, for how could ASSK lie? It's impossible. Or is it ...

While the problem can improve if there is more media scrutiny - as it can only also improve in Indonesia's Papuan provinces, where recently it was announced the international media would be allowed to operate - the foreign media has to be allowed and in fact assisted to operate so that its reporting can be unbiased. There must be no coercion. There must be no members of the security services following the foreign media around. The media must be allowed to operate on its own terms, and talk to anyone it wants to talk to. Ideally there should also be security support so that the media can operate unmolested by any of the performers on the ground in Myanmar.

I suggested that more media scrutiny was needed on a comment thread on social media but one of my Myanmarese friend's friends vehemently disagreed saying that the media cannot be trusted. But I think the real problem is that people don't like it when the media says things they personally don't agree with. Sometimes the truth hurts, as the saying goes.

[UPDATE 22 May 2015:] Last night on the ABC they said that the Rohingya had been in Myanmar "since the 19th century" when they were brought to the country (then known as Burma) by British colonisers. However tonight on the ABC on the 7pm News program they said that the Rohingya had been in Myanmar "for 1000 years", contradicting what they had said only the night before. I think there is definitely a need for someone in the media to do a bit of legwork and find someone who can be relied on - probably it will be someone working in academia - to provide an accurate and definitive pronouncement on what is undoubtedly a key element of the entire refugee debate.

We need more people to come out like Charlotte Dawson

When I saw news online that a TV personality named Charlotte Dawson had suicided I had to puzzle and do a bit of research because I had no idea who she was, which is entirely due to the fact that I never watch commercial television least of all the to-be-avoided-at-all-costs Murdoch's Fox. While Dawson participated in the low-rent side of the media which flatters the aspirations of the unlovely majority, it seems that in private she was a nice person, someone who would look out for you and ask if you were OK. Ironically, it seems that it was the very medium she had adopted as her platform - a TV interview with her ex-husband that was to be aired - that led to the collapse of her sense of hope, and her death.

It may also have been fears of a repeat of the online attacks that she was subjected to two years ago, and which led to a suicide attempt. Whatever it was, Dawson found herself suddenly walking over a chasm into which all her hope fell in a glittering waterfall as it pulsed out of her chest, as panic set in. The black void below consumed the entirety of this output and as she took each uncertain step it continued to froth and splash down into the darkness filled with a thousand stars. The life was being drained out of her by the void. She was terrified and she did the only thing for which strength remained at the time.

The terrible truth is that people around the country - and around the world - do the same thing as Dawson did, all the time. Not a day passes that someone in Australia does not take the steps she took to end the fear and anguish, the terrible, crushing paralysis of despair. Just like Dawson was herself a really nice person behind the trashy mainstream-media glitz and bubble, in reality depression and other mental illness is a constant humming quietly - but awfully for those who live with it - in the background at a pitch that the majority of people just do not hear. This is why, in 2012 when Dawson was subjected to harassment by online trolls, the barrage was unceasing: noone realised what they were doing. But we never talk about mental illness, and so it's no surprise that this is so.

There are tens of thousands of functioning individuals in positions of authority and material significance who hide their mental illness because they fear that knowledge of it by the community will damage their prospects. But unless people like this come out and declare their conditions publicly we will just continue on in the same way, regretting another death among the cohort of prominent people that the community broadly speaking looks up to. And then they turn away and spend the rest of the year oblivious to the pain and suffering that surrounds them wherever they walk. The streets are in fact filled with invisible men and women. Meanwhile hundreds and thousands of ordinary people - who do not appear on TV daily and who do not live in exclusive harbourside apartments in Wooloomooloo - fall prey to the fear and the loss of hope.

It also struck me that the tendentious emotion that was generated in the wake of Dawson's demise assumed that death was the worst thing that can happen to you. The fact is that a mentally-ill person usually does not have the objective clarity to see this anyway questionable fact. What they experience IS real. It IS happening to them. And it IS unremittingly ghastly. You think death is bad? Try a 10-hour panic attack, or three months of paranoid psychosis. For people in such situations death can look just like a walk in the park.

Homophobic Barilla boss part of Italy's conservative culture

Guido Barilla, head of the eponymous Italian pasta company sparked a fierce row that spread globally along with calls to boycott his company's products after he voiced what were taken by many as highly offensive remarks about homosexuals, saying he would not consider using a gay family to advertise Barilla pasta.

"For us the concept of the sacred family remains one of the basic values of the company," he told Italian radio on Wednesday evening. "I would not do it but not out of a lack of respect for homosexuals who have the right to do what they want without bothering others … [but] I don't see things like they do and I think the family that we speak to is a classic family."

The interview where this dog-whistling occurred took such a turn because the interviewer asked Barilla about his views on how women were portrayed in the media in Italy, as the Guardian reported.

The interview started by asking Barilla what he thought of an appeal made on Tuesday by the speaker of the lower house of parliament, Laura Boldrini, to change the often stereotypical image of women in Italian advertisements.

Italy, where the Catholic Church insinuates its influence in cultural and political arenas, is also the country that is home to Silvio Berlusconi's Mediaset, a broadcaster (see pic) that definitively exploits women in its programming as providers of sex. Barilla's insistence that women function primarily in the home as providers of food plays out in the imagination along precisely the same lines. A conservative bias like this is extremely unhealthy for both women and girls, serving to bolster a culture of stereotypisation and discrimination and exploitation. The man's comments fit into the opinion among many that Italy is a country mired in outdated ideas where given the continual development of cultural products women and girls are more and more expected to conform to limiting role models for the gratification of men. Part of that paradigm is a tendency to relegate to second-class status anyone who dies not fit the dominant lifestyle pattern, such as homosexual men. (Interestingly, there is no acknowledgement at all of homosexual women, or lesbians.) In Australia, we see politicians doing a similar kind of dog-whistling when they talk of "values".

A man like Barilla's comments furthermore foreground the importance of global companies employing spokespeople who are able to project a positive image of the company, rather than merely relying on tired and outdated tropes that gratify personal feelings.

Barilla is a global company and the remarks played out within a day to a global audience, including many people who regularly consume spaghetti and other pasta products. Among my friends the immediate reaction - for those who are gay as well as those who are not - was to make a decision never to buy Barilla products again in future. This was even without seeing the hashtag that emerged in Italian Twitter circles asking people to boycott the company's products. A local player like Berlusconi who only has to think of what people at home think about his views is at least tolerable in political circles - even if he routinely figures in satire overseas. But a company that relies on the goodwill of consumers throughout the world cannot afford to continue fielding narrow-minded executives prone to on-screen gaffes like Guido Barilla.