Green views

Fed to the lions

When my grandmother seemed about 100 years old (though in reality she was only a young thing about the age I am now) she would turn to the obituary columns of the morning newspaper first. In the charming way know-it-all teenagers have I would scold her, suggesting that she was being morbid, and that she should be reading the news first, find out what was going on in the world, take an interest in political events, worry about the environment. But she unaccountably ignored my opinion and kept turning to the part of the paper where paragraphs were edged in black. And every so often she would exclaim "oh, so and so's mother has died" or "oh, so and so has died and they were only 62". It was a very practical interest. Her husband had already died, and she was at an age where the parents of friends, and the friends themselves, were starting to die off (in those days with a somewhat lower life expectancy than now), and she needed to know in order to grieve, express sympathy, offer help, attend funerals. She had also lived through two world wars, in one of which a husband and four brothers had served, in another where she had a son and son in law involved. And she was now in a time where her grandson and other people's grandsons had Vietnam looming as either an actual or a theoretical danger.

So an interest in death was a practical matter, information she needed to have to function in her society. But I suspect, looking back from a vantage point of someone about the same age she was then, that there was also a psychological aspect. She was at an age, as am I now, where your own body starts to give you echoes of mortality, near or far. In seeing the black-rimmed announcements of those who had died you were failing to see the ones of those who were still alive. And by implication, if your circle of friends were all still ok, then your family was still ok, still safe and secure, and so were you yourself. But the interest and the reassurance was at a very personal level. She had little interest in the deaths of strangers, why would she? And since all of her friends were behaving in the same way, for the same reasons, the newspaper was providing an obituary page as a service for those searches. Occasionally a death would emerge on the front page, but it would either be of someone important, like a prime minister, or involve some particular tragic circumstance.

This remained the pattern of media representation of death for many years, but in just the last few years a major change has come over the role of death in commercial television news. A typical bulletin now has the first third devoted to death. There will be car accidents, house fires, industrial accidents, people falling down cliffs, murders, drownings, plane crashes, disease, "bashings", sharks, home invasions. Bodies or body parts will be found, corpses will be recognisable or unrecognisable. People will have long "battles" with cancer, or die unexpectedly. The cameras will be there while the police search for bodies, find bodies, and load bodies into ambulances. They will be there when the grieving family chokes back tears to mourn their child or mother, will be in the church where children break down in reading eulogies, will get close ups of teary faces of pall bearers and widows, will be present later at memorial services, will follow up with images of the victim's family in situations where court cases deal with cause of death. We can't be far away from cameras in ambulances, emergency operating theatres, at autopsies, in morgues. In fact the first two are already beginning to happen.

Now this is not a service to viewers in the way the obituary pages are, this is a wallowing in the grief of strangers for the sake of entertainment. The programmers are betting on public necrophilia, that viewers will absorb all the death they are offered, will get, perhaps, some kind of thrill that they are still alive while someone else has died horribly. Will love sticky-beaking at other people's grief. Will love being scared silly by all the disasters that could befall them but haven't yet. Will picture themselves in the position of grieving widow, their children as orphans, their body racked with cancer, their home invaded, their brother stabbed in the street, their car engulfed in a ball of flame, and be glad that it wasn't them.

Programmers have no concern, it seems, for the invasions of privacy, the cheapening of emotion, the deadening of sensibility, the distortion of public policy, that all this exploitation of death involves. They see it as part of modern tv programming, on a par with reality shows that deliberately humiliate and damage contestants, "factually based" series for the glorification of gangsters, television programs in which the level of violence and sheer nastiness continues to escalate. Life it seems, is once again as cheap as it was to the Romans, watching murder and mayhem in the arena; or to the Elizabethans watching public floggings, burnings, hangings, and eviscerations.

Is that really how we want our society to develop? Or should the television front page go back to informing people about the issues that matter?

television news

Your shoes get so hot

Roses blooming outside my window. Birds nesting and singing outside my window. Grass and clover growing outside my window. Echidnas and stumpy tail lizards strolling outside my window. Must be Spring, hooray.

But unlike the chirpy weather presenters on television I don't say "hooray, Summer is coming". That lovely thick grass that is creating contented fat sheep will soon begin to dry. I will watch as the hillsides go from green to brown, leaving just a fine network of green lines along the gullies; and then from brown to yellow with no green lines. And just down the road, last weekend, billowing clouds of smoke from a neighbour's paddock gave me an awful scare until I realised that the number of fire trucks meant it was a training exercise burn. Fire season underway in Victoria, and Queensland has had major bush fires already. And the snake in the grass is climate change, the warmer and drier it gets, the more, and more severe, bushfires we will get all over southern Australia.

If stumpy tails are strolling on my door step then snakes will soon be slithering over it, and a few days ago I saw the first one hurrying over my driveway. Always seems to be the way with farming - rain gets the pasture growing but also can lead to worms in sheep and will certainly lead to long dry grass that can be a fire hazard. Warm weather brings on the growth of flowers but also brings the snakes out of hibernation.

Is it just me that dreads summer? Maybe it is, maybe the whole population of Yass would be cheering on the Sydney weather presenter who in the record high temperatures a week or so ago strolled on to Bondi Beach, wriggled her high heels firmly into the sand, and proceeded to tell us how wonderful it was that it was already hot enough for the beach and Summer couldn't come fast enough. Funny isn't it that these people always present the weather from the beach on these sweltering days and not, say, from a bare paddock on the hills around Yass.

Come to think of it, isn't it funny that the climate change deniers (of whom my one time favourite National Barnaby is now sadly a leader) always make their pronouncements about how there is no such thing as global warming from the air conditioned environment of parliament house in Spring, and not from that same bare Yass paddock in Summer? Same reason I suppose.

Look I know Winter can have its down side on the southern tablelands. What's that you say? "Grim"? Well, yes, it can be grim. But you can always dress up warmly, stoke up a fire, close the curtains early on a dark evening, eat a roast hot from the oven. And Spring and Autumn can also have miserable windy and wet days. But those nine months don't have you watching your step for brown snakes in the long grass, or wondering whether one is visiting the shed to hunt mice around the feed bags.

And they don't have you anxiously scanning the horizon for columns of smoke, don't have you wondering whether you can smell smoke, don't have you feverishly reading weather bulletins to see how high the danger levels are going to be. Summer is tension for me, digging my fingers into the yard rail, not digging my toes into Bondi Beach, and I don't relax again until well into Autumn, endlessly grateful that the bush fire brigade people are hard at work on our behalf.

I bet they hate Summer too.

global warming

Thank god I am an atheist

From time to time some religious leader, somewhere, seeking to be provocative, will announce, smugly, that of course all morality comes from religion and therefore atheists, those scum of the Earth, have no morality.

Let's leave aside for the moment, the fact that not only is there absolutely no truth in this proposition but the reality is in fact the diametric opposite. The most immoral people on Earth are, always have been, religious, while all atheists are extremely moral people. Let's also leave aside the obvious remark that if it were true then the more extremely religious you were the more moral you would be, and this would make members of Al Quaeda, say, or the people who blow up abortion clinics, extremely virtuous.

So, let us behave as the climate change deniers do and set aside the real world. Let us pretend, just for the moment, that morality did come from religion. This would mean, would it not, that the only reason some people have for being moral, the only reason that stops the average citizen of, say, Kansas or Waziristan, from murdering and raping and robbing and blowing things up and being really nasty to contestants in reality shows, is a belief in an imaginary being.

These people have to have an imaginary friend tell them what's right and wrong?

Thank god I'm an atheist.

atheism

Set some thieves

I heard a representative of the Company Directors union the other day say that there should be no restriction of any kind on the salaries of CEOs. No one, except company directors, had any right to say anything about what they, the company directors, and the CEOs, earned. Certainly not shareholders. And absolutely no input from public interest or ethics or morality or even economics.

There seems to have been a whole procession of these spokespersons in recent times - foresters against conserving trees, nuclear physicists in favour of nuclear power, coal mine owners against reducing coal use, television executives in favour of advertising to children, cattlemen against national parks, coal mine unions against reducing coal use, supermarkets against accurate labelling, seed companies against GM restrictions, irrigators against reasonable water use, bankers against financial regulation, oil companies executives against petrol price controls, sugar cane farmers against reducing pesticide runoff, health fund owners against public medicine, housing company owners in favour of massive population growth, whaling company executives supporting whaling, private school principals in favour of grants to private schools, hotel spokesmen against any alcohol restrictions, and so on.

And each time I see one of them on television I look for something to throw (have to ask my dog to give me my shoe back), change channels, turn the sound down. I know that they will say the most outrageous things. Black will become white, up become down, damage become good, yes become no, fiction become fact, lies become truth. The results of extensive scientific research will be dismissed in a sentence, public opinion dismissed in a word. If these people have children and grandchildren they conveniently forget them and their future, if they have a conscience it is securely packed away in Swiss bank vault, if they once had any sense of right and wrong, or of public interest, it has long since been isolated from the rest of their brains by the scar tissue of a hundred board meetings. They are people, who, somewhat like diplomats, have been sent out to lie for their companies, and lie they do. If their company wants to bulldoze all the forests of Tasmania then so do they; if the planet is warming and their company pumps out CO2 then so be it, CO2 is good for the planet; GM food is good for everyone; children aren't obese and aren't influenced by adverts; the Murray River isn't drying and dying; petrol is cheap; cattle should devour national parks; the Barrier Reef isn't under threat from run-off; whales are abundant; nuclear power is problem free. They are people who must have another planet to go when this one is stuffed, because they clearly don't see themselves as being affected by any of the activities of companies they represent, rather like the lawyers representing Al Capone.

I keep hoping, foolishly, for one of them, just one, to do a Mal Meninga, who on the brink of running for political office, recoiled back and said no, I can't do this any more. And just walk away from the companies who are willfully causing so much damage to human beings, our society, and the world we live in. But they don't, too enamoured of, too addicted to, it seems, their seat at the high table with the bosses, their Armani suits and Harbour mansions and Porsche Boxers. So we need to get them on the path to rehabilitation, flush the drug out of their systems, for their own good, and ours.

And I thought how about there be a two strikes law? If one of these people makes two ridiculous anti-public interest statements in favour of greed and destruction then they have to go and work for the opposition. For consumer groups, and conservation activists, and organic farmers, and sustainable energy developers, and shareholder groups. And they have to for some period, say a year, work actively and wholeheartedly for the groups they once opposed.

Two advantages. They themselves might, just might, see the error of their ways, and never go back to their unconscionable behaviour. And second, the opposing groups could learn a great deal about how to oppose these organisations effectively, learn their secrets, find their dirty linen, setting a thief to catch a thief. There might even come a day when no one could be found to do these dirty jobs anymore. When companies are exposed to full public accountability and exposure with no bouncer to hide behind.

Don't hold your breath though - there still seem to be spokespeople for cigarette companies around.

media

Girt by sea

I have had a crashed computer for two weeks. Once upon time, oh, say, ten years ago, that would have meant just a mild inconvenience of having to hand write a letter instead of word processing (remember that term?) and that would have been that. But these days it leaves you feeling isolated from the world outside the house. No more instant communication with friends in Perth, or Paris; no more reading, as published, newspapers online in Britain or America; no more responding to other bloggers or to petitions; no online banking or registering for a conference. We have become so used to being instantly part of the world community that I felt as if I had been plunged back into the 1920s.

Exactly 80 years ago my family were on a crowded migrant ship coming from Britain. The boat people of their day they were part of a scheme by a Premier of WA to populate the south west. Every generation thinks that the previous generation of migrants were the best ones. Had some kind of pure motives, untainted by consideration of economics, just keen to be part of the young and free people of the great southern land, instantly leaving any thought of original homelands behind them, and with much needed skills that instantly had them functioning as part of the Australian community.

But it wasn't quite like that in the 1920s, and I doubt that it ever has been. My family were escaping the misery of the coal mining industry, and the poor wages and terrible living conditions of the north of England then. Almost all the other passengers, crowded onto this old ship, were similar - they had come from mines, or factories, or shops or offices. They were hoping for better climate, more chances for the kids, but they weren't happy about coming. And they were put onto uncleared small blocks of land and, with no farming skills, and no money, told to establish dairy farms. And, while they were still at sea, Wall Street collapsed as a result of that earlier period of greed and madness and the global financial crisis granddaddy them all began. And, perhaps worst of all, they were essentially on their own. Communications back to the land of their birth involved the exchange of handwritten letters which could take months. They had, and knew they had, cut themselves off from all the family and friend support networks (very strong in mining communities) that they had always relied on. Internet connections and video links would have made a huge difference.

But the country was strange, and hot, and had snakes, and the locals weren't too friendly to the ten pound Poms, so for many years they stuck together with people they had met on board, people with shared backgrounds and experiences, especially when things got really grim and the men of the family had to go on the road working hard labour for the dole.

I have no doubt that later migrant generations of eastern and southern Europeans, and then Vietnamese, and now Afghans and Sri Lankans, could all tell similar stories (often with the horrors of war added) about their arrivals in the land of beauty rich and rare. Big difference now is that there are shock jocks and shock politicians, screaming abuse at the new arrivals, calling them diseased and dangerous and dole bludgers, and, sickeningly, terrorists.

Wonder if any of Wilson Tuckey's ancestors were on the wharf at Fremantle when my ancestors arrived, dazed, and depressed and somewhat desperate? Must email him to find out, if I ever have a working computer again.

asylum seekers

Ozymandias

Look, everyone knows I am no financial whiz kid, not even a financial fizzing old man, but there are some things I do know. One is that the Liberal Party has yet again demonstrated the hypocrisy it has shown so often since it found itself in the depths of opposition. Overnight, it seemed, things they wouldn't do in government became essential; things they had done became taboo. And with the financial crisis they have excelled themselves. These are people who demanded no action, were quite happy to let "the market", that mythical sole arbiter of truth and decency in our society, deal with the crisis by watching thousands lose their jobs and houses. That is, happy to let the average person on Comur Street pay all the price for something they hadn't done; while the heads of banks and other giant corporations, whose greed had caused the problem, laughed all the way to discreet banks in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands. The last thing Mr Turnbull and friends would have done was provide money to ordinary people to keep the retail sector ticking over until the resource sector kicked back in again.

But it doesn't mean I think the government is beyond criticism, nowhere near beyond criticism in fact. The individual cash handouts could have been better targeted so that on the one hand some didn't end up stimulating Italy (that's Berlusconi's job, yes, that is a double entendre) and on the other there wasn't a low end cut-off in which people as poor as church mice, like your columnist from Grub Street, didn't receive anything. If I was marking young Wayne's assignment, I would have said "good attempt, marred by some silly errors caused by lack of attention to detail, must try harder. 9/10". Young Malcolm on the other hand wouldn't get more than 1/10, especially for the nonsense about the stimulus causing interest rates to rise.

But the lack of attention to detail has been evident in much of the stimulus. The anecdotes about poorly chosen school projects (again hypocrisy from the Liberals, who left public schools to run down for 11 years while building Olympic swimming pools and rowing sheds at Kings School) are just the tip of the iceberg I suspect. And this week came stories of poorly installed roof insulation, by unqualified, but now richer, "tradesmen", causing house fires. Again, both criticisms, from a party that would have totally relied on private enterprise in the same way, and howled in outrage at any suggestion of government regulation and control of private contractors, were thick with hypocrisy, but that doesn't make them wrong. This has been sloppy work, like stimulus cheques sent overseas, and it seems to have been caused, in the case of the schools, by an unwillingness to let individual schools know best what they needed, and to let the NSW Education department, for example, impose hasty and irrational decisions from the top down. In the case of the insulation there seems to have been an unwillingness to believe that there could be such a thing as a shonky operator when big bundles of cash were up for grabs unsupervised. Who could have predicted that?

So a great pity, and lost opportunities to simultaneously help to stimulate the economy via the building industry, and do enormous good for public schools and the conservation of energy and reduction of greenhouse gas production. Remember Ozymandias, the statue of a once mighty king out in the desert? I think the Rudd memorials similarly are going to be the shells of burnt out roofs, and unwanted classrooms and libraries, all with notices saying "My name is Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Prime Ministers: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!".

And I do.

Kevin Rudd

Attenborough presents

Back in the golden age, those long ago times just before the Woodstock swan song, back when it was bliss to be alive, and to be young was very heaven, back to the spring of hope, back in fact to the 1960s, we all thought we knew how to save the planet. Simple really, pity it hadn't been thought of before, but it was the magic of television that was going to make it a practical proposition. And this was it - get David Attenborough to present nature documentaries. Dozens of them. Cover every possible plant and animal group, every part of the world, every habitat, every major natural event. Adopt every technological advance in filming, make use of every biological scientist and the most recent research results, find the most charismatic and empathisable species and individuals and put David into close contact with them.

The logic? Obvious really. The problem, we thought, was that the people who were hell bent, it seemed, on destroying every part of the natural world with chain saws, bulldozers, large fishing trawlers, pollution, explosives, guns; and for Chinese medicines, wood chips, and den trophies; were simply behaving out of ignorance. So David Attenborough's role, if he chose to accept it, would be to remove the dark of ignorance by shining in the bright light from moving images of gorillas, and dolphins, parrots, snakes, animals without backbones; of whales and zebras migrating, of frogs mating; of ancient trees, and unusual flowers, and strange mushrooms.

And gradually, over time, the people who loved the smell of burning forests in the morning, the ones who employed the bulldozers, the ones who ground up the penis bones of tigers, the people who casually dropped sticks of dynamite off the back of boats, and the people who built golf courses on coastal sand dunes, would say, "oh, my goodness gracious me, I hadn't realised we were killing such friendly animals, such magnificent plants. And now I know I must stop, and spend the rest of my ill-gotten gains, and my life, in trying to atone, by donating money to conservation groups and chaining myself to bulldozers." And if they didn't immediately get to this point themselves, then we would only have to wait a little longer and in a year or two their children would be tugging on their sleeves saying "Daddy, daddy, why are you killing chimpanzees?"

Well, now I'm as old as the Rolling Stones (though somewhat better preserved) and I'm still waiting. What went wrong with our cunning plan? The other day Peter Garrett gave a talk in which he said we should be trying to protect ecosystems rather than individual species, but also, depressingly, said that we had to make "pragmatic" decisions about which species could be saved. The media interpreted this to mean that he was happy to let species go extinct, in a kind of ecological triage system, if we couldn't afford to save them, and we couldn't. Right on cue in came the Chinese to support Peter. The media had the cuddly images of perhaps a dozen young Pandas. Announced, as usual, by simplistic television presenters, as a good news story that the Panda was being saved as a result of all these births. But, unusually, the plot thickened. Seems all these young pandas are being born as a result of an IVF program, adult Pandas won't breed in captivity. A Chinese ecologist pointed out that consequently you certainly couldn't think that these births from a test tube, born into a laboratory, however undeniably cuddly and photogenic the consequences, had anything at all to do with conserving wild Pandas. Furthermore, he said, the problem with the Pandas was that their habitat was disappearing rapidly as a result of unchecked development. He rather hoped that it might be possible to slightly adjust some development to leave a bit of Panda space here and there, for old times sake, but you could tell he wasn't holding his breath over the prospects that this might happen.

And when it was recently pointed out that palm oil plantations in Indonesia were wiping out orangutans as forest was cleared, a right wing think tank was outraged that there be any suggestion we should try to stop this happening, and the grocery people were unwilling even to label products as containing palm oil to give consumers a choice. And generally in Australia (as elsewhere), any suggestion that a piece of vital habitat be protected to preserve the species that live in it is met with at best indifference and at worst contempt, and the bulldozers go in, sooner or later. Garrett's reference to conserving biodiversity falls on deaf ears - people neither know nor care what biodiversity is, nor about the individual species that comprise the biodiversity of a particular place. Whatever cuddly animals and unusual trees are present are out of sight and out of mind, and there is absolutely no link to whatever wildlife documentaries have been seen by developer, bulldozer driver, or the general public. Any online or newspaper article about an oil spill (sorry, "floating seaweed" we call it now) or other environmental damage will be met with an outpouring of contempt for the environment and everything in it, and every incident will be seen as a one off, wiping out a few whales here, a few turtles there, big deal, but certainly not a lesson to be learnt when the next multibillion dollar oil well is proposed.

I remember a story I once read about a white student in an outback school who was asked his opinion about Aboriginal people. "They are bastards" he said. So the school undertook an extensive program of cross-cultural education for his class. After a long course looking at Aboriginal culture, society and history the student was asked if his opinion had changed - "yes, they are cunning bastards". Ideas and prejudices run in parallel lines. It is, it seems, quite possible to enjoy an Attenborough documentary, on, say, birds, purely as entertainment, on a Sunday night, and see, on Monday, absolutely no connection between it and the bulldozer clearing trees that you observe from your commuter train. Or indeed see no connection with the bulldozer you are driving yourself. There is a world of nature documentaries, and a world of everyday life, and the two things are unconnected. No matter how many documentaries are shown, human behaviour will not change. So people who think trees, and kangaroos, and parrots, and flying foxes, are pests, and obstacles to progress, the obvious response after watching a documentary might be to change "pests" to "attractive pests".

Andrew Bartlett recently wrote of the "5 per cent of people who allow more than 1 per cent of their daily thoughts to be occupied by matters political". That is, he was pointing out, in effect, those of us who are consumed by politics/current affairs, and who assume as a consequence that everyone else is too, are completely wrong. That is why political junkies always get a shock when they find the general public uninformed about, say, Iraq, or emissions trading, or leadership turmoil, or utegate (rather in the way that those, like me, who allow none of their daily thoughts to be occupied by matters motoring, can't understand the enthusiasm of the rev heads at Bathurst). To extend Andrew's analysis we could speak of the "5 per cent of people who allow more than 1 per cent of their daily thoughts to be occupied by matters environmental".

Whether the other 95% watch nature documentaries or not, they don't care about the fate of the subjects of those documentaries. We need a new cunning plan.

Cross-posted at ABC Unleashed.

Foxhole for atheists

Well, at last I am all booked in for The 2010 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, Australia, March 12 - 14, 2010. They had, amazingly, already sold out of gold passes, so you had better get in quick. I hope many of my readers will see me there, oh, as well as checking out Dawkins and a number of others on a star-studded program.

atheism

Minding our Ps and Qs

There would be those, I imagine, who would think I am being politically incorrect, but I think it is time to bring back political correctness, or, more correctly, just correctness. I had finally reached this conclusion when a tv reporter said that he knew it was "politically incorrect" but he liked the old steam trains, driven by mountains of coal. No, Peter, I yelled at the tv, its not correct because we have to cut out the use of coal altogether, faced with a melting planet, and this kind of sentimental rubbish doesn't help. But the turning point, the moment when I yelled out my window "I'm mad as hades and I'm not going to take it anymore" came when I saw the television skit with white Australians painted up in blackface playing the Jacksons including the recently dead Michael, in an appalling performance (including groin clutching) that would have seemed gross even in the first piece of television I ever saw, the "Black and White Minstrels", over 50 years ago. And when Australian commentators, and Julia Gillard, were puzzled as to why Americans might think this was offensive.

Like all my dear readers I was brought up to behave correctly, and politely, the two being synonymous towards other people, especially those "less fortunate than myself". And as I grew older I learned that there were more subtle considerations, that the kind of language used in relation to Aborigines, and migrants, and the disabled, those with different sexual orientation, the poor, and even, in those distant days, women, had consequences, mattered to them, and to the society we all shared. Affected how they were treated, what opportunities they had.

John Howard, who I supposed must have been raised, more or less, as I was, threw out politeness and correctness (calling them, incorrectly, politically correctness) for political purposes in 1996. Let's call a spade a spade, he said, having calculated, correctly as it turned out, that attacking people who were polite, and allowing the impolite ones to attack the easy (and popular) targets in Australian society, was a way to steal Pauline Hanson's thunder, and some of her votes, and obtain and retain power. And in using this cynical ploy he unleashed the demons who had long been frustrated at being unable to use all the carefully honed terms for women and people of any group but WASP, and then all hell broke loose on the airwaves, in the pubs, and on the streets of Cronulla and elsewhere. But he is long gone, little Johnny (see, in the days before political correctness ended I wouldn't have drawn attention to his height, won't again, after this), on his way, it seems, to permanently rub shoulders with the big men of rugby league. So we don't need to follow his prescriptions about political discourse in Australia any more. Can all of us go back to being polite and making our grandmother's proud of us? Can we go back to avoiding words that cause pain and misery and help to keep the victims of prejudice prejudiced against? Can go back to the Australian ideas of mateship and a fair go and not hitting a man (or woman) when they are down? Can we go back to not judging on skin colour or language or sex or physical attributes?

Can we go back in fact to ... Ah, no, wait, let me re-phrase that. Can we go forward to radio stations and newspapers and reality television shows that don't thrive on sneering and demeaning and assaulting people with words, and to election campaigns that are not fought by demonising some members of our society? Can we resume trying to go forward to a society in which there are equal rights and opportunities for all?

So the next time you hear a ranter on the radio, turn him off, and the next time you see a vicious newspaper columnist, avoid reading her, the media owners will soon get the message that politeness is back to stay. And think about your own words. As my grandmother used to say - if you can't say something nice about someone don't say anything at all. Or, as some say, better to keep your mouth closed and have people think you are stupid than open it and remove all doubt. Don't use racist and sexist language yourself, don't tell nasty jokes about women or immigrants or Aborigines, and don't put up with it when your mates down the pub indulge themselves. You'll be able to look at yourself in the mirror next morning without embarrassment.

A bit of correctness might have stopped Mr Sandilands (see, already I am being polite) from wanting to send Magda Szubansky to a concentration camp, might have stopped him strapping a 14 year old girl to a lie detector, and asking her, live on air, about her sex life. Might have stopped Hey Hey approving mockery of MJ and Kamahl. You want to argue with me on that? Feel free.

But mind your Ps and Qs.

racism

Sh-t happens

The day after the Samoan tsunami I heard a tv reporter, after recounting the death and destruction and misery and coming plagues, say "their Christian faith will comfort them". It's the kind of thing you say on these occasions of course, and people nod wisely. Ah yes indeed, wouldn't do for me, but if you are a believer it must be a comfort. Sort of like the "no atheists in foxholes" nonsense.

But having nodded wisely I stopped to think. Never a good move with religious mythology. And I said to myself "why?" Let me see if I understand the options. First there might be a big unfeeling brute of a god who when he gets bored, or has a hangover or something, pulls the Earth's crust in such a manner as to set off a tidal wave just near some beaches occupied by one of the most inoffensive and nicest people on the planet, the Samoans. As a result these nice people, men women and children, old and young, have their lives taken, families taken, suffer horrible injuries, have their homes smashed to pieces, their animals killed. I'm not sure where Christian faith manages to comfort them for believing in such a creature.

The second option might be that there is an omnipotent but somewhat nicer creature, who, although he could stop the natural event of earthquake and tsunami (even though they are going to hit some of the most religious and god-fearing people on the planet), chooses not to. Instead, in a kind of video game, he decides to randomly save a few of the people who might otherwise have died etc. And they, believing that their faith saved them (though why it didn't save their equally true-believing neighbours must be a mystery), might take comfort in that.

Or third, they might believe in some sort of distant figure in the sky, who neither starts disasters nor plucks a few survivors from their path, but, having noticed that some humans (and animals) have been killed on a planet he purportedly created for them, takes them up, 2 year olds and 82 year olds alike, and gives them another life in some distant part of the universe as yet unseen by the Hubble telescope. In that case, I suppose, survivors, believing in a god not powerful enough to prevent disaster in general, nor enough to save extremely religious people, instead believe in one that removes people from their families for no apparent reason and takes them somewhere out of reach to their loved ones left behind.

And the final option, I suppose, might be a kind of combination of the three. That is, whatever the hell god is up to with his earthquakes and tsunamis and random deaths and theoretical second life believers trust that if you just knew enough it would kind of make sense. And therefore they believe something that may have been said by someone who may have once lived who was a self-proclaimed god translator who thought that yes indeedy it did all make sense. All reminiscent of public attitudes to the war in Iraq, or to banking deregulation. At least one Samoan could be heard on a television report saying something like "help me christ to believe that this is all for the best" or words to that effect.

Look, I don't know about you, but I think my atheist religion would be of much more use to me than any of that self-contradictory rubbish. I think I would accept that the movement of tectonic plates in the Pacific rim triggers earthquakes, and these in turn can trigger tsunamis. And that on low Pacific islands, or even high ones where people, naturally, live on beaches, there are going to be high mortality rates and great loss of property as a result. No pattern to it, no one to blame, no get-out-of-disaster free cards being issued, just a big wave with your number on it. As an atheist then I would make sure that scientists came up with the best possible tsunami and earthquake warning systems. I would try to make sure that infastructure and planning and building codes in seaside villages were of a high standard, and I would try to build appropriate refuges. And I would make sure that disaster planning and response was of the highest order to rescue and treat people (and animals) and then to rebuild. I wouldn't waste time looking for answers in the sky to a question that has no meaning. Not feeling obliged to do that would be a great comfort to me. What about you?

atheism

Cui Bono

I am close to putting Barnaby Joyce on my list of least favourite politicians (Wilson Tuckey, Steve Fielding, Eric Abetz ... it's a long list). Climate change denial and a proposal to raise the PM's salary to a million dollars in his latest interview. The reason? So we can attract those big businessmen who gave us the global financial crisis into politics. The public, rightly, is very suspicious, and angry, that politicians have ultimate control over their own remuneration, and the latest 3% rise has raised the usual anger. I don't share that concern. I think many (oh, alright, some) politicians both work hard and do a good job, and their salary should match those of other hard working people in the community like nurses and scientists and aged carers and teachers and police. No question about that, fair's fair.

But what I do worry about is politicians controlling the electoral system of Australia. If you want to see the end result of that look no further than America and Zimbabwe. And they are at it again this year with a review of the electoral system to be carried out to address all kinds of issues, of which only one, possibly two, is valid.

Just to remind you. The most important features of our electoral system are those which make it the fairest in the world. They are compulsory attendance (not compulsory voting) at a polling centre during the election period; preferential voting; a totally independent electoral office; a paper record of every vote cast; a transparent counting and recording of votes; public funding of candidates in proportion to their popularity; some control of the fairness and extent of advertising, and a transparency of its origin. If you were setting out to design a fair election process now you couldn't do better than that, and the absence of many of its features (for example in America and Britain, and Zimbabwe) make elections in many other parts of the world a poor representation of the needs and views of people in those countries.

Beware of people who want to tinker with this. Especially reject the introduction of electronic voting (a disaster for American democracy, notably in the election of George Bush); of the loss of preferential voting (again, first past the post systems are extremely unfair in countries like Britain and the US); of the loss of compulsory attendance (in most countries without this, the tiny attendance and consequent biased voting patterns, ensure rule by the rich for the rich); of the weakening of regulations for fair advertising (if you think there is some bad stuff now take a look at American elections where there is open slather to lie and lie and lie about opponents).

There is a need to have a look at funding for the major parties and how this is recorded and publicised. I wouldn't allow any outside funding, and I would prefer that all parties rely on their own membership fees and public funding. Again, the influence of big money and lobbyists in American politics is not something we want to see repeated here (think NSW politics and developers), and we are on a slippery slope already. Dropping the voting age to 16 is possibly worth discussing, but when I think that at that age I told my grandmother to vote for Menzies it is clear that 16 year olds are too immature to be trusted with the vote.

There is an old saying in the law "cui bono?" "who benefits?" Meaning if you want to solve a crime the best place to look is at those who stand to gain from murder or corruption or robbery. If you want to know what to do about the Australian electoral system find out who would benefit from the proposed changes (and who is against more funding transparency). It is the two major political parties and big corporations. Tell both that we like things the way we are thank you very much, as long as they get money out of Australian politics.

Perhaps if we agreed to another pay rise on condition that Australian elections stay as they are?

Australian elections

Pushing cars uphill

The very first car I ever owned, at the age of 18, was dropped off at our house by the second hand dealer. "Better put some petrol in it soon" he said, riding off into the sunset in another, much bigger, car. The nearest petrol station was some 5km away, in those far off days, so I set out immediately, and finding the gauge was on zero, switched to the reserve tank (yes, it was an old VW), only to find out that the used car dealer I had bought a car from had also drained the reserve. Well, brand new driver's licence in my pocket, I didn't know much about cars, but I did know that if you were running out of petrol it was best to drive fast in order to make it to the pump before you ran out. And the rest, dear reader, you can guess.

Was reminded of this sad introduction to driving the other day when we were hit with an unexpected prediction of some 40 million people in Australia in a much shorter time in the future than the time elapsed since I first pushed a car uphill into a garage. This was greeted with great enthusiasm by all the usual suspects, one saying, no worries, by then there will be 9 billion people on the planet we can sell lots more coal to pay for our 40 million. "Global warming", I want to say, "hasn't anyone in parliament heard of global warming except Wilson Tuckey?" But then another even sillier suggestion came that this was a jolly good thing because there would be lots more young people to look after all the old people they had been worried about. "But what happens when those young people get old?", I yelled at the tv, "are you going to have even more young people to care for those old young people? Isn't that like driving faster as you run out of petrol?".

But occasionally a good thought, among all the craziness that infests tv news bulletins these days (yes, I'm getting old). Britain is thinking of alternative strategies for the elderly. We live forever, us old people, these days, 75 is the old 65, 85 the old 75, and so on. An enquiry included "Policy should treat 75 as the normal upper age limit for economic activity, replacing the outmoded 60 to 65". And as a result, many more old people will need to learn new skills, for both work and pleasure. So, some excellent practical suggestions too: Funding should be switched from young students to older age groups. A birthday bonus should be paid into individual learning accounts when people reach a significant age (such as 50) to help pay for education courses. Those aged 75 and over should benefit from extra cash aid to help them study. Official employment statistics should include all those up to the age of 75.

So, all us oldies need to stop relying on the maths we learnt in 1955, or the science of 1960, and seriously go back to the old schoolyard. There needs to be much more support here for TAFE courses aimed at the over 50s, and more support for University of the Third Age, education on the internet, training built into employment for old apprentices. I'm sure you can think of more.

And a significant number of us need to keep up to date with environmental issues, climate change, demographics - these young politicians and businessmen need to learn about pushing cars.

Australian population

Cover up that chimp

I blame creationism for everything I don't blame corporate media for in my ongoing attempts to come to terms with what is wrong with the world of the 21st Century.

But something I hadn't previously put on the creationist list was oppression of female women. Fundamentalist religious oppression of women, yes, of course, just a tautology, but here I'm focusing on the creationist and women.

If you really understood that humans, male and female humans, have equally evolved from male and female earlier humans, and they in turn equally from male and female great apes, then the idea of oppressing the female portion of Homo sapiens sapiens would strike you as both laughable and obscene, depending upon mood. But then I saw a creationist questioning the other day how the first "male dog" that evolved could have found a mate, so the depths of incomprehension are truly great.

These are people who believed that a "god" created woman, demanded that their bodies be totally covered (could have created them ready made with a covering, but hey, mysterious ways, right?) in order not to inflame the sexual desires of men which he had created to be totally uncontrollable, ready to be set off at the merest distant glimpse of female lock of hair, ankle, hand, eye (again, mysterious ways), I mean, yeah, you set out to create a sexually reproducing organism and that's the way you would do it.

But at what point in an evolutionary development from apes to humans does the need to cover up the possessors of two X chromosomes arise? And at what point in the social development from hunter-gatherers to early farmers to city states does human nature suddenly evolve from one that deals quite comfortably with near nudity (male and female) in Australia and Africa and South America to one that doesn't in the Middle East?

In Victorian times it was the Christian fashion to cover the legs of furniture with draped fabric in order not to excite the menfolk (LEGS, get it?) and I don't know how we drifted away from this very good procedure, which should certainly be reinstated, as a matter of urgency. But I would like to take it further. I think all the female great apes should be completely covered up with fabric. It will not only stop the uncontrollable impulses of the great ape males, but prevent any impure thoughts among the human males that see them.

God should have seen to this himself with an edict somewhere in the good book, but I guess he just forgot, a lot on his mind telling people not to use their god-given impulses in relation to sex and food, but to follow strict recipes in both. And equally unaccountably the fundamentalists, following so blindly the letter of the laws, have apparently not noticed the temptations of the female great apes.

So, ever helpful, I have taken it upon myself to make the suggestion. Don't thank me. Just doing my job of pointing out where creationism diverges from reality.

Everywhere.

But I converge on reality on The Watermelon Blog.

creationism

Untidy town awards

Saw a piece the other day that will gladden the hearts of messy gardeners (like me) and ease the strain on those who strive for garden perfection. It was a study of British gardens, but since most Australian gardens are a facsimile of British gardens, in style and content, the findings apply just as much to Sydney or Yass as they might do in Birmingham or Stockton on Forest. I can sum up the findings very briefly - "Untidy gardens are best". There, doesn't that make you feel better as the tidal wave of Spring weeds overwhelms your garden beds, lawns grow so fast they seem determined to singlehandedly reduce CO2 in the air to 350ppm, and shrubs and trees grow inches every night?

Here are the suggestions in more detail:
*Plant large shrubs and let them grow big. Shrubs and trees produce more vegetation where wildlife can live and eat.

*Allow at least some flowers to turn to seed and the lawn to grow tall. Don't be in a hurry to clear up fallen leaves. Don't be too tidy: don't be in a hurry to clear up everything when the garden stops flowering. Just leave a bit of stuff lying around.

*Create a pond for insects, frogs and toads. Think before stocking it with fish which will eat insect eggs and larvae.

*Don't illuminate your garden at night with bright lights. This will disturb many nocturnal creatures, such as moths.

*Create a compost heap – they are miniature nature reserves in themselves. Compost also enriches the soil.

*Keep hard surfaces (decking, paths, driveways, paved areas) to a minimum.

The author of the study, Ken Thompson of Sheffield University, said that Britain's 16 million gardens are a haven for hundreds of species of animals and plants that would find it impossible to survive on intensively farmed land "Gardens are amazingly diverse even compared to natural habitats that are good for wildlife. Gardens are more interesting on a small scale because they are so variable. All the wildlife responds to these variables ... Compared with an equivalent area of modern intensive farming, gardens are much, much better in terms of everything you measure, whether it is spiders, bugs or birds," he said "It sounds heretical, but from a biodiversity perspective most farmland would be improved by having a housing estate built on it" . I don't think I can add much to that, except to say that most Australian farms could be improved by having some untidy areas too. In Britain the study found that it didn't matter whether native or exotic plants were used. Here, because of the nature of our bird species, a good proportion of native shrubs and flowers would be very important.

So no more tidy towns - let your hair down and your grass and shrubs up and help to maintain biodiversity in your area. Tell your wife I said so.

Australian gardens

Keep evolution out of schools

Look, like everyone else I have no trouble dismissing creationists as bat-shit crazy religious fundamentalists who wouldn't know a scientific fact if the ghost of Richard Feynman bit them on the backside. No trouble at all, and I am always happy to join in a little gentle poking of a stick through the bars on the megachurch windows and stirring things up a bit. But while that gives me a nice warm glow of mental superiority to go with my first cup of morning coffee, it really avoids the question of how the creationist/ID crowd find it so easy to convince these simple people that up is down, night is day.

And I guess the answer, reluctantly (as I drink my second cup of morning coffee), is that it is the fault of most of us who write about Darwinism. The mistake, the original sin, is that we have talked about species evolving when we have talked about evolution. An easy mistake to make, and you can see why we made it, but it has proved fatal.

As soon as you understand this you understand why the babble of creationists, as apparently as mindless as "speaking in tongues", is actually based on a fundamental educational failure, and a consequent fundamental misunderstanding.

The two commonest glossolallies are "where are the transitional fossils?" and "if humans evolved from apes why are apes still around?" They don't ask these questions merely to annoy (although it is a bonus), but because they genuinely think these are points to be considered. And the fact that they can ask such questions, 150 years after "The Origin of Species", 150 years of tens of thousands of biologists and paleontologists, and geologists, and chemists, and botanists studying every aspect of evolutionary theory, and after being schooled in scientifically advanced western countries, is a sign of our collective failure.

All of us, creationists and rational people alike, understand how the first organism evolved out of the primordial soup by a process of natural selection gradually producing a bundle of self-reproducing chemicals, no argument there. And it is a sign of Darwin's genius that he understood a process that could lead from inorganic chemicals to organic life forms without any need for an imaginary friend to send a lightning bolt from out-stretched finger. But it is what we say about what happens next that has left us still having to debate Robert Chambers one and a half centuries after his theories should have been buried without a vestige remaining.

If these people who start creation museums (yet another oxymoron) had as much intelligence as a neanderthal they would ask not why apes are still with us but why, if all life on Earth evolved from the very first bacterium swimming in the primordial ooze, do we still have bacteria today?

In a sense "natural selection" is the least important of Darwin's ideas. Oh sure, it's not bad, but it's so obvious that I don't know why I didn't think of it. But the far more vital part of evolutionary theory (or "Darwinism", as the evangelicals call it, if any creationists are still reading) is the idea of allopatric speciation. Never heard of it? No, and that is the problem.

Allopatric speciation is simply this - if one part of a species becomes separated by a geographic barrier (a mountain range forms, sea level rises, a desert comes into being, a river changes course, a landslide falls, a continent moves, a glacier extends), and stays separate long enough, then its members will no longer be able to breed with the other part of the population and it will therefore have become a different species.

Doesn't matter why it becomes different - just an accumulation of mutations might do the trick, hell Lamarckism would do the trick. But in fact Darwin had this one pegged - natural selection, acting on variation within the two populations, causes them to diverge. And the more different to the original environment is the place in which the second population lives, the more adaptation will occur, and the more the second species will differ from the first. And, in turn, as further changes in the land occur, these two species can in turn split, and so ad infinitum.

So this is the answer to the questions that so furrow the low brows of our primitive fundamentalist cousins. Both the original species and the separated species can (and often do) go on surviving side by side. The "human" population somehow got separated from the "chimpanzee" population, one took the high road and one took the low, but both made it all the way to 2009. Sometimes though, one or more of the subsequent species become extinct for all sorts of reasons, and if their fossils don't survive we may never know of their loss.

And astute readers (the creationists have all turned off the lights and left the building now) will have seen that this pattern of speciation makes the concept of "missing links" meaningless. You could, with a time machine, trace back through every chimpanzee generation to the chimpanzees of, say, 5 million years ago. And you could do the same with human generations. And replaying the process backwards you would see these two populations become gradually identical and then merge into one (and further back you would see that population merge with the orangutan one, and so on). There would be no gaps, no missing links, no opportunity for missing links. Play it back the two populations become one, play it forward they become two, play it as many times as you like, Sam, and the process of speciation remains the same.

And the process happens no matter how different or similar the resulting species are. Chimpanzees might well have become more bipedal more naked apes, humans might well have remained as hairier less bipedal ones. The reasons they, we, look like we do now is bound up in the climatic and geographic fluctuations of long ago Africa.

So if I was writing biology text books for use in Texas or Kentucky or Missouri schools I think I would join their education authorities in demanding that the word evolution not be mentioned. Instead I would put all of my effort into explaining speciation. Show how that original bacterium could become 2, 4, 8, 20, 30, 60 ... species. Could become, even after losing tens of thousands of species along the way, the tens of thousands of species, including humans, chimps, and bacteria, we see today. Explain about the movements of continents, and climate change, and its effects on both the origin and demise of species. You will find they will know about climate change in the past as a result of another misinformation campaign, but it will come in useful here.

And by teaching, over and over, the mind numbingly obvious process of speciation you will cut off the oxygen from the creationists who want to keep children ignorant of the origins of the astonishingly diverse plants and animals we see today. Give them the sense of grandeur in this view of life on this planet.

The Watermelon Blog, as those adapted to it know, has a certain grandeur all of its own.

creationism

Tweet tweet

No, not the sound of the thornbirds now feeding young in a nest just outside my window.

But I am still wrestling with the idea and, more to the point, practice, of Twitter. If you want to watch me wrestle, or just get updates on new blog pieces, or occasional random thoughts or observations, visit http://twitter.com/, get an account and download some software, and register as a "follower" of http://twitter.com/watermelon_man. I know "follower" has ominous connotations of Hitler, or Charles Manson, or the Pied Piper, or John Howard, but think of it as a little band of good guys, wandering across a landscape, and eating pieces of watermelon when thirsty.

It may all be nothing, still, but when I discovered that Kevin Rudd has over half a million followers (on Twitter), I thought, this is the way of the future, Kevin knows which way the wind blows, while I've just been on the pavement, thinking about the government. So I'm getting with the twitter generation like young Kevin. It may be a technology too far for this old Macintosh SE man, but let's see if we can make it together.

twitter

I am all right Jack

When Victorian minister Tim Holding (is it just me or are government ministers getting younger every day?) was found alive and well after being lost on a high and cold mountain recently it was inevitable that after all the nonsense about which media group's helicopter had actually found him, and the nonsense about how he was ("dehydrated" said one reporter, ignoring the inconvenient fact of images of Mr Holding on the mountain drinking from his water bottle), would come the demands that he pay back the cost of his rescue.

The first time I remember hearing this media demand was when Tony Bullimore was rescued from his overturned yacht in the southern ocean (amazingly, this is now 12 years ago!). Most of us were horrified by this idea, taking for granted the idea that a human in distress should be saved, if possible, by the nearest country, and that in turn an Australian in trouble might need help in a distant place some other time. But with every rescue the demand for repayment has grown, and reached an absolute frenzy when the young English chap lost in the Blue Mountains for 11 days was found alive and well, especially frenzied from the television networks that hadn't paid for his story.

And now Tim Holding, and the frenzy starts again. When all the television channels sing to the same tune you have to think that they are either unable to think for themselves (for example when every sports report now uses the word "redemption" to describe sporting events) or that they are following an agenda (no regulation of children's advertising). And this business about rescues is undoubtedly an agenda.

You see the kind of people who own television networks, all round the world, seem to share a vision of a world in which every aspect of human endeavour is a profit-making endeavour. And political parties, of purportedly both left and right, have caught this brand of swine flu, and have been busy for the last 20 years or so, privatising every publicly owned enterprise. The only remaining ones are those that they just haven't got around to yet. Roads, rail, buses, airlines, hospitals, child care, aged care, the Commonwealth Bank, airports, employment services, telephone companies, all gone. And many others, like power stations and prisons and national parks and Australia Post, on their way.

Even those not yet privatised are saddled with user pays. Because, well, the only thing that motivates human beings to do anything is profit. Except a few hold outs, like fire brigades and emergency services. In America, where there is a desperate battle to pull back some health care into the public domain, fire brigades are used as an example of a public service where need shouldn't depend on ability to pay. Conservatives there have as a result started talking about privatising fire brigades - non-subscribers would simply watch their houses burn down. And here, rescue services are an example of volunteers and public servants like police, giving up time, and taking risks, to save people in peril, whether they are government minister, tourist, small child, rich or poor.

Can't have that, or people might start wondering about some of the other once public services. So make them pay. And slowly a society once renowned for mateship and compassion becomes renowned for greed and every man for himself.

user pays

My Oath

You might be surprised to learn, as I was, that the legal (as distinct from the political) process of becoming Prime Minister of this country is no big deal. Not for us the heartfelt oath of office of the President of the US. No, our guys are so laid back and reticent that you would think they were becoming leader of a country that doesn't take its politicians, or itself, too seriously. The governor-general just sort of mumbles "Whaddya reckon mate, you up for this?" and the new prime minister sort of shuffles his feet, looks down at the carpet, goes red in the face, and says "Dunno, suppose so, give it a bash, see how it goes". And then they shake hands in an embarrassed sort of way and have a cup of tea and some lamingtons.*

Call that an oath? This is an oath and how it should be taken:

The Prime Minister Elect and the Governor General walk side by side into the Great Hall of Parliament House. The edges of the Hall are in darkness, but in the centre a circle of lights illuminates a circle of people, standing quietly. There are nurses, teachers, farmers, carers, old people, young people, people in wheel chairs, musicians, scientists, artists, doctors, firemen, writers, road workers, train drivers, social workers, conservationists, judges, veterinarians, soldier's mothers, the chronically ill. They are representatives of the people who will depend on this Prime Minster to champion them, to look after their interests, to care about them. There is a space in the circle for the PME and GG to pass through and then it closes behind them, all the people in the circle now holding hands. The PME and GG reach the centre of the circle where a single spotlight illuminates a table with four books on it - "Origin of Species", Ragged Trousered Philanthropists", "1984", "Catch-22". The PM Elect chooses one or more of these and places a left hand on them, the right hand being placed on the heart, and speaks -

"I promise -
1. To maintain or improve the well-being of the environment of the country"
Governor General: "Farmers try to hand on a farm to their descendants in better condition than they received it, so, PM, you can do no less for the country. Some jobs on your to do list include improving river flows, ending land clearing, reducing pollution, closing coal mines, increasing renewable energy use: on your not-to-do list should be uranium mining and nuclear energy."

2. "To ensure that all citizens have access to good health care".
Governor General: "Being healthy improves the quality of individual life. Unhealthy children don't learn well, unhealthy adults can't work well, unhealthy old people are high cost. Being unhealthy doesn't relate to the ability to pay for access to health care, except in a negative way. As PM you will ensure that all will receive medical care that reflects need not income. And support preventative medicine".

3. "To ensure that all children have access to good quality, secular, education".
Governor General: "Prime Minister, your oath emphasizes the words quality and secular. You must ensure that the public schools have funding and teaching resources to match the best private schools. And you are pledging your government not to assist schools based on religion - children have a right to an education space which does not add to religious indoctrination in the home."

4. "To protect the rights of all citizens equally".
Governor General: "As Prime Minister you will be the one who ensures that sex, or sexual preference, or age, or wealth, or skin colour, or ethnic origin, or disability, or political activity, or belief system, do not create divisions between people in their potential for involvement in society. Whatever rules apply to some must apply to all, whatever benefits are available to some must be available to all".

5. "To maintain a sound and equitable justice system".
Governor General: "As PM you must must ensure that there remains a single golden thread running through the web of Australian Criminal Law "which is that the burden of proving guilt rests with the prosecution ... a man shall be presumed innocent until proven otherwise". Oh, and that justice, as she weighs the scales, is truly blind as to the status of the parties to any case."

6. "To support a media culture of freedom of speech and a voice for all views".
Governor General: "All opposition leaders call for a free and diverse media, and all governments instantly forget; your job in relation to media is to continue to think like an opposition leader. Ensure there are no media monopolies, support freedom of information and whistleblower laws, retain an open internet, allow public demonstrations, tell the truth".

7. "To promote scientific and cultural development of the country".
Governor General: "You will begin by agreeing that all of your decisions, in health care, the environment, the economy, all of your decisions will be based on the science, not on the activities of lobby groups or the quest for short term populism. And your aim will be, with your encouragement, to make culture as important in Australian society as sport. More if possible".

8. "To ensure that all citizens have access to water, food, and affordable housing".
Governor General: "No photo-opportunities, no media sound grabs, no non-core promises in election campaigns. Everything else in society flows from getting these fundamentals right. So no shunting off responsibility to giant corporations for profit, or small charity groups with no resources. Find out where the problem communities, and individuals, are, fix them. Easy".

9. "To maintain an economy in which extremes of wealth are muted".
Governor General: "As Prime Minister you will move in the circles of the rich and famous, and you will be tempted to see their interests as being the country's interests. They are not. Your role should be to ensure, every day in every way, that the rich become a little less rich and the poor become a little less poor by providing a ceiling on wealth and a floor under poverty".

10. "To protect against real enemies, internal and external".
Governor General: "There will be times, PM, when you will be tempted to invent some enemies to distract public attention from some stuff-up. Resist the temptation. Creating internal enemies divides society and leads to problems where there were none. Creating fake external enemies can get you caught in unwinnable wars. Besides, like the boy who cried wolf, you want the public onside when there is a real crisis".

- "and I will do so while maintaining the highest standard of integrity and ethical behaviour by myself, my ministers, and all other members of parliament; and while maintaining the dignity and effectiveness of the parliament of Australia."
Governor General: "I now declare you Prime Minister, servant of the land and people of Australia. Be good, and if you can't be good, be careful. Can I have my book back now please".

And just as every soldier carries a field marshal's baton in his knapsack, so every politician should carry, in a scroll, a copy of the Prime Minster's Oath. And if they feel, any of them, that they would be unable to make such an oath they should not agree to leadership of their party, and nor should they continue as parliamentarians.

* The actual question and answer exchange, for those who think I might have slightly understated the dignity and importance of the ceremony, is as follows:
Governor-General: "I invite you to take and subscribe the oath of office as Prime Minister".
Prime Minister Elect: "I, [Everyman/Everywoman], do swear that I will well and truly serve the Commonwealth of Australia, her land and her people in the office of Prime Minister. "

Cross-posted at ABC Unleashed.

Marked for life

Have tattoos when young, regret them later, but it is too late, the indelible stain is there for always. The kind of person you are in later life, not necessarily the kind of person who would have tattoos, has been compromised by the decisions you made while young. As a young man you might have, just for fun, tattooed H.A.T.E. on both sets of knuckles. Or had images of devils or guns or savage dogs or swastikas or "Hells Angel" or "Death to Sickos". And later, if you became the kind of person who might rather have L.O.V.E. on both hands, or Mary, or Mom, or "proud liberal", or "public option", or "Angel of the Morning", you will find it is all too late, no room on the body canvas.

America seems like a country trying to rise to its better self, but being doomed by the tattoos applied by Atwater and Rove, in hidden backrooms on sleazy alleyways, and Beck and O'Reilly and Coulter, up front and proud, advertising their wares on the main street. What is needed is some kind of process that would painlessly remove the old tattoos and make room for new ones. Give it a catchy name, oh, I don't know, the "Democratic process" perhaps.

Clean skin, no old tattoos, on The Watermelon Blog.

American politics

Sunburnt country

So the tourism industry is looking for a new way to promote Australia overseas after one or two less than totally successful previous attempts. What should we boast about, they seem to be asking, and advertising people were quick to point out that it wasn't so simple, that boasting about something in one state might well put the noses of the good folks of another state out of joint, and vice versa. But the whole concept seems to me wrong anyway, wrong in the way that big bananas and giant prawns and world's tallest buildings are wrong.

One of the things that gets up people's noses about America is the endless triumphalism and exceptionalism that comes from the American media, and some American politicians.

So Australia could be the opposite of that. We could have a campaign that is based on not having a campaign. Refusing to boast, to claim superiority, to claim endless wonderful magical experiences which are almost bound to end in disappointment when the actual experiences of, say, Bondi Beach, or outback bus trips, fail to live up to the glossy hype.

Not only could we become the country that boasts about not boasting, but we could also boast about a lot of other things we either don't do now, or, with a stroke of a Peter Garrett pen, could stop doing tomorrow. We don't have people wearing guns to political meetings or church services; we don't have nuclear power stations; we don't have a theocracy; we don't kill our native fauna; we don't clear forests; we don't have armed soldiers in our streets; we don't have GM crops; we don't kill whales; we don't let people who can't buy health care die; we don't, usually, have violence based on ethnic or religious divisions; we don't have silly national costumes; we don't execute our citizens; we don't have too many people; we don't pretend that oppression of women is culture. What else can you think of that we don't and shouldn't have, or do and shouldn't have (I'll drop Peter a line)?

So my advertising campaign would be based on a black screen, with a voice over (from anyone except Jack Thompson who has done every documentary voiceover in the last 100 years) which says "There are many things Australia doesn't have and doesn't want. We like it that way. If you want to come and fail to experience things sadly common elsewhere then by all means drop in. But we don't care if you don't. The fewer people who know the secret the better really. So if you come, don't tell your friends. It will be our little secret."

I believe there is an award for the winning entry and I reckon I'm a shoo-in to collect it. What do you reckon?