The Underwhelming Blog

Stop the boats. Seriously.

2013-03-11T00:44:00.000-07:00

The sun rose over the eastern expanse of the Indian Ocean at 5.31am on December 15th, 2010 but not much of its light reached the decks of the 15 metre long wooden fishing boat, the Maju Jaya, as it struggled south through 4 metre seas. It was monsoon season, and thick, low cloud hung above the water’s surface restricting visibility to just a few hundred metres.

A fierce wind and tropical rain had been battering the little boat since departing the Javanese coastal village of Tanjung Kait three days earlier. Onboard, suffering from exposure and seasickness, 89 people were crammed into a space that could barely accommodate 20. Most were huddled together below decks seeking respite from the wind and rain, others above them sheltered under ineffective tarpaulins earnestly anticipating sight of their destination - the perilous cliffs of Christmas Island’s north-east cape.

Just to their south, the people of Christmas Island were waking to another day of the most fierce weather they had seen in months. The conditions caused the presence of the Maju Jaya to go completely unnoticed by the island's Customs and Border Protection Service until Customs Officer Ross Martin happened to look out from the balcony of his room at The Mango Tree Lodge. He noticed the boat a few hundred metres from shore with black smoke pouring from the rear. The swell was so high the boat would disappear completely from view each time it slid down the face of a wave. It was 5.40am when he alerted Customs’ on-call officer Les Jardine.

About half the passengers onboard what was to become known as Suspected Irregular Entry Vessel 221 (SIEV-221) were from the Iraqi cities of Baghdad and Najaf. The remainder were Iranians fleeing Tehran and a small number of stateless Kurds escaping the conflict with Turkey.

The stories of their journey from distant homelands to a tiny volcanic island south of Indonesia are all too familiar. The streets of Baghdad and Najaf feature a flourishing market in people movement that is only considered “people smuggling” in destination countries like Australia. There is no such stigma in the Middle East as the practice is widely viewed as an acceptable means to escape danger and reunite families.

According to later testimony, the Iraqis on SIEV-221 each paid otherwise legitimate travel operators around $4,000 for fake travel documents and a flight from Baghdad to Kuala Lumpur where they boarded boats to the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. The Iranian market in people movement is less overt than in Iraq so the prices are higher. The Kurds and Iranians paid $8,000 to $13,000 each for flights to Jakarta, complete with forged passports and accommodation on arrival. These operations are run by syndicates with people on the ground in the passengers’ home countries, and in Malaysia, Indonesia and here in Australia. Operating with apparent impunity, they openly and freely move between here and the Middle East selling a promise of safe passage to Australia.

Those onboard SIEV-221 were staged at safehouses in Jakarta for two or three weeks before their final leg to Australia. The promises made to them tell as much about the naivety of the travellers as they do the disregard the people smugglers had for their safety. They were told they would sail to Australia on comfortable, even luxurious, boats with their own cabins. They were told their meals would be catered and the crew were trained, experienced seafarers.

In the evening of December 12 the travellers were collected from their accommodation in Jakarta and driven the 35 kilometres to the fishing village of Tanjung Kait. With thatch-roofed buildings and floating bamboo jetties crowding the water's edge, the village is small and chaotic. Here the travellers were led onboard two small wooden boats. As night fell, they were ferried out to deeper waters a few kilometres offshore where, in darkness, they were transferred onto the Maju Jaya.

It hasn’t come to light if, once onboard, any of the group complained about the obviously disgraceful conditions but, in a later inquest into the fate of the group, West Australian Coroner Alastair Hope would find, “the passengers found themselves in an extremely difficult position when they were finally taken to SEIV-221.”

"The passengers were all taken to the SIEV 221 by two or three smaller boats. By the time they were on board the SIEV 221 they were at sea, in the dark and had no ability to turn back. Many might ask why a passenger would travel this way if they could see how poor the boat was and could see there were few life jackets. The passengers had no ability to turn back once they appreciated this was their ‘final’ boat and the one to take them to Australia."

Having paid many thousands of dollars, travelled many thousands of miles, and given themselves over to the stewardship of their guides, the group were too heavily invested and too disempowered to do anything other than make themselves as comfortable as possible and wait out the journey.

Fast forward 72 hours and 320 nautical miles to the afternoon of December 14th. The most senior of the four crew onboard brought the boat to a standstill and called to a second boat that had been trailing them from Java to pull up alongside. He gave some final instructions to the other crew before stepping across to the second boat and heading back to Indonesia.

As Coroner Hope would later say, “In respect of the three remaining crew, they appear to have had limited relevant seafaring experience. It appears clear that so far as the people smugglers were concerned, both the vessel and its passengers were expendable.”

At first light the next morning, in the most appalling weather, the crew spotted the northern shores of Christmas Island. Expecting to be intercepted by Australian patrols, they immediately instructed all the passengers to destroy their passports and any other forms of identification and throw them overboard with their mobile phones.

They continued to drive their boat through the huge swell towards the bluff at Northest Point. Then, barely 100 metres from the island, the crew turned west, into the face of the wind and oncoming waves. At the coronial inquest into what would happen next, Coroner Hope found “The decision to turn the boat to the west, into the weather, was a fatal one in the circumstances [and] ...from the moment the decision was made ...all on board were in great peril.”

Minutes later, the small wooden fishing boat with 89 people onboard, including eight children under 5, was hurled into the face of the cliff. Having seen the boat outside the front of their homes, locals rushed to the shore shouting and waving at the crew to turn east, away from the weather. Their efforts amounted to nothing as the boat was thrown for a second time into the rocks, doing significant damage to the hull. The people onshore later described hearing the screams from the passengers as the boat was hurled against the cliff a third time, exploding into pieces.

With the crashing down of the next wave the larger remaining sections of hull sunk completely. Over the next 30 minutes, as those onshore threw lifejackets and inflatables into the water, 34 men and women drowned. Fifteen children under the age of 10 died with them. Seven were boys aged from 3 months to 9 years and eight were girls between 9 months and 10 years.

You can look elsewhere for the horrific accounts of how they died, suffice it to say, it was as awful a death as you could imagine.

“I don't want to stay awake at night thinking about this issue and imagining how terrified a young kid or a woman would be in a violent ocean, slipping below the waterline with no one around to save them or protect them. The images of that are just too horrific.”

These are the reflections of one of the country’s most ardent advocates for the rights of asylum seekers. Paris Aristotle is more than just a campaigner, he is a man with decades of experience actually solving human rights challenges and few Australians are better placed to contemplate solutions to our intractable asylum seeker quandary.

Along with public policy specialist, Michael L'Estrange, and former Defence Force chief Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, Aristotle is a member of the federal government’s Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers charged with the unenviable task of formulating “a plan to prevent asylum seekers risking their lives on dangerous boat journeys to Australia”.

That group consulted widely with the community and their own consciences before concluding the imperfect but “best” solution was to implement, among other things, a raft of deterrents designed to dissuade people from making the dangerous journey to Australia by boat.

Their assignment forced them into the type of reality that would paralyse the likes of Sarah Hanson Young, Greg Barns, and countless other moralists who have added their reductionist bias to the discourse ever since.

Despite the best efforts of the panel to present a non political document, intended to endure regardless of which party was governing, the discourse was soon hijacked and politicised by vocal opponents. Interest groups and individuals unburdened by complete knowledge, some with their own agendas, have been regularly featured by our agitating media to provide the false balance they pass off as objectivity.

At an event hosted by the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law, Aristotle claimed critics of the plan were failing to grasp the life-and-death consequences of their opposition to offshore processing. He may well have been referring to Sarah Hanson Young who, three weeks earlier on ABC’s Insiders program, accused the government of “keeping people waiting [in detention] until the Government believes they’ve suffered enough”. Her reasons for believing this were demonstrated in this rhetorical question to Barry Cassidy : “Do you honestly think that Julia Gillard wanted anything other than a get tough, get mean, get tough like John Howard approach?”

Aristotle also says it appears many critics of the plan haven’t actually read the panel’s full report because their comments are often ill-informed. Reactions like those from the Refugee Council of Australia appear to demonstrate his point. Part of their opposition to the plan was that some of the panel’s recommendations “specifically target refugees who arrived in Australia by boat.” Contemplate that for a moment.

They go on to criticise the planned excision of the Australian mainland as “unfair” to boat arrivals because it doesn’t apply to air arrivals. A less lucid understanding of the problem is hard to imagine.

Others who have failed to comprehend the more obvious elements of the plan include Greens leader, Christine Milne. Apparently unaware the idea is to prevent drownings at sea, Milne characterises the policy as not recognising the genuine need for people to flee violence and persecution. “The Australian Greens have long taken the view that we need to recognise that a lot of people around the world in desperate situations are going to flee appalling regimes and seek asylum in our country. Deterrence has never worked and is not working now.”

Other critics, who have struggled to see beyond the apparent “punitive” elements in the plan, evidently fail to understand the role of disincentives in behaviour change. At her sanctimonious best, Sarah Hanson Young has said “it's time we brought these children and their families here to Australia and started looking after them and caring for them, not punishing them further.” Christian group, the EA Foundation claim reintroducing offshore processing means “people are to be punished on the basis of their method of arrival. Instead of setting high standards, Australia now has a policy based on matching the lowest standards possible.”

Lucy Fiske writing for The Conversation says “the ‘no advantage principle’, while having a catchy appeal, is punitive pure and simple.” Fiske and the other commentators are happy to highlight the humanitarian costs of deterrence but there is an inherent dishonesty in not similarly acknowledging the lives it is designed to save.

Perhaps the most ludicrous criticism of our asylum seeker policy has come from two of our more reliably ludicrous sources. Clive Palmer has called on the government to put refugees on free flights from Indonesia to Australia. “If they haven't got a legitimate claim, they can go right back on the plane the next day.” How that prevents those returned to Indonesia from trying again by boat is a mystery Clive doesn’t attempt to solve.

But not even our eccentric mining billionaire can match Greg Barns’ intellectual midgetry. Barns’ praise of Palmer’s cunning plan which he calls “the most sensible suggestion of the past week” could be dismissed as a hopeful attempt at ironic humour, but what he was to say next leaves no doubt about his incapacity to contribute to the conversation:

“People smugglers, the object of Canberra's ire, should not be condemned. They are simply reacting to the failure of the official channels to provide for the effective movement of people around the globe.”

That absurd statement puts “refugee advocate” Greg Barns at odds with every international human rights organisation, from Amnesty International to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Assertions like these and claims that the government is in a “desperate race to the bottom on immigration policy” fail to appreciate the excruciating moral choice made by the Expert Panel. Despite being intimately familiar with the human cost of detention, the panel believe a transitional mechanism which includes mandatory detention is the lesser of the two evils when weighed against the intolerable loss of lives off our northern coast.

The carping moralists who accuse both sides of government of fanning racism in a fictitious quest for the racist vote should try to to conceptualise beyond their own diminished distortion of the facts.

Making difficult decisions about intractable problems requires the type of awareness and judgement possessed only by those prepared to get past their personal conflictions to support a greater good.

Given Sarah Hanson Young’s wont for tearful public displays of anguish for the plight of ‘imprisoned’ asylum seekers you may think her fears are exclusively for their wellbeing. But I suspect the demons in young Sarah’s mind are the ones reminding her of her incapacity to cobble together a conscionable alternative to the very policies she decries as inhumane and illegal.

Any attempt to understand why asylum seekers make that dangerous journey will always come back to the same conclusion - these people believe boarding a boat is their best alternative and we have to change their mind about that before they hand over their money.

Knowing they can’t solve this vexing problem, vocal critics radiate their energies in every direction other than towards a solution. They rail against the government, the opposition, advisers and bureaucrats with misting eyes and boiling indignation, the whole while not noticing they have yet to offer an actual, workable life-saving solution of their own.

Somewhat thoughtful ideas have been tabled like increasing the humanitarian intake (as recommended by the panel) or allowing onshore processing, but these only offer false promise. Increasing the intake to 20,000 per year still leaves people waiting on the ground in Malaysia and Indonesia, people who will be vulnerable to the promise of a quick solution by boat. An increased intake also has little impact on the people smugglers selling passage to Australia in the streets of Najaf.

Allowing onshore processing gives those who make it here protection under the Refugee Convention but, as a consequence, actually increases the incentive to reach our shores. It solves the humanitarian problem by disposing of offshore detention which would help the well-meaning critics sleep more easily at night, but only until they notice the consequential rise in boat arrivals.

It’s not the purpose of this article to offer solutions to stop the drownings, to do so would patronise the work of Aristotle, L'Estrange and Houston. My wish for those who rush to criticise the plan and accuse the government of normalising racism, is to look beyond the invective and the slogans to remember there is no perfect answer to boat arrivals, only improved ways to manage them. The intent of our country’s asylum seeker policy is to stop the drownings, by stopping the boats. It’s not about stopping the people.

Paris Aristotle perhaps sums it up best this way:

''All I'm asking is for people to take on the full complexity of the issue. There are risks that we're going to have to monitor carefully, and work hard to ensure that they don't result in damaging people. But there are greater risks with doing nothing.''

Seinfeld's guide to political polls

2013-02-22T02:20:00.000-08:00

Lately, the cadet journalists in the Olde Worlde media have been hammering away at their keyboards, working themselves into a lather over the recent round of political polls. Conclusions have been formed, winners declared, and leadership spills predicted. Like an Essendon fan telling us this year is their flag year after a strong showing in the NAB Cup, it’s worth remembering just how long the footy season has to run. In fact, the football hasn’t even started yet, and the election won’t be held until AFL semi-finals weekend.

That, it seems, won’t stop our frothy young guns from falling over themselves to misinterpret what are apparently conclusive polling results. Yes, that’s right, misinterpret. You see, to the uninitiated, polls are esoteric harbingers of mystery whose message is designed to mislead. To Seinfeld fans, as we shall see, they are actually soothsayers of faultless precision.

I’ve never been a fan of the poll. I’m not convinced by their statistical rigour and I don’t trust that the pollsters aren’t loading the questions to get a skewed result. However, like James Reyne singing Beautiful People, polls are easy to understand once you’ve cracked the code.

You see, where our impetuous young cadets are getting it wrong is they’re failing to consider the long run. Keen to impress, they sprint to a conclusion and then sprint to their laptops. The eager little beavers rush to publish their premature interpretations of the polls and bang out a cut and pasted selection of catastrophic hyperbole, mostly recycled from the last election campaign.

Unlike you, dear reader, the problem with these teenagers is they’ve never watched a Seinfeld episode. If they weren’t so busy fawning over Glee or getting their jollies from Big Bang Theory and chose instead to seek the insight of a Larry David script they too would understand the folly of hastily interpreting a voting intentions poll.

You know that Seinfeld episode where Elaine hooks up with Bizarro Jerry and his Bizarro World friends? Or the one where George realises everything he says gets him into trouble so he decides to always say the exact opposite of what he was was going to say? What about the backwards episode where the whole story runs backwards in time, starting at the end and finishing at the beginning?

Sure you do. Like me, you can recite every word from every episode, right? Right??

Well, anyway, if our journalist interns had as intimate a knowledge of Seinfeld as you and I they too would know the value of a little Backwards Bizarro World Opposite Thinking and it would occur to them how political polls actually work.

Let’s take a closer look, for the uninitiated.

In the 2001 federal election, the Liberal-National Coalition romped home to a handsome win, leaving Kim Beazeley’s Labor with their lowest primary vote since 1934. And Labor’s Kim Beazely with a seat in the bleachers. The polling, seven months out from the election (which is how far we are from this year’s election), had Labor giving the Coalition a serious flogging.

“Government gains ground but ALP would still easily win” said the Bulletin in June that year. The polling and the pundits couldn’t have been more wrong.

With Labor holding a handy lead in the polls in 2004 the Sydney Morning Herald declared “Latham's recovery gives Howard heartburn” and went on to lament how screwed we would all be once Mark Latham become our next Prime Minister. Just a few months later John “Lazarus” Howard romped home, riding hands and heels, with an increased majority in the House plus control of the Senate.

How about something more recent? Back in 2010, 7 or 8 months out from the election, Julia Gillard’s Labor government were so far ahead of the Liberal Party on primary polling you’d be forgiven for thinking all she needed to do was show up and collect her first-place ribbon. It was like going to Flemington to watch Black Caviar race - not for the thrill of the contest, but the morbid curiosity about how badly everyone else would lose.

But, like The Sportswoman of the Year twisting a fetlock in the last furlong, Big Jules ended up losing a whopping 11 seats in the election race she should have won by a country mile. Only a marriage of convenience with the crossbench kept them in government and the polling from the beginning of the year couldn’t have been less relevant.

See the pattern here, Seinfeld fans? Pollsters and their polls are denizens, not of this world, but of Bizarro World. Like the backwards Seinfeld episode about the heiress to the O’Henry candy bar fortune, it’s all backwards. Like George Costanza, the polls say the opposite of what they mean. When a political poll tells you, seven months out from the next election, that one party is going to give the other a towelling on voting day, put some folding stuff down on the other guys. You’ll get great odds.

Our last election betting update from The Kook had Labor at $5.00 to win this year, while the Libs were $1.16. Meanwhile, the cadets are telling us “the Coalition has a thumping election-winning lead” (ABC), and “Labor's support... has now collapsed, plunging it back towards landslide-losing territory” (SMH).

All this Labor gloom is on the back of polling that shows the Liberals are heading for a massive win in an unlosable election. Well, TV heads, I reckon that’s a bit premature, don’t you?

No news is... quite typical, actually.

2013-02-05T17:37:00.002-08:00

Spend an afternoon nosing around the Twitter streams and blogs of #AusPol fetishists and online news outlets and you'll soon encounter the intellectual midgets from Fairfax et al trivialising the sensational ("the longest election campaign in history") and sensationalising the trivial (JG's "hipster eye-wear").

Our newspapers' infantile clickbait headlines and substance-free analysis of political machinations are designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, or to deliver the secret agendas of their corporate overlords, depending on which of the 4th Estate's many failings you choose to believe.

In the meantime, the left-wing 5th Estate commentariat are in a lather about the free ride given to the Coalition and the lack of gravity afforded the Labor government's suite of reformist policies. They decry the double-standards, the lack of transparency, and right-wing bias so thick it would bring a sentimental tear to the eyes of ethno-nationalists everywhere.

Some lefty activists are so outraged at the lack of media interest in Coalition shenanigans they're actually crowd-sourcing cash to fund independent journos to "get to the truth" of #AshbyGate or to expose the LNP puppet-masters responsible for Jon Faine's "slapdown". Hello, @margokingston1, by the way. I love your work :-)

The lathering has begun in earnest, and for good reason. There's no denying the unbalanced and subjective nature of the commentary being offered up as political "news" by our old media and it quite rightly fires up the Progressive crowd. But I think that's all about to change.

News media makes money by getting eyeballs to their platforms - either print or online. And their proven method is to find (or create) a target, take aim, and let rip. In government, the ALP are a big, easy and profitable target for a lazy, unimaginative and profit-seeking Olde Worlde Media. By developing and implementing policy, the ALP provide a steady stream of targets for political hacks, helped along by an enthusiastic Opposition with binders full of invective to spice up a column.

It's a win-win-lose kind of thing.

But, and here's the good news, we just began Not The Longest Election Campaign In History, and this Not Campaign will require the Abbott clan to start filling their policy vacuum with, well, policy. As soon as they do, expect their faux-friends at The Holt Street Bowling Club^TM (thanks, @Polytics) and elsewhere to sell them out like George Lucas at a Star Wars rights sale; like a bald-headed Protest Activist Rock Star becoming a federal politician; like Ron Barassi going to Carlton; like... you get the idea.

Once the Libs start telling us how they'll turn our lagging economy around, fix the shameful unemployment rate, and repeal the Carbon Tax without clawing back tax breaks, they'll become a target as big as a barn door. Our media would eat their own young to create a sensation so they'll gladly feast on the banquet of gaffs and budget black holes offered up by our LOTO and his Treasurer-in-waiting.

In the meantime, Labor will chip in with their own binders full of trash talk and before you can say Ray Finkelstein the newspapers will be Labor's best mates again. It'll be like the Howard years.

So, continue your breathless outrage at media bias, my Lefty friends, and be assured that in the race to the finish line this September Tony and Joe are guaranteed their time in the warm glow of the blowtorch.

Offsetting the Cowgill Effect

2013-01-16T15:08:00.000-08:00

Matt Cowgill is some bloke I hadn’t heard of until yesterday. He knows about economic policy and shit like that and he just wrote an excellent blog post about the futility of trying to solve a particularly sticky welfare payment problem. Let’s call it the Cowgill Effect.

Before you do much more here you really should go over there and read it.

My sales manager at a certain Launceston car dealership many years ago would belt me with a tyre iron for letting you go without reading my post first, but like all those tyre kickers back in 1989 “You’ll be back”, right?

Matt does a great job of describing the conundrum facing our Federal Government but he leaves us with the sad reality that "we can’t have it all". What I’d like to do is talk a little bit about how we get around that. It’s less about macro ecomonics and more about Dr Phil.

Who am I to have an opinion? Well, it turns out I worked as an Area Manager with Centrelink for a while. Even managed one of their call centres for bit. Despite successfully dodging work and making myself look busy while I figured out how to download porn through the Government’s firewall, I couldn’t help but learn a few things about how welfare delivery works.

For the fun of making broad generalisations I like to group Newstart clients into three types - Unemployed Workers, Bludgers, and the Unlucky Ones.

Unemployed Workers are skilled, self-motivated, and actively engaged in finding a job. They just don’t have one yet. These folks don’t need much from their government other than a living payment and an economic environment that will create a job vacancy for them to fill.

The Unlucky Ones have something to overcome other than (or as well as) the lack of a job vacancy. They need retraining, education, or to be cared for. They have disabilities, injuries, and other challenges to overcome or learn to live with.

The Unlucky Ones can require a great deal of assistance or just a bit more time before they’re fit for regular employment. Some of them will never be fully fit but will be able to work in some capacity.

Then there are the Bludgers. These guys are the ones targeted by most of the more controversial government policies. These are the ones who choose not to work because, for them, the value equation doesn’t stack up.

The Bludger understands the concept behind the Cowgill Effect. They realise working for a living is a sham when stacked up against sitting on the dole. If your average Bludger is banking $250 in weekly dole payments they know a job worth, say, $400 a week only earns them an additional $150 for 40 hours’ work. Given the choice, the Bludger would rather stay at home and earn cigarette money repairing old lawnmowers.

Being full-time employed costs the Bludger 40 hours’ work, $250 in dole, time away from Dr Phil, plus maybe a whole new wardrobe and regular transport. In return he gets his $400 in wages which, after tax, he values less than his time on the couch with $250 sit-down money. So that’s where he stays.

To motivate the Bludger we need to change the equation. We need the Bludger to value going to work more than they value staying at home.

We can enhance his opinion of getting a job if we show him the pathway to a $1,000 weekly wage. Alternatively, we could cut his Newstart payment so he derives less value from being unemployed. And we could make “earning” the dole increasingly difficult, irritating, and inconvenient until he gets the shits with it all and finds a job just so he doesn't have to deal with Centrelink any longer.

The challenge is to shift the balance sufficiently to motivate the Bludger off the couch without marginalising the Voting Bludger and the Voting Bleeding Heart - the torment of many a sitting government.

As Matt explains so well, we can’t be fiddling about with the levers to make one thing better without making another thing worse. This is why we need policies beyond a simple weekly payment with a sliding reduction in income support.

A government can’t reduce the Bludger’s Newstart payment without inciting civil war. The French tried that in the 1700’s and look where that got them.

No, reducing the payment is not an option.

So what can we do? Well, quite a lot, actually. We subsidise the bejeesus out of everything from bus travel to university education to give the Bludger less reason to stay at home and more hope of seeing that $1,000 job within reach. But the real opportunity is in making life on the dole hard for the Bludger.

We make them apply for a bunch of jobs every week. They have to fill in diaries and get sign-off from businesses proving they’ve applied for work. They have to attend training and counselling and sometimes even take part in work for the dole programmes. The have to attend interviews at Centrelink and their local job network provider to convince a bureaucrat they’re trying hard enough.

This makes life on the dole a cumbersome and tiring experience. But there’s more.

We make them call Centrelink all the time, and when they do, we put them on hold for an hour.

Sometimes, after spending the afternoon on the phone with the call centre, we tell them they have to go into a Centrelink office to deal with something. So we give them an “appointment” for sometime between 9.30 and 11.00 and make them wait until 12.00.

When they attend their fortnightly Centrelink interview and diary check they stand in a queue until their knees buckle.

We have other tricks too, like not paying job network agencies to travel out to regional centres for regular appointments. This means many Bludgers have to spend an entire day plus bus money getting into and out of town to show a desk jockey the resume they’ve written.

And if they fail to attend any of these compulsory interviews and other appointments we suspend their dole. If they do it again we suspend it again, this time for longer. Eventually, we take it off them entirely.

All this adds up to make life on the dole a really shitty experience. Many an Unemployed Worker, Retired Worker, Domestic Engineer and other fine welfare recipients get caught up in the same annoyances sometimes, but that’s the price of welfare, I guess.

Like it or otherwise, these policies are in place to move the Bludger out of the living room and into the crib room. This is how we overcome the Cowgill Effect, for better or worse.

"It's all happening (on the radio), Tony!"

2013-01-01T22:37:00.001-08:00

With all due respect to the collective wisdom and endless hilarious banter of the Channel 9 commentary team, some of us would prefer to listen to the cricket on the radio while watching it with the sound down on the telly.

Thanks largely to the variations between terrestrial radio broadcasting and geostationary satellite tv broadcasting (plus, I suspect, some deliberate fiddling by 9) these days our radio commentary arrives as much as 10 seconds ahead of the tv signal.

This makes listening to the radio while watching the cricket an all but futile exercise. Having said that, there is one very handy advantage - tune into the radio and stick an earbud in your ear without your mates noticing; when you hear Sidds or Mitch take a wicket ten seconds ahead of the tv pictures, say out loud "I bet he gets him out this ball." After a couple of these your mates will think you are a cricket savant.

Other than that, listening to the radio commentary is just a waste of time. Unless you know how to synchronise your radio with your television.

Here's how. (It takes 5 minutes of fiddling to set up but you have 5 days of cricket to enjoy... although we are playing Sri Lanka so maybe two and a half days.)

You'll need a Windows computer, a radio, a stereo cable and some free software. And a geek attitude.

Download and install VLC Media Player from here: www.videolan.org This is an excellent lightweight media player with many advantages over similar programmes. It's free, secure, open source and if you're a tiny bit geeky you probably already have a copy.

Plug the audio cable into your radio's headphone socket and the audio input on your computer. Tune in the cricket.

No audio? We need to modify your audio settings. Right click on the Volume icon in your Taskbar and choose Recording devices.

Select your input device and click Set default (if it's not greyed out) then click Properties.

On the Listen tab put a tick in the Listen to this device box.

Still no sound? Check the volume levels on your radio and speakers. If that doesn't work, ask the nearest 14 year old, they're good with this stuff.

Got sound? Oddly, we now need to turn it off. Right click on the Volume icon in the taskbar and choose Open volume mixer. Mute your input device so you no longer hear the radio.

Launch VLC and select Media > Open Capture Device...

Then, from the drop-down to the right of Audio device name select the input device you plugged the audio cable into on your computer. It may be called Line In or Mic or something similar.

Press Play. You should now be hearing the radio again. If not, review all your settings and revisit Step 6.

Now, with the cricket playing on the tv click on Tools > Track synchronisation and adjust the Audio track synchronisation value until the radio and the tv are in sync. Start at around 9.5 seconds and make small adjustments up or down from there.

Goodbye Mark Nicholas

FIRST LOOK: Google and Motorola launch "game changing" new phone.

2012-11-24T04:48:00.000-08:00

Google and Motorola have finally released their long awaited first handset.

"This new device changes everything." Says Google product manager.

BREAKING NEWS: Nov 5

2012-11-05T04:36:00.000-08:00

Greg Barns shows us the value of keeping his mouth shut, by not.

2012-11-04T08:14:00.002-08:00

It’s time for the narrow minded, reductionist, backseat drivers who hurl their malignant, obsolete invective at the Labor party’s asylum seeker policies to make a choice: Pony up an effective alternative or STFU.

Yes, Greg Barns, I’m talking to you.

I was listening the other day, Greg, when you were interviewed on ABC radio and you were asked to comment on the Labor party’s decision to excise the Australian mainland from the country’s migration zone, remember? What a display of prejudice, fear and fallacy you turned on. Again.

After calling the decision an "Alice in Wonderland " policy, you went on to demonstrate how much value you bring to the debate:

“We’ve got desperate political parties in the ALP and the Liberal party wanting to kick vulnerable people to win an election.”

“Politicians, as we’ve seen in this country in the last few years, have shown an abject failure of leadership on human rights issues including asylum seekers.”

“The Liberal party is no better on this policy. This was the party which brought in putting women and children behind bars...”

“Australia is a hard place to get to and yet we’re taking the most draconian measures of any country in the world.”

“We’ve participated in a war in Afghanistan now for 12 years, and we’re going to push back these people who come here ”

Sadly, Greg, your views on asylum seeker policy are mired in the manic days of John Howard’s fixation on border protection. The last few months of 2001 inspired an era of reactionary and perhaps even racially motivated preoccupation with reclaiming our borders and tightening control over who could enter our country. The pseudo-hijacking of the Tampa in August that year followed just 13 days later by the September 11 attacks, witnessed first hand by John Howard, gave legitimacy to fear and prejudice in the eyes of many.

But Greg, that was then. That was a time when overreaching asylum seeker policy developed in an environment of reactionary fear. A time when border security was the narrative and the government believed (or at least, asserted) we needed to view refugees as potential terrorists. Back then, Greg, the government probably deserved your criticism.

Things are different now. The situation has changed and you and those of your ilk need to bring yourselves up to date and face the reality of today’s challenge. Today’s policies are a response to hundreds of tragic drownings off our northern coast. Today’s policies, Greg, are about saving the lives of refugees. If you don’t get that yet then it’s time you acknowledged your own irrelevance and stayed out of the discourse because your shitty liver isn't adding any value.

“The government doesn't care how many people are harmed by its particular policies, it dresses it up by saying we want to stop people from drowning on their way to Australia, well there are other ways to do that...”

Before you accuse me of drinking the Kool-Aid let’s summarise your position on this. You declare the Labor and Liberal parties want to kick vulnerable people to win an election and the Labor party doesn’t care how many people are harmed by asylum seeker policy. Unhinge much, Greg?

To be fair, I should share with my reader the “other ways ” you propose we stop people making a perilous journey to reach our shores by boat. (This won’t take long, reader)

Here’s Greg’s grand plan:

“...(the government) dresses it up by saying we want to stop people from drowning on their way to Australia, well there are other ways to do that and that would be by increasing the migration intake and by allowing people to land in Australia and to be processed fairly.”

You say we can stop the drownings (not that we actually want to, right?) by increasing the refugee intake. Setting aside the fact that WE JUST DID THAT, let me point something out to you - WE JUST DID THAT!

And your other pearl? Allowing people to land in Australia and be processed fairly. Mate, WTF does that mean?! We can stop people drowning on their way here by processing them fairly after they arrive?? Alice in Wonderland, meet the Mad Hatter.

Let me tell you something, mate, because nobody’s doing you any favours keeping this from you. If the best you can do is invent fictional political parties who get their jollies out of deliberately hurting vulnerable people then it’s time you turned your hand to writing fantasy fiction because your licence to contribute to a grown-up conversation has expired.

In the meantime, the adults would like to get on with trying to stop people dying at sea.

Gaming God: A sinner's' guide to salvation, baby!

2012-10-29T00:59:00.000-07:00

Early one morning Agnes Schickin, a thirty year old serving woman from the town of Schorndorf in Germany walked into a neighbouring town and stopped to enjoy a glass of milk offered by a local peasant woman before continuing on her walk. She would later testify that playing by the roadside ahead of her she spotted four “beautiful little boys ”. She approached them and asked for directions back to Schorndorf. Seven year old Hans Furch said he could help and he accepted a gift from her in return for walking part of the way and helping with directions. The two of them headed into the forest alone.

Deep in the forest Agnes threw the small boy to the ground and cut his throat so deeply she later said she could “look down into his neck”. Leaving him to die as his “bright blood ” flowed she returned home and confessed the murder to the first people she saw and she was taken into custody.

On another morning, the daughter of a Nuremberg butcher took one of her father’s knives and walked out along the lane near their home. The first child she encountered was a nine year old girl whom she attacked and decapitated with her father’s knife. With the deed done, she returned home to collect her prayer book and headed for the town hall to turn herself in.

Maria Wolf, the daughter of a fur trader in Pegnitz, Bavaria, abducted the eight month old daughter of a local soldier from the town’s market square. She carried the tiny child outside the market walls and immediately strangled her with a handkerchief. She later appeared at the gates of the city jails and demanded to be let in. She had murdered a child , she said, and was there to receive her punishment.

These shocking, apparently random and motiveless killings are just three examples of the nearly 300 similar instances Kathy Stuart, a professor of history at the University of California Davis, has uncovered after searching the archives of cities and courts across Western Europe.

The reason you (probably) haven’t heard about them before is they all happened in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. And, shocking though the crimes themselves may be, the reason each of these young children was killed is even more repulsive and entirely motivated by selfish religious purposes.

Ava Litzelfelnerin was a 25 year old farmer’s wife living in an arranged marriage on her husband’s farm in Austria. Her mother-in-law, a domineering matriarch, made life difficult for Ava from the day she arrived. Her husband, whom she met just days before their wedding, gave her no support nor comfort. In time Ava became desperately unhappy to the point she decided to end her life rather than live in misery.

But killing herself would, Ava believed, condemn her to a fate far worse than her Earthly predicament. St Augistine decreed in the fifth century A.D. that committing suicide was a mortal sin so those who took their own lives, and were therefore unable to repent, would spend eternity in damnation. Unlike suicide, committing murder would not keep you from getting into heaven so long as you repented - that is, if you said you were really, really sorry then all would be forgiven and you would once again be worthy of a seat at the Big Table.

So what Ava needed was a loophole. She and the hundreds of others Professor Stuart has found needed a way to end their own lives to escape their unhappiness but they had to do it in a way that would avoid the pesky hitch of not getting the chance to say “Oops, my bad.”

Ava thought she had a solution. She figured she could game the system if she could find way to kill herself slowly. So she hunted down some arsenic and took what she thought was just enough to kill herself, but not enough for it to be over quickly. On her last legs she planned to stagger to the church and confess to having killed herself... almost... and just before taking her final breath the priest would tell her she’s been a bit naughty but nevermind, as long as you’re sorry, God still loves you and he’s waiting for you.

Trouble was, Ava took just enough arsenic to make herself feel like shit for a week but not shitful enough that she thought she would die. Afraid that if she took any more arsenic she’d die too quickly, Ava needed a Plan B. So, as any clear thinking and rational person might do, she decided to avoid going to Hell for eternity by killing some random baby. “Perfect! Why didn’t I think of this before taking that damned arsenic?! ”

That’s right, Ava decides to abduct and drown a little baby from a nearby village as a means to get herself into Heaven. Murder was a capital offense, you see, so by killing another person she was guaranteed to be killed by the state, but before her sentence is carried out she’d get to repent her sins and redeem herself with the Big Guy Upstairs. And why kill a child? Well, if you’ve been following the perverted logic you’ll have guessed the next part - a young child was considered pure and free from sin. Ava would be doing the little nipper a favour by getting her into Heaven before she grows up to become a hooker or a defence lawyer and jeopardises her chances of making it to the Big Dance with Grand Master G. It’s wall-to-wall winners with this cunning plan.

The same depraved planning is behind all 300 murders uncovered by Professor Stuart. In her new book to be published in 2013 she calls it suicide by proxy. Her book explores the belief-beggering practice of desperately unhappy, but conveniently clear thinking, God-fearing peasants whose religious doctrines have perverted their sense of right and wrong to such an extreme that slitting the throats of little boys and girls is considered a worthwhile path to eternal happiness. Yay, religion!

Well, she can call it suicide by proxy if she likes. I call it murder. And any belief system that finds justification in the murder of little children for the sake of the (imagined) future wellbeing of grown adults has no place in any society. Fortunately religion has evolved in the two hundred or so years since Ava and her friends went on their infanticide spree and now we can rest assured that our children’s safety and wellbeing are forever cherished by a loving and gracious church.

Oh, wait...

McArts Degrees and other paths to unemployability

2012-10-26T03:37:00.000-07:00

So I’m listening to the radio the other day and “education campaigner” and undergraduate Arts student at the University of Tasmania, Georgia Allen, has popped in to the studio to tell us how “sad” she is about the University’s decision to trim elective subjects being offered for Arts students.

Under the Arts Faculty’s restructure program they've committed to the “Deletion of units that do not contribute to Intended Learning Outcomes” which, according to Ms Allen, will limit each course to 14 subject choices, down from more than 40 in some cases.

“It makes your degree a lot more generalised ” she says, “it’s a generalisation of university degrees. It’s really sad.”

Um, more generalised? This is an Arts Degree we’re talking about here, not Medicine or Science. An Arts Degree. You know, the one that fills in four years of your dud pre-twenties life before you come to the depressing realisation that you really should have spent that time doing the hospitality training that would be handy now you've become a waitress.

An Arts Degree. The one that has produced entire generations of pizza delivery drivers who try to convince people they’re not functionally retarded once it becomes known they've done a Communications Major.

Ms Allen goes on to say “the core units you have within a major or minor are really the ones which shape your employability, then the electives you do on top of that choose your path.” Employability?? Is she serious? It’s like she thinks studying Philosophy or English is some pathway to employment.

Three types of people study English: people who want to be lawyers and mistakenly think they’ll need to learn how to write to be a lawyer; people who want to be writers; and people who can’t do maths.

Ok, so I'm getting a little sarcastic now, aren't I? In truth, there is untold advantage for any jobseeker who understands Brownings allusionary references to Shakespeare’s personal identification with Shylock the moneylender, and the inevitable link to the anti-Semitism apparent in the distrust and suspected extravagance of his narrator in “How It Strikes A Contemporary ”. Stuff like that can open a lot of doors for a bright young wannabe.

My first year of high school was 1981. One of the many sermons repeated at assemblies that year by our Deputy Principal was the one about planning for our futures. "If you expect to get a job after High School" he would bellow with his combover flapping in the wind like a kipper on a jetty "then you must make sure you complete grade 10."

Notwithstanding that he’d just let the cat out of the bag about being able to quit school after grade 9, I'd always just assumed I'd complete grade 10 so his rants were wasted on me.

On leaving High School at the end of 1984 the employment market had become competitive to the point that one had to complete year 12 to have a shot at getting a half-decent job. You know, one that paid more than about $75 a week, maybe one that broke the coveted $100 barrier.

Two years later and things had moved on once more. Anyone not considering going on to University was unlikely to find work outside Kmart. For the next decade or so Uni graduates did pretty well for themselves but progressively things tightened some more and I found myself needing to get Masters level qualifications if I was to progress far in my business career. So I completed my MBA and my career took off.

That was then, this is now. Expecting an interview with a large organisation without an MBA on your c.v. today is like trying to get past the velvet rope at an underground nightclub. Unless you know the owner, it’s just not going to happen.

Rocking up armed with an Arts degree and expecting it to open any doors will just get you laughed at.

If poor Georgia Allen thinks her Arts degree will be devalued by the narrowing of available elective options, she’s deluding herself. Her Arts degree is already less than worthless and if she’s not practicing how to balance a tray full of drinks in her spare time then maybe she’ll get lucky and land herself a job at Macca’s, if she’s not too old.

How to bury the opposition.

2012-10-09T17:20:00.001-07:00

Dear Internet...

2012-10-03T17:44:00.000-07:00

You are a byzantine enigma.

More than 250 denizens of the Internet came to visit The Underwhelming Blog yesterday; thanks for stopping by. *waves*

Of 250 visitors, zero felt compelled to leave a comment. If engagement on a blog is a measure of reader interest then, dear reader, your interest level is somewhere between zip and diddly-squat.

If visitor numbers are a measure of interest in a blog then apparently we have something here.

My guess is you come in the hope of finding enlightenment. Nonplussed, you linger, waiting to be entertained, and leave. Underwhelmed.

I wonder what would whelm you.

Out-takes from Leigh Sales' interview with John Laws

2012-10-02T19:43:00.000-07:00

When did "skills" become "functional literacies"?

2012-09-30T02:12:00.000-07:00

Gillard and Swan vs Statler and Waldorf

2012-09-26T09:23:00.000-07:00

Julia Gillard and Labor will win the next Federal election. There, I've said it.

You read it here first. Unless you read it somewhere else already.

Yes, yes, the current polling shows she's as popular as a pork chop at a bar mitzvah, the party she leads has all the support of a wet noodle and they'd be far more likely to win with Pol Pot or Kevin Rudd as leader.

Despite this, Federal Labor are emerging, not just as a dark horse, underdog, pigeon or sitting duck but as a genuine chance.

Gillard and her party headed into oblivion after announcing in early 2011 they'd put a price on carbon and remained lost while Peter Slipper, Craig Thompson, Andrew Wilke and others kept the waters turbid and the polling around 40%.

Dark horse under dog

While Labor were lying beaten and bloody on the floor, Tony Abbott's team feasted on the entrails. The broken promise about a carbon price, ballooning government debt, the forty billion dollar NBN, roofing batts, school halls, live cattle exports, the Malaysian refugee swap and a host of other whipping posts were flogged mercilessly by the Liberals.

From a dismal low in mid-2011 Labor rose steadily and strongly in the polls as consecutive interest rate cuts were gleefully received by the public and the good news story about the economy gained momentum. By February 2012 Labor had pulled ahead of the Coalition for the first time in a month of Sundays only to see themselves crash back to the floor in the wake of Kevin Rudd's failed leadership bid.

Despite that self-inflicted rope-a-dope uppercut early this year, Labor has recovered steadily and strongly.

The Python Squeezing Wrecking Ball Toxic Tax turned out to be more like a Millennium Bug, Peter Slipper was sent packing with Craig Thompson carrying his bags, and the June economic growth figures were the envy of the developed world.

In the meantime, Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey have continued to act more like Statler and Waldorf than an alternative Prime Minister and Treasurer. Abbott has become a caricature of himself with his blustering sound bites and vitriol and Hockey has added, well, nothing. Unless you consider this pearl from June to be something: "The numbers are the numbers, I totally accept that the numbers are the numbers." Or his equally insightful response to this week's reported deficit results "Sooner or later the rubber hits the roads when it comes to the numbers."

Julia Gillard put in a strong performance on Q&A in June and an even stronger "give me your best shot" media conference in August the day before Leigh Sales gave Tony Abbott her best shot and a bloody nose on 7.30. Also in August, Abbott blamed Gillard's carbon tax for the massive rises in electricity prices around the country only to be told by his own shadow minister that, like Gillard said, the problem has been caused by State government policies.

As Abbott continues to act like a blithering fool and the government finds clear air for its reformist policies the electorate are beginning to see we have in Labor a party with, if nothing else, a clear and purposeful direction. The Liberals, however, are being shown up for the nay-saying policy vacuum they perhaps have always been - since John Howard, at least.

So as the 2013 poll gets closer, Labor will find themselves running in the election they were always going to lose against an opponent that surely can't win.

Ten books I wish I'd never picked up

2012-09-21T00:02:00.001-07:00

Radio dude, Leon Compton, has called for lists of 10 books we wish we'd never picked up.

Here's mine:

1. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy 1869

I haven't read it, but I have picked it up. It's so heavy I put my back out.

2. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser 2002

This book turned me off pink slime for life.

3. A brief history of time, Stephen Hawking 1988

I read it. All of it. And that's two years of my life I'll never get back.

4. Les Patterson's Australia, Sir Les Patterson 1972

A drunken misogynistic ramble that offended me as a woman, and I'm a man.

5. Killing me softly, Nicci French 1999

Because the movie was so much better. Ok, the movie was dreadful, but Heather Graham took her gear off.

6. Quotations from Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong 1966

I can't read Chinese, I really don't know what I was thinking.

7. Activities of federal law enforcement agencies toward the Branch Davidians : joint hearings before the Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, and the Subcommittee on National Security, International Affairs, and Criminal Justice of the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, One Hundred Fourth Congress, first session

by United States Congress House Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime; United States Congress House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, International Affairs, and Criminal Justice 1996

Before I finished reading the title I fell asleep and hit my head on the bedside table. I recommend you wait until it comes out in paperback.

8. The Walrus was Paul: The Great Beatle Death Clues of 1969 by R. Gary Peterson 1998

Delusional claptrap written by a supercilious buffoon whose fifteen minutes of fame thankfully ran out after 90 seconds. Everybody knows Ringo was the walrus, duh.

9. I Want to Tell You: My Response to Your Letters, Your Messages, Your Questions
by O.J. Simpson 1995

Simpson's diatribe made me even more upset that he was found not guilty. The book alone is worth jail time.

10. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand 1957

I would rather bash myself over the head with this than read it again.

Out of the frying pan etc.

2012-09-17T09:13:00.000-07:00

Ban Chinese Jews!

2012-09-16T23:48:00.003-07:00

I've never been one to favour Federal government protectionism of markets or industries. I've tended to believe if an industry can't survive without government protection or handouts then maybe it shouldn't survive at all. That was until I heard some bloke from the local apple industry on the radio today.

Apparently, if Australia was to put a stop to all concentrated apple juice imports from China we would need to double the size of our nation's orchards to supply enough juice to replace the imported product.

Wow. It's as easy as that to double the size of our apple industry.

Economic pedants will quickly tell you banning Chinese juice concentrate won't exactly DOUBLE the locally produced volume, but that's not the point. The point is, the demand for this country's locally grown product is HALF what it could be simply because we import Chinese juice.

I'm not about to cry out for the banning of Chinese apple juice, but damn, how much stronger would just one industry become if we did?? And what would that mean for the economies in our rural and regional centres?

One step closer to Gay cure: Symptoms isolated

2012-09-15T09:01:00.000-07:00

As the Homo scourge continues its prophylactic-wearing march across the globe, corrupting otherwise chaste and sensible young men and women with its evil debauchery, a band of good and decent Allah-fearing Malaysian school teachers have dared to stare down this ungodly threat to all that is good in the world.

While Parents and Friends committees elsewhere are agonising over themes for their next trivia night, a parent-teacher seminar in Penang has published a breakthrough list of 'symptoms' of Gayism. Parents across the country are encouraged to keep a keen eye out for these signs of illness in their children's besieged young bodies.

The Malaysian Ministry of Education has endorsed an expansive inventory of subtle but significant indicators of Faggotishness, including the remarkable finding that "gay males have muscular bodies" and that they "like to wear v-necked shirts". Extraordinary.

Bur it doesn't stop there. Parents are urged to be on the lookout for boys who "like to wear tight fitting and light coloured clothing" with an apparent preference for sleeveless garments. Such insight.

The most dreaded sign of all, the one that confirms your little boy likes to punch some dung, is when he begins to "bring along a large handbag, similar to those used by women, when hanging out".

Fear of uncovering a Chanel corduroy tote with mag-lock buckles and Egyptian cotton seam treatments in their son's sock drawer will now strike at the heart of Malaysian mothers everywhere. Mothers who wanted so much more for their sons than a life of felonious fellatio.

The great hope is the next generation of shirt-lifting pillow biters will be saved by this "best approach to address the spread of such unhealthy phenomenon among students".

I remember a time when a big moustache, a leather cap and matching vest were all mums and dads needed to look out for. The world's gone mad.

God help Malaysia's inspirational parents and teachers in their brave quest to stop these insidious fashion choices, your children need you.

Handout from seminar

Seminar advertisement

[Original Chinese language report here. Official meeting minutes here.]

What's the capital of Greece?

2012-09-14T08:04:00.001-07:00

Who wants to buy Mars?

2012-09-03T01:28:00.000-07:00

Which product is most important to Google? What can they least do without?

Search. Duh.

They rocketed to Number 1 in search by using a smarter, revolutionary algorithm. Back in the day, they sent users to those sites with the most inbound links, making the (correct) assumption that the sites with the most inbound links were the most relevant or authoritative.

Today's "digital natives" (that was typed with an eyeroll, ok?) would laugh at the way Yahoo used to manually categorise web sites into lists of groups of groups of lists. It was more like searching the Yellow Pages - another institution many digital natives might need explained.

As soon as Google delivered a product that did the searching for us by using keywords and relevance scores every other method looked antediluvian.

Well, the Big G's position is equally as precarious today as Altavista and Ask Jeeves were a decade ago. Google's search results are driven by keyword hunting but when we search we seek information and knowledge, not keywords.

The first bedroom-dwelling university dropout to come up with a way to understand what we're asking, and to understand what web pages are saying, will either sell his secret sauce to Microsoft or Google for $Billions less than it's worth, or he'll go on to become rich enough to buy Mars.

Google's greatest strength is search but it can be taken away from them overnight by a 16 year old accidental genius.

What's wrong with being a deconstructionist?

2012-08-29T01:27:00.000-07:00

Political opportunism

2012-08-01T03:25:00.000-07:00

As the debate here rages around the impending arrival of the Mega Death Ship, known more widely as the F.V. Margiris, it's only recently dawned on me how the issue has been able to maintain so much momentum in the local media.

In short, a local commercial fisher has the rights to take 18,000 tons of jack mackerel and redbait from the Aussie coast but they intend to take the fish using a bloody big factory ship.

Bloody big factory ships scare the natives.

The heat should have gone out of this non-issue by now, especially since Local, State and Federal pollies have (mostly) voiced their support for the operation and the scientists responsible for advising on setting fishing quotas have described the catch limits as 'very conservative'.

But the local media, especially ABC radio, are continuing to cover the story, including the odd town hall gathering and 'secret' meetings between the protagonists.

I've been wondering why it hasn't died a quiet death as word spreads that much of the initial objection was based on misinformation and agenda bias. It started to make sense to me after a public meeting hosted by the Green Party to stir up more opposition was attended by scores of rednecks who spend their weekends huntin', fishin' and tearing up the place in their 4WDs.

Those same rednecks have since staged their own rallies towing their fishing boats and 'various other marine craft' through the cities and towns of our fair state to 'show the guvvment we mean business'. Those rallies were also attended by a few local Greens

Then it made sense to me.

Here we have two social groups that have been on the opposite side of every environmental debate since Cocky was an egg suddenly standing shoulder-to-shoulder against a common enemy. The rednecks want the fish left alone so they can catch them and the Greens just want the fish left alone.

The Greens have been driving the debate and will continue to stoke the fires for as long as possible because they just might pick up some votes from within the bogan community. They NEVER get bogan votes but after this they just might win a few hillbilly hearts.

Bloody clever, those greenies.

This is the first post.

2012-07-30T07:47:00.000-07:00

...and that's about all I should say, don't you think?

I mean, the chances of someone actually reading a blog's first post must be pretty low so why bother even writing it? Sure, without a first there can't be a second etc. but the opening effort does little more than test the equipment.

It's hardly the place to put one's best work.

For starters, nobody but me and the cat know of theunderwhelmingblog's underwhelming launch so the reader count is sure to be vanishingly small.

By the time my first reader subscribes by mistake, after misspelling theunderwearblog, I'll have a laundry list of posts and this one will be buried so deep it'll have begun its metamorphosis into brown coal.

Nope. I'm not going to write anything here, I'll save the pixels for something that might actually get read.