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Wednesday, August 25, 2004
'I'VE NEVER TOLD A LIE IN PUBLIC LIFE', Mark Latham told interviewer Neil Mitchell today, in my paraphrase. 'So you still think George Bush the most incompetent and dangerous President in US history?' asked Mitchell. Do you think he got a straight answer? Of course not; that would be a straight lie or a political disaster. So much for Labor's Truth in Politics campaign. Next stunt, please. Tuesday, August 24, 2004
THERE IS A SERIOUS POSSIBILITY that someone may be listening to Late Night Live tonight, as Anu Singh and the parents of the young man she murdered, Joe Cinque, put their cases. In fact, so seriously does Auntie take this possibility she has been giving the Gastropod's gig peak-time promotion. This makes it a unique event. Those of you who've read Helen Garner's book, Joe Cinque's Consolation, will be holding your ears to the loudspeaker. Those who haven't may still find enough of this fascinating case surviving Philip Adams's smarm to make it worth the time. The personalities of the antagaonists alone should make it riveting. Anu Singh is a smart, articulate, ambitious young woman who would by now be a successful corporate lawyer or Radio National staffer but for one indiscretion. In 1997, while a student in Canberra, she deliberately and with malice aforethought, killed her fiancee, Joe Cinque with overdoses of Rohypnol and heroin. Singh was charged with the reduced offence of manslaughter on the basis that her responsibility was diminished by her mental state at the time. She suffered from an eating disorder and was given to histrionic threats of suicide. In the end she found it sufficient to kill her boyfriend, but any hope she had of passing it off as his suicide was defeated by the unconscionable time Joe Cinque took to die, waiting until well into the day after a suspected second injection to breathe his last. Apparently fearing the circumstances of Cinque's death made it impossible for her to plead ignorance, Singh sought advice anonymously from the 000 operator. The ambulance eventually arrived shortly after Cinque's very avoidable death. Since forensic skills are not required in the Gastropod's terms of employment with Auntie, allow me to suggest a couple of questions to bear in mind, just in case some relevant information should present itself in the course of the program. How is that someone can be, in 1997, so barking mad that she so deliberately kills the man she still claims to have loved, and then, by 1998, be so recovered that a token prison sentence is sufficient? Of course, Singh had psychiatrists to argue for her craziness, and the added benefit of a single-judge, no-jury trial. But there was a time when the crazy defence was a ticket to a life behind high walls. No longer, it seems. As the author Helen Garner wonders with the rest of us, has psychiatry driven personal responsibility out the door? While medical science has never found psychotherapy to have any power to cure, as far as our shrinks, and Justice Crispin, are concerned, the healing power of therapy means you can indeed be a psychopath one day and a citizen the next. A second angle. Our courts defend such leniency with undoubted villains on the grounds that social harmony beats retribution. If you listen to Cinque's parents you will hear their unrelieved grief and anger, their passionate sense of injustice, as fierce now as it was seven years ago. No harmony there. Mrs Cinque argues that only her own moral standards hold her back from seeking her own revenge, and, ugly as that idea is, who could blame her. Meanwhile, Anu Singh has recovered so completely from her mental incapacity that she has been able to complete a Master's degree. She has now enlisted other women prisoners, 'victims' of the system, as subjects for her campaigning for prison reform. Proof of our courts' curative powers, or a continuation of her career in manipulating other people? Perhaps, after tonight, you can judge for yourself. Justice Crispin would never claim to be delivering natural justice, but you should read Garner's book and ask yourself, just what did he deliver? After Singh refused to talk to her, Garner saw her book as a consolation for the abandoned Joe Cinque and his parents. It seems to me Cinque's real consolation, insufficient as it is, lies in avoiding marriage to Anu Singh. Monday, August 23, 2004
"PRESIDENT GEORGE W BUSH [w]as a tyrannical political imbecile who put Adolf Hitler in the shade ..." No, not Mark Latham this time; Kim Jong-Il. DEFENCE OFFICIALS ARE A BUNCH OF PRECIOUS DRAMA QUEENS, according to those who claim to speak for them. First there were the 44 duffers and their public declaration, and now Henny Herald claims to have Defence sources for its story that the government was told of increased risk to Australia from joining the Coalition of the Willing. Better leave aside questions like the balance between various kinds of risk, long-term and short-term, conventional and WMD, because, according to Henny Defence officials just never advise on things like that. Despite the pathetic quality of Defence advice, as Henny reports it, the government is condemned for "contradicting his intelligence advice". In fact you could accept Henny's version of Defence advice and still decide, rationally, that taking out Saddam would be a net addition to Australia's medium to long-term security. And that's without factoring in the almost-Free Trade Agreement. But before you write Defence off as just another case for out-sourcing, remember how Henny puffed up the support for 'whistle-blower' Andrew Wilkie, and then had to admit that not one of his former colleagues supported his position. And how they puffed his appearance before the House of Commons committee. Those Defence hacks are on a hiding to nothing. You either maintain your professional silence, or you let the duffers, Wilkies and anonymous 'sources' claim to speak for you. Courtesy of Henny Herald, and their ABC. IF YOU'RE ON THE PROGRESSIVE SIDE OF POLITICS, there are some things you can have both ways at once, like the role of oil in international politics. But political rights you can only have legally cooked up on one side, according to Professor George Williams, keen supporter of Canberra's new rights law. Should we also define political responsibilities in law, as the ACT Liberals have proposed? After all, even Williams sees the problems he's helping to load onto the community: Rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin. No advocate of human rights could argue with the idea that rights can often exist in tension with each other and that the possession of rights also entails the need to exercise them responsibly. Nah. Too vague, difficult and unnecessary, according to Williams. Legislated rights, you see, "have the benefit of a rich and growing body of law from around the world to draw upon", not to mention a rich and growing body of lawyers. Responsibilities, on the other hand, "exist in a domestic and international context devoid of interpretive guidance." And responsibilities will continue to be political orphans if they're depending on George Williams for legal support. OIL'S ALL ABOUT IRAQ, in Auntie's serial commentary: The latest security problems in Iraq are being blamed for the overnight oil price spike.Then how was Iraq all about oil? Stupid, stupid, multinationational-US-Republican conspirators. Thursday, August 19, 2004
IT MUST BE TOUGH BEING A POLITICAL REPORTER with a cause. For one thing, what do you do to refresh the relentless focus on personality? Policies are boring, your own side doesn't have any you would want to admit to, and the stunt-a-day program is on sick leave. With an election campaign under way only a fool could wish up a Costello leadership challenge to keep the anti-Howard pot boiling. Undaunted, Auntie led her commentary yesterday with a re-run of Tuesday's news. Henny Herald buried it on an inside left page, at the bottom. Last night, on PM, Auntie led with the same story, although absolutely nothing had happened during the day. This perhaps is Auntie's contribution to re-cycling our scarce resources. Auntie's best efforts weren't able to produce this gem, the late-arriving duffer, Mike Scrafton's taste for down-loading pornography to the Defence Department's computers. Scrafton's defenders say that's irrelevant, and they're probably right. They also point out he was copped before his secondment to Peter Reith's staff. None has yet, to my knowledge, checked whether Reith was informed that his departmental liaison person was carrying this embarrassing baggage. It was later used against Reith by the Herald Sun. Perhaps Mark Latham's illness has been a blessing for the Opposition, on this issue at least. Labor was pushing the issue close to three hazards. With enough attention to the 2001 influx of illegal entrants, the electorate will be reminded that the children overboard incident that didn't happen was the exception, and that it was general practice at that time to create risks to men, women and children to put moral pressure on the Australian navy. Some of these incidents are catalogued here. Senate leader John Faulkner is rushing towards a new Senate enquiry for the purpose of compelling evidence from Ministerial advisers. In the previous enquiry Labor was prudent enough to resist making both governing parties hostage to such a disruptive intrusion that will greatly advantage the permanent opposition parties, the Dems and the Greens. Laurie Oakes's use of the polygraph on his protegee Mike Scrafton, not reported in Oakes's column in The Bulletin, was perhaps the cheapest media media stunt in the current Parliamentary session. While Mark Latham was on his feet there was always the danger he would impulsively adopt polygraph testing as an instrument of public accountability, and challenge John Howard to do the same. The truly stunning thing about the polygraph stunt is that it reveals the infantile character of both Scrafton's and Oakes's concept of what policy-making is about. A policy is a construct, not a belief or an observation, and a politician who can believe sincerely in his simplified policy positions as categoric truths is a hazard to the country. It may not be good scholarship, but if politicians were not allowed to ignore inconvenient truths in putting forward their views, Parliament would be much less noisy, and political debate as lively as soggy biscuits. Do you think that Mark Latham doesn't know that his industrial relations policies will destroy jobs? Would you be more comfortable with the idea of Latham PM if he were able to convince a polygraph to the contrary? We'll see what Mark Latham makes of it when he leaves hospital. In the meantime, we here at ABCwatch wish him a speedy recovery, and hope that he lies comfortably, and straight, in his bed. It seems to me the 44 duffers have done enough damage to the principles of Parliamentary government, by behaving like people loyal to a previous President. Ministers will find it even harder to trust any but their closest political appointments in future. The two major parties should refrain from making the situation worse. Tuesday, August 17, 2004
YOU CAN'T SAY that Mark Steyn is sorry that a swag of US forces are being withdrawn from Europe. European countries now have attitudes in inverse proportion to the likelihood of their acting upon them. They're like my hippy-dippy Vermont neighbours who drive around with "Free Tibet" bumper stickers. Every couple of years, they trade in the Volvo for a Subaru, and painstakingly paste a new "Free Tibet" sticker on the back.German officials, especially those in the vicinity of US bases take a different view: For instance, Rhineland-Palatinate state officials say they have suggested that lighter units replace the heavy armor now stationed at Baumholder. Mayor Pees called on the German military to move into facilities vacated by the Americans.I doubt that anyone's troops will be much help against the kind of collapse now afflicting Europe. Monday, August 16, 2004
FOLLOWING THIS AFTERNOON'S PERFORMANCE I am coming to the conclusion that Michael Duffy's Counterpoint is the best left-wing chat show on Radio National. That's a great improvement on those sloppy, self-indulgent commentators like Phillip Adams, Max-weird McCutcheon and Pastor Lane who own about 95% of the franchise, but it's a sad reduction of what the country deserves for its millions of dollars of funding. Duffy's email and telephone correspondents reflect a higher quality of leftism than the Stalinist boofheads attracted to his ordained colleagues, but that still leaves a large part of the spectrum of views unrepresented and uncatered for. Today's discussion was Terra nullius, that idea whose leading part in national debate and legislation is the achievement of Professor Henry Reynolds, an achievement that has been mentioned once or twice before on ABCwatch. The discussants were Reynolds himself, a welcome public appearance, a second historian Andrew Fitzmaurice, and critic of Reynolds, Christopher Pearson. Reynolds worked his old sideways shuffle, disclaiming a role in the promotion of the notion of Terra nullius and rubbishing the notion that the High Court had been much influenced by it, a position broadly supported by Fitzmaurice, who thought Terra nullius and the older concept Res nullius close enough in meaning to be employed interchangeably, at least for political purposes. Uncle has heard Reynolds's disclaimers before and is still not convinced by them. On one occasion he modestly refused the title of father of the historical discipline of frontier conflict studies, and was promptly contradicted by one of his followers, another historian who reported that Reynolds had inspired him to teach the subject, and that Reynolds's books were the sole texts for his students. No doubt there are hundreds of such teachers in our universities and high schools. All of this modesty could lead us to fail to notice those everyday incantations of Terra nullius in support of the faith taught in our schools and universities, that the founders of this country were composed of equal parts of callousness and blind stupidity as far as the land's indigenous inhabitants were concerned. I'd be prepared to wager a small sum that Henry Reynolds's modesty, and Fitzmaurice's dismissals, have not reached one percent of the large population now infected by the crude version of Terra nullius. Pearson played strongly from his layman's corner, and was out-numbered rather than out-gunned. What was absent from this discussion was anyone with substantial knowledge of the law and its history in this country. Instead Duffy gave the last word to lawyer and Aboriginal activist, Larissa Berendt. Either Duffy is out of his depth or he was ill-advised in this choice. Berendt works for the University of Technology, Sydney, one of those universities where you don't teach history, you teach histories. Berendt takes a similar approach to law, which serves her political agenda of promoting Aboriginal sovereignty, the form of which she will determine after the power is handed over. Needless to say, Berendt's long summing up added nothing in the way of reliable knowledge to this complex subject, instead giving it all a heavy dose of the kind of spin intended by Reynolds in the first place. On its current form, it is hard to see why the communards would bother to sink this program, even after the election. There may be a transcipt later on.
US NOW THE LEAD IN THE FREE TRADE TANGO According to the Washington-published Free Trade Journal: US private sector sources said the Labor Party amendments would violate the TRIPS agreement [WTO rules on patents] because they would set up penalties that only pharmaceutical patent holders would be subject to. This would violate Article 27.1 of the TRIPS, which prohibits governments from discriminating against specific technologies by setting up specific obstacles to protecting certain patents, such as those on pharmaceuticals, private sector sources said. The Latham amendments will now get the rounds of the Washington lobbies and bureaucracies, with George W Bush's sign-off required before a deal comes into effect. Bush will be in no hurry. The issue now hangs over the Australian election campaign as a potential "Agreement overboard" show-stopper. WHAT IS IT WITH 43? Now 43 Iraqi Australians have written to the press with a reply to the Duffers' Declaration on lying about Iraq. You recall the duffers said the invasion by the coalition was a " destructive, especially for Iraq". Here's what their antipodean relatives say: These Iraqis may be new to the country, but the can read its politics more clearly than most media commentators: We respect the rights of the 43 former senior figures to freely express their views in their statement to the Australian people last Monday. However, many of us have certain doubts about the timing of their statement since it appears to be politically motivated as there is an election to be held very soon. SHOULD THAT BE 44 DUFFERS? Mike Scrafton, a defence official seconded to the office of the then Minister of Defence, Peter Reith, has published his version of his telephone conversations with the Prime Minister just before John Howard made his 'children overboard' statement in November 2001. Scrafton says he killed the story before Howard went public with it. Howard denies that. [Howard's spokesman] said Mr Howard did not agree with Mr Scrafton's comments on the dating of the photographs of the incident or the fact that that no one in Defence believed the children overboard claim was true. End of story, apart from wishful thinking from the Opposition and the media. Why does Scrafton go public now? I don't think you need to be born in Iraq to guess the answer. Scrafton is prepared to break his obligations of confidentiality in order to support the other duffers. "The issue they raise is the issue of truth in government and the Government has been clever in deflecting the argument," he said.Strange that those briefing for the duffers over the past week have been running away from the 'government lies' angle, and claiming their complaint was really about something else entirely. First, that Australia's military operations should not encompass the attempt to seize and hold territory, subdue or control the population of other nations (unlike Iraq). Second, that Australia's resort to military force must be legitimised either in terms of self-defence or by an explicit UN Security Council resolution (unlike Iraq) or as part of a UN peace-keeping operation. And third, that Australia must be careful of the deployment of military forces in the pursuit of unattainable political objectives. You can't be too fussy about your weapons in an election campaign. Sunday, August 15, 2004
BALLOT RE-COMMITTED The ZDF on-line plebiscite on Kerry vs. Bush, mentioned here, has been opened again. You recall that 69% of voters had backed Bush before the ballot was switched off. The liberal, righteously anti-American broadcaster has decided its audience deserves another chance to get it right. That's better odds than you get from Uncle. So far, the voters in the second round are backing Bush 89%. If you want to register your vote, you may need to be quick. Click on "Stimmen Sie ab". |