Australia Day and Night

Australia Day: 9 July

2012-01-02T12:57:00.003+11:00

26 of January is a historic day for Australia and it needs to be reminisced with a Public Holiday. It is the day that the colonisation of NSW started by the British. The colonisation was not peaceful and the indigenous Australian suffered grossly. Their unjust suffering is Australia’s heritage and we need to be strong enough to accept it and vocalise it. No country in the world has a clean past. It has been part of the genesis of a nation to go through transitions that become a dark point in time. We need to understand and accept that. We can do that by proclaiming the 26th January as National Mourning day, for the suffering caused to our Indigenous Australians. The day needs to be filled with events around reconciliation and Indigenous history and culture. The flag of the day should be the Aboriginal flag.

The day for celebrating Australia is the 9th of July, currently the Constitution Day, commemorating the day in 1900 when Queen Victoria gave her assent to the Constitution of Australia. It makes no sense to celebrate Australia Day on an event that occurred only in the state of NSW, on a date 112 years before even Australia existed. Australia is its people, its Democracy and Constitution, not a boat load of convicts arriving at NSW shores. Australia was born by its Constitution and that is the day to celebrate the start of our nation. 50 other countries celebrate their Constitution day, most of them with a public holiday. Whenever Australia becomes ready to shed its racist past and embrace its future, the logical date for celebrating it awaits her. It is the 9th of July.

Boardwalk Empire soundtrack: The original songs from the 20's

2011-12-11T17:04:00.001+11:00

The HBO soundtrack has songs written for the show by contemporary artists.

However, here is the list for the original releases of those songs, from the 1920's.
From Archives.org, free to download

Enjoy :)

01_Livery Stable Blues_Original Dixieland Jass Band_1917
http://goo.gl/3W2xR

02_The Dumber They Come_Eddie Cantor_1923
http://goo.gl/szPBD

03_My Man_Fanny Brice_1928
http://goo.gl/NVysf

04_Darktown Strutters Ball_Jungle
http://goo.gl/ULDhY

05_Crazy Blues_Mary Stafford
http://goo.gl/T7UXQ

06_Mournin Blues_Original Dixieland Jazz Band_1918
http://goo.gl/lG9U7

07_Some of This Days_Sophie Tucker_1926
http://goo.gl/E0ShD

08_ Margie_Frank Crumit_1920
http://goo.gl/Yq1lk

09_Carrickfergus
Hmm.. not really from the 20's

10_Wild Romantic Blues_Jane Green
http://goo.gl/F9ppQ

11_After You Get What You Want, You Dont Want It_Van & Schenck_1920
http://goo.gl/n5t7a (Youtube)

12_The Sheik of Araby_The Palm Court Theatre Orchestra
http://goo.gl/4ydgm

13_Japanese Sandman_Olive Kline_1921
http://goo.gl/9Q0Hg

14_Don't Put a Tax On the Beautiful Girls_Eddie Cantor
http://goo.gl/iQb0e (iTunes..sorry)

15_All by Myself_Aileen Stanley
http://goo.gl/xwNmS

16_Life Is A Funny Proposition After All_George M Cohan_1911
http://goo.gl/2KBUl

17_Maple Leaf Rag_Bonus Track_United States Marine Band_1906
http://goo.gl/DCy2s

18_Alice Blue Gown_Bonus Track_Edith Day_1920
http://goo.gl/uqpq9

The Reasons Behind Australia's Federation

2011-06-12T18:33:00.002+10:00

Australian federation is proud to have come to being, not by a revolution or an occupation, but after a democratic process, where people voted to become one nation. There were many reasons why these independent colonies thought that unification would be beneficial to them and there were many voices who debated the opposite. There was also the colony of New Zealand who opted out of a federation at the last minute. The discussions on the federation of the colonies lasted for over half a century, starting from Governor Fitzroy’s suggestion for a federal scheme in 1846 and were concluded with the federation convention during the last decade of the 19th century. After three federal conventions, a decade of economic depression and numerous votes with close results, the five colonies, with Western Australia following shortly after, voted for the birth of Australia, whose democratic start still runs today in our Parliament, unopposed and uninterrupted.

From the mid-19th century, all Australasian British colonies had a form of constitution and an elected parliament, along with a running economy. However, there were issues that those distant democracies wanted to unite to one. As councillor Thomson of NSW put it in 1856, a federation would help internal trade, by creating a uniform tariff system, would assist with the management of the gold fields and with the communication between colonies, by unifying the railways and the telegraph. All these technical issues have come about through un-coordinated between the colonies infrastructure, like the different rail gauges, and by new technologies that would benefit from a central command, like the telegraph.

In addition to the NSW concerns, Queensland, due to its geographic proximity with South East Asia, had to address the issue around its security and foreign relations. With Germany close by in PNG and the refusal of Britain to assist Queensland in claiming and occupying New Guinea, there was hope that a Federation would give more emphasis on the local security issues and a more sympathetic ear than the distant motherland. On the other side however, Queenslanders were contemplating going the other way: to separate into two or three colonies, since the vast size of Queensland was a hinder to administration by the south positioned Brisbane.

South Australia, being a ‘free’ settlers’ colony, did not consider the unification with the other colonies, which were born out of convicts’ labour, as a good idea. However, the promise of commerce free of tariffs and the building of a unified railway system along with a federal control of the Murray River was a good reason for the South Australians to look positively to a federation, as it appeared that such an agreement would put their colony in the middle of the Australian trade map.

Western Australia was the last to join the federation, but this was because it was the last colony to gain a self-governing status, only during the last decade of the century. While they appeared reluctant to move to a new direction so soon, at the same time, they were afraid of missing the federation boat, which was under way with the remaining colonies. But the idea that a railway link to the other colonies was at stake, along with the build of the Fremantle port, which would be the first point of contact between Australia and Europe, was just too good of a deal to be missed.

Tasmania was the smallest colony with the most venerable economy and a federation with the rest of the mainland would provide all the stability needed along with new markets. But there was a looming danger within this federation: the fear that the big fish would eat the small. Tasmania small size and economy could mean that it would lose its voice in the big federal arena. However, this was adequately addressed in the new constitution, by giving each State equal voice in the Senate, making Tasmania a significant powerbroker in the political history of Australia.

The second biggest power within the colonies was Victoria, with a big objection to federation. The majority of Victorians believed passionately in protectionism, the support of the local markets by imposing tariffs on imports, and the idea of opening the markets was against the way their economy operated. Their biggest opponent was NSW, with an economy based on free trade with all. The compromise was found in the way the federation was set to support its own industries. While Victorians would now have to compete with the other States, the new Federation would enlarge Victoria’s protectionism ideas to include the whole country, essentially continuing protecting Victoria’s interests but also giving them the opportunity to expand to the surrounding States.

Besides the bargaining between the representatives of the colonies to achieve federation, the people of Australia had another reason to look up to this new entity. The last decade of the 19th century brought economic depression Australia wide. The Gold Rush was over and the labour Unions were losing the battle against workers right, with a return to a 48 hours week and massive unemployment. With the world trebling in front of the eyes of a common citizen, this new idea for a new beginning must have been very appealing. Australians were ready to give up the failed past for a fresher and promising start.

An indication of why federation happened can also be seen within the failure: the denial of New Zealand to become one with the rest of Australia, even if they were involved with all the federal conventions. New Zealand was not a distant land. It was quicker for NSW to commerce with New Zealand than Western Australia. There was already in place trade agreements with some of the colonies. However, New Zealand bailed out at the last second solely because of economic reason. The last decade saw a stronger link with Britain with agreements in the transportation of frozen meat, which made Australia a competitor in the trade. Besides all the other common reasons to federate, at the end it didn’t make economic sense to do so.

When faced with such historically significant events like the birth of the Australian Federation, one can only but find a myriad of reasons behind it, from economic benefits to socio-political motives. What makes the Australian federation unique compared to the French revolution and the US Independence is that Australia chose to peacefully debate the reasons to federate and then democratically vote for it. This is why no one ever challenged it and this is why it still thriving today.

The Stolen Generations: Ethnicity

2011-06-12T18:08:00.003+10:00

The Stolen Generations is a clear case of racism. However, one of the reasons why white Australians resorted to racism was because they were trying to safeguard their idea of the Australian Ethnos. Since the first fleet, white Australians were looking up to Britain, not only for financial help, but also for the nation’s identification in this South East Asian corner of the world. Besides the economic reasons that were behind the mistreatment of the Indigenous Australians, there was the need of the newly arrived European to keep their connection with the motherland because being (white) Australian was initially synonymous with being British.

The distinction of those who had the right to be called Australians and those that did not was easy: the guide would be the colour of the skin. Anything off-white would belong to the subclass of immigrant or would be part of the “black” problem. The “black problem” was gradually illuminated, by the systematic extinction of the Indigenous Australians, by pushing them away from their land and segregating them in missions and camps. However, the problem seemed to re-emerge with the ever increasing appearance of the “half castes”, the product of the interracial sexual encounter, volunteered or otherwise. The dividing line between black and white that used to provide a clear cut distinction was now threatened by shades of grey. Were those children partially white? Did their mixed blood give them mixed rights? Is there some British-ness in those children? The white colour of Australia’s ethnicity was threatened. In the deluded brains of every racist society, impossible solutions with brutal consequences are invented. In Australia, this was manifested with the idea of “die out” and “breed out”: The “blacks” would be left to die and the “half castes” would be removed, taught the white ways and forced to marry white men, so their blackness would eventually become diluted in British white. However, these racist ideas would have never surfaced, if only Australia’s ethnicity was inclusive of its indigenous past in a similar way to that of New Zealand’s. It was the search for an ethnicity in the links with the white Europe that made those Australians resort to the genocide of the Stolen Generations.

The Stolen Generations: Gender

2011-06-12T18:07:00.005+10:00

Although the Stolen Generations had both boys and girls forcibly abducted from their parents, the fate of the girls were different. Based on the sexual discrimination that already existed in white society, the “half caste” girls were to be trained and placed at the lower end of the female chain. Their education was focused on domestic tasks as their predetermined future would be one of maid in a white person’s house. This was not uncommon in Australia’s treatment of indigenous females, as they were always used as servants by white women. It was custom for the wealthy women or those who were trying to demonstrate their middle-class, to have an indigenous girl as a domestic servant in their household. Besides the use of those girls as sex slaves for their white male bosses, they also found oppressive treatment by their white female guardians, as the distance that was conveniently invented between the two was not only due to the race difference but also due to their difference in class; the indigenous girls would be legally discriminated against because of their colour and freely abused because of their subclass status of domestic servant. As if being stolen from one’s parent is not enough of a trauma to carry for the rest of one’s life, the gender discrimination that was enforced on those people was an added ordeal.

The Stolen Generations: Race

2011-06-12T18:07:00.002+10:00

The Stolen Generations was the epitome of racist policies in Australia. Those policies align very closely with the definition of the crime of Genocide as per the resolution 260(III), adopted by the General Assembly of the UN. The aim was to find a solution to those children that were of a “mixed” race and who were left to their Indigenous parent to “inadequately” take care of them. They would remove those children from their native environment that was full of “dirt and diseases” in order to dress them up as white children and teach them the European ways. In reality, they would end up in camps where they would be prepared for cheap labour on farms or as maids to white masters. Not only those children suffered abuse, but they were never given a chance to become equals to their white bosses. The consequence of this policy was generations of people detached from their roots and their culture, ending up living on the fringes of regional centres, with no past or future. This policy did not just had the consequences from the forcibly separation of families. Since it was aimed at a specific race that was considered as subordinate to the white one, there was no effort given to protect those children and ensure their future. The trauma inflicted on those children was double. Like any other activity that is based on racist ideas, it failed to achieve anything and it has been judged harshly by history, even if it took us years to recognise this as an issue.

The ANZAC legend: Race

2011-06-12T18:06:00.005+10:00

As the Anzac legend is short on acknowledging women’s contributions, same can be said for the one for Indigenous Australians. Although initially Aborigines were banned from joining the army fighting in WW1, by 1917 “half-castes” were allowed, due to the failed conscription referendum. Indigenous Australians would fight out of pride for their country, hoping to achieve equality by fighting next to white Australians. Like the Maoris fighting for New Zealand, Indigenous Australians fought as equals next to white Australians. However, after they returned to their country, they found that racism still existed and fighting for Australia did not bring them equal citizenship. The Anzac legend would resist any other race, but the white one, to the extent that the Return Service League would not allow membership to Indigenous Australians. Like with the exclusion of women, the legend had to be a story free of controversy and social issues. The purpose of the legend was to create a national identity for Australia. Issues of gender and racial discrimination, the reasons why we had to be involved in the war in the first place, and the cost of the war to the new nation were all questions for historians to ponder, not for a flag waving crowd.

The ANZAC legend: Gender

2011-06-12T18:06:00.002+10:00

We have been using the Anzac legend as our nation’s flag, to explain who we are and why we have the right to exist as a country. But this legend is flawed; it talks about the fight and sacrifice of only half of Australians, only the male half. It appears that women do not matter as beings or they do not need an identity. Their husband’s efforts are enough for both of them. The fact that women were the nurses healing the wounds of those men and even more importantly, women were the mothers, without whom there would have been no army of men, somehow has evaded this male focus driven Anzac myth. Women had to raise the family of men who never came back and women had to deal with the psychological traumas of those who barely survived the war. The reason why women are excluded from these nation building exercises could be something more than just the unwillingness of men to recognise their contribution. We have chosen to celebrate our nationhood with war legends. Although Ancient Greece was declaring its power in the Mediterranean with its contribution to the arts and science, civilization has been playing a different tune since then, with the military might being the nations’ oxygen. The Anzac legend is a bloody legend. If the story involved women’s sacrifices, it would be a myth full of grief, loss and depression. The true social price of war that women had to pay is no material for celebrations. Women are excluded from the Anzac legend, because when a legend is based in war, there is only place for a story of heroic soldiers charging towards death, not its aftermath.

The ANZAC legend: Ethnicity

2011-06-12T18:05:00.005+10:00

While Australians after Federation were trying to find out what “being an Australian” really means and what the qualities of the Australian ethnicity were, the First World War brought the opportunity for this question to be answered. At Gallipoli, Australians died in a hopeless battle but the fact we were involved as a nation, with an army that was willing to die for a cause, was enough to prove that we were indeed a nation equal to any other country. The more desperate the fight was, the more the odds were against us, the bigger were the ethical rewards for a country that was born only a decade ago. The Anzac myth has seen various days through Australia’s history. During the Vietnam War and during periods of social and identity questioning, war trophies become less important, as the futility of war overtakes the debates. During other periods, usually for political reasons, like the need to support the foreign policy of the United States during the last decade, the Anzac myth is revived and celebrated with new generations of Australians getting involved. However, as Australia’s ethnicity has evolved since federation with the cultural mix the migration to Australia has created, the Anzac legend is losing its shine and Australia again questions what it is to be Australian. This was not the case during the first decades after Federation, when Australia was predominately white and British. It was allegoric that we used a European war, fighting for the ‘old country” as the way to prove that Australia is a country in its own rights, with a foreign policy, an army and returned soldiers with war stories to tell. Nevertheless, the Anzac legend was the signature that validated the Australian Nationhood to the world.

Federation and White Australia: Ethnicity

2011-06-12T18:05:00.002+10:00

There were many reasons why the colonies federated to become one country and most of them were for economic reasons: Trade, labour, telegraph and railways. Another reason put forward was defence reasons, due to the ever increasing presence of foreign powers in the area. In hindsight, this might sound a very weak reason, but during federation the fear of other growing countries in the area was seen as a threat to the colonies that were missing the strength of a united Ethnos. Australia then was distinctively British, but every colony was taking a separate approach to immigration depending on their needs for cheap labour, and the physical distance between each other made them feel isolated. The presence of Germany, Spain, France, Netherlands and the United States in the area, claiming pieces of the Pacific, and with Britain’s ever weakening foothold in the area, created the need of a strong nation encompassing the colonies. The Federation of the colonies created a nation that could compete with those international forces. With the help of the White Australia Policy, Australia was proclaimed as a country made of white North Europeans of distinctively British heritage. This need for a connection between Australia’s ethnicity and Britain was evident during the First World War, where Australia felt the need to be involved even if it was not directly affected by it. However, in the following years, with Britain becoming an even more distant power in the region, the Australian ethnicity created during federation would be challenged by the influence of the United States and the neighbouring Asian countries.

Federation (and White Australia): Gender

2011-06-12T18:04:00.004+10:00

While discrimination against different races and cultures was legislated in the new Federation, the discrimination against sexes took a different course. Women received the right to vote in federal elections as early as 1902, which is something unique for women’s rights during that period. However, the right to vote does not bring equality automatically. Women had a long battle towards equal rights and only during the war periods did they managed to get some recognition for their contribution. But the right to vote was not a small thing. With many female political organisations forming since 1880, male dominant political parties could no longer ignore this group’s new voting power. This came to light in the major electoral win by Menzies in 1949, where his long years of connections with women organisations payed off. His election speeches were written as if they were talking to all women, giving them hope that the new Liberal party was their party, while Chifley was still speaking as if he was addressing men only. Women’s power in the 1940’s would not have involved to that extent if they had not received the right to vote at Federation, even though it did not bring full equality at the time.

Federation and White Australia: Race

2011-06-12T18:04:00.000+10:00

At Federation, when part of the new legislation enacted by the new parliament was the White Australia Policy, the issue of race in the Australian psyche took centre stage. It is striking that a colony, created by immigrants and relying on the labour of people from all over the region, was to have such a strong resistance to other non-British cultures. Since the gold rush and the pastoral expansions after the 1840’s, there was an influx of Chinese, South East Asian and Polynesian migration to the colonies. Although these immigrants were not always welcomed, their presence was not an issue as long as there was enough wealth to go around. However, when the depression of the 1890’s arrived, immigration control became an issue, with individual colonies enacting regulations to restrict migration from those countries. With Federation, this became a country wide policy, with different races receiving different restrictions, but almost all were denied citizenship. A whole generation of Chinese people working and living in Queensland, with established businesses and families, had to look for a better future outside Australia. The need for a new national Identity, closely aligned to a British past was too strong to allow some rational thought amongst the new federal legislators.

Political Parties and Australian Federation

2011-06-12T17:53:00.001+10:00

The turn of the 20^th century brought a transformation to the Australian political landscape, with the formation of ideology-driven parties, the birth and establishment of the Labor party, and the fusion of the remaining parties into an antipodal political position. The Labor party, formed during the depression of the 1890’s and arising out of the need of the unions to give a political voice to workers, gradually became a great force in the federal politics. The other two parties, the Free Trade and the Protectionist party, modified their colonial economic positions to suit the new federal system. However, the Federation provided solutions to many of the problems in the past that had divided them and as a consequence they united against their new enemy, the Labor party. Although these realignments during the first decade of Federation created massive shifts in the way politics were practiced, the political parties managed to see it through and create the necessary legislation needed to kick start the new Australian federated realm.

Around the time the Australian colonies federated, there were some big changes to the political systems and ideologies, not just in Australia, but also around the world. The idea of political parties, consisting of individuals ready to support the party line, even against their own beliefs, was a new idea in Australia. It started with the formation of the Labor party, which created a system of party control unprecedented in Australian colonial politics. This control gave power to the party to persevere through historical changes, when other parties were not able to keep it together. The Labor party, although starting out as the smallest player in the new Federal Parliament, managed to grow slowly and steadily through the use of its unifying disciplinary political party powers and by the end of the first decade of the 20^th century, it succeeded in such an electoral win that saw it, for the first time, controlling both Houses of the Parliament.

Political change around this time revolved around consistency and purpose of the new political parties. Colonial parties had similar ideologies during the last half of the 19^th century, with the only differences between their policies being their practical implementation; they were all democratic and they voted for legislation on the same economic and social issues around taxes, tariffs, railways and telegraph. Their issues would differ; however, customs barriers and inter-colonial and foreign affairs were not on the everyday agenda so they never became a huge distinction point between them. The colonial parliaments consisted of very influential individuals and their groups of followers, which was never big enough to constitute a governing party by itself, but had to rely on temporary alliance with other groups. Being a member of a federal party meant a temporarily alliance with a specific interest group in order to address a specific, usually local and of a set term of time, issue. Political groups that surfaced before federation were the protectionist of Victoria, the Free traders on NSW, the land reform groups, the farmer unions and religious groups.

However, a new breed of political party, the Labor party, surfaced just before Federation, which was surprisingly unique and unprecedented. The trade unions, losing power during the economic depression of the 90’s, decided to move their fight in the parliament, by creating a political party, where their only objective was to support the workers, not the government of the day. Suddenly, ideologies and social issues became the main plate in parliament and a point of difference. The Labor party members would not come to an easy compromise with other parties for the sake of moving on. All those economic issues that groups had to face before federation but without making them a sticking point became, after federation, the main debate.

As the Labor party side of politics changed with the new parliament, so did all the other powers. When Federation took place, the inter-colonial issues of trade and tariffs lost their importance. The two main players in the colonial parliaments, the Free Traders and the Protectionists, saw their rhetoric weakened by the resolution of the issues that made them a party when the colonies became one country. The economic issues between the states were regulated by the new Constitution and the details were left up to the states to resolve, as the Commonwealth had limited jurisdiction to deal with these matters. In addition, the trade with other countries was never the main issue in the parliament; everyone agreed that the Australian economy needed protection from overseas markets in order to stay competitive. This loss of purpose brought the parties to an awkward position; they did not have a dogma anymore. A political change was needed and it was created by the Free Trade party when it changed its name and politics to become the Anti-Socialist party, creating an alternative thesis to that of the workers’ rights party. The new Right placed itself on the opposite side of the growing Left, fighting the war of businesses and industries against wage rises and anti-development philosophies. This brought a brand new political face to the Federal Parliament, completely different from what colonial politics used to be.

The big change in Australian politics came from the creation of the trade unions party, the Labor party. Australia saw an economic boom during the decades after 1850, mainly due to the gold rush. Immigration was welcomed and Victoria become populated with migrants looking for the gold shine and Queensland farming expanded creating mega farms that employed domestic and overseas workers. By 1890, the Australian economy had grown enormously with industrial and population dynamics changing the Australian landscape on a grand scale. However, the last decade of the century brought a worldwide economic crash. British banks were in trouble and refrained from giving away loans to the colonies. The housing boom in Melbourne exploded and the banks collapsed. The price of wool dropped internationally. The over-extended Australian economy that rode the prosperity boom for forty years came to a dramatic collapse. Mass unemployment and depression hit Australia. The unions tried to protect the workers, but the governments, watching the economy collapsing, sided with the industries and crushed any strike the unions would organise. The trade unions, now powerless, decided to change tactics. Realising that elected Governments have the ultimate power to change and force change to the economy and the people, they decided to move their battle from the factories and the docks to the parliament. Under the Tree of Knowledge at Barcaldine or in the Unity Hall in Balmain, the Labor party was created in order to gain political power to serve the rights of the workers. The Australian Labor party became the first workers party in the world to form a government, first at colonial level in 1899, when it became government for just a week, and then on a national level, when in 1904 Chris Watson become the prime minister for four months.

The Australian Labor party was not only unique because it represented the rights of the workers and the trade unions; it was also distinctive because it formed an internal mechanism of controlling its members not before seen in other parties. The Caucus of the party would make decisions on all matters that were binding to all its members. In addition, the party would occasionally publish manifestos with policies and thesis that all members were obliged to adhere too. This was completely different from other parties, whose members represented local issues and would only vote in unison on matters that they all agreed on or matters that were irrelevant to their local constituency. This was very problematic when faced with locally significant economic issues, where local members would be keen to change alliances to other parties if it would benefit their electorate, leaving their party weak and with an unpredictable future. On the contrary, all the Labor party members would follow an unbreakable line, which eventually gave the party a great force through unity.

Besides the newly created Labor party, the new Federal parliament was a game with three teams, with the Protectionists and the Free traders filling the other two positions. Both parties existed before federation. The economic issues around the type of trade and protection needed for the colonies to flourish were deeply rooted in the colonial Parliament. The Free Traders, based mainly in NSW, believed that open markets and free economy was the way for the country to develop. This was well fitted to the psyche of NSW that, as a new colony, found it hard to be self-sufficient and was relying on trade and loans from other countries. Victoria was enjoying enormous prosperity through the gold rush and immigration in the second half of the 19^th century, and the big ticket was the protection of the local industry from competition by the other States, a position championed by the Protectionist party. Both ideas clashed during the Federation Conventions and they almost stopped the federation from coming into being. Both parties entered the federal parliament with force, with the Protectionists forming government for the first 10 years, but only after having to transform and interconnect with the other parties, change names and fuse ideologies in order to fight the ever growing Labor party. At the conclusion of the first decade, the Labor party had managed to overtake both its rivals and create a strong government that held the power of both Houses for the first time ever.

The reason why the two non-labour parties gradually lost power in the federal arena was mainly due to their pre-colonial mantra becoming irrelevant after the colonies had actually federated. While free trade and protection of the industries were issues at the colonies and the national level, the people and the rhetoric before federation were focused mainly on the local arena. After the two parties managed to resolve their issues and agreed on federation, the raison d'être of those parties slowly evaporated. The interstate trade was legislated and all parties had similar ideas on how Australia should trade with other countries. There were still minor changes regarding questions about tariffs and the way income and taxes should be distributed between the States and Federal government, but these issues had become small enough to take a back seat in the new Federal arena. The “new sentiment” had been decided and the parties needed to find another way to prove that they were needed. This ironically came easily for the only party that had strong and universal reasons to exist, the Labor party. Federation saw no change in the fight for workers’ rights. The Labor party, coming out of the depression of the previous century, had more reasons to ask for arbitration in wages and protection of workers’ rights. The non-labour parties, in their effort to oppose the political growth of their enemy, transformed into parties that opposed what Labor was standing for. The Free Traders, under the leadership of George Reid, become the Anti-Socialist party, opposing wage rises and advocating for a free hand to the way industries were regulated by the government. These far right positions saw some members defecting from the party and some members joining its new cause. By the end of the decade, there were no longer three players in federal politics; only two remained: the Labor and the non-labour parties.

The Federal Parliament of the first decade was very active, with names and numbers created from numerous elections and changes in alliances that were never to be seen again on such a scale and variety. The Protectionist party won the first two elections with Barton and Deakin. While Barton secured his government with the votes from the Labour Party, the second Parliament saw all three parties forming government. As Protectionist policies fluctuated towards a socialist agenda, the Free Traders needed to distance themselves from their allies’ new socialist policies. For the third Parliament, Deakin turned back to the Labor party for support. Labour found Deakin too right wing, the Protectionists wanted to move back towards the right and the Free Traders changed their name to the Anti-Socialist party. Inevitably, Deakin changed his alliances and formed a new ‘Fusion’ government with the Anti-Socialist party, changing the three party systems to two, Labour and Liberal. Besides all this political interweaving, the parliament and the political parties during this period created legislation and nurtured High Court decisions that had an enormous effect on the way Australia operated during the rest of the century, like the White Australia Policy, wage Arbitration and our international relationship with Britain and other foreign powers. Regardless of the transformation of the political parties and the changes in ideologies, these politicians initiated the massive work needed to kick start Australia as a strong country, ready to navigate almost independently through the turbulent waters during the wars and other challenges of the following decades.

The Australian Federation did not see the creation of new political powers. The political chessboard was already occupied with groups before and around the time of Federation. The only difference was that those powers had to re-invent themselves in order to be relevant to the new political realm of federated Australia. The Labor party had drawn and solidified its political career map since its formation and it rarely veered off course, starting as a consort of union members to become a full grown power, controlling both Houses of Parliament by 1910. The other two parties took more time to create a modern vessel for their liberal ideas, even if they were in control of government in the years after Federation. In the end, as Alfred Deakin would claim, the “three cricket elevens taking the field at the same time” did not last and, although he considered Labor as being the third interfering team, the fusion of the right into one liberal party and the opposing Labor party were the only two teams left to play political cricket for the new Australia of the 20^th century.

Australia since 1900: Censorship and the Internets (part two)

2011-04-28T07:45:00.000+10:00

An ISP filter will not only restrict internet to children, but also to parents. What is more applicable is something for our own computers, a local filter. This website http://www.cybersmart.gov.au/ has some info that could be useful, but IMO the only weapon against 'bad' things is real and open conversation about why bad is bad and then allow freedom of choice. If we don't allow it, they will get it any way.

Also, specifically about porn, it is the easiest thing to restrict from children, only if we just give them a small idea why porn is bad (abuse, abduction, prostitution, slavery, drugs etc). The output of all these is a faked, drugged, staged imagery that when its true origin is uncovered it becomes a filter by itself that no one wants to bypass.

The problem becomes more vivid for all these situations that we want to restrict from our children, but we are happy to be involved in, like gambling, alcohol, drugs, bulling and again porn. The hypocritical filters we try to apply to our children are useless because their eyes can clearly see through them.

Australia since 1900: Censorship and the Internets (part one)

2011-04-24T16:18:00.006+10:00

The Interenets has scared the old generations. They realised that this new world of instant communication and information is not as controllable as it was some decades ago. You can censor and control books, as there are only a handful of publishers; you can control the message transmitted through TV and Radio by rules linked to their licence to broadcast. But the internet has made every citizen a broadcaster and a publisher. And this is very hard to control, if possible at all.

Those with power would like to censor people because the message transmitted might be illegal. Child pornography, euthanasia, abortion (by choice) and graffiti are some of the crimes that censors would like to see eliminated from the internet. If they succeed in this, they would like to move in to more “ethical” territories, by drawing a line on what behaviour the “community” approves and what is not acceptable and this applies to mainly sex, addictions and other personal choices. The next step could be anything, since the internet is “everything”, as this way of communicating with each other has penetrated every aspect of our lives and in some cases has created new ways of living (Internet shopping, dating, gaming, be-friending etc)

Unfortunately, we do not have a bill of rights to protect our freedom of speech and the censors are free to exercise their heavy hand on our keyboard. Fortunately for us, we have free elections!

Censorship has always been a futile exercise. Like the cold war, it has been used to scare the masses with a “new order”, to make them more compliant and controllable. The true aim of the cold war in the west was not to limit communist gatherings (although it did limit them). It was aimed to keep us consuming and accepting any political and economic change needed for this to happen. Censorship has the same effect. Whether you burn books or call jihad on the authors, you do not aim to actually stop people from reading, but to enforce your position as the one who has control over people’s choices.

Nevertheless, the actual censorship of material is always a flawed exercise, as people will always find a way to bypass it. In ‘the old days’, underground press and makeshift radios tuned to BBC was the way to circulate news that were forbidden. However, these days, the penetration of the internet in our lives has made it the number one target for censorship, raising the ante on application and bypassing the censorship net.

One idea is to use a filter that the concerned parties (parents , schools, employers) can apply on their private network to limit access to certain websites. On a bigger scale, the use of filters at the ISP level is consider to be a stronger approach, as the material in question will be blocked with or without the approval of the user. Both filters are useless. It could be hard to find crystals and tubes to build a radio during the WW2, but today, every question has an answer only a click away. There are many ways to bypass any filter on the internet. Chat rooms and p2p networks are impossible to monitor and control, just ask the big studios who are after movie pirates. Bypass proxies are widely available (www.hidemyass.com is one of my favourites). And if you cannot find these on the internet, there are special groups meeting in libraries and seniors clubs that can show you how to do it. In some cases, the volume of internet traffic is show big, that it is impossible to monitor, like the heavy bandwidth using site of YouTube.

Nevertheless, there is always the change that someone can just pull the plug of the internet to stop a message spreading. After 9/11, someone (the FBI director?) asked the question: “Where is the Internet? Take me to it.” It sounds funny, but it is not. They did take him there. Let me explain (with my unqualified knowledge): Two computers hocked together with a cable make a network. Add a couple of hundreds more and you have a bigger network. Take it outside the university wall and it is even bigger. Same way that I have a phone number that you can call, every computer has its own number, the IP address. When I ‘call’ your computer, I place the ‘call’ to a central system that has the phone directory and it hooks me up with the computer I called; this central system that holds all the numbers is called DNS. One DNS is not enough to deal with the whole internet traffic. There are dozens of those DNSs in every country, usually run by our internet providers (i.e. Telstra) and they all linked with the big DNSs in USA (where the internet is controlled/delegated). So when I “call” another computer, let’s say the computer that holds in its hard drives the abc.net.au website, I ask the DNS of my internet service provider (ISP) to connect me with the abc computer. If that DNS has a filter and the mq.edu.au website is marked us inappropriate, then I will not be connected. This is the ISP filter. In China, the government has forced the local ISPs to filter out of their DNS certain websites in order to censor free speech. However, it takes little effort to ‘tune’ your computer with another DNS, not the Telstra one, but a free one from overseas, like from a university, and then you can access anything you like. As I said, censorship is futile exercise.

Recently, when Egypt was uprising, the local government tried to censor their internet, by ordering the ISPs to shut down, so people would not be able to get instant messages about where the next protest is about to happen. It took less than a day for technology to overcome this ‘total’ restriction. Google and Twitter established the “speak-to-tweet” service, a phone number that users could call and speak out their messages, which all users could then call in and listen to or read online on Twitter. Even when they attempted to cut down phone communications, Egyptians managed to get their message through, by using satellite phones and foreign sim cards.

Technology does make total censoring impossible, but censorship is still used as a display of power by those who hold it.

Censorship is not always bad. At least not for Dr Who fans. In the 60's, broadcasters would not play repeats of shows on the TV, as the rights they had to pay for playing them was so high that it was cheaper to actually shoot a whole new episode. So they would just not play repeats. As a consequence, they would get rid of all the original tapes since there was no use for them. The Dr Who tapes were re-used, written over with other shows. Now fans all over the world try to discover some VHS tape or an 8mm film hidden in the attic to fill in the blanks of the first seasons.

But the Australian Censorship board had a surprise for them. When they played Dr Who, they were targeting children for audience, so the censor was very heavy on chopping off pieces of film that were too scary. That included a scene 'the most terrifying scene in the show's history' where a woman is attacked by two weed-infected males, using some supersonic sound coming out of their wide open mouths. This footage was discovered in the Australian censorship vaults and it is the only scene found up to this day from the 6 part episode of 'Fury from the Deep', featuring the second doctor.

A second instance that I know that censorship was useful was during the first Australian Idol series. At the finale, when Casey Donovan won, they placed on the screen the address for her website as Casey Donovan.com. Terror landed on all parents when their kids tried to access the website, only to find that the Casey Donovan.com was a website about a homosexual porn star! It could have been a very nice educational opportunity for sexual education, since that porn star was known to be the first one who died from AIDS, but parents were not thinking clearly at that stage. Telstra helped with the situation by applying censorship tactics: They redirected all traffic that was trying to access the .com site to the .com.au site which was the correct one… Which would have created more terror to those who would try to access the porn site, only to be faced with some karaoke tone deaf singer!

And here is a poster for the memory of the deceased and censored star (G rated, of course!!)

Australia since 1900: A case of genocide against the Stolen Generations

2011-04-24T16:10:00.002+10:00

The 260(II) resolution of the UN, article 2e states clearly that forcibly transferring children of the group to another group is Genocide. Reason being is that children is our future, if you take away our children, you take our future = genocide.

The reasons behind the UN taking that step are as relevant today as the initial reasons for the Australian Federation. Laws are not made for a specific reason, but BY a specific reason. WW2 created the need for UN, but UN was created not just for the past mistakes, but also for future ones.

The reason why it has been so hard to prosecute genocide and other war crimes is because our friend “Up & Above” doesn’t want to play game. Guess why?

I believe that the race concept could have not been clearer as during the first half of the 20th century. The Stolen Generations were not targeted because of their bank account, political thought, sexual orientation, sports club or favourite energy drink. They were targeted because they belong to a common group, nominated by the white Australia, as those who we stole land from, those who are still here and those who if we don’t exterminate, might rise and demand back their land, the Indigenous Australians, who conveniently had darker skin than a common pale english farmer.

I am sure that Hitler’s motives, in his head, were just, when he ordered the slaughter of Jews, homosexuals and disables. He should have known better and same for all the other whitefellas who thought that removing children in the name of god, science or some psychotic social construction was a good idea. It was not. And it was a crime. The name of the crime is Genocide. So says the UN.

Daisy Bates CBE, honorary protector of Aborigines and federal adviser on Aboriginal affairs etc etc said: “I did what I set out to do – to make their passing easier and to keep the dreaded half-caste menace from our great continent". The ‘dying race’ was intended to be left to die, with a little help. That is intent to destroy, backed up by years of extinction practises, started from the day cpt Cook arrived. The one million indigenous Australians were not decimated to 10% during federation due to migration to other countries. They were systematically exterminated. This was genocide. Something that did not happen in New Zealand. The Stolen Generations were just one of the dozen other ways the Indigenous Australians were systematically destroyed, like the black line in Tasmania.

We don’t need a scenario where the extinction occurs inside the walls of a concentration camp to prove genocide. Abducting children, to let their parents race die out, is genocide. Same is applicable for rape. Rape was considered a component of genocide by the UN when they convicted those involved in the genocide in Rwanda. That was not a conviction for sexual assault, but genocide.

But if we prefer not to call a spade a spade, but just call those that were involved as ‘naughty’, the truth remains that those people committed crimes that we have the moral responsibility to amend, monetary and morally. We need a bill of rights in the Constitution to make sure this will never happen again. We also need protection from any form of racism, by having special definitions for hate crimes, so next time the media will think twice to entice another Cronulla riot.

This is the real issue, not if the letters are in the right order in a UN declaration that was always empty, since its underwriters are involved themselves in war crimes.

Australia since 1900: Anzacs vs. Godzilla

2011-04-24T16:05:00.001+10:00

The Anzac myth has been used by some to create passionate responses by the crowds for certain reasons. Like any banner, it is constructed by a specific iconography, which might have little to do with the real events. From time to time, it has been used as our civil religion, which is not unusual, since religion and war have common connections in history, with crusades being one of the obvious examples. Those who promote the ANZAC myth can find all their weapons in the way religion is exercised.

The religion of ANZAC has been used after the event, as a cushion to those who lost their family members. It was forgotten during the cold war, since “war” was a four letter word them, with the focus on the unnecessary destruction and the criminal extermination of civilian population, and it was revived during the last years and especially during our invasion in the other peninsula, in the Mesopotamia, as it served the mantra of the Government to parallel the ANZAC religion with this new unrelated war.

Gallipoli has been chosen as a focus of this war celebration because it was the last ‘clean’ warfare we were involved with. There were minimal civilian deaths, although they were Turks’ houses that were bombed in the peninsula, and there were no chemical warfare, even if chemical shells were shipped in the area but never used. The Boer War, which was the actual first war that Australia was involved in, was too meshy for celebrations, with many concentration camps and very clear economic reasons behind the whole expedition. Gallipoli has a very nice war story: Them in one side, we on the other, men killing each other, men got sick of it and stopped. It is a classic football game, with us being the away team that might have lost the game, but at the end got the championship.

I don’t think that the ANZAC myth has permeated the Australian psyche. I think that the idea of an Australian Psyche has been hijacked by various groups over time to force their philosophies as the real Australian ideas to the rest of us. Not everyone wants to celebrate ANZAC day. Question yourselves and your colleagues if that day was not a public holiday, would you participate in a dawn service? My grandfather, who fought with the NZ army, didn’t even want to hear about it, since he had seen with his own eyes what war really was and it didn’t look anything like a parade. In Inglis readings there are many examples of people speaking against the ‘legend’, since it excludes women, it does not include the real misery caused to the families back home or to all the soldiers who returned and who suffered for years, physically and emotionally. No one is asking the question if they had a second chance, if they would volunteer for the war again.

Like any other religion, it is assumed that everyone is involved and happy with the arrangements. Like a religion, attendance at the mass is never accounted for, or compared with those who didn’t attend. Same goes with other civilian celebrations, queen’s birthday, christmas, labour day etc. Big speeches and big headlines does not necessary means that these are part of our Australian soul. If they were, they would have been observed every day of our lives, not only one day a year. If we cared about the queen, we would be drinking tee out of teacups with her face; if we all cared about christmas, we would be all visiting a christian mass every Sunday; if we cared about labour day, we would be on strike more often. None of this is happening (by the majority). The Anzac myth, along with the other constructs, are ways some groups use to gather the crowd’s emotions when needed, usually to serve a hidden purpose. The real Australian psyche is made out of ideas that are in practise every day, have nothing to do with war atrocities and are rarely celebrated by national days.

Australia since 1900: The men behind the Federal Conventions

2011-04-24T16:01:00.001+10:00

I will use an abstract from a lecture by John Bannon, ex-Premier of SA, given in 2009 in the SA Parliament, about the “Constitution Founders”, which was focused on the personal efforts they made for this Federation to become a reality (http://goo.gl/8v7Qr) . The following occurred during the Second National Convention:

“It was here on the evening of 13 April 1897 that federation was nearly killed for a generation. The delegates had not been able to agree on the Senate’s power over money Bills that, under the draft proposal, could only be initiated in the House of Representatives. The smaller colonies were insisting on the Senate’s power being unfettered, the larger arguing for it to be totally restricted. The numbers were against a compromise. If outvoted New South Wales on one side, and Western Australia on the other, would simply abandon the Convention.

Late in the evening, with the vote about to be called, Barton realising the numbers were against him and that disaster loomed, told delegates he was suffering from a ‘bronchial cold’ and asked for an adjournment to allow the vote to be taken the next day. This was granted, and through the night some extraordinarily intensive lobbying took place. Two Tasmanians, one New South Welshman and two South Australians broke ranks from their delegations to support the compromise that was carried by just two votes. Kingston’s vote, with that of his colleague Glynn, was critical to the result. The Convention proceeded.”

We are proud to claim that our Federation came out of a democratic process, where people did not revolt or fought for, but voted for. But we cannot dismiss the importance the actions our representatives took during the bargaining period of the Conventions. They went through a colossal task of persuading, not only their counterparts from the other colonies, but also their own people they represented.

Those individuals came from different backgrounds and political persuasions. It was those differences that make the constitution what it is today. Because those personalities were so different, our constitution is very generic and had to be interpreted by the High Court many times during the last century. But because it is so generic, it managed to survive through wars and political crises untouched. And this is a direct consequence of the drafters being such a political diverse group.

Australia since 1900: Federation and Racism

2011-04-24T15:54:00.001+10:00

I find it unsettling coming across some excuses written in books for the WAP. It is like having a discourse on the theory behind the Jewish noses, because Nazis were obsessed with them. Race is rarely the reason why racist ideas develop. The new Australian Federation did not enforce racist laws because we really had a problem with some skin colour. It was about refusing to pay the rent for the land we occupied and for protecting the labour union’s power of local workers against the influx of cheap overseas ones.

Imagine if the First Fleet arrived in Australia, only to meet at the shores of Sydney a native Welsh population (speaking that weird Welsh language!). Then they decide to chase them away, murder their families and take their land with no compensation. Somewhere in the literature to be, it would be very easy to justify their actions, if they could find some nice discriminatory reason for it. If with the Welsh the reason is hard to find, how easy is it if you are dealing with someone with a darker skin!!!

One hundred years later, a GFC hits the shores and unemployment reaches 15%, with unions fearing of losing more power from the importation of cheap labour. Every day, thousands of Zeppelins arrive in Brisbane, full of Irish workers, ready to work for nothing in the mines and the sugar fields. Guess what the discriminatory literature would say: Protect Australia from the Gaelic peril (which they did say, but for other reasons).

Before Federation, when hands were needed to help in the mines during the gold rush, Australia was open to every race. The Chinese were very active in Queensland with many business owners and a very strong economic community. After federation, they suddenly become a problem and they were all send “home”.

The politics of discrimination were driven by economics, not by one specific race against another. The imperial Britain was against WAP, since they had no benefits from it. On the contrary, with their trade expanding to Japan, the noise that young Australia was making was very embarrassing for mother England and after Japan complained about it, we were told off. This is why we had to pretend that we do accept every race in Australia, as long as they can pass that tricky, impassable language test. So I would say, it was not race but economic protectionism that was central to Federation, which was disgracefully expressed (and applied) with racist ideology.

War Themes

2010-02-28T08:20:00.002+11:00

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are presented as modern wars, with new technologies in weaponry and new ideologies on which the wars are based. However, the history of wars tells us that there is nothing new to these conflicts; they started because bigger powers needed to control the area for their own benefit and the civilians will, once again, be those who suffer the most. In addition, those conflicts have proven again that although war is portrayed as the ultimate tool of arbitration, it really does not resolve anything and the path of destruction left behind becomes the trigger for another war.

Both Afghanistan and Iraq have minerals that everyone is after and they both hold strategic positions with access to important seaways. As Ancient Greek mythology had the abduction of Helen as the cause of the attack on Troy and the Crusades were fought in the name of religion, in those Middle Eastern countries, fear of communism or terrorism has been used as an excuse for the invasion of those sovereign nations. Nations’ power players in the global arena will use any excuse possible to cover the true intention of aggression. War is not an easy subject to sell. People are aware of the malaise of war and they are reluctant to agree on another military expedition. As a consequence, political leaders will try to wrap war in a package that the public will accept. In Afghanistan, soviets invaded the country on the pretention that Muslim extremists’ resistance was destabilising the country. Later on, NATO invaded to chase terrorists. No one wants to admit that Afghanistan occupies the strategic route of natural gas, from Asia to Europe. In Iraq, it was weapons of mass destruction as the reason for invasion, not the wealth from oil at stake. In Vietnam, we had a war against communism, not a war for the control of South East Asia. In Algeria, France was protecting its own territory, not a country they colonised. World War II started because Germany invaded Poland, not Czechoslovakia, WWI started because an ambassador was assassinated, not because the big powers of Europe had the need to fight for domination. The list is endless. The initial reasons why a country will fight another are always false and it is left to history to clarify things for the future. As information becomes ever more available to the general public, it has become increasingly difficult for a war to be justified.

Another theme that emerged from the unit readings was civilian casualties. War makers promise that they only after combatants; that the new smart weapons will spare civilian losses. However, throughout history, civilians have been targeted during wartime, because their loss can affect the morale of the army and destabilise the political power of the enemy. The concentration camps in the Boer Wars, the air bombing of Spanish towns during the civil war, the Holocaust and Hiroshima are tragic examples were civilians were intentionally targeted. Today we witness the reinvention of the suicide bombers, where the targets are civilians, locals or foreigners, for the sake of creating chaos and to undermine public trust in the government or the invading forces.

The aggression of war and its consequences has been a timeless phenomenon. History is the guardian of truth; by observing the past, the present (and the future) becomes clearer and more real.

War: A Constant Characteristic of History

2010-02-28T08:17:00.002+11:00

War has been present throughout human history, from Antiquity, with Greek, Chinese and Rome narration written in blood, until today, with nuclear and terrorist threats to our daily peaceful lives. Although war has changed face and tactics, it has always been the tool used to resolve differences between nations. Our history books are full of war, not peace. It can be said that historians prefer to amplify stories about warfare instead of peace, as warfare makes more interesting reading. In addition, war sacrifices need heroes and historical writing can be used as a tool to explain and encourage new heroes. Nevertheless, the millions of victims of warfare and the personal loss that almost everyone has witnessed are enough evidence to prove that war has been a major element in human history.

Every animal has the survival instinct, the instinct to use its full power in order to protect its own existence. As the aim is our ‘protection’, this instinct does not entice us towards war, but towards peace by all means. If we could measure the duration of peace against the duration of warfare through out history, equally divided to all humans, not just the armies, we would find that war is just a fraction of our time on this earth, with sleep taking up 1/3 of our day. Everyday living, hunting, eating, socialising is the norm, while war is the rarity.

War has been used as a tool of survival on those occasions where one’s survival was at stake. Usually driven by lack of resources, one tribe would unite to fight another tribe, in order to gain an advantage in survival. This was more prominent in Antiquity, where tribes or towns would clash with each other over a piece of agricultural land. In recent times, the term survival has become more complex to include the notion of living standards and political ideologies. For whatever reason, war has been present throughout history as the ultimate way of resolving disputes created by imbalance of power between groups.

As humans learned to communicate more efficiently with each other, so warfare became a less popular political option. While in antiquity everyone seemed to be at war with everyone, in the Middle Ages, humanity tried to moderate wars and in the last century global organisations were created to try and resolve disputes in a peaceful manner. Although it is true that every new century has broken the war death record of the previous one, this can be attributed to technological advances in warfare.

War has been with us forever as the ultimate arbitrator between nations. As humans continuously develop their social skills, peace resolution is taking over aggression, slowly making wars obsolete.

Women Are Saying, Let's Give Peace a Chance

2010-02-28T08:13:00.002+11:00

Peace and war are two interrelated concepts. Since Ancient Greece, peace was considered to be the period between wars. Giving peace a chance meant that time was needed to re-adjust, re-collect your strength so you were ready for the next war. Followers of the Christian religion later debated for peace and to only resort to war if the war was “just”. During the last centuries, the idea evolved into a call for talks and international arbitration in order to avoid war altogether. However, war kept on happening with ever increasing ferocity. The anti-war movements became more vocal, demanding for a re-think on the way humans approach resolution of international conflict. Especially in the period between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the Great War, the anti-war movements flourished and expanded all around the globe. Although war has been the domain of the male population, women have historically been affected by it; directly, through civilian city seizes or bombing, and indirectly, through war trauma on soldiers and the effects on their families and communities. However, women only became “citizens” with the right to vote at the beginning of the 20th century. Thus women had no political power to exercise their objection to war. The only place they could do that was through the anti-war movements. Women became heavily involved in the quest for a peaceful resolution of international conflict. The Women Peace Party (WPP) and later, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), became instrumental to the peace process and the fight of women to make their opposition to war heard and accounted for. Toward the end of the century, the “peace women” at Greenham Common created a peace camp that lasted for 19 years, causing a worldwide phenomenon of visual and constant objection from women to nuclear weapons and the machine of war. Clearly, women had destroyed the image of the previous centuries that they were only capable of “making babes” and “serving the man”. Women, through their fights for equality and their demand for the world to give peace a chance have claimed the rightful political position in the world, proving that they are a power to be reckoned with.

As war has been a human undertaking throughout history, so is the quest for peace. Although anti-war thought and the way it is expressed has evolved since Antiquity, the idea that it is worthwhile to ‘give peace a chance’ has always been present, with dialogue and arbitration taking centre stage from guns and killings. In Ancient Greece, the Olympic Games gave the opportunity to all Polis at war to stop the hostilities. The Olympic Ekehiria-Armistice asked for all parties to put down their swords and play the Games in the name of their Gods. This was the opportunity for opposing parties to re-organise or for the envoys to find a solution and end the fighting all together. Even if they did believe that war was the economic way forward and that peace was just the period between wars, the fact remains that they saw there were merits in the non-violent period, that delegation had its benefits.

Later, the Christian religion debated non-violence in an effort to control the wastage from unnecessary wars. The idea pushed that war was not the answer to every problem. Even if Christianity ended up approving the Crusades, as a war that was just and with a divine purpose, they still argued that, in some instances, peace could replace war, not just delay it. Another burst for Peace was seen in the period between the end of the Napoleonic War and the Great War. Disturbed by the atrocities and the loss of war, people started thinking seriously about Peace as a replacement of war altogether. Peace societies were created and volumes were written on the subject. The idea that peace as an international issue emerged, giving birth to the idea that arbitration must come from a global body. Although these ideas largely remained only on paper, the horrors of World War I and II pushed for the creation of the League of Nations and the United Nations in an effort to tame war and give way to peace instead. Recently, the nuclear age of the Cold War, along with the liberation of societies with more rights across sexes and more chances for the distant voices to be heard, the quest for peace has picked up momentum and attitudes have changed; more people now believe that war is the time between peace and if we give peace a chance, war can become redundant.

The historical pursuit to define and acquire peace was initially men’s business. Same as in war, women were expected to continue their domestic duties and leave the big decisions, or in fact any decisions, to their husbands and fathers. However, as the women’s liberation movement grew and the idea that women should become equal citizens, the participation of women in the debate for peace expanded into an active undertaking, in addition to the quest for equal voting and working rights. In an ancient Greek comedy “Lysistrata”, Aristophanes placed women in the major roles, asking for the end of war. They claimed that their natural power of fertility gave them the right to demand for peace. Although this was only a play, made by and played by men, it derived from the notion that women should have a say about the life or death of their sons. Over the years as Christianity spread, writing about peace emerged from Christian nuns, focusing on the malaise of war and the extreme suffering by the female population. After the Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century, where the peace debate had flared up, educated women from the intellectual circles devoted their lives to peace. Writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Helen Maria Williams theorised on the aggression of war and specifically the French revolution, addressing the need for peace.

All this time, those women had no political status and no citizen rights. The vote was male and so was the decision on peace or war. Women were thought best fitted for their domestic duties. This made it almost impossible for the female voice for peace to be heard. Women would claim that their right to speak was justified through their contribution to society; giving birth to the sons that war would later consume. In addition, the women claimed the right to speak up for peace was given by the fact that the outcomes of war - poverty, hunger, diseases and loss of life - affected women and their children.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, as women start getting the right to vote and the right to be heard, the fight for peace intensified with the creation of women’s peace organisations, which were debating the end of wars at an international level. As feminism grew, so did the voice of their main causes, equality and peace. After the two World Wars, and the rise of the nuclear era, women’s movements were concentrated on anti-war protest, making a strong claim to life and peace. Women, in their quest for peace, started from the disadvantaged position of the powerless non-citizen, but through time, following their liberation from sex discrimination, have become the strongest opponents of peace, whether in the name of motherhood or of new citizen, that refused to play male power games of war and aggression.
One example where women were significantly involved in anti-war movements were the peace campaigns around World War I, with the establishment of the WWP and WILPF women’s peace movements. At the end of the nineteenth century, women’s societies expanded their involvement in women’s rights issues and debated for peace. Women celebrated their win in equal rights as they started gaining the right to vote in countries like New Zealand, Australia and USA. It was the time that women began to be counted as citizens with rights to decide on their future and the future of their children. The quest for peace was written on their first banners, with publications and newsletters advocating non-violence. Before World War I, Author Bertha von Suttner was responsible for the creation of the Nobel Peace prize and she herself became a Laureate in 1905. The growth of the international women’s peace moments saw close to fifty anti-war associations in USA and Canada. This growing strength and devotion of women to peace was not hindered by the outbreak of war. In the middle of the fight, while men were killing each other in the trenches of Europe, women from twelve counties decided to host an International Conference for Women in Netherlands. This move upset the male status quo and the media covered it as a “silly” move made by “hysterical women”. Many countries tried to stop delegates from travelling to the conference. Women from both sides of the conflict met at the conference to seek peace. From this conference, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) was created, an activist group that is still fighting today for peace and equal rights for women. Their first president, Jane Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. The Hague conference or the creation of the WILPF did not stop the war. However, this was the first step in an international movement of women in the global political, male dominant, arena. Their voices demanding that peace should be given a chance might not have silenced the guns of war, but they made everyone aware that there is another opinion, worn by mothers and sisters, who had had enough of seeing their family members killed in the name of excessive testosterone. The WILPF would continue their work after the war, helping to establish a framework for international peace, accompanied by other women’s peace movements like the Women’s British Commonwealth League or the International Alliance of Women, which was involved in the diplomatic efforts for peace in the League of Nations.

After the end of the two World Wars, the fear of the nuclear threat, where the push of a button could bring the whole world to an end, became a dark cloud that settled in the heart of every human, male or female. Technology seemed to have become a monster that could not be reckoned with, persuaded or debated. Through this futility, a group of ordinary Welsh women, started a peace walk to a US base were nuclear weapons were to be stored. This Peace walk transformed into a 20-year peace camp outside Greenham Common, a women’s only worldwide phenomenon of peace activism. This “walk for life” was the idea of Ann Pettitt, and it was supposed to be a ten-day walk from Cardiff to Greenham Common US cruise missile base. The march was uneventful, with minimum media coverage. When the 36 women arrived at the base, the protest against nuclear weapons did not stop. In an unforseen and unorganised manner, the women decided to continue their quest for peace, in any way they could. It began with some women chaining themselves to the main gates of the base. Then the decision was made to camp next to the site. And then, it just never stopped. As days and months went by, more media coverage of the peace camp led to more women wanting to come to the place and raise their voice against war. A year passed, during which time the Police and the local Council were initially reluctant to intervene and evict the women from the area. When they actually did end up forcefully removing them, the women just came back to re-pitch their tents. The peace camp remained in place until the year 2000, creating a vocal non-violent base for women to express their objection to the aggression of war.

At Greenham Common peace camp, women used a variety of methods to demonstrate for peace. Besides the initial chaining to the gates, the women occasionally would pull down fences or just use them as a place to hang their banners. There were anti-nuclear demonstrations on Nagasaki Day, with Japanese paper cranes delivered to the base. Occasionally, protesters would jump the fence and occupy machinery or sheds inside the base. They would be active, such as disturbing construction work outside the base, or totally pacifist, with candlelight vigils and Christmas light decorations on the fences. This non violence protest camp was wholly a female creation and it was fuelled by the spiritual and moral strength of common citizens who could not except their designated social positions, but wanted to shout to the world that there were other ways to resolve dispute than aggression and this was the women’s way of doing it.

What happened in Greenham Common was not a local affair. The news spread the word around the globe that there were women who were willing to give away their roles as mothers or carers and devote their life to peace. Women from all over the world visited the camp including US feminists, whose countrymen were soldiers, guarding the gates of the base. The world reacted in various ways to the camp. Some criticised the fact that it was only a women’s camp while others tried to disgrace the protesters by moving the focus onto their clothes, their living standards at the camp or their sexual orientation. However, regardless of the world’s changing perceptions to the peace camp, it became a symbol of female non-violent protest against the nuclear powers, with women taking the lead, using their own actions, voicing their own opinions, and giving birth to an international movement of peace, by women but for the whole humanity.

Women’s fight for equality was a long battle that only saw victories in the twentieth century. The focus was on voting rights, equal working conditions and world peace. If it was difficult for women to accept their present social positions of mother and carer, with no input or rights, it became impossible to accept that war and peace could be left in the male domain, especially when the atrocities of war had non-combatant civilians in focus. In the eyes of a mother, whose children were dying in the battlefield, of a wife, whose husband come back from war “half the man” they used to be or the eyes of a sister who died in a bomb raid, war was inhumane and it had to stop. As women were not blinded by male talks of aggression, nationalism and division, they were the only voice of peace and delegation left to humanity. When men were killing each other in the trenches, women were creating international peace parties. When men were placing nuclear missiles in the countryside, women were camping around them and singing songs of reasoning. It is not that men were indifferent to peace. It is that women, through their struggle for equality found they could no longer accept a passive role in war, the greatest evil of humanity; And for that, all humanity should be grateful.

War in Ancient Greece

2010-02-28T08:10:00.002+11:00

Ancient Greece is known as the place that gave the world a plethora of gifts, like Democracy and the Olympic Games, with new discoveries in Science, Philosophy and the Fine Arts. One would think that life in such an extraordinary place would be a peaceful co-existence, dedicated to innovation, study and dialectic discourse. However, this could not be farther from the truth. On average, Athens in the classical period was in war for two years out of three. Warfare was a regular theme in Greek life, with every citizen being also a soldier. At any given time, one city-state would be at war with its neighbours, while peace treaties were uncommon and short-lived. The reasons for this culture of war lay with Ancient Greek ideology to expand their powers and fortify their positions, as well as out of necessity for survival, generated by the Greek rough terrain and the ever-looming danger of invaders. It was a culture of war that enriched the socio-political Greek skin and as a consequence, created the wonders of philosophy and politics that we inherited from them.

War was embedded in the lives of the Ancient Greeks, although their war has no resemblance to today’s conflicts. Hostilities typically were of minor scale, with small objectives and duration, causing negligible damage; usually they resulted only in the loss of agricultural land. It was expected from every farmer to join the army in order to protect his land, along with the land of his fellow citizens. Only on rare occasions Greeks would engage in town sieges, where the whole population would be involved, including children, women and the elderly. While in the archaic period war was fought over agricultural land, the stakes became higher when the Greek polis expanded beyond the Aegean Sea and the threat of the Persian army forced the Greeks to unite and evolve their warfare to a more professional level. Greek soldiers were initially farmers who paid for their own armour to protect their own land, but later on, during the Peloponnesian Wars, the army became increasingly organised using mercenaries and trained seaman. In Sparta, a citizen’s only responsibility was to prepare for war, with the Laconian slaves’ providing the labour needed to run the city, while in Athens, picking up the spear meant a seat in the Assembly with equal right to any other citizen. In Greek antiquity warfare was the norm, with every political, economic, and social aspect of Greek lives formatted to accommodate the next conflict or celebrate the last.

The war culture in Ancient Greece was not a choice. It emerged through the system of small polis-states with limited natural resources colliding over the same territory. War was the only answer when Greeks were trying to acquire new land or safeguard the land they already possessed, by pre-emptively attacking their neighbours. Sometimes, acquiring too much power to protect your land would be considered an act of war, as was the case with the Spartans who fought the Athenians, provoked by their economic expansion. The prize of war went beyond the acquisition of the land in which the fight took place. After the dust had settled and the loot was shared, the soldiers would return to a polis that would treat them like heroes. Greek mythology is focused on war successes with most of the statues built to depict and celebrate victories. But above all, a returned soldier would have earned a place as an equal citizen. The only way a poor farmer could elevate his status in the society was through war. His participation in battle would not only safeguard his land, but also earn him a place in the class of citizens, the class of decision makers. For the Greek aristocracy, the machine of war was providing them with even more opportunities for wealth, prestige through diplomatic positions or power through political postings. In Ancient Greece, the only way up was through war.

This necessity of war brought its own rhetoric. In order for Hoplites to sacrifice themselves to the cause, something more than reason (or wine) was needed. The Ancient historians talked about ‘honour’, ‘respect’ and a need for ‘excellence’ that drove the Greeks into war. Their modern counterparts talked about the competitive character of the Greeks, clearly depicted in many artefacts from that era. The famous poetry of Homer, which celebrated the war efforts of Greek soldiers, was a marching band for every hoplite. There was a clear ideology behind the need for war in Ancient Greece. Being part of the war effort meant that you were part of the society as equal among the powerbrokers. War was progress. Offensive warfare would enlarge the polis, earn respect from the neighbours and keep the citizens safe to enjoy the luxuries of living; or, defensive warfare would protect the city and withstand the invaders. It appears that peace was never an option in a world that was under constant expansion. Regardless if it was the necessity of war that brought the ideology of conflict or the ideology that made the war necessary, it is certain that they both contributed to the state of constant warfare that the Greeks were exposed to during antiquity.

War! What is it good for? Absolutely everything, for the Ancient Greeks. War would signify if the city would expand and prosper or if it would be captured by the enemy. As a consequence, everyone was involved with the war effort, whether out of necessity or out of aspiration for wealth and power. This socio-political catalyst consumed every aspect of Greek life and it was the power behind the Ancient Greek’s evolution to a nation that would influence enormously the western civilization.

Outlook. Change meeting organizer

2009-10-20T07:25:00.002+11:00

Yes we can !!!

Create the appointment in Outlook, but don’t send.

When everything is completed, save as and choose .ics

Open the .ics file with a text editor.

Find the line where your email address appears as the organiser.

Change your email address to the email address of the new organiser.

Save (just save, don’t change extension to txt etc).

Attach the .ics file to an email.

Send it to the new organiser, asking them to run the attachment.

An appointment will be created in the new organiser’s calendar, exactly as you set it, but you will no longer “organising” it, but the new person.

And if you are till wondering why all the fuss, then this is why: This way, you can create template recurring appointments (calendar reminders), which you can send to other staff. They can use it, without the appointments appearing in your calendar, without you being the person controlling them. It will be their business, their choice to use them or not, change them or not, but also, they will have a template to start with.

If you feel misled by my title, as you don’t actually change, but create a new organiser, then delete the appointment you want to change the organiser (as you are still controlling it) and then create the new one.

Hope this helps..

The Causes of the Myall Creek Massacre

2009-06-15T18:24:00.002+10:00

As Europeans expanded their settlements away from the coasts of Sydney, they increasingly came into contact with indigenous tribes. The pastoral industry would occupy previously used hunting grounds, starving the Aborigines of their native food. As no accommodation was made for this loss, conflict was inevitable. The two socially incompatible civilizations did not meet in the middle to reconcile their differences. Thus, an ever-increasing hostility ruled the Australian bushland, with Aboriginals raiding settlements in order to steal food or livestock and the Europeans retaliating by organising killing groups, murdering whole families and abducting their women. One of these conflicts happened in Myall Creek Station, where 12 white settlers, looking for revenge for their loss of cattle, captured the Aborigines of the station, dragged them to a nearby place and murdered them. The outcome of the Myall Creek Court case found seven white men guilty and they were eventually executed to the dismay of the general public. However, their punishment served only as a caution to the white population, so future atrocities against Aborigines would be better concealed from the authorities. As the causes of these massacres were never addressed, the destruction of the indigenous society continued until the aboriginal society dissolved into the European one, and thus, they ceased to be a threat on the prosperity of the Colonists.

The Europeans, who established the new settlements in Australia, were lucky enough not to encounter any major resistance from the native population. In general, Aborigines preferred to withdraw from a place that white men were claiming as their own, than to engage in an open conflict. During the first decades, around Sydney, when the first colonials established themselves, Aborigines would retreat from the land of their ancestors and hide in the nearby bushland. Alternatively, some Aboriginals managed to establish relationships with the whites and found a way to live with them. However, as Governor Macquarie began establishing new settlements over the Blue Mountains and into the Bathurst plains, Europeans started invading on a larger scale the lands Aborigines used for hunting. It was no more a question of just withdrawing into the next field. Aboriginal's hunting grounds were becoming fewer and the sourcing of food becoming ever more difficult. Aborigines had no alternative but to steal food or animals from the white settlements. The two civilisations began to engage in hostilities, involving not only property, with stealing animals or food, but also with the occasional killing of a lone white farmer or an aboriginal team of hunters.

These early hostilities troubled the authorities. The Governors would give orders to the settlers to defend themselves and their properties by responding to these attacks with enough force to drive off the Aborigines away from the stations. However, there was no attempt to compensate Aborigines for their loss or to take into account the suffering they were experiencing due to the European activities in their area. Occasionally, whites would give shelter to aborigines and exchange gifts, food or blankets, in order to keep them happy and evade their hostility. But this was not a wide spread policy, but merely a sporadic occurrence, based on the humanity of certain Europeans. The only benefit from such actions was a temporary, fragile peace, that would quickly give way to more violence, especially as dispossessed Aborigines would move around from place to place, spreading the imagery of atrocities that had started to happen across the more remote areas of colonised Australia.

As the pastoral industry grew, the problem spread across many tribes and the food shortages became bigger. Aborigines would frequently attack properties, stealing food. As they did not have a culture of individual possession, they could not understand that fences were not to be crossed and cattle and sheep not to be taken for free. These occurrences became ever more frequent and as there was no help from the authorities, white settlers would group together in vigilante groups to hunt and kill any aboriginal in their area. These killings would usually happen after a raid had occurred in a neighbouring property, or as a general practise, in an effort to eliminate any aboriginal in their area. They were never reported and no evidence was ever collected, but it was a wide spread understanding that killing of natives was the responsibility of a settler, in order to protect himself, his family and his property.

The law in Australia derived from British law and was exercised by Officers and later Magistrates in the cities. But in the remote stations, the white colonists were more or less free to act as they liked. Britain had ideas about treatment of native populations and occasionally would instruct the Governors to adhere to their wishes. But the reality was different. The stations were too remote for the words of a Governor to have any effect. In addition, the focus was to sustain the building of the colony, against all odds of drought and rough terrain, placing the welfare of the local aborigines at the bottom of the Governor’s to-do list. Furthermore, as Aborigines were not Christians and believed to have no understanding or affiliation with any religion, they were not considered as equals in the eyes of the Law, as they were unfit to take oath. This created the notion that Aborigines had no civil rights and that it was acceptable for Settlers to treat them as animals or even kill them. For the Colonials, Aborigines were another natural obstacle that had to be overcome and eradicated, as if it was a wild weed in the Imperial garden.

If the law could not bring some sense to the settlers’ minds about the correct treatment of the Aborigines, it would be expected that the human ethos of a civil society should have intervened. However, the society constructed by the first settlers did not have any of the characteristics of any other European society. This colony was built by convicts and ex-convicts, not by family men, with wives and children. There was a sense of brutality in the way the first Colonials operated. Most were uneducated and arrived in Australia against their will or in order to make quick and easy money. Diplomacy and manners were not on their agenda. Few sought reconciliation and understanding with the Indigenous population. Few examples existed of whites who wanted to share the land with the locals and to create a haven for both worlds to live together. Yet, most of the time, the sight of an Aboriginal would bring fear to the heart of a settler of a remote station; a fear that would overcome any humanity or civility a Colonial might have had; a fear that could awake his deepest animal instincts of survival; a fear that would provide a moral cushion for the atrocities that would follow. There were no weekend picnics or church visits in the Colonial Australia. The pastime for these rough colonials was chasing the locals off their property. Thus, it seems that any ideas and philosophies that Britain had cultivated in their society for years, unfortunately, missed the First Fleet, and in its place, the brutal face of British imperialism took over, a misfortune for the entire Australian indigenous nation.

As the need for more wool intensified across the British Empire, Australia’s pastoral and the wool industry grew stronger with ever more native lands taken away from the locals. The stations grew massive in size and spread to even more remote places, provoking more frequent attacks by hungry Aborigines. However, the growth of the pastoral industry created the need for more manpower, bringing local Aboriginals to the stations to be employed as animal handlers. Usually, they would bring their families to the station and Aboriginal women would also be employed in domestic duties. The Myall creek station was one of these remote properties, with a couple of white managers and a group of local aboriginals who helped with the running of the station. This Aboriginal employment engagement in white stations would not provide them with any new legal benefits in relation to their civil status in the white society. However, they were considered to be under the protection of the manager who would own them as he did with all his other possessions. Aborigines became good stockman because they had a culture of understanding of animals and expert knowledge of the land. Aboriginal women were also used for sexual procreation by the white men, something that Aboriginals were not against, as they were accustomed to using their women in exchanges with other tribes. These arrangements were far from any reconciliation between the two civilisations, but a mere arrangement of convenience between two groups of people existing in the same place.

In the decade of 1830, the conflicts between white settlers and aborigines become ever more frequent. The Aboriginal losses were always disproportional to the damage they would do to a white property. It was common for the loss of one cattle, for a group of white settlers to retaliate and kill any aboriginal around their property. One of these hunting expeditions happened in Myall Creek Station. The massacre that followed became historical significant, as it was one of the few times that white men were brought to Justice. The land at the Myall Creek Station belonged to Henry Dangar, who regularly offered the local Aboriginals work in his station. On 10th June 1838, while all the workers were herding cattle away from the station, 12 white settlers arrived, looking for revenge for a loss of cattle by an unrelated Aboriginal attack at their property. They captured 28 Aborigines from the station, dragged them to a nearby place and murdered them. The manager of the station, William Hobbs, decided to report the incident to the police. The trial that followed found all men innocent, as there was very little evidence and the white jury was very sympathetic to the accused. An appeal was raised and in the consecutive trial, seven out of the ten men were found guilty for the murder of only one of the aboriginal children. They were hanged later that December. Despite the outcome of these events, massacres like this would keep on happening throughout the Australian outback.

The outcome of the Myall Creek Massacre trial alerted Europeans to possible legal consequences, so they took more care concealing evidence of their killing raids, by hiding the bodies or by using undetected poison in food offerings to Aborigines. The trial did not awaken the humanity of the public. Most of the settlers believed that the nuisance Aboriginals caused in their everyday pastoral activities needed to be dealt with, so they could not see why those white men were being punished. The murdering of Aborigines was so common, that it was believed to be something lawful. For one more time, the half-baked efforts by the authorities in Australia to impose a peaceful coexistence with the indigenous population had fallen on deaf ears. The real reason behind this massacre was not addressed. Aboriginal people evicted from their land were left alone by the authorities to fight for their lives. And even those who did not fight the white invader, but tried to reconciliate with him and live, work and offer their wives to him in exchange for food and shelter, they too would become victims of a society that did not recognise them.

Very little evidence exists on the atrocities that occurred in the first decades of Australian colonisation by the Europeans. Although there is extensive writing about the first encounter of the First Fleet with plants and birds, the atrocities committed on the Aboriginal nation evaded the eyes of the first Colonials. But the sheer size of the population cleansing and the oral history that it created was enough proof of how the whites treated the first Australians. Those massacres were not inevitable. They were not a casualty of war. When Macquarie was governing New South Wales, he put land restrictions on the new settlements around Bathurst, in order to control the white greed. For that period, very few hostilities happened, as Aborigines were given some ground to hunt and live. But after Macquarie left, all the settlement in NSW grew uncontrollably, and so did the hostilities. It was the ‘hungry for land’ European colonial practice that brought war in Australia, by first excluding aboriginals from any land and second by putting civility and British law on the backburner, leaving Aboriginals unprotected and unaccounted for.

The Myall Creek Massacre and the consecutive trial had no meaning in 1840. It did not change the way Europeans thought about aboriginal rights or gave any guidance on the way indigenous Australians should be treated in the future. Today, the area has been added to the National Heritage List, as it signifies the unjustified suffering the Aboriginal nation endured at the hands of greedy and uncontrolled colonials. It is a historical reminder of how human creatures, if left without civil or social guidance, can become the most vicious being in the animal Kingdom.

Aboriginal Women vs Feminism

2009-04-24T06:52:00.002+10:00

In the sixties and seventies, a new wave of feminism emerged from a new generation of educated youth. Following the fights of previous decades for working and voting rights, the time had come for women to ask for total equality. The oppression of the female gender had reached an end and this generation was ready to claim the end of sex discrimination. However, indigenous women did not receive this message with open arms. Although feminism was fighting for all women, they did not see how this rhetoric could be applied to indigenous people, when their number one problem was discrimination from the white population of men and women. Aboriginal women would question this second wave of feminism, for it seemed to only speak in white tongues.

Colonial white women and indigenous women were never equal or experienced similar social issues. During the colonial era, indigenous women were oppressed because of their race, not only by white males, but also by white females. Although indigenous males would be chased away from their land, women would be captured and forced into domestic service, where they would be cruelly subjugated by their white female mistresses. At Federation, when the decision was made for white women to received the right to vote, the debates were still open whether the indigenous population should be considered as human or not! At the time that Second Wave Feminism emerged, the healing process had not even started for the indigenous people who were about to be recognised as cultural human entities and would be given the right to keep the children they gave birth to, without having any fear that the white man would come and steal them away. The issues of gender relations the feminists raised were of no interest to the indigenous population, who were haunted by deeply rooted racial discrimination from the white Australian society. As this white movement expressed no interest in the racial problem, the indigenous women kept their distance from a cause that was made by and tailored for white middle class women.

The Second Wave Feminism was a movement for womens rights, equal to those of men. It asked for equal pay, equal employment prospects and equal law. Above all, it challenged women themselves to stand up, accept their sex and place it next to that of their male counterparts. This message was addressed to women who already had the vote, but not equal representation in the government; who had a job, but were not getting paid equally to men; who could make a family, but would prefer to delay it for education or seeking a career. It was a fight against the male who had it all, by women who wanted an equal share, at least. However, this was not a fight for the indigenous women. They were not represented in the governments, not because they were female, but because they were black. They had minimum employment prospects, but so did their husbands. And they did not consider motherhood as a barrier against those middle-class white pleasures they had no access to in the first place. They had suffered for years from the abduction of their children by white invaders, so that now they would treasure the idea of enjoying a family with their children. While white feminists wanted to defeat gender discrimination, indigenous women had to deal with racial discrimination from both sexes. The struggles that indigenous women were facing were simply not white enough to be included in any white feminist leaflet.

There was no serious attempt to incorporate the fights of the indigenous women into the new feminist movement. The reason for this was a fundamental difference between the two groups of women: White women were against men; indigenous women were not. Aboriginal men faced a different kind of discrimination from the white population. They were ostracised. When they took away their ancestors’ land and hunting grounds, they erased any connection the indigenous male had with their community and tradition. These broken men, with no status, ended up as alcoholics or in prison. Indigenous women were already in a better position in their society than indigenous men. They wanted their men and children to have a better life, with healthcare, education, legal aid and above all, ownership of their land. Indigenous women wanted to fight racism, and they wanted to fight it with (and for) their male counterparts, not fight against them.

When the women of the seventies left the university class and raced down the streets, burning bras and demanding equality of the sexes, they thought they were speaking on behalf of all their ‘sisters’. They were not. Indigenous people were still being discriminated against for their race, and any gender issues were not their priority. Aboriginal women disputed the universality of the feminists cause as a middle class white problem and as such, feminism was not their fight.

WW2: The Birth of Temporary Employment

2009-04-24T06:47:00.002+10:00

When World War II broke out, Australia entered the fight on the side of Britain and the other Allied forces. About one million Australians were sent overseas to fight. As industries lost a major part of their workers in the war effort, the Curtin Labor government decided to encourage and legislate the entering of women in the workforce, but only “for the duration”, meaning that after the war, women were expected to return to their previous social place as second-class citizens. The dominant male society did not want anything to change back home while their soldiers were overseas. Males wanted to keep their place in the workforce and their wives at home. Although most women did return back to their previous role after the war, it become clear that there was no reason to keep this separation of the sexes, as women had proven that they could do exactly what men could do.

Even before the war, with the help of the entertainment industry in the U.S. of America, women started asking for more independence. The movies and the advertising industry wanted to create as many consumers as possible and they found in women a potential candidate. They portrayed the need of an image of beauty and individuality, an independent identity that every woman should aspire to attain. These newly injected ‘guidelines’ could not be followed within the walls of a house containing a woman in her role of cook, mother and servant to a male. They demanded women exit their traditional positions, hunt for ‘beauty’, ‘individuality’ and ‘independence’ in areas reserved for males, and ‘purchase’ their own social identity. The war years gave the opportunity for this freedom women were looking for. However, the male frameworks, being afraid of this social change, kept on announcing that this would only be a temporary situation, hoping that after the war, men would reclaim what they had and women would wrap up this ‘party’ and go back to being housewives.

As women began taking over their husbands’ positions in the workforce, the male society made sure that women understood that this was only a temporary thing. There were two major issues: the unequal wage system for the two sexes and the possible corrosion of the status quo that had women as mothers and not as independent citizens. The Women’s Employment Board was formed to regulate wages so industries would not take advantage of the cheap female wages and ‘flood’ their floors with women, taking away jobs from male hands. The principle of equal pay for equal work was established, so there would be no reason to prefer a woman’s labour over a male’s, and in addition, Curtin promised to the unions that women would return back home when the war had ended, so there would be no social revolution while males were fighting abroad. The war was a temporary crisis and women were asked to briefly help out their husbands, by keeping their industrial seats warm for them while they were away and as soon as they came back, women would return to their ‘natural’ position of mother and housekeeper.

The temporary nature of this social, war-driven necessity was also an inspiration to many feminist movements during the war years. This new economic independent girl became socially active for the first time and, especially the younger members were happy to ignore all the stereotypes that had motherhood as the primary purpose of a woman. Social freedom brought sexual freedom, enflamed by the arrival of one million young U.S. American soldiers in Australia. Feminists like Jessie Street, who were seeking equality between the sexes, saw the women of this period carelessly enjoying a break from their household duties, without caring or having any understanding about gender relationship issues. This was not only believed to be dangerous for women, as sexual transmitted diseases were on the rise, but also for the feminist movement itself, as this was not the image women’s groups were fighting for. Those feminists were not ready to accept so much freedom. They were hoping this would only last ‘for the duration’ of the war, so their fight against equality could reset afterwards and be more guided and shaped to their own views about womanhood.

At the end of the war, the U.S. Americans left, the Australian soldiers retuned home to claim their social positions and in effect women did return to their previous status of second-class citizens. Women left their highly paid ‘manly’ jobs, but some did continue being employed in ‘secondary’, ‘women’s’ jobs on a lower pay rate . The only thing that did change was the image of the Australian Bloke as the only sex capable of moving the big wheels of industry. The dominant male frameworks that tried to sustain a gender divide had just lost the first battle in the women’s war against sex discrimination.

The Harvester Judgement or: How Women Learned to Start Worrying and Hate the Basic Wage

2009-04-24T06:40:00.003+10:00

When the colonies federated into Australia, a string of essential laws came into place to guide the new nation into prosperity. One of the decided policies of that era was the mediation of wages. In 1907, the Harvester Judgement brought the idea of the Basic Wage: the setting of a minimum payout for an unskilled worker, so he could support his family. Australia became a pioneer in wage arbitration and unions would treasure the concept of the basic wage. However, the concept of the Basic Wage was gender bias, as in there existed the notion that women’s place was at home, unemployed, with children, always supported by a male. This model of wage security was only to be applied to men, while for women it was a lifelong sentence of control by their husbands.

During Federation, Australia was portrayed as a social laboratory, where the state is the protector of its workforce. Having just fought through the economic depression of the previous decades, the decision was made to protect the industries through tariffs and in return the industries would protect the workforce with wage arbitration. A case was made by sampling workers from the Harvested Company and by looking into their living conditions in regards to their earnings. Since this was an agricultural machinery manufacturing company, the focus was only on males with families. Through this calculation, the Basic Wage was established, so a male can live a normal life, supporting a house, a wife, three children and other necessities, including tobacco and liquor. While this arrangement made sense for males, it did not take into account the needs of women, to become independent and equal citizens to their husbands.

With the Basic Wage, the assumption was made that women would always be married to a male. Since the male wage included a portion for supporting a wife, and females were always under the protection of men, there were no merits for asking for equal pay between the sexes. For most of the decade, the wages that women received would always be a percentage of the equivalent male wage, as the female wage was considered to be a supplement to the male one. As women were expected to be involved only with motherhood, the wage discrimination went even farther, by cutting off women from difficult “male” jobs and from night shifts, when both were the most highly paid employment. In addition, it was assumed that there was no need for maternity leave, as women were expected to leave the workforce once and for all when they became pregnant.

These assumptions were based on a society were most of the females were indeed wives of a husband with kids and a house to take care of. However, not all of the female population was like that or aspired to stay at home forever.

The Basic Wage forced women into unsatisfactory employment and into motherhood or unwanted domestic situations. By separating the sexes in the workforce, the industries were split into those that were only for men and those that only suited a part time employed mother. Women would work in the textile industry, usually under poor conditions. They would be the helping hand of the family corner store, babysit, do the laundry cleaning for the neighbourhood and cook meals for the farming male workers. All theses employment opportunities were low paid, with no benefits or only casual. This forced women into relationships that they might not really want to be involved in. If a woman were the victim of domestic abuse, she would not be able to afford exiting the marriage, as it was very hard to maintain oneself on a female wage. Mothers who were forced to live outside the security of marriage often ended up giving their child up for adoption in order for them both to survive. With the notion of divorce being unknown for most of the twentieth century, women who escaped an abusive relationship could have their salaries paid directly to their husband and their children taken away from them. Such was the pressure that the Basic Wage system imposed on women. When it meant to give peace of mind to male workers, it became a nightmare for women.

Arbitration was one of the jewels of the Australian Settlement. It is claimed that it helped Australia become the secure nation it is today. However, it was a socially interventional policy that was applied to an unequal society. As an outcome, some parts of the community benefited from the wage negotiations, others, like women, unemployed, indigenous and elderly citizens were severely disenfranchised. Feminists, like Heagney and Street, would devote most of their efforts to overturn the injustice contained in the Basic Wage and fight for equal pay for all the sexes.

The War Against Abortion (1880 - 1940)

2009-03-19T08:05:00.003+11:00

Abortion, as a method of population control, has been in practice throughout the ages. Before the legislative reforms of the early nineteen century in Britain, women would go through multiple pregnancies, not all of them successful. Even after a child was born, it was uncertain if it would reach its first year of life, as malnutrition and diseases were wide spread, keeping the infant mortality rate at a high level. Thus, society was not interested in controlling or legislating anything around the act of pregnancy. As medical science advanced and our understanding of the human body was enriched with the aid of new technological discoveries, like the microscope and antibiotics, society slowly turned to the mother, trying to control the process of birth. The Ellenborough Act of 1803 was the first legislative step in Britain for recognising the rights of the foetus. Even if the legal frameworks proved unsuccessful to control the abortion practises, the power over the body of the woman passed from the mother to the State. This trend continued through the turn of the century, where a dramatic fall in the birth rate saw society gathering around Commissions and Judges, trying to criminalise and stop any attempt to interfere with a woman’s “reproductive machine” that provided the nation with its much needed citizens. However, close to the middle of the twentieth century, it become clear that any attempt to control something as personal to a human being as its own body was futile, so women were left alone to control their own reproduction organs, but this time under the strict supervision of the medical profession.

In the eighteenth century, society was alarmed by a population increase, fearing that we would not be able to produce as much food as needed to sustain humanity. A century later, with advances in agriculture and food production, that fear was eliminated. However, another anxiety overcame the social planners of the late nineteenth century: the dramatic drop in fertility rates and infant mortality to levels never seen before. The reasons behind this demographic shift could be found by looking at the social changes in play during that period. Women were not willing any more to dedicate all their life to bearing children. By the use of contraception or abortion, they tried to ‘space-out’ births, giving them a breathing space to explore the same life as their male counterparts were enjoying. In addition, the economic depression during the end of the century forced families living in poverty to avoid childbirth, as they could not support having a big family anymore. Another reason was that contraception became more available than in the past, however it was still expensive for most of the low-income families, leaving them with no choice but abortion. This was a social evolution, where families realised that by controlling the number of their offspring, they could end up living a better life, with more opportunities for survival and with a mother for the first time enjoying life after childbirth and maybe even having the opportunity to join the male dominated workforce.

However, this social revolution occurred during a difficult period for the Australian nation. At the end of the nineteenth century, there was a growing fear that the Colonies were in danger of been overrun by foreign powers. European powers like France and Germany had started to spread their dominance in the Pacific. In addition, our anxieties of a possible enemy from Asia, trying to invade us from the north, was keeping our politicians alarmed. The creation of the Commonwealth of Australia from the federated Colonies was a solution to this threat. One of the first laws enacted by the new country was the White Australia Policy, in effect closing our doors to anything non-British. However, for this plan to succeed, Australian women were asked to dedicate their lives to bringing up as many white children as possible. The 1903 Royal Commission into the decline of the birth rate and the increase in the infant mortality rate was formed to address this issue, along with other benefit schemes, like the Baby Bonus (1912) and the Child Endowment (1920). The idea of protecting our border by numbers was soon enriched by the rhetoric that our “race” needed to be protected from the pollution of foreign blood and the only people able to do so were our women by the means of pregnancy. Any woman that denied the Country’s right to her body as a ‘citizen-maker apparatus’ was considered immoral and selfish. The wide spread practice of abortion would surface as the root of the evil. Contraception was still expensive, making it less available to the masses and thus less of a public concern. But the reality of abortion, which was a ‘woman’s business’, with an extensive underground structure, controlled only by women, was considered as a massive threat, a crime against the Nation. The committee never considered analysing why this social change occurred. They never acted upon the worsening of the living arrangement of the city dweller, the need of women to liberate themselves from the tyranny of sexual discrimination and her right to seize life as males do. Young Australia was too young to understand itself. Instead, it chose to deploy a witch-hunt against abortion, a witch-hunt that would only push abortion more underground, but never successfully stop the practice.

Abortions, regardless of their legal status and safety records, occurred inside female networks for centuries. With the consent or not of the father, under the legal protection of a doctor or behind the closed doors of a midwifes house, women, the rightful owners of their own bodies, would be the only ones to decide if the foetus would become a child or if it would not. From the late nineteenth century up until the beginning of the Second World War, there was one abortion for every four pregnancies. Initially women would try to perform abortion to themselves, whether by the use of chemical abortificants and Epson salts or by other mechanical means, like crochet needles, in order to cause a miscarriage. When these failed, they would approach a midwife, a local woman with some knowledge in abortions, possibly a nurse, who would help the pregnant woman to miscarry the foetus, by mechanically penetrating the placenta. Some times, other organs would be accidentally breached, portions of the aborted foetus would remain in the womb, or infections from un-sanitised objects would occur and then the woman would become gravely ill. If she were not taken immediately to a public hospital, where a doctor could perform a curette, the woman would be expected to die. Middle class women with bigger financial independence would preferably go straight to a doctor for an abortion.

Before the late nineteen century, the medical profession was unaware of the functions of a woman’s reproductive organs, let alone have the expertise of how to perform a safe abortion. Midwifes were using traditional methods, which they acquired through local female networks or after many past failed attempts. They were the only ‘professionals’ that women could look for help to stop an unwanted pregnancy. Midwifes had the right to provide health care to women in their own houses and even sign death certificates. With the advances in medicine and the professionalization of the medical vocation, doctors became increasingly interested in the female reproduction process. They were alarmed with the cases that appeared in public hospitals or their private clinics of women who had gone through an unsuccessful abortion. They were opposed to the midwife’s practises, some because they were after the clientele that midwives had; others were against the practice of abortion all together. Dr O’Sullivan, president of the Victorian Branch of the British Medical Association, claimed that women should refrain from any intellectual pursuits, like education and bicycle riding, as this would affect their generative organs. Some doctors believed in Eugenics, were pure white British middle class females should produce as many offspring as possible, to enrich the Empire and hold away from our shores any alternative culture that could infect our moral values. Others simple believed that women only existed to bear children. In any case, doctors wanted to be a part of the process, to control and dictate the procedures involved in a woman’s pregnancy.

The Private Hospital Act of 1908 gave doctors the authority they were seeking over abortion. The Act took away from midwives the convenience of issuing death certificates and the right to provide services in their own home, while doctors were issued on mass with licences to run private clinics. While midwives continued their operations, they were pushed underground, compromising the safety of their patients. In addition, midwives lost the option of getting help from a doctor, in the event of a mishap during an abortion, fearing the doctor would inform the authorities. While initially it appeared as if women lost control of their bodies to a predominant male profession, in time, the advances in medical science saw the abortion procedure become more available and in the safer hands of practiced medicine. Ultimately, it was the medical profession, with its heavy social status that saw the partial decriminalisation of abortion, by claiming the right to perform abortions for medical or moral reasons.

The legal control of abortions proved to be next to impossible. The vague legislation that derived from British Law did not help bring about convictions and the criminal status that abortion received helped create a cloud of secrecy that was very difficult to infiltrate by the local authorities. The Ellenborough Act of 1803 was the first attempt to control the process of childbirth. According to this Act, the foetus acquires the right to live, and consequently, the mother loses the right to induce an abortion, after ‘quickening’. As the mother was the only one able to mark this timeframe, she could always claim that she never felt the foetus move, thus the abortion was not illegal. However, this first step was the beginning in the control of a woman’s body by the legal frameworks. It also gave a clear message that after birth, killing an infant was definitely illegal. However, in the pre-antibiotic nineteenth century, backyard abortions became a major concern, as it was the main cause of fertile women deaths. Again, a British Act was used to address the issue, the Offences Against the Person Act (1861), where it became illegal for a woman to force a miscarriage or anyone else assisting her, in an effort to protect mothers from unsafe abortion practices. Now the Courts had the weapons needed to prosecute anyone involved with abortions.

The persons who were targeted by the system had a lower class background, were unskilled and unemployed. They were targeted because police were inclined to bring in to courts those who were least likely to afford bribing them. In addition, women from the middle class and above would prefer controlling their pregnancies with contraceptive methods, while working class women could only afford abortion. As this was a ‘woman’s business’, fathers used to take a back step in the process, besides sometimes providing the finances needed. If they were asked in court about their involvement, they would declare their ignorance and express repugnance for such an act.

For a conviction to stand up in court, incriminating evidence was sought, from the tools of abortion to letters settling fees with the practitioner. Before the Private Hospital Act of 1908, medical practitioners were not obliged to keep records and death certificates could be issued by midwifes, even two months after the death of a person, while stillbirths were not required to be registered at all. The Private Hospital Act saw the role of the midwives being pushed more underground, while the medical profession took centre place. However, this did not bring more doctors in the courts. On the contrary, they still remained untouched by litigation proceedings. Doctors had their own network that was capable of concealing evidence and hiding the true cause of death. In addition, they had the luxury of using medical equipment and safer abortion methods than midwifes, avoiding the unfortunate event of the death of a patient and as a result, alerting the police to their ‘illegal’ practice.

No matter how many court cases did occur, the conviction rate was very low. The reason was the gap between intended legislation and actual ethos of the society. The juries were usually from the same background as the accused and would be very sympathetic to the misgivings of any woman who had to go through an abortion. Even the police, coming from the same class, would understand the predicament of unwanted pregnancies and they would be happy to look the other way, especially if a fee was involved. Nevertheless, the biggest obstacle that the dominant social and legal frameworks were up against in their attempt to stop the abortion practises was the ideological distance between their own intentions and the actual needs of a society that faced the dilemma of an unwanted pregnancy. Women would choose abortion instead of the misgivings of a large size, working class family. At the end of this period, doctors became willing to stand up and ask the Courts to give them the right to decide if an abortion should be performed or not, putting the health of the mother ahead of any ideology. After the Second World War and with the rise of immigration intake from Europe, the need to populate Australia by birth took second place and the witch-hunt for abortion disappeared.

Over time, our social evolution passed through stages of discovery and adaption of new ideas and ethos. Even if birth control and abortion was common knowledge, we lacked the understanding of the science behind the wonder of birth. As we became aware of the mechanics of labour, we began to panic at the idea that women, who at the time were classified as second-class citizens, were in control of this crucial stage of life. The dominant social frameworks, politicians, doctors and judges, gathered around the pregnant woman and tried to fit in a square legal box the enormous complexities that childbirth contains and to no surprise, they failed. It is true that (male) doctors had a small “win”, as abortions were moved from the dirty back alleys to proper hospitals and specially built clinics, but this only happened because the medical profession, as a whole, evolved scientifically and became the Expert of every medical condition, not just abortion. But the ethical and practical control of a woman’s body never actually changed hands and it always belonged to the women themselves.

Aboriginal Women in Pre-colonial Indigenous Society

2009-02-22T07:20:00.002+11:00

When the first Europeans arrived in Australia, they came across a culture that was very different from their own. The social structures of the indigenous society were unique to the landscape and to the evolutionary stage that the Aboriginal civilisation had reached. Europeans were perplexed at the status that Aboriginal women held in their society, sometimes witnessing women being treated inhumanly by their peers and at other times seemingly in control of their own fate. It was apparent that Aboriginal women held a unique position in their society, with a balance of power operating between them and the male population that was exclusive to their Australian Dreaming.

The social position of aboriginal women has only been debated recently, as early historical attention seemed to evade the topic of gender relations in indigenous societies. There are no records for the period before colonisation, as aboriginal history was passed on verbally from one generation to the other. Furthermore, the witnesses from the first British arrivals were focused on the male population. Those observations were influenced by a European way of thinking, giving unreliable data on how the Aboriginal society was structured. Anthropologists, sociologists, historians and archaeologists have tried to re-evaluate the position of aboriginal women by comparing data from similar evolutionary level societies and by filtering any evidence in-hand through the universal theories of sexual selection, maternal instincts and physical differences of the sexes. Therefore, this absence of direct evidence should be taken in account when we analyse the social position of aboriginal women.

The early years of an Aboriginal girl were parallel to those of her brothers, nurtured and protected by their parents, until they would reach adulthood. The responsibility of bringing up the children was laid mainly on the mother. This would involve providing food, security and early education to the newborns. When children grew and started playing social games, the two sexes would be encouraged to play games according to their gender; while boys would train in spear throwing with their fathers, girls would stay close to their mothers and learn craftwork and storytelling games. Those first years of Aboriginal girls, although innocent and joyful, were constructed in a way that gender divisions were emphasised for the preservation of the social status quo.

When girls reached puberty, they became a ‘marriage’ commodity, to be sold and bought by peers with, or most commonly without consent. A girl would be promised to a man and in return, the new husband would provide a portion of his future hunting to his in-law. It was also customary for men to chase, beat up and ‘acquire’ a wife, usually from a neighbouring tribe. Although this was a helpless situation for the girls, it was providing mothers and elder women with the significant power of negotiating marriage agreements. Marriage was the means by which Aboriginal society kept its family ties, providing the elder population with a ‘retirement income’ at the expense of a tormented female population.

As a wife, women would not only bear children, but would also play the significant part of being the main breadwinner of the family. While men were most of the time absent from the household, occupied with ‘large-scale hunting’, women would provide an everyday meal to their children by hunting small mammals, fishing and collecting plants. This did not necessarily elevate the aboriginal woman’s position in society to equate that of a male, even if it might appear so in the eyes of a European observer. Others concluded that this equated to slavery and that this daily routine was not appropriate for women. Nevertheless, this exercise provided the Aboriginal women with survival skills, with some degree of independence and, since women hunted in groups, a female bonding.

Both sexes in indigenous society were deeply involved in a spiritual life and were ‘part of the Dreaming’. Although much has been written about the ceremonies reserved only for men, women were major participants in many rituals and even had they own secret ceremonies. Women played a major role in all the family focused formalities, like marriage and death. However, the spiritual status of the women could never be elevated above that of the male. Even during birth, the male was responsible for the connection of the spirits with the newborn, while the female was just a spiritually empty participant. Yet, as the whole indigenous social structure was based on the traditions of the Dreaming and not any written history, the spiritual world was an obligatory necessity for men and women to be a part of.

Australian indigenous society did not have any official chain of command that excluded women, but politically, Aboriginal women were second-class citizens. They were not allowed to use the spear and fight or communicate with other tribes. They did not have any power over their own marriage arrangement and they were kept away from any spiritual secrets of “reproduction” or communicating with spirits. However, they held power over the food production, which gave them relative autonomy and they had the last word over the marriage arrangements of their daughters. Without disregarding the special socio-political powers that Aboriginal women held, the Australian indigenous society was ruled and control by males, leaving only those positions for women that would serve male domination, not threaten it.

Aboriginal women were more independent than any other European female during the era of the first settlement. They had a position in the indigenous society that was invaluable, with responsibilities as vital as food production and as powerful as control over betrothal, while their Victorian era counterparts were only trained in table manners and in how to look beautiful while standing next to a man. At the same time, Aboriginal women were brutally abused and used as sexual merchandise by their own peers. They did not have control over their own bodies and they were excluded from any major decision-making. The Australian bush was a place of inequality, where the power of the fittest was in control. The Rule of Law was not observed and in the eyes of the first Europeans the Australian female was living in misery. Nevertheless, the Australian Indigenous society operated for thousands of years, and during that time, geography and social evolution dictated a unique balance of power between the two sexes, giving the Aboriginal women a special role to play, if not equal to men, still fundamental to the structure of the Indigenous culture.

Early Australia: Dreaming for males, Nightmare for females

2008-12-20T21:15:00.004+11:00

Prostitution never was and will never be an option or an occupation. Prostitution is a product of abuse that females are facing since ever, but not for-ever. Sweden has recognised prostitution as a form of abuse and has criminalised the purchase of sex (not the selling of sex, as those who sell are victims of abuse, while those who buy are taking advantage of the products of abuse).

Without getting into any details, the sexual act can only be performed mechanically and psychologically if both parties feel ‘attracted’ to each other. If not, it is abuse. Every single prostitute out there has been a victim of sexual abuse. The trauma of rape produces a physiological defence that makes humans disassociate with their bodies in order not to feel the pain any more. After this “opening up”, the disconnected person can allow other people to ‘abuse’ them. This is what prostitution is and if you need evidence please visit your local ‘shop’ and ask. If you don’t know where it is, ask a local, he will know, as more than 10% of males (VIC) do regularly visit those places.

With this in mind, I would expect that about half a million indigenous females started their adult lives as sexually abused victims, initially at initiation ceremonies, so later they will accept any husband their mothers force on them. The Dreaming was for the males while Nightmare was for the females. In addition, all the females from the first fleet were left alone and unprotected by the authorities so the beautiful orgy that Capt. Philip arranged after he placed the flag in Sydney Cove could take place. After all this, I wouldn’t dare call those women willing prostitutes or devious or whatever.

Surely, the colony was a nasty place; but let’s start taking a different path and stop calling prostitution an occupation.

Screen writing lessons for Baz Luhrmann: The “Australia” tragedy

2008-12-20T14:43:00.003+11:00

The 40 million gift from the Australian people to Baz Luhrmann for his epic flop should have had a provision for him to take basic screen writing lessons. He is a great art director, I’m sure he can renovate my lounge room to something more elegant, but when it comes down to writing a story, he utterly and unequivocally sucks at it.

His classic story starts right, but flops in the middle, when for half an hour the couple lives a ‘happy’ bush style married life. The crash in the cinematic rhythm of his flop is so big, that the ending in Darwin looks like a story told by a drunk: half baked and making no sense.
If he had just asked any experienced screenwriter, or if he had called me (not that I would have picked up), the ancient language of story telling would have been revealed in front of his arrogant eyes.

So here is what he should have done:

The posh blond helps the drover drive the cattle to Darwin. She changes only a bit from her English way. He changes only a bit from his lonely ways. At Darwin, the ‘high society’ with Governor Generals etc, drags her back to where she once was, while the drover is pushed away by the society who doesn’t love outcasts. The bond they created is not strong enough to withstand the social divide. They fight and split. They did not learn their lesson.

He goes back to the bush, with no job, getting drunk as we saw him in the beginning. She sells the farm to the Big Pastor. He tricks her in the contract, leaving her with very little and takes the boy away from her. She falls into despair, rejected and mocked by the ‘high society’ in Darwin. Then the Japs attack. (10 min later, not 40). The need to save the kid appears. They reunite to save the kids. This is the second voyage the characters will travel. They will both put extra effort into this one and they will change a lot this time. After they BOTH ‘drove’ the kids to safety, they will have changed enough to create a strong bond and stay together for ever..

Simple, ancient Greek tragedy. Baz, leave the scriptwriting to the professionals and go and do something you are good at, like putting up some (CGI) wallpapers.

The distance between Paul Kelly's 'Australian Settlement' and Australian political history

2008-11-30T14:02:00.004+11:00

In 1992, the newspaper editor Paul Kelly introduced into the political arena a thesis explaining how Australia operated the last 100 years and how all that is now changing. This claimed new era was an idea that was also advocated by the governments and the economists of the late 80s. They found a bible in Kelly’s book, making “The End of Certainty” a best-seller, and talker, among political circles, historians and universities. As his book could explain so much of what was going on in Australia at the time, in a way that (almost) no one had ever heard before, Paul Kelly was given the throne of political expertise and historical understanding, with many followers willing to bow in front of him for his great way of presenting Australia’s history. However, many took the opposite view and accused Kelly of distorting the facts and of conveniently rearranging history, picking only those events that would advance his story telling. A second round of talks and debates would start, where Kelly’s ideas and motives would be questioned. Regardless of who was holding the truth or what portion of it, Kelly’s book was unquestionably the fire starter of unprecedented debates in Australian political culture. With the Australia Act of 1986 giving us full independence from the United Kingdom, the time was right for us to rediscover who we are and what Australia stands for. Kelly’s book, accurate or misleading, was the first to do so and the tsunami of dialogue it caused is enough for his thesis to be cited as an important piece of our newly discovered political thought.

Paul Kelly, in his book “The End of Certainty”, presents the notion of the Australian Settlement, an agreement made 100 years ago at the time of federation. According to him, this settled political construct guided Australian political ethos for the next 80 years. It was based on five action pillars: White Australia, where policies were placed to make sure Australia will be populated by British-like people in order to avoid the different qualities of other non British cultures, whether they were good or bad; Industry Protection, along with ‘public subsidies, price fixing and industry levies’ to encourage the growth of the small local industries that had to compete with foreign giants; Wage Arbitration to distribute the wealth of the industries down to their workers, by having the obligation to pay at the minimum a living wage; State Paternalism, where the ultimate goal of any government would be to benefit its citizens, usually by intervening in the private affairs of a citizen or a company and rule according to the collective good; And finally, an Imperial Benevolence, supporting our nation building, with the British Navy always on our side protecting this remote British outpost and guiding this nation from its birth and adolescence years to a full grown state, a proud protégé of the British empire. This bipartisan idea of growing a nation was decided around the federation years, not through wars or revolutions, but after years of political debates and parliamentary voting. According to Kelly, it was an arrangement between all political parties and it was so strong that it lasted for 80 years, until the Labor governments of Hawke and Keating came in the 80s and destroyed them. This Settlement lasted through two world wars and numerous economic depressions. Although Kelly does not claim that his idea of five headings could explain every aspect of the Australia political history, he did believe that those five agreed thoughts were responsible for what Australia was about until the 1980s.

Since the publication of his book, a wide debate was established on how accurate Kelly’s depiction of Australian political history was. Although no one would dispute that the world was changing drastically through the 80s and that globalisation was slowly reshaping the way governments operate on a national level, the question was posed on how important those five policies were to Australia’s narration and if they were actually ever settled in the first place.

Kelly starts his book with the following quote: ‘The story of the 1980s is the attempt to remake the Australian political tradition’. The book’s intentions are not to evaluate Australian political history, filtered through the political realities of the 80s, but to evaluate the Labor governments of the 80s, by presenting them through the lenses of Australia’s past historical discourse. Kelly would stretch and pick parts of history that would help him provide a contrast between the past and the new political present. During this exercise, Australia’s political history was distorted.

Three of the five headings of his settlement, Protection, Arbitration and Paternalism, could be misleading to history, if they are to be considered separately. During the federation years, Social Liberalism was accepted in the Australian political circles. Australia was claimed to be a social laboratory, where policies were created to improve the life of the citizens. The three policies in Kelly’s settlement were in fact one: The Paternal State will intervene, create laws and regulations so companies would be protected from external economical forces and for that, they will provide a better life for their workers. Over time, we saw tariffs changing, being reduced or enlarged and take a back seat at the political arena before and a bit after the two world wars. This would occur when the Australian social laboratory needed to adjust some of its elements to continue its duties through various times. This is the situation were Industry Protection can not by itself account for Australia in the 20th century. When Kelly separated those three elements, he moved away from the historical significance that social liberalism had in Australia since Federation.

Another point of contention is the importance that the British Benevolence had to Australia. Foreign policy is a discourse that every country takes in order to create alliances for military and trade purposes. But for this, Australia did not keep its eyes focused on the English Isles forever. While after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour Curtin announced that ‘We shall hold this country and keep it as a citadel for the British-speaking race’, soon after he gave a speech where he claimed “Australia looks to America”. After the fall of Singapore, Australia would not count at any Imperial Benevolence for security. Trading with Britain was always important for Australia, but it was not a one-way street. As much as we were relying on their industrial products, they would equally depend on our agricultural goods. Since the creation of the European Union, our trade with Britain would steadily decrease while we sought new partners in China and Japan. Although our dependence on Britain was essential during the first decades of the colony’s settlement, it could no longer hold a rightful place in the top five of Kelly’s political chart of the 20th Century.

Besides the different views on the value given on the five headings of Kelly’s Settlement, there is the position that his account of Australian political history is missing other important factors, which might not be helpful in his depiction of the changes in Canberra of the 80s, but these factors would be very important in interpreting our history since federation.

Geoffrey Stokes suggested three extra pillars to be added at Kelly’s historical construction: Secularism, Masculinism and Australian Democracy. In Secularism, he describes how religion played a part since federation. The constitution protects freedom of religion and the Australian State is a secular one. However, without drifting away from the word of the Act, political debates that involve religion, not as faith but as an institution, have had their markings in our history, especially in the sensitive topic of education. Masculinism was a fact of life during the Federation years. For most, it comes natural to read a history written by men, for men, about men. Wage Arbitration was about giving a ‘fair go’ for men to hold and acquire property and … a wife. But for the other 50% of Australians who happened to be born as females, the years since Federation are filled with struggles against the unfair discrimination of one human being to another of a different sex. However, on the top of any political struggle that characterised Australia’s history, should be the fight for a true Australian democracy. On paper, female citizens won early in the century the right to vote. The same can not be said for our indigenous population that are still fighting to this day to be fully recognised and treated as equals with the rest of the Australians. Although Stokes coupled our treatment of indigenous Australians with the White Australia Policy, as both are bi-products of a search for an Australian racial identity, the fights for recognition of Indigenous rights since Federation were based on lawful and democratic merits and they were judged and usually dismissed according to the Rule of Law. Since the constitution was focused more on how the States would unite and who will get what, instead of how to build this new nation, the efforts to re-define what Australian democracy stand for were deemed to be vivid, with referendum and dismissals, marches and Mardi Gras, but fortunately and proudly, with very little blood shed. Australia’s political history cannot stand only on top of Kelly’s five headings. This country has witnessed political discourse far more important than the strict economic view that Kelly presented, making his Settlement too small and limited in providing any useful understanding of our history.

Kelly used his book to explain how the political certainty we enjoyed since federation ended in front of the new political realities of the 80s. The hindsight we have twenty years after that period can help us judge how his settlement was dismantled. The cracks started as far back as the fall of Singapore, where we stopped expecting any benevolence from the British Empire, but instead, turned our eyes towards the American one. Then Holt dismantled the White Australia Policy, although racial tensions have yet to disappear. Whitlam’s government was the first to take a major bite out of the Industry Protection, by cutting the tariffs rates by 25%. Hawke and Keating continued the tariff cuts and expanded into destroying any Paternal instincts that the Settlement had, by starting the deregulation of government agencies, something that their Liberal successor would build upon too. Howard punched down the last of the pillars, the Wage Arbitration system, by limiting the unions’ powers in wage negotiation and by taking away workers rights to holidays and overtime. The last Labor government, although reinstated some of the workers rights, did nothing to rebuild Kelly’s Settlement. This federation construct has lost its meaning and application in the present, market-driven, political arena. The Settlement was born when Australia was an affluent British colony and it was dismantled when we become an autonomous country, which lived and operated in a global financial arena.

It is clear that the Australian political landscape has changed since federation. The two-party political system used to hold all the keys and was the one responsible for where Australia was heading. All five of Kelly’s pillars are policies made only after the two parties policies collided in the public arena, researched and debated, until finally they would reach a consensus. All the decision-making, the consultation with the public, the control of the media and the agenda of the day was actioned and filtered through the two-party political machine. However, this system began to lose its glory. The two parties developed a common language, pushing for global, neo-liberal economies, avoiding any major social policy or discussion. Suddenly, Australian politics became untouched by any issue that had no effect on the annual budget. Policies are formed in financial markets and a government is considered a successful one only if the GDP stays in positive territory. Kelly’s five headings, although of an economic nature, were policies drawn to advance the Australian Fair, not the stock market. Protection, Arbitration and Paternalism were social policies, belonging to one system, aiming to provide a better life for all. Since politics lost interest in any social agenda, the ideas that Kelly presented as the pillars of our political history were doomed to crumble. Furthermore, since the one voice of the current two-party system has lost touch with the grass-roots citizenry, it is unlikely that it has the power to bend the arc of politics toward the hope of a new Australian Settlement.

Paul Kelly’s concept of the Australian Settlement is far from being a comprehensive account of our political past. It gives no merits to the vast challenges we faced as citizens of this country during the last centenary. This nation character-building exercise is lost in his book, only to be replaced by his social nightmare of a country run by a group of accountants. The only use of his book was the fact that his best seller awoke our political and historian brilliant minds, out of their university books and into the real world, debating about what Australia stands for and why we should be proud of our past. However, Kelly would claim that his aim was not to explain history, but to account for how those economic certainties of our colonial past, which managed to see us grow to what we are today, are ending at the doorstep of today’s globalised economies and neo-liberal ideas. For that claim, we could safely accept that every single pillar his Settlement was based upon has now turned to gravel and dust, squashed by the cold reality of the global economies and the electronic stock markets. Even today, that the stock markets have also turned to gravel and dust by the weight of their own greed, a return to the old Settlement or the creation of a new contract, equivalent to the one dreamed by the Founding Fathers is highly unlikely. The profit driven world is still spinning too fast and there is no time for any settlements. The only place left for settlements is not near our pockets, but near our hearts, were justice, reconciliation and social equality is still waiting to be Settled.

Redirect mobile traffic to your mobile website

2008-11-16T16:29:00.007+11:00

And now for something completely different !!!

Create your mobile friendly website as a cut down version of the original one, with no flash, less and smaller pictures with only the essential information. Create a subdomain (m.mysite.com) and place your mobile.html in it.

Then open or create a '.htaccess' file in your original subdomain. Enter the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "Windows CE" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "NetFront" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "Palm OS" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "Blazer" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "Elaine" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "^WAP.*$" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "Plucker" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "vodafone" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "iPhone" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "nokia" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "symbian" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "Opera Mini" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "BlackBerry" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "j2me" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "midp" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "htc" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "java" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "sony" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "android" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "AvantGo" [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://m.mysite.com [R,L]

Those extensions will do for now, but you can add devices as they come. As you can see, it works for iPhone and android..

When traffic enters your domain, it first checks with the .htaccess' file, which checks your browser's type to see if it is one from the list. If it is, it sends the visitor to your m.site..

The trick is in the wildcard RewriteRule (.*) and the use of a subdomain http://m.mysite.com

Check your progress with your own phone or with online emulators like this one
http://www.operamini.com/demo

A gift to my online constituency !!!

Ramblings of a Bleeding Heart

2008-10-13T08:08:00.002+11:00

...There is no way governments will ever give aid to those with mortgages.. Ever.. They will only give aid to the big companies/banks. The big ones know what to do with the money. Poor people might end up going crazy with all that cash...

...House prices are up 200%. They should and will go down to their real value. USA collapsed because of their property bubble, and their bubble was only half as big as ours. Everyone with investment was just living a dream the last years. Time to wake up...

...And I wouldn't worry about unemployment. It will not rise. Even if the whole market collapse, there will still be opportunities for ONE hour work per week, the benchmark we use to calculate unemployment. If you actually use the measurement they used during the previous recessions, you would see that we already have 20% of the workforce without full employment...

...We should all take our Financial Reviews, turn the page to where our investments are and go and read it out at Auburn or Mt Druitt etc etc etc and ask the locals what they feel about this.. At the time that our nation was rich, they were still poor and ignored...

...And for the few that have many, I saw a British banker commenting about the crash and he lifted his shoulders and said that "we will have to live with just making normal profits, not the crazy ride we had the last years"...

...I always felt that there was a greenback elephant in the room.. Greed, greed greed.. Can we buy the 5mil waterfront this year? I think i'll go with a Jag this time, i'll dump the bmw...

Gluttony...

...It's one thing to allow individuals to flourish and another to give a few the power to control everything for their own gratification. These were economical pseudotheories and irrationalism...

Run rabit, run rabit, run run run..

Economic Rationalism… Like our old friend Menzies, we do put labels on things so we could say: whether we are with us or against us...

...I heard the question around the bush, whether the right thing/balance would have been for USA to had stop the subprime lending happening. They would had control the bubble and all would have been good now. The thought is that there are some bad apples out there and when you become too radical and free, they will come out and bite you, as they did during the previous recessions. So the solution and the future is for free markets , but not as free as Bush and Howard wanted them, just a bit less free, like Obama and Kevin might do.

The other side of that gossip was that USA is doomed. USA was doomed after USSR died, they just don't know it yet. USA economy and their international politics have tried various tricks the last years to keep USA as the super superpower: see Iraq wars and "terrorists", while the rest of the world invest in USA by selling them money (USA's foreign debt the only thing they are #1 in the world). Now the Iraq war has finished (like, forgotten), so that's it, the end...

..Que cera, cera. And usually what it cera every 20 year recession is that the rich become old money and retire at some luxury villa in the countryside, the rest straggle a bit and then life goes on, while some new smart banker becomes the new money in town. In the mean time, our schools are the same demountables since Cpt Philip, the hospitals are looking for sleeping bags, the trains travel at the speed of rationalism = 20km/h and our broadband runs at speeds we had around the dot-com bust. But all these are just something for the bleeding reds. Well, that's all i see around me. Apparently there are no Porsche, waterfronts, hedge fund and leverage around my suburb...

Keep the Baby Boomers honest: Tax the Bastards !!!!

2008-09-28T07:47:00.004+10:00

Maybe we should introduce a new tax for the Menzies era’s & the baby boomers retirees; Maybe we should tax their million dollar properties. After all, that money doesn’t belong to them. No one has worked so hard to end up with a couple of million dollars. It just can't happen on a salary, or two. They just 'stole' that money from the next generation, a generation who will have to work day and night to pay for their inflated mortgages.

The "Middle Australia" of the Menzis era has turned to a bunch of 'Unaustralian' parasites that eat away our economy for the pleasure of their new-found rich lifestyle.

"Keep the Baby Boomers honest: Tax the Bastards"!!!!

Forgotten Menzies' Middle Class

2008-09-17T07:18:00.002+10:00

To get elected, you need lots of people voting for you. So a successful pollie needs to ‘find’ or ‘create’ her group of voters that is big enough to give her a majority.

So you get up on the balcony, clear your throat and start: “My fellow…”
“Battlers”= because everyone is battling, everyone is fighting in their everyday life .
“..who want a fair go, are a fair dinkum” Do you know anyone who is for unfair go? Who thinks that he should not be given a fair chance?
Be part of the “Middle Australia”, not come from a “lifetime of privilege”
Etc etc etc. All big words for saying nothing but “you are mine or like me, vote for me”

Menzies, after he realised that his dream of becoming a PM in Britain would never happen, he turned his head down on Australia and tried to create his own group that would vote for him. He used the old European term “middle class”, knowing that the majority wouldn’t have heard of this term, as they wouldn’t be as privileged as him to have studied at a university instead of going to Gallipoli.

Middle class would not be the less than 1% Turnbull’s, who are living a lifetime of privilege and only care for the politics of Switzerland, nor middle class would be the homeless, the ones who are not connected with the society, the ones not enrolled with AEC.
Menzies used four terms to define “middle class” or the sum of the voting electorate his was targeting

A) They should have a home.. Back on those days, they all had one. The reason was that if you care for your home, you care for the society around you, thus you care for the nation. That’s a bit rich coming from a man that he called Britain home for a quarter of a year, while we were at war. Nevertheless, people who didn’t know who to vote or which party represents them best, they now know: You have a home? You Vote 4 Pedro.

B) They should be democratic, believe in giving to society. Middle Australians are not selfish; they care more than just their personal wealth or well-being. They care for their country. Hmm, you could find a couple of Australians with no home back then, but in the middle of the WW2, you wouldn’t find a single person who would be against democracy or against the troops fighting overseas, or against the common good. What? Are they unAustralians or something?

C&D) They should like art and education. Middle Australians should appreciate culture and should embrace education, because a nation needs to be inspired by true art (not Hollywood-made starlets) and a nation needs new scientific discoveries to put them ahead of others (nuclear bombs). After Menzies defined his middle class group, now he tells them what they need to hear, that if you do consider yourselves as my kind of middle class people, then I will give you Art and education, I’ll give you a fair go to become like me, a rich, well groomed, educated, British barrister. You want to become as rich as Turnbull, you vote for him. You want to look like Paris, you buy her merchandise.

Middle class, middle Australia etc.. I call these political lullabies.

The rise (and fall?) of US hegemony

2008-09-07T18:15:00.001+10:00

The end of the Cold War saw all the world players losing their position, except USA. This made USA the default winner, or just the only state left with enough power to dictate its will to the world. The question is if this hegemony will bring global peace, or if that one state will become a destructive force, using its power to acquire more and more wealth, at the expense of the rest of the world.

The great wars of the past occurred when a number of powerful nations collided over various territories or several ideas. Now that USA is the supreme power, a state of relative peace is expected, as no one would dare to challenge the hegemon. In theory, there will be no more struggles between states. It would be pointless for any state to try and force its will with its military, as the hegemon will be looking over and will eventually intervene. The game is rigged, so no need for the states to play it. It is up to USA to impose the politics of the world. If the new superpower is willing to enforce a wave of justice and cooperation between the states, then world order will prevail. However, the hegemon needs to find a balance between the national interest, which would demand the immediate acquisition of all power and world resources for the benefits and pleasure of its citizens, and the human interest, which wants all the citizens of this earth to have the same opportunities for happiness. The first 20 years of USA in the hegemon role has seen a more selfish approach to USA’s global responsibilities as a superpower. However, in time this could change, as per the theory of liberalism; if USA chooses to spread the politics of cooperation and help the world become a peaceful place, then USA will be the most respected nation in that prosperous world.

A new economic order can see the hegemon on top of the markets, regulating and safeguarding the smooth financial operations of the states, creating a better future for all. The power that USA might have to enforce its will upon everybody could be an economic stabilising factor. When in the past the stock markets crashed in the late 20’s, the whole world felt the pain. When USA banks were hit hard due to the fall of the subprime lending scheme, the banks of the world responded in the same way. Globalisation has interconnected the financial markets in a way that any hiccup in any market could see a domino effect throughout the world. A hegemon can change all that. A superpower can control the raw material and their distribution and blow an air of stability. As a great power has by definition a great economy too, it can encourage constant growth, which is the best message for the world markets to invest and expand without the fear of the unexpected. On top of that, a hegemon can dictate policies of free trade, giving the chance for the weaker states to take advantage of their special geo-abilities. Long-term vision and stability is what drives economies forward and a hegemon could secure both. Again, USA has engaged in free trade only with terms beneficial to them and encourages only the international financial agents that fit its purposes. USA might not be up to the task of a world financial arbitrator, mainly due to the volatile nature of its own financial market and the looming oil crises. However this does not prove the theory wrong and maybe after time, a hegemon will appear that would bring economic stability in the world markets.

There could be cultural benefits in a world ruled by a hegemon. Since quests for more respect and power will be pointless, cultures will be left unaltered by the states’ will to encompass a message of national pride and state superiority. The traditions and significance of ones culture is a power that states are keen to manipulate for the sake of national interest. Whether by hiding the embarrassing past or the minority voices, states tend to facilitate and fund those cultural activities that promote their national image to the world. On the contrary, the culture of the enemies of the state are ridiculed or even destroyed. When such rivalries become pointless by the presence of the hegemon, the world might be able to celebrate its cultural riches without any prejudice. Perhaps out of all that is asked from USA, this could be the hardest. USA has cultivated a strong national identity and has an even stronger chauvinism against every other culture. This comes back to the creation of USA when it had to fight for its separation from England and the bitter isolation that followed afterwards. If USA seeks the recognition and respect of the world as the new superpower, then USA needs to travel some extra miles on the route of tolerance and acceptance.

World power is a mixture of military, economical and persuading capacity. It is questionable if USA could rightfully claim to be the most powerful state in the world. After the end of the nuclear race of the Cold War, USA emerged as the state with the most powerful army in the world. That gave USA enormous persuasive power. Although USA is “number one”, other states can claim to be close behind. There are eight other states with nuclear weapons and since the missile defence system has failed, each of those states is a considerable military force. The rise of terrorism and the inability of a regular army to control it, has made the USA military might appear even less important. On the economic front, the USA economy is in recession and USA still hold the first position in foreign debt. On the contrary, EU and China are both ever-growing economies. Finally, no matter how much USA is trying to persuade the world of its good intentions in spreading peace and democracy, the world seems evermore disillusioned about USA’s motives and claims of supremacy.

We could dispute the powers of USA as a hegemon and the intentions of that power for global good or personal prosperity. However there is the potential of one global Sheriff with good intentions to bring peace and prosperity to the world, the same way the Romans brought peace in Europe. It still remains to be seen if US could become, in time, that world power of peace.

The West vs. the Rest

2008-09-07T18:11:00.001+10:00

Since the beginning of time, humans were predisposed to gather in groups. This collective action would give them an advantage in their quest for survival. They would gather in hunting parties and later in villages and towns. In the Middle Ages, they would follow their king or priest. After the Peace of Westphalia, states were created and people became a group within the borders of their own countries. Today, globalisation has eroded, or widened, the borders of the states and the struggle is now claimed to be broader, between the western civilization and the rest of the world. However this is more a struggle of ideas and definitions than an actual warfare. A U.S. American would claim that his country is the west; maybe he would also include Europe. But Japanese citizens would also claim that they belong to the west, so would an Indian from Mumbai or a Saudi. On the opposite side, a Nigerian would feel as if they belong to the ‘rest’ of the world, but the same claim could be made by an unemployed African American in Detroit or a homeless drug addict in St Kilda. West vs. Rest, Haves vs. Have-not’s, phone vs. iPhone… If you look around you, in any part of the world, you will see people getting up in the morning, having breakfast with their families, going to work and coming home. Does it really make a difference if you belong to the west or is this just a fake division for the sake of playing the game “us against them”, but not WITH them? And if ‘we are the world, we are the people’, who are the rest who claim to be the west?

Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history, democracy has triumphed against autocracy and the best of us will come forward to create a better world. Centuries of rule by the few saw nothing but wars, while democracy will bring a common voice from the people and common sense will prevail end bring peace and prosperity. We have yet to see that future but certainly the end of the human history of wars between everyone against everyone has come. Since forever humans would gather behind a flag and kill each other: behind the flag of a king, a god or any other ideology. This bloodshed is a remarkable characteristic of our species. Our instinct for survival, along with our ingenuity, has seen humans in a constant state of warfare. Although fights would be fought for the sake of a flag, the reasons usually would be for securing resources and protecting the group against extinction. Every war that happened on any scale, including the two World Wars, was an attempt of one group to steal land or technology from its neighbour. However, the technological advances of the 20th century changed the rules of the game we were playing since the beginning of civilisation. Now almost any country could have the technology that would help it sustain itself, whether by manipulating the environment or by trade with its neighbours. Furthermore, the ability to replay images from all around the world, into our TV sets and mobile phones, made it impossible for us to tolerate war atrocities on our fellow humans. Technology made the world smaller, and now we can “feel” how the rest of the earthlings “feel”, so we are not so comfortable anymore to follow a flag or a murdering cause. Diplomacy and trade is a bigger vote winner than war and bloodshed. However, the claim that credit should be given to the victory of Democracy might a bit rich. Certainly, Democracy is on the other side of the scale from autocracy. Today, in order for the citizens to say yes to war, a softer approach is needed. We are more educated and informed about the world today than our ancestors who fought the old wars. Caesars and Hitlers could not survive in the world of Internet. The ancient idea of Democracy has been adopted or highjacked and it now comes in a spreadable form, as a universal voting right, once every couple of years. As technology has helped the rest to witness what is happening around the world, so did technology help the few that control the power to influence the citizens to vote as the few wish. The idea of democracy has every citizen caring and participating in the common affairs of the state. Our spreadable Democracy has only given us the power to choose, but nothing to choose from. However, regardless if it is democracy, education or global trade, we have come closer to each other. Our reluctance to kill for a flag has seen the state conflict part of the history to come to an end, gaping the divisions between us, them and the rest, to just us.

Although comparing the past with the present gives us the impression of a more peaceful and united world, it could be argued that war and divisions still exist. The new evils, terrorism, global warming and yet again, nuclear weapons are still separating those with guns, polluting industries and fundamental preaching’s from the others with the diplomacy, bicycles and secular bureaucracy. Is it geography, history, resources or culture that separates us, and are we truly separate or is it just an illusion. When the first human stepped on to the moon, we all felt that now there is nothing we can’t do. If we could make it to the moon and back, then surely humans have the power to prosper, all of us, from every side of the world, through any intricacy. But it didn’t happen right away. Those who had the knowhow kept it for themselves, but technology cannot be kept under key forever. Today about a quarter of the countries have a satellite orbiting the earth. Malnutrition is the major problem facing Africa, along with infant mortality and lack of roads, however they all have a mobile network, Internet and television. The world is not a peaceful place, yet. But we are getting there. More than sixty years have passed since the end of WW2 and we have come a long way since then. When the Germans invaded the rest of Europe, there were no demonstrations in the streets of Berlin. The state was above all and the state had to be protected, or enlarged. Today we have changed our ways. We all feel that war is not the best option. We look on things that divide us and we consider them as exotic and inviting. Air travel, commercialism and Internet has made a young citizen of every country today look and sound the same; same clothes, same computer, same fast food, same music. Not for all the humans, but certainly not just for the ones who live in the west. The rest of the humans who live in a state of warfare are the minority. If the rest are the citizens of Iraq, whose everyday life includes suicide bombs in markets, then the west is every single country in the world that has cars and enjoys petroleum by-products. And that would include the Iraqis themselves. Warfare in the 21st century is the old way of solving issues and is slowly disappearing as an option. Europe has the richest history of warfare, yet now it is united and intergraded to such an extent that war is impossible. Our economies are so interconnected that economic losses from wars are far bigger than any gains from it. The way of the sword has already been replaced by the way of the financial markets and those states that have fallen behind will eventually catch up and solve their differences on the trading floor.

The classic opponents on the world political chessboard are the states, democratic or not. The governments who hold the control over those states would make decisions about the interactions of the state with its neighbours. But the opening of the economic markets with the freedom to invest anywhere they accept credit cards have seen the corrosion of the sovereignty the states have over their territory. Trying to see if we can group the west against the rest, we might want to put the states stronghold to the test. Since the Peace of Westphalia, the supreme power was the state, with geographic boundaries, a leader and a population. Democratic or not, the state would act as one and would go en mass to war or to the negotiation table. Any difference in language or culture would be exacerbated so the state would look unique and righteous for its people, while the opposite state would look weird and alien. This grouping of people would help keep the team united and the leaders on their throne. Unfortunately, us everyone was focused on divisions, wars were inevitable. However, the opening of the markets, with the USA pushing its products to the rest of the world with the Marshall Plan in the 50’s , followed by all the intergovernmental organisations that promote free trade in the world like the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank , the peoples of a state started talking to their neighbours with the international language of the dollar. Europe and USA were happy to get involved in trade with Asian countries, where they could push all their heavy and industries there, where the natural resources and cheap labour was plenty. Asian and other third world countries would be happy to get involved and soon they acquired the infrastructure to stand up on their own feet and bring their economies to a more western level. China is the best example of a undeveloped country that, since it took the decision to open up to the world, has transformed into one of the biggest economies, changing the dynamics of world trade and the Chinese people themselves; today there are 39 Cadillac auto-dealerships in China while Australia has none. All this global interaction has put the powerbrokers of the world in the same boat, a luxurious cruise liner, sailing in a sea of wealth, where all the passengers are out to have a good time… and make lots of money. War between states is now considered a drawback. Every day in the battlefield is a day lost on the trading floor. The war in Iraq will see USA losing 2.7 trillion dollars in the long term. Most of the wars today are the exceptions, with the Bush family deep inside Saudi pockets and even with a history of dealing with Nazis , while Australia’s ex Prime Minister John Howard, who ordered the Australian invasion of Iraq, is locked in a state of mind that belongs to the Menzies era. All these politicians are relics of a different time and they will soon be wiped away from our memory, especially when the new generation, born in the globalization epoch, will take over. Therefore, as war between states loses its meaning, so do the states themselves. With the European Union showing the way, states will slowly relinquish their sovereignty to other, bigger powers or ideas of unification and global coexistence. The future might still hold a place for the west, but it will not come wrapped up in a state’s flag.

On a micro level of analysis, the individual occupants of the third rock from the sun are getting closer to each other for the first time. Religion did not unite them as promised, neither football teams or union memberships. It was the Internet that broke every barrier, political and geographical and managed to unite the west, the global north and south and rest into the same bandwidth. The Olympic game of the Marathon run, a painstaking 42 km road race, came from an event from ancient Greece, where a messenger had to run that distance from the battleground of Marathon to the city of Athens, to pass on the news of war. Athenians would have to rely on the words of a dying man to learn about the victory or losses of their army. The Vietnam War was one of the first wars to become televised and even claimed dot be the first to be lost because of the media coverage, while during the last Iraq invasion, television crews would broadcast live video from the battleground. Citizens of a state are now more informed about what war and division can bring to a human. In addition, it is harder for the state to manipulate or lie about what is actually happening on the other side of the battle trenches. People are more informed about politics and global affairs, so those who control the power cannot act anymore without some sort of consent from the citizens. On top of that, the new age of information technology opened up the road to education. Computers in the classrooms and online universities have made knowledge an accessible tool for everyone. Nelson Mandela said that “from education a better world can be born”. By becoming more educated, we come to understand our true nature and the ways this world operates. By looking back in history, we can see the outcomes from hostilities and war. By learning about nature, the planets or the fragility of the human body we come to terms with our position on this earth. By learning about our neighbours’ struggles for democracy, independence, the pleasures or agonies of providing a plate of food for their children, we become more reluctant to engage in hostility and more willing to give aid when natural disaster strikes. The information highway has brought us out of the dark ages of misinformation and ignorance to a united world, where those who hold the economical or the military power find it ever harder to justify the separation of humanity to clubs of haves and have nots.

The notion of west against the rest has come from those that live in the past, where left was against the right and east side was against the west side. The states are losing their appetite for war, terrorism or counterterrorism, as these are not a viable economic option anymore. People have learned to look at each other with understanding and education is reducing aggression and intolerance. The whole world is a click away and the flutter of a butterfly's wings in China could be photographed, geotagged and download instantly on the web for the pleasure of a New Yorker eyes. As the Baby Boomers enter the nursing home stage and the new interconnecting generations take over the reigns of power, so do the definitions of dissection brought about by the 20th century lose their meaning. Even if there is still a division between rich and poor people, it is a fact that the poor people are living a better life than they did in the past. The future will not see wars against the earthlings, but struggles between humans and the polluted and overpopulated earth.. and that could mean the end of us all, including the west and the rest.

The Australian Settlement

2008-09-07T18:04:00.002+10:00

“On 01/01/1901, people who lived on the Australian continent had a lot to celebrate: a new year, a new century, and a new nation” (Year 7, Australian History).
So we federated. After the decision was made, the ribbons were cut and the queen posted the Commission of Assent, our pollies had to think for the future, to unite the States, not just in landmass, but with a common political thought. After all, Melbourne resembled Sydney as much as Greenwich looks like Brighton (I’ve no idea). Enter the “Australian Settlement” or “Fortress Australia”.

For entrée, they thought that White Australia was cool. That people “possessing the same general cast of character, tone of thought and the same constitutional training and traditions” should stick together. That’s a sentence of 100 years of fish & chips, cricket and ‘are you being served’ snobbery! Of course the local ex-convicts had Asia in their minds. The explanation for the upfront racism was that ‘it is not the bad qualities but the good qualities of these alien races that makes them dangerous’. So, we are crap, and we plan to stay that way by keeping all the goodies off shore… And that indigenous alien race we found here when we came, with no good qualities to fear (so they thought), we would embrace them wholeheartedly. Right… Even if it sounds weird in our minds, the beginning of the 20th century saw Fascism and it’s ideas as a valid political option, also in Germany, Italy, Spain etc.

For salad, we had Industry Protection, where our industries would be assisted by the government against the competition from overseas. So if we make wool and they make wool, we put an extra tax on their imported wool, so our wool is cheaper. If you feel like wearing French clothes, tough luck, pay for it. That sounds fair, until we come to a point were we cannot make iPhones, Holden’s plans for a hybrid car are in a hybrid state and our t-shirts’ washing instructions tag cost as much as the whole t-shirt made in China, including shipping costs and home delivery. Today we talk about having a ‘smart’ economy, where we develop expertise and technologies that others can’t, so we can have a balance between imports and exports. But what are we good in exporting and how come we still produce the water hungry wool?

For appetiser, Chef Deakin served Arbitration, “the legal obligation” of companies “who benefitted from industry protection to redistribute their profits to their employees in wages and working conditions”, or in short, give us a “fair go”. So if those companies thrive due to public subsidies and tariffs, they would pass on 50% of their profits to their employees… Ok, ah,, maybe 40%?.. 10%?..
No… A family of 5 would get just enough for food, shelter, tram fares and no chance at all for free university fees or anything that could see them threatening the CEO of the protected industry. I guess you need to start from somewhere, and the Labor party definitely grew from Arbitration, as the unions who were representing the workers became a very powerful political force. Just wondering what the minimum wage calculation would add up to today. Lets see: support five people (only one working), electricity, D&G clothes and leather boots, Ikea furniture, cappuccino maker and dishwasher from Bosch, Telstra bill, NRMA insurances… I can go on, but the sum would be today’s minimum wage times 10.

At last, here comes the main course: State Paternalism, or ‘individual happiness through government intervention’. Or, shall we sell the electricity to private companies or just give away Morris Iemma to any charity that is looking for a new CEO? Governments, running the big industries, had the benefit of those industries running for the good of the government. If trains were run by the government, then the train network would spread all over Australia for the benefit of all Australians. If they were run by MacBank, then we would have only one line, between Parramatta and Central. What’s not right with the above example? State run companies tend to become counterproductive and run on red. The trick is in the definition of “company”. If you are looking for a quick, quarterly, don’t care how you do it, 50% up in profits, look no further than any big company today. It is those big companies that are going broke after their involvements in subprime lending. But their CEO will find another job, their stockholders will invest somewhere else. However, if those were the companies that run a country’s infrastructure, then the whole country would collapse. Maybe the industries that a State should foster are those that are essential for the State to survive and thrive and maybe we could cut them some slack if they are not making massive profits every year. Can you imagine the Army and the Police in private hands?

And finally, the dessert: (Everybody stand up!) Imperial Benevolence: “The Royal Navy was the guarantor of White Australia” God save the queen, she is no… The motherland will be there for us… After we wasted half our male population in Gallipoli for a silly idea that Churchill had (well, actually only 8000, but you can never exaggerate enough), we started wondering if the union jack on our flag was a good idea after all. Then Singapore was lost to the Japanese and the queen was unavailable to take our calls… But let me tell you New Zealand’s story of European Benevolence. Wondering why they have so many sheep? They made a deal after WW2 with Mama and France to sell all the lamb chops they could produce and on top, they would get cheap French Champagne. All went well, until European Union was formed and the EU Industry Protection clashed with the NZ Benevolence, leaving the poor Kiwis with billions of sheep, but no Imperial love…

So that’s the Australian Settlement, by Paul Kelly. Almost twenty years after he wrote it and the Fortress Australia has totally collapsed. Thank you so much Mr Kelly for spoiling the party, you party pooper…

We, the Dictator and the British (or the Good the Bad and the ugly of International Relations)

2008-06-29T10:10:00.003+10:00

I’m one of those party pooper kind of a person, that when there is a conversation about a sexual assault in a carpark at 3am, I don’t join the group throwing darts at the monster (or ICE consumed human), but I start questioning why the victim was there in the first place etc.. Not in a “cover the meat” way, but with the logic that even if we dismantle that monster in 100 pieces, there will be other monsters out there to do it again. So i would care about how to be more educated and not wander around dark carparks, alone at 3am, what the schools and parents ought to do and how to control drugs, bla bla bla..

After WW2, we all learned to throw our darts at the Hitler board. Then it was Nasser board. Then Saddam. Then Howard (we will get there soon…). But we should be putting on that board our faces too. The end of the WW1 found the USA saying goodbye to all: "you do your thing, we’ll do ours". And what else could you expect from a bunch of farmers, caring only for their crops, still bitter that the motherland put them down. They are still baring arms, in case the queen sends ships after them again…. So the Brits were left “alone”. Even worse, the all mighty pound, that was Thy currency for the whole world, become not so powerful and the $$$ + gold took over as the world currency. So now the realist Brits saw from one side their mortal enemies, the French, being equally powerful and at the other side, the Russians, who never liked the queen in the first place, standing at the corners of Europe as strong as ever. And the solution? Let’s rearm the Germans!!! We are “Anglo-Saxons” anyway.. So there you have it. If it wasn’t Hitler, it could have been Franz Beckenbauer. Give an inch, take the whole world (minus the British Isles.. funny that…).

With Saddam, my favourite South Park character, the Yanks had issues with Iran, so there you go, Rumsfeld and Halliburton P/L on the give, take guns, take, chemicals, do what you want with them. So Saddam asked: “After I do your dirty laundry with Iran, would you mind if I use your gas on a bunch of Kurds too?”. And why would they mind? The Kurds were not a problem just for the Iraqis, but also for the Turks. And the Turks were one of the long and strong Allies of the USA (along with Pakistan). The reason why the Russians were shipping Nukes to Cuba was because the yanks had already positioned Nukes in Turkey, facing north… So for USA sake, it was killing 180,000 Kurdish birds and 1 mil Iraq/Iranians with one stone. Some decades later, Rumsfeld and Halliburton re-entered Iraq for sale#2, this time they put Saddam in their scope. No darts this time; this game was with a poker card deck.

What I just said, has been said before: Imperialism / Colonialism / isolationism / Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Killism. It’s just that the version of history we pick to explain thw wars are a bit… I don’t know.. American?
Here is another story of the WW2 and the Jews. Not many sites mention how the Brits felt about the Jewish diaspora in their country. Jews, before WW2, were like gypsies, immigrants at any country that would take them. No one wanted them. It was a “problem” for all. A bit like the Iraqis or the Sudanese refugees today. So when Hitler slaughtered them, the Brits somehow had not as a priority to bomb Auschwitz, even if they were aware of the facility. Instead they chosen to "focused on the morale of the enemy civil population”, which means that one side was gassing families in a camp while the other was bombing sleeping babies in their cribs. For every one British civilian death by bombs, there were 10 civilian deaths in Germany by USA/UK bombings. And when the war ended, the genius plan for the “Jewish problem” was to send them to Palestine!!! From the German camps ovens to the 2000 years nonstop warfare inferno of the Middle East.

History needs to be rewritten, with more emphasis to us, the ordinary people and less on leaders names and dates of victory. For example, a little quiz: In the conflict of USA and Japan we have mass deaths per day. Can you cite that one date that the biggest numbers of casualties happen? Those 24 hours that we managed to become the worst animal in this planet and successfully created the technology to kill the biggest amount of our fellow humans? Well, it was 5 months before the Hiroshima bombing that most of us would say. It was the 10th of March ’45, when the USA planes firebombed Tokyo, burning to death some 100,000 civilians. Yet they only made a movie about Pearl Harbour…

So who is to blame for those civilian deaths? Or who will be responsible if they happen again? UN, or the countries involved, or the leaders and us who voted them in? If we don’t know or discuss or have books written about the firebombing of Japan, how will we be ready to judge/act/vote when our next leader asks for the OK to invade a country? When we voted Johnny in again, was there any visual of the destruction from bombing an Afghani civilian wedding or how dismantled bodies look and smell after a suicide bomber kills 100 people in market? Do we saw any of those in our newspapers or our TV sets? Or was the timeslot occupied by “Bondi Rescue”? No, it was not Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin who should carry the blame. It is we, you and me. Global is made out of States, States are made out of Individuals. Individuals is were the buck stops and starts.

If you want to tease a young German, start a conversation about the WW2. They are embarrassed of their past and they don’t like discussing much about it. They don’t blame Hitler. They just look at their fathers and grandfathers and wonder: What's wrong with you, dude?

The Japanese Economic Model in the 70s-80s

2008-01-13T10:03:00.000+11:00

In the 70’s, two major oil crises hit the world markets and most of the economies fell into recession. The Japanese economy managed to recover in no time at all and ended up being the most prosperous state during that time, with a worldwide recognition.

By the end of the 60’s the western economy was booming for more than 20 years. The consumer society was enjoying an affluent lifestyle and the industries were working constantly to supply their ever-increasing customers’ needs. The demand for oil was growing, but nothing would create any concern to the West, as the Middle East was under the West’s influence for decades. All this ended when the Arabic nations rebelled against the West and blocked supply of oil. First in 1972, after the Arab-Israeli War, the oil producing states put a quota on the oil productions, which brought shortages in the West. Then in 1979, the Iranian revolution brought to a stop the oil supply to the West. The boom of the 50’s and 60’s had come at an end and recession struck the West.

Japan was the only wester nation that saw a way out of the recession. First, Japan did not align its policies with Israel and remained an ally of the Arab world. That ensured that initially Japan would not run out of oil. Then, Japan asked from its people to minimise consumption of energy and people listened and did their share, as the nationalistic pride in Japan was always strong and Japanese believed it was their duty to respect the leadership and listen to its advice. In an attempt to keep expenses down, salaries were asked to stay low, for workers and executives, keeping costs at a minimum and productivity high. The next step was to move overseas all those energy hungry industries, to other countries that could do it cheaper, as they had lower wages and they were positioned closer to the raw material than the island of Japan was. Finally, Nixon visited China and a new market was opened in the area. Even after the history of hostilities between China and Japan, the two countries signed trade agreements, giving Japan another market to expand to. While in the same period all the markets of the world were collapsing, the Japanese economy managed to grow and expand at an amazing rate.

With the turn to the 90’s the Japanese dream vanished. The cold war ended and countries stopped fighting each other and concentrated more on their own economy and development. When the Berlin wall fell and the Soviet Union became the Russian Federation, the focus shifted from military research and expenses, to the creation of the biggest market that any country would love to buy from. In effect, foreign investment was reduced and for the first time, Japan stopped being the recipient of U.S. dollars for aid or investment. The European Union grew and in an effort to keep their export deficit low, they reduced the importation of goods from Japan. The world economies became more aware of their own need to normalise their markets and at the wake of the end of the Cold War, tariffs were introduced and a sentiment of protecting the domestic markets against the “Made in Japan” label was born.

Japan was envied for its growth when the rest were in recession. This has been accredited to the Japanese work ethics and to the free ride they had from wars since their defence was left to the USA. However, it must be taken into account that no other country saw the devastation from war as Japan did. This guided the Japanese people to seek foreign and economic policies that did not need a military intervention and in effect, saved the economy from the unnecessary expense of armament. When the rest of the world was fighting each other for ideologies or with ego, Japan had its head bowed, its hands working and its pockets full. These days, the rest of Asia has caught up and china has become the biggest economic superpower of the region. Nevertheless, for the period of the 70’s and 80’s, Japan economy was the envy of the whole world.

50 Years of USA Policy in the Middle East

2008-01-13T09:55:00.000+11:00

After the explosion of the industrial revolution, the West developed faster than the East, creating a divide between the two worlds. The doctrine of Occidentalism wants the West obsessed with material goods while the East remains a more spiritual place that values the human and not the dollar. Like any other big doctrine, this was created as a substitute to a real analysis of the political situation in the world.

The USA policies in the Middle East (ME) since WW2 have played their part in fuelling the Occidentalism theory. Initially, ME was thought to be a dreamy place with kings, lots of sand and most of all, far away from America. Eventually, the ever-increasing need for oil turned the economic and political U.S. American eyes on that side of the globe. They found states that were left by the British after the war, unorganised and undemocratic. In the end, the break of the Cold War and the Soviet’s proximity and interest in that region saw the USA getting involved in ME politics.

When Iran and Egypt declared their independence and their aspirations to become nations based on their own cultural image and not the one of the West, the USA did not want to accept it. On the contrary, when Israel was created to a westerner’s image, the USA became their number one supporter. Iran was an ally that during the Oil Crises continued to ship oil to the USA. However, when the Islamic Revolution overthrew the USA’s friendly government and the oil flow stopped, Iranians were declared an enemy of the West. Egypt, as long as Nasser did not side with anyone on the Cold War, was accepted as a friend of the USA and was given economical and political support. Nevertheless, when the conflict between Israel and Egypt broke out and Egypt sought assistance from the Soviets, their USA friendship was over. On the contrary, Israel, besides its problematic existence in the ME, became the biggest ally of the USA in ME, placing it in the frontline of confrontation between the two civilizations, a new age Crusaders occupation of Arabic Lands. These political interference of the USA in the independence of the sovereign Arabic States has infuriated the Arabic world and has made the “American” image a synonym for despotism, aggression and an insult to the Arabs.

The USA has also interfered with the sovereignty of the States of Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, creating an air of discontent amongst their citizens. When Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviet Union, the USA supported a guerrilla war with arms and training. When the occupation finished and so did the threat of communism in the area, the USA and the USSR withdrew, leaving behind a country devastated by war. From the rubble, evolved a new generation of extremists who felt that their land was used by the Superpowers and then it was left to the Afghani people to foot the bill of the war reconstruction. Pakistan, a USA ally since its separation from India, has been ruled by military regimes with the support of the USA. The dictatorship would do their best to please their USA friends and suppress any feeling against the West by their citizens. This gave ground for grievances from the local Islamic extremists, who joined their Afghani counterparts in anti-USA terrorist activities. However, in Saudi Arabia, the oligarchy of the Royal Family has managed to control the local extremists. The alliance with the West has been safeguarded with the permanent presence of 5000 USA soldiers in the area and any attempt for a rebellion has been suppressed immediately and quietly for years allowing the uninterrupted flow of oil to the west and the continued rule of the Royal family. The notion of the US army on Arabic Holy lands is always going to create extremism and the fact that Osama Bin Laden is a Saudi should not be a surprise.

There is no other country in the ME that has been more affected by USA policies than Iraq. Saddam Hussein would rule the country for 24 years. The USA would make Iraq their ally during the war with Iran and then their foe during the war with Kuwait. During the period between the first and the second invasion of Iraq by the west, an embargo of goods was in place; a tactic that drew the Iraqi population to starvation and slow death and that infuriated the Arab world. The second invasion of the USA has been transformed into a civil war between the religious groups in the country and terrorist actions are an everyday event. Iraq is feared to become an open wound for the West and the breading ground for a new extremist and terrorist generation.

The USA intervention in the ME for the last fifty years had one aim: Do anything that needs to be done in order to profit our economy, no matter what the consequences are for the people of the ME. The USA is creating enemies with every step they take in the region and thousands deaths every month have those policies to blame. Terrorism is now present, not only in the 2000 attack on the USS Cole or the 1993 and 2001 in the World Trade Buildings but in Israel, Bali, London, Madrid and every week in Baghdad. These are all consequences of USA policies in the ME, intended or unintended.

The Beginning of the Cold War

2008-01-13T09:54:00.000+11:00

Even before the end of WW2, the USA and the Soviet Union were contemplating and discussing about who would get what after the war had finished. The Yalta Conference in February 1945 drew some lines on the World Map, but that did not prove enough to stop the new superpowers in spending the next decades engaging in a war of threats and covert operations.

The first attempts towards the coexistence of the two superpowers between Stalin and Roosevelt were rather promising. However, when Truman become President, all the personal trust was lost and no communication was initiated after that point. The death of Roosevelt was an unfortunate event in history, but that is the outcome when a country relies on a person and not on policies.

The USA and the Soviets entered WW2 against a common enemy. However, while they were all fighting the Germans, they never tried to create a climate of trust between them. They lost that given window in history to find a common future for their countries. After the war and the death of Roosevelt, the focus, from finding a way to overcome the war, shifted to finding a way to get the biggest piece of the European pie.

Truman brought to the table the nuclear bomb and the Marshal plan. The bomb scared the Japanese into surrendering, but infuriated Stalin who did not want to trust the USA any more. The Marshal plan was perceived as an attempt to align Europe with the USA and although the Soviets were invited to participate, Stalin could not accept a model of aid that was made by the Capitalist West. These actions from Truman benefited his country’s interests, but exasperated the Soviets, who considered them as hostile moves toward the USSR.

The division of Germany could never work with a western island in the middle of East Germany. For practical reasons, like the black market to the spread of “propaganda” from both sides, Berlin become a “designer’s fault” of the post WW2 treaties, which inflated the difference between East and West, feeding the Cold War with misinformation and dark conspiracies. No matter how unlikely it seems, if the USA had left Berlin or even Germany undivided, the provocation of the Berlin wall, those stones that fed the Cold War, would have not existed and Germany could have become the country that would keep the two superpowers apart from each other’s faces.

The USA was not economically affected by the war. However, the Soviet Union was devastated and as Stalin had Eastern Europe under his control, he took advantage of his position and looted those countries of their national resources for the benefit of the USSR. The more the West was portrayed as the “good” alternative to the Soviet system of control of the East, the more Stalin’s grip became firmer on those countries, to counterpart the “propaganda” from the West. This tactic from the USA, although justified, could not have any positive result, given the need of the Soviet economy for raw material, in order to support their ever-increasing need for armament against the Cold War enemy.

The difference between Capitalism and Communism was inflated by both sides. The sole existence of one system would need the other’s defeat to survive. This fallacy was played out by both superpowers in an attempt to gather support from other countries. Communism was portrayed as a fascistic system, with no respect for westerner’s values. It was very easy to compare Stalin with Hitler and the totalitarian regimes they were the leaders of. On the contrary, the west was the capitalistic monster, which in order to survive, needed to engage ever increasing numbers of consumers, from the coast of the Atlantic all the way to Moscow. Stalin thought that another economic crash was imminent in the USA and the only way to avoid it was if the West managed to infiltrate Europe. This threat would make him suspicious of every move the USA would make into Europe.

The Cold War occurred because the leaders of the world did not resolve the issues that brought them into conflict in the first two world wars. There was no reconciliation after the fall of Germany. World domination, lack of respect for human rights, selfish and egocentric leaders kept on holding the top positions of the new “Superpowers”. The historic disgrace at Yalta, the splitting of sovereign nations over a dinner table by the big three, was the beginning. After that, they were ready to fight for the rest. Tensions slowly built up after the WW2 until 1950, when the Korean war started. After that, the Cold War was doomed to tyrannise the world for the next 40 years. Leaders from both sides are to blame, as they did nothing to bring the two nations together.

European migration since 1945

2008-01-13T09:49:00.000+11:00

Western Europe witnessed a long wave of migration after WW2. European industries grew and so did the demand for labour. Workers and their families would move from the less developed states to the countries that needed their labour. With a small intermission around the oil crises of the 70’s, the migration patterns, although varying in nature, would continue until the end of the century and beyond.

The immediate years after WW2, Europe started the reconstruction of its industries. The demand for more hands was obvious. Every country developed policies that suited their particular needs to attract workers. There was no competition between the citizens and the immigrants as there was work for everyone. Cultural difference existed and sometimes ghettos were created to ease the coexistence of different groups. There was an obvious change to the cultural imagery of those countries that accepted migrants, but the impact was minimum, as those immigrants were mainly workers without families, who came on a temporary basis and were usually out of sight, inside mines and factories.

After the Oil Crises of the 70’s, economic depression sunk in and work was not as available as after the WW2 years. Citizens were no longer as accommodating of immigrants; they were here to “take their jobs”. Furthermore, to battle the need for oil, Europe exported its heavy industries to those countries closer to raw material and places that could produce goods at a lower price. This reduced even more the usual unskilled positions in the rich countries and in effect the need for migration. Although the migrants would end up doing demeaning jobs that the “natives” did not want to be a part of, the atmosphere was not in favour of the newcomers. Race and different cultural values would become a source of friction.

However, a new source of migration appeared during the seventies and this came from the reunion of the existing migrants with their families. Although most governments tried initially to restrict migration to only the workers of a family, to which they gave temporary visas, human right issues and the complexity of monitoring family movements made it impossible to stop family reunifications. The migrants were no longer the ones who came temporarily to work in the factories. Now the whole family was here and they were their new neighbours. Migration soon became a mainstream phenomenon.

In the 90’s with the union of Europe, internal migration become very common and was even encouraged by the European Union. The new migrants into Europe were mostly asylum seekers or economic refuges from Asia or Africa, who would illegally enter the European borders in order to find a better life. This kind of migration was publicly renounced. However, the need for a cheap workforce overtook Europe’s policies. Those new migrants would fill construction sites and cleaning positions. The “Natives” would consider them as second-class citizens, especially when their illegal status deprived them from basic human rights. Nevertheless, the economy dictated the need to accept these migrants in order to fill all the low paid and part-time positions. Migrants would no longer clash with the citizens, as each was assigned to work in a different sector of the economy.

The unification of Europe eventually created a mix of cultures and the race of the new arrivals was not an issue anymore. The migrants were seen for what they were; a cheap workforce to help the economies of the West grow. Globalisation helped change the notion that migrants would “take our jobs” to a realisation that the world is a changing place where culture is secondary to the economy and the profits.

U.S. American Occupation of Japan

2007-12-24T15:55:00.000+11:00

The USA occupation of Japan lasted seven years. Its original mission was to dismantle the Japanese war machine and to help the population recover from the destructive WW2. However, halfway through this period, the political circumstances in East Asia changed and the threat of communism dictated the reverse course of the USA strategy in Japan. The war machine was rebuilt, authority was given back to the pre-war Elites and Japan turned into a crucial ally on the American war against Communism.

The 1945 bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki shook the entire world. Japan had no option but to surrender to the Allies. The USA, as the main player in the Pacific, took upon itself the administration of Japan. To govern Japan, they did not appoint a politician or a bureaucrat, but a General of the Army. Douglas MacArthur was given a blank cheque to administer the country, even if had no prior experience in economy rebuilding. His team, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) was a mixture from all sides of politics. Their first orders were not to reconstruct the nation, but to make sure Japan would lose its war fighting capabilities forever.

The first years of occupation, SCAP was focused in eliminating all the powers that controlled Japan during the war. A secondary object was to democratise the country based to a western image. Initially, waves of first-aid arrived to battle starvation and to restore the bombed infrastructure. Then, the big wartime lobbies that fuelled the war, lost their powers. First, the powerful companies, the Zaibatsu, which controlled all the industries in Japan, were taken apart. Then, the landowners lost their huge properties to the farmers who were actually working on them. MacArthur allowed the establishment of unions to fight for the rights of workers, in order to level the gap between the few privileged and the Japanese people. In the political field, a new constitution was drawn. The most important clause was the article 9, a declaration that Japan has forsaken war forever. In addition, religion was renounced and the emperor was declared as “human”, although he still remained the Head of State. The new constitution gave power to the parliament and the cabinet, as now it would be elected my the people and not appointed by the emperor. To bring the Japanese society in line with the west, equal rights for woman were declared and a new curriculum was brought in from US to educate the youth and to rewrite the history as the winners wanted to be written. Although most of these changes were envisaged by the General himself, the main focus, which was the dismantlement of the Japanese war machine, was carried out efficiently.

During the first years of the occupation, MacArthur's policies were adopted with virtually no resistance. The Japanese people welcomed the changes. After the surrender, they had no national pride left to fight for and it was easy to accept the new Status-Quo, especially after the American aid started pouring in. The politicians, at least the right wing ones, returned in the parliament and they were allowed to serve their people under the SCAP supervision. As Japan was ruled by an army of bureaucrats during the war, MacArthur thought that chaos would come if he destroyed them completely, so he allowed them to keep their posts. Only in USA there were people unease with the way MacArthur dealt with the big companies and the powers he gave to unions. The “Japan Lobby” perceived his policies as against the ideas of Capitalism and not beneficial to USA companies with investing interests in the country. Nevertheless, MacArthur objective to disarm Japan was met and no one dared to cross roads with the winner of the Pacific Wars. As long as everyone was happy, or at least quiet, the USA occupation was considered as a success.

However, the end of the 40’s saw a dramatic change in the East Asian politics. The threat of Communism became even more present and the occupiers of Japan suddenly had to change objectives. It started with the end of the civil war in China and PRC, the communist Party, taking over power. Subsequently, in 1949, USSR successfully tested its first nuclear bomb; the USA was not the only superpower in the world any more and the Cold War starting to heat up. The Two Giants of Asia become red and the alarm bells scared the USA that the rest of Asia would follow them. Finally, in 1950, the Korean War started and the USA, with the rest of the world, was fully engaged on the fight against Communism. MacArthur would lead the war against Communism in Korea and he would drag Japan with him.

MacArthur was now at the Korean Peninsula’s battlegrounds and the only thing he wanted from Japan was to become a strong economy to support his war machine. The new policy was named “The Reverse Course”. The big Zaibatsu were reinstated and were given as much power as they wished to kick start the production of weapons. The unions lost their muscle and strikes were put under strict control. The Japanese lobbies regain their influence on the parliament. They became strong again and started demanding independence for Japan. As long as Japan was standing on the USA’s side on this new war, occupation lost its objective. In September 1951, in San Francisco, the Japanese peace treaty was signed, with the USA securing its presence in the islands in the form of military bases, ensuring that Japan would remain part of the Capitalistic West. In a very short period, power was returned to the same group of people as before the war and Japan, from being a wartime monster, was transformed to the most valuable ally of the USA.

The remarkable Japanese recovery from the war devastation was mainly due to the fate that the USA had in plan for the country. Aid started pouring in from the USA and never seemed to stop. The recovery and development of the country’s economy was always aim number one to the occupiers, from the first years, when they took the guns away from the Japanese hands, to the last days, when they gave them back. The Japanese Elites, who wanted to conquer Asia with force during the WW2, were given by the USA the peaceful weapon of Capitalism. Japan took advantage of it and not only manage to rise from the literal ashes of war, but succeeded in becoming one of the most powerful economies in the western world.

The End of the Cold War

2007-11-16T07:27:00.000+11:00

The fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 was the event that signified the end of the Cold War. With it, the imaginary iron curtain fell and the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The USA became the sole superpower, and the ghost of communism almost disappeared. Everyone was initially astonished, as this event was unexpected. However, when the dust settled, it become clear that the Soviet economy was haemorrhaging and that the powerful Red Army had lost its might. Only the leadership of the Soviet Union saw it coming, as their policy changes played their part in ending this imaginary war..

The last decade before the end of the Cold War, the USA took a step forward in the technology of armament. They pursued the development of the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) or “Star Wars” defence system that in theory would shield the USA from a nuclear attack. An enormous amount of money was spent for this exercise. However, the Soviet Union decided not to compete. No actual new SDI weapon was ever produced. It was just the idea of a SDI that the Soviets had to fight against, an imaginary weapon for an imaginary war, making the race even more difficult to follow. The USA would claim that the Soviet economy was not strong enough to compete with theirs at such a level. However, after the Cold War, the USA entered a time of economic recession, fighting a record budget deficit because of their one-man race to unsuccessfully deploy the SDI. The Cold War was a battle of economic supremacy, of Capitalism vs. Communism and when the USSR left the battle for new weapon technologies, it sent the West a message of weakness and defeat.

During the Cold War era, there were physical wars taking place in countries at the border of influence of the big two superpowers. Korea, Vietnam, Middle East and Latin America were some of the places that were in a constant warfare state, between rebels trying to overthrow military governments, with the covert or open support of the USA and the USSR. Afghanistan was one of those places, with the USSR spending enormous resources on a war that was characterised as the “Soviets’ Vietnam”. For ten years, the USSR tried to take control of the country but they faced a fierce resistance, backed up by weapons and training from the USA. In the end, the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, giving the opportunity to the West to claim that the Red Army had lost its power and that Communism was on the retreat.

Another factor responsible for the diminishing of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War was the financial situation in the USSR. The Soviet economy was collapsing under the lack of any market reform since the Stalin era of the Big Red Empire. The financial gap with the West was ever increasing, as the capitalist economies benefited from the new globalisation trends, the birth of computers and the strength they gave to the stock markets. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, understood that in order for the nation to develop, the old empirical system needed to transform to a more open, democratic and modern one, an alternative to the failed and archaic Stalin’s system of influence by the force of weapons. In the process of democratisation, Gorbachev allowed the Eastern Bloc to break away from the USSR, in order to lessen the drainage of the empire’s resources on supporting those neighbour states. Therefore, as the republic started breaking apart, so did the whole idea of a Soviet Union. The Cold War would see one of its players slowly eroding under the weight of its own economic mismanagement.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, many records that were hidden, deep in inside the Kremlin, have become available and historians are re-evaluating the reasons behind the end of the Cold War. However, it could just be as simple as looking at those who led the nations to war or peace. Would WW2 ever have occurred without Hitler? Would Hiroshima have become a nuclear casualty if Truman had not replaced Roosevelt after his sudden death a couple of months before? Stalin started the Cold War because of his deep beliefs that he was responsible for the rebirth of the Old Russian Empire. Gorbachev finished the Cold War to save his nation from the economic destruction brought by their implicit position as policeman of one half of the world. A nation’s leader is always responsible for the fate of the country. The reasons why the Soviets lost, or just decided to exit the Cold War, can be attributed to Gorbachev’s own dream for a new future for his nation.

The cold war was a virtual war, a war of threats, a war of imaginary weapons, a war of imaginary races. When the Soviet Union decided to stop running, they left the race, giving the right for the USA to declare themselves as winners. However, in December 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist and their successor, the Russian Federation, is still the biggest country in the world with a seat in the Security Council, a strong economy and with ever growing ties with the European Union. The USA is still running, looking for any evil that would make its superpower status relevant, spending billions on wars and keeping on accumulating foreign debt. It seems that if the cold war ended two decades ago, someone needs to tell the winner.

From the Council of Europe to the EU

2007-10-22T21:12:00.000+10:00

The two world wars (WW) of the 20th century devastated Europe. The shattered nations looked for a solution to avoid future wars. They realised that integration to one common market would connect all the nations with bonds too precious to break over national egos. The smaller nations would come together to avoid domination from the new giants of the cold war. Over the next 50 years, on a slow but steady speed, Europe would unite to a strong federation, a new economic superpower.

The initial step to integration was the Council of Europe (CE) formed in 1949. It came at a time when Europe was rebuilding its destroyed cities and infrastructure. No one wanted another war, so the promise of a united Europe was very appealing. Like the League of Nations after the first WW, the CE was not a bounding treaty, but a promise for a peaceful future.

The European Coal and Steel Community, created in 1951, saw a common high authority supervising over one aspect of the European markets. Coal and steel were products for warfare and the shared control of these commodities would make the creation of any single state war machine impossible. This agreement would seal a peaceful future for Europe and help the reconstruction of the national economies.

In 1957, the Treaty of Rome took Europe integration to a higher level by creating the European Economic Community (EEC). After the successful experiments in coal steel and agriculture, time came for a free market with free movement of people. The European nations witnessed the financial rewards of larger economic units and the benefits of low cost production from larger scale industries, so they decided to apply this model to all the sectors of their economies. Their common external tariffs were advantageous for trade with the USA, which preferred to deal with Europe as a whole and that saw a strong Europe as a barricade blocking the communist influence to the west. Furthermore, these were times of foreign currency volatility and this treaty promised to aid its members with a doctrine of mutual support in case of any monetary crisis. The unity of the European nations was coming into being, at least in the form of a common European economy.

The European economy after the second WW was mainly agricultural. That was inevitably the next phase to integration. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was an agreement where the sovereign nations of Europe united and were ready to give away some in order to gain a bit more. The strongest supporter of CAP was France, which was eager to maintain a major international political stance, especially with its colonial loses after the war. The CAP promised the farmers access to inexpensive first material and structural and monetary assistance. The abolition of the custom tariffs would provide the signatories a bigger market to sell their products. CAP was the first major policy that changed the way the European Nations did business forever.

For the next 20 years, European integration moved forward only at crawling speed. The oil crises of the 70s’ saw the nations moving apart in foreign policies while UK was too protective of their new oil discoveries in the north. As the exchange rate system was collapsing, there were thoughts of a European monetary system to immune the Union from outside crises. Over these decades, markets collapsed and depression kicked in. However, even if no new agreement was signed, the trust in the treaties already in place was maintained and the EEC become the high authority regulating the economy of the continent.

In the 80s’, USA and Japan appeared to be advancing in Computing and space technology. It was time for Europe to move forward again. The Single European Act (SEA) of 1986 created the European Union, an act that not only incorporated all the previous treaties but also established a zone of free trade between the member states with no borders. A common foreign and security policy was established and the European Parliament received extra political power. Above all, a final timeframe was created for total unification in the future, including a single currency. All the member states had a clear economic target to achieve in the next years or face expulsion from the union. Europeans understood that in order to become relevant in the world markets and compete with the ever-advancing USA, total economic integration was the only way and the SEA established the plan to achieve that goal.

The Treaty of European Union, signed in 1993, saw the political integration of Europe into one federation. The term “European Citizen” was adopted and Europeans acquired a common foreign policy, a close judicial cooperation and a more powerful parliament with delegates for Europe, not for the national parties they came from. The road for extending membership to new countries was open, in an effort to counterbalance the powerful reunited Germany. Now Europe was not just about trade, Europe was a true Union of nations.

One of the last economic targets was reached in the new millennium with the adoption of Euro. The single currency for Europe was a psychological medal to the nations that worked hard in union with their neighbours over the last 50 years, for reconstructing and reaching a level of economic sophistication, where their financial similarities would permit a common currency. The fate of Europe was interconnected and bonded in the same side of a Euro coin. The Euro was the reward of the effort put by all the European citizens and its adaptation was celebrated as the new era of Europe.

Today Europe has twenty-seven member states. It has become an economical superpower, but at the same time, a pioneer in environmental protection, food quality and animal welfare. It started as a promise for a peaceful future and become a federation with economy of the size of the US and with a strong presence in every international forum. The secret of success lays on the motivation of the member states to unite in order to “make money - not war” and to take advantage of the cheap labour and the tariff free trade of a big size market. The slow but steady pace that the changes took place helped not to scare the members away but lure them into signing binding treaties, which in the long run would overcome any political issues and steer the nations into acting for the European integration. The European utopia dreamed by elites at the ruins of 1945 has been transformed to a strong federation with a buried past and a newborn future.

Australian Cultural Values

2007-09-04T11:59:00.000+10:00

The Australian Liberal government names as Australian cultural values the following: Freedom, equality, mateship, friendship, independence, democracy, the rule of law, "the spirit of a fair go" and compassion for the needy.
All these values are not unique to Australia. Any country in the world would claim these values as their own, even countries that are ruled by dictatorships. These are values of the human kind. The United Nations Millennium Declaration defends the same values: Peace, dignity, equality, justice, human rights, freedom, democracy and solidarity.

The truth is that there is no such thing as Australian cultural values. We try hard to give an image to that statement because we need to, in order for our immigration policies to have a meaning and because we need to wave the Australia flag up high every time we invade another country. The Australian cultural values are words without meaning, made up to cover the sad truth that we are not a nation who practice freedom (sedition laws), equality (10% bellow poverty) or mateship (One Nation / Cronulla Riots).

Here is my understanding of “Australian cultural values” since 1945:

After WW2 and until the late 60s’ Australia was dominated by white colour skin Anglo-Saxon politicians. They made policies to fit the colour of their skin. Visually, Australia was a white country following the American dream. The Australians of Italian, Japanese and German heritage who were detained in the WW2 concentration camps in Australia, were just let free without an apology or compensation. The Aboriginal Australians were still considered legally as part of the fauna. Australia stopped being British, as Britain abandoned us in the war, and became US’s sheriff in Asia. Everything would become americanised and their enemies, the Communists, became our enemies. In the spirit of a fair go toward the Aboriginals of Maralinga, we gave them gifts of nuclear bombs, which we detonated on their land.

After the Whitlam government of 1975, we saw the rising economic power of Asia and wanted a piece of it. We forgot about the communist threat and we opened our doors to any other culture of the world to come in. Multiculturalism was pronounced and everyone was welcome, even if their food smelt weird. Nevertheless, beside this new Australian cultural value, the multiple cultures did not dance well together (as they did in Canada). They had to withdraw in their own suburbs where they were left to create their own little home away from home. The British establishment in Australia would shout: “You don’t assimilate to our image” and the multicultural new established Australians would cry: “Where is your equality, mateship, friendship and compassion?”

Today we are accepting Asia as our stronger economic partner and US as our master, who we obey economically (free trade) and militarily (Iraq). The Australian cultural values are stuck on the same vague taglines. The one half of Australia, the Australians who were born overseas or have a parent who was born overseas, are still living in their ghettos to protect themselves from having to answer the question “where are you from mate?”. The other half, the “true aussies”, have learnt to look away, but if you dare cross their eyesight, you will become the target of arrogance, ignorance and British binge drinking testosterone.

We are yet to acquire Australian cultural values because we have yet to accept Australia as an independent nation that controls its own destiny and respects its inhabitants regardless of colour, ethnicity or religion. We first need to become a sovereign nation without a foreign queen, then to accept diversity by law, as they do in Austria where holocaust deniers are being put in prison, and finally, separate Religion from the State. Then wait for a couple of generations to live under this new, free, independent and democratic Australia and then ask them what are the Australian cultural values.

Until then, the only thing that keeps this nation together is our ability to live our life looking away from trouble and hoping that tomorrow will never come.

To Suck or Not to Suck a PM ?

2007-08-30T20:25:00.000+10:00

The crisis of 1975 tested the constitutional foundations of our democratic system. An unelected governor dismissed a popular elected prime minister, using his constitutional powers. Although the Governor-General’s actions were according to the letter of the constitution, his conduct tilted the political balance and created a precedent for future political instability.

In 1972, Labor won the Federal election and formed a government, for the first time since the Second World War. Whitlam, the leader of the Labor Party, fought for a new set of policies; free tertiary education, universal medical system, land rights for the Aborigines and withdrawal of our troops from Vietnam. His ‘Programme’ hit a nerve with the Australian electorate, which brought a double victory to the Labor party, in the ‘72 and ‘74 elections. In 75’, two Labor ministers misled the parliament over the Loans Affair and resigned. This sparked calls from the opposition for the government to resign. The Senate decided to defer on voting for the budget, effectively withholding the funds needed for the daily running of the government. The Prime Minister decided to ‘tough it out’, something that led to a dangerous stalemate. In the end, the Governor General, Sir John Kerr, intervened and, based on a strict interpretation of the Constitution, dismissed Whitlam and called new elections. His action solved the deadlock and normality returned to the political arena. However, the way this solution was applied left a dire legacy in our political history.

The failing economy and the “Loans Affair” created a totally different climate from the one the electorate was living in when they gave Whitlam his mandate to govern. Those who welcomed the decision to dismiss the Labor government said that the Australian people should have again a say in the actions of the government and that can only happen with major elections. M. Fraser claimed that, as scandals kept on coming to the surface and the image of the government was being constantly destroyed, the trauma of having this situation continuing for a further 6 months would have been worse than that of forcing early elections. There have also been claims that the whole state of the economy was at stake. The Labor government failed to act rationally and face the world economic downturns with cuts in the public sector, putting Australia on the brink of recession. The move of the Governor to sack the government would eventually save the economy from a total breakdown. Meanwhile, the Senate could not come to a vote and approve or reject Supply, leaving the public sector in limbo and a danger of major disruption in the Australian way of life. The only one vested with constitutional right to act and resolve the situation was the Governor General. The later election victory of the liberals proved that the people of Australia were behind his actions.

The major accusation against Kerr’s actions was that he decided to act against his appointor and with a sudden and clandestine move. Convention has it that the Governor acts only under the directions of the Queen or the Prime Minister. Furthermore, he did not inform in advance the PM of his actions, giving no room for diplomacy, in fear that he might be the one to be dismissed. In regards the legality of the Governors actions, arguments against the dismissal are based on the fact that constitutional conventions were not followed and a rather strict interpretation of the Act was used. Against tradition, vacancies in the Senate would be filled by persons from other parties; Senate would defer supply indefinitely; The Governor General would seek advice from Judges making it impossible for the High Court to rule on the matter if asked. All these conventions were overruled by the letter of the Constitution that puts the Queen and the GG above every other entity. If conventions were followed, especially in regards to the filling of vacancies in the Senate, the situation would have never come to that braking point. Furthermore, Whitlam claimed that he had found a legitimate avenue to finance the government through bank loans, so there was no reason for his elected government to be dismissed.

Australia is proud of its stable democracy. The Federation of the six colonies was created without a civil war and our political culture has been uninterrupted by any military intervention or major calamity for more than 100 years. The events of 1975 could be interpreted as the time we came close to spoiling that democratic image, or the time that the constitution proved to be enough by itself to resolve any political tensions that might arise.

Australian Constitution 106 years On

2007-08-29T20:22:00.000+10:00

The Founding Fathers of the Australian Federation drew up the Australian Constitution of 1901 by mixing the systems found in the British Westminster system of governance and the bi-house parliament of the United States of America. Australia was seeking its independence from Britain with peaceful means. The document was drafted in a non-binding way, so the Crown would be pleased and the States would not lose any power from the new Federation. After one century, that open space for interpretation gave the Act the flexibility needed in order to survive almost unaltered for a century and become the pillar of Australian Democracy.

During the period of the constitutional conventions of the 1890’s, the States already enjoyed the power of self-governance and they were not about to lose it under the new federation. Therefore, two houses were created. The Senate (s. 7), a house directly elected from the States and filled with equal numbers of senators per state, and the House of Representatives (s. 24), composed of members directly chosen by the total of the Australian population. In effect, they created one house to stand for the States and one to represent the Federation. Today, globalisation tends to favour small governments and minimum intervention from politicians. There is the opinion that the two levels of government can slow down the economic progress of the country. Nevertheless, the power invested in the States by the constitution can act as a safeguard against losing its sovereignty to global players, as States tend to look politically more inwards their borders than the federal governments.

The Executive is vested in the Queen and the Governor General. The Australian constitution asked for the creation of a Federal Executive Council (s. 62) to advise the Governor General. However, it was implied by the Westminster system that this council, compiled by the Prime Minister and his ministers, would have the real power to govern the country, while the Governor General role of approving legislation would be ceremonial. In effect, this is how the executive power is conceived in Australia, and for more than a century, the Queen has not intervened in any political situation. Today, the Sovereign still holds its position as it did 100 years ago and by abstaining from making any political involvements, it gives few reasons to the people to ask for a change.

The constitution gave the judicial powers to the High Court of Australia (s. 71). The High Court would be responsible for interpreting the constitution. The early High Court was filled with the drafters of the constitution, so its reviewing powers were used by the Founding Fathers to fine-tune their creation after it was implemented and various problems would have aroused. Later on, the High Court would take a more strict interpretation of the constitution, using the text itself as a guide for their decisions and not the intentions of its drafters. As years went by and the constitution started to look old in front of the vast social changes of the late 20th century, the High Court took advantage of its powers and interpreted the text with regards to what were the implied intentions of the Founding Fathers. This has been criticised as a political move from a court that is supposed to be impartial and uninfluenced by social changes. The constitution has made it almost impossible to be altered (s. 128) and the politicians have not proactively aligned their legislation with today’s social trends, especially in regards to human rights. Therefore, the High Court is making use of its powers to interpret the constitution and make the necessary adjustments to keep the Act relevant with the times, exactly as the Founding Fathers intended them to act.

It has been more than one hundred years since the federation of Australia was created. The purpose behind the drafting of the constitution in 1900, bringing together the six colonies, is no longer valid. However, a number of high court decisions and constitutional conventions have taken advantage of the documents liquid form and managed to keep it relevant to today’s political and social climate.

De Jure and De Facto Sovereignty

2007-08-28T20:10:00.000+10:00

Sovereignty is the right to exercise absolute and indivisible authority within a given territory. The new era of globalisation has seen the sovereignty of nations eroding by giving away their powers to international bodies and global corporations. Australia’s sovereignty has been challenged by outside forces since the white colonisation. Presently, with the increasingly expanding economic interdependency of the developed world, we are witnessing a farther deterioration of Australia’s sovereignty.

There are two different notions of sovereignty: the de jure and the de facto. De jure sovereignty is the legal control that one state has to govern within its own borders. That power of the state derives from international agreements on shared borders and on the understanding that those borders are to be mutually respected. Absolute jurisdiction of that territory belongs to the state enclosed by those borders and the rights to exercise coercion, regulate the movement of people and appoint citizenship rights and duties, constitute the de jure sovereignty of that state. However, there is a gap between the alleged authority the states enjoy within their borders and the power they have in reality. De facto sovereignty is the actual control the states have over a territory, control that can be severely lesser than the assumed de jure sovereignty. The reason behind this adjustment is that states own right to control their territory gives them the ability to use their sovereignty as a commodity that can be traded in exchange for another quality the state is in need of. Islands in the Pacific have repeatedly requested the Australian Federal Police to intervene within their own borders to suppress uprising, giving away for a period part of their de facto sovereignty, with the hope that when law and order returns, their de jure sovereignty will become again relevant. Therefore, although a state can be very proud of their de jure dominion, their de facto sovereignty could be something less dignifying.

Another element that has interfered with the sovereignty of states is the interconnection of the global economies. Globalisation has seen states wanting to look outside their borders for economic opportunities, so they can become more powerful than they could ever become on their own. In M. Latham’s words, “things which used to occur within nations are [now] happening between nations.” The advances in technology, satellites, air travel, telecommunications and Internet, gave the world economies the chance to expand their reach all over the globe. Companies have now the opportunity to sell their products to customers in other countries too and customers have a bigger selection of goods to choose from. Suddenly, the state borders seem to lose their meaning, in a world of instant messaging and online stock exchange. Globalisation has challenge the de facto sovereignty of the states, whether by the big corporations powerful demands for open markets or by their own citizens hunger to join the global community.

Australia’s sovereignty was questionable from the start. The British colony in Botany Bay did not enjoy de jure control, as it was created and administered by the Crown. However, as the settlers could not feed themselves off their land, they engaged in commerce with other nations. This early global trend in Australia’s economy gave de facto power within the hands of the colonials. In Federation, Australia claimed its own independence and the de jure and de facto sovereignty was aligned. After the Second World War, Australia became a global economic player with interests in Asia and America. This created challenges for the de facto sovereignty of the state. International organizations like the United Nations, but also WB, WTO and WEF set rules to states, in order to acquire membership and be a part of the global game. Australia is currently a signatory to a range of international conventions, which set limits to the state’s de facto sovereignty. Furthermore, the power that multinational companies enjoy dictates to states polices like deregulation of banks, reductions in social welfare, privatisation of government services, which benefit the global trade in the expense of diluting the state’s sovereignty.

This shift in Australian sovereignty is not necessarily a negative thing. Supporters of the free markets claim that globalisation will not bring the end of the state, but will help it develop into a modern, active state with the powers of a regulatory body to oversee the democratic and fair operation of their side of the economy. As long as States have their de jure sovereignty intact, they can take advantage of the global economic prospects and act in a way that their de fact power remains intact.

The dismissal

2007-08-18T23:15:00.000+10:00

Australia is proud of its stable democracy. The Federation of the six colonies was created without a civil war and our political culture has been uninterrupted by any military intervention or major calamity for more than 100 years. The only exception is the crisis of 1975, which tested the constitutional foundations of our democratic system. An unelected governor dismissed a popular elected prime minister, using his constitutional reserved powers. Although his actions were according to the letter of the constitution and a testimony that the system works, his conduct tilted the political balance and created a precedent that in the future could become a trigger for instability.

In 1972, the Labor party won the Federal election and formed a government, for the first time since the Second World War. The Liberals had to relinquish power and move to the opposition. Gough Whitlam, the leader of the Labor Party, fought for a new set of policies; free tertiary education, universal medical system, land rights for the Aborigines, and above all, withdrawal of our troops from Vietnam. His ‘Programme’ hit a nerve with the Australian electorate, which brought a double victory to the Labor party, in the ‘72 and ‘74 elections. Liberals’ political complaisance, largely due to their long reign, made them anachronistic, and for that, they received punishment at the ballot. However, they never accepted their defeat and from the first day pledged to challenge Labor’s right to govern.

In the early seventies, the world’s economy entered a period of depression. World events, like the wars in Palestine and the consequent oil crises, found most of the western countries with economic complications. Australia was not immune to this current and during Labor’s period in government, we saw an increase in inflation and unemployment. Nevertheless, Whitlam decided that this should not affect his plans for social reform and refused to cull the ever-increasing public sector spending. The opposition found his stance unacceptable and would attack him on a daily bases. Eventually, they blocked Labor’s budget in the Senate, causing a double dissolution election in 74’. Nevertheless, Labor won that election and managed to hold on to their power.

The situation only worsened when in 75’ two Labor ministers misled the parliament over the Loans Affair and resigned. This sparked new calls from the opposition for the government to resign. The Senate decided to block the budget, effectively withholding the funds needed for the daily running of the government, hoping that Whitlam would eventually resign. The Prime Minister decided to ‘tough it out’, something that led to a dangerous stalemate. In the end, the Governor General, Sir John Kerr, intervened and, based on a strict interpretation of the Constitution, dismissed Whitlam and called new elections. His action solved the deadlock and normality returned to the political arena. However, the way this solution was applied left a dire legacy in our political history.

An appointee, as important as the Governor General of Australia, need to be a holder of great altruism for the good of the country. However, positions of this power have the potential to cloud the judgment of its holder, if not corrupt it. John Robert Kerr was serving as the Chief Justice of NSW at the time Whitlam considered his appointment. He was far from the zenith of his career, with more than ten years ahead of him in serving the courts. Kerr was reluctant to accept the position; it had tenure of only five years and no political future to follow on. Whitlam acknowledged Kerr’s anxieties and decided to make radical changes in order for Kerr to accept the job. The Governor General’s tenure was doubled to 10 years and his salary and privileges were massively increased. After Kerr accepted the position, the political turbulence created between the two parties fuelled his insecurities about his tenure. As the Head of State, he felt the weight of the political climate pressuring him to take a stance. He was aware that as his appointment was in the hands of the Prime Minister, so was his dismissal. At a time when Australia needed its statesmen to operate with self-sacrifice, to take the high moral ground and act for the good of the country, Kerr became too obsessed with his own political future. In November 75’, with the opposition blocking Supply and the government seeking alternative funding, it became clear to Kerr that his time to act had come. Both sides had come up with compromising proposals. Malcolm Fraser, the leader of the opposition, suggested a double election in 1976 and Whitlam a half-senate election. Kerr’s curtain call found him contemplating tactics to ensure the security of his political future rather than trying to mediate the crisis. He failed to act within the convention that gives him the right to be consulted, to encourage policies, and to warn his ministers. Instead of him calling both leaders together to listen to their proposals, seek the middle ground, and pose a timeframe for the resolution of the predicament, he remained silent to avoid irritating the Prime Minister, who had the power to seek his dismissal at any time. Kerr decided to act against his appointor and with a sudden and clandestine move, on 11 November ‘75, he dismissed Whitlam, placing Fraser as the caretaker Prime Minister and calling immediate elections. Although his conduct were according to the strict interpretation of the constitution, Kerr failed to live up to his position as the Head of State by acting as the Head of his own ego. His moral judgement gave way to his own ambitions and he proved that you cannot trust a politician to act morally when his personal survival is at stake.

Edward Gough Whitlam was another aspiring politician. He managed to ascend to the top of his party with no union connections or any links with major lobbyists. Whitlam had a strong, charismatic personality and became the Labor leader at a time that change was much needed, in both the party and the political landscape. However, his radical policies and the lack of support from his own party pushed Whitlam into a political martyrdom. Whitlam’s eagerness to reform the archaic social system was evident from his first moments in power. Only days after his win in the 72’ elections and while the votes were still being counted, he formed a government with himself and Lance Barnard, sharing all the ministries between them. His first action was to abolish conscription and withdraw the troops from Vietnam. Later on, he would implement changes in education and health that gained him enormous support from the public. However, a political programme is not enough in itself to create a good government. Most of the ministers in the cabinet were inexperienced in their portfolios and they would let the Party down on numerous occasions. Whitlam received two massive hits from his own ranks, with the dismissal of two of his top ministers for misleading the parliament over the Loans Affair. First, in July 75, his treasurer, Jim Cairns, was sacked because of his undisclosed loan-raising activities. Three months later, Minerals and Energy Minister Rex Connor, was accused of seeking overseas loans when instructed not to. Both cases produced an enormous cloud of distrust over the government’s ethos and fired up the opposition to seek immediate elections. Whitlam put too much trust in people and believed that they would do the right thing, but all his appointees, his two top ministers and the Governor General, betrayed his expectations. After his dismissal, ACTU President Bob Hawke, would not call a major strike and left the elections undisturbed, something that was exactly in line with the wishes of the opposition. Whitlam found himself alone at the top, with no support, not even from his own party. In order to sustain a viable government, you need to be surrounded by the right people in the right places and enjoy wholehearted support of the party caucus. Unfortunately, regardless of Whitlam’s just intentions, he was the leader of the government, but no one followed his lead.

The only winner in this political chess game was Malcolm Fraser, the head of the opposition. He managed to successfully overcome any obstacle on his way to the top. A political mastermind, who could read his adversaries and strike when the time was right. He was the cause of various leadership challenges in his Party. He orchestrated the change of leadership from John Gorton to William McMahon in 71’ and became leader himself in 75’ after twice challenging Bill Snedden. That demonstrated his capacity to gather the support needed in order to reach his objective. He immediately moved to frustrate the government in blocking legislation and used the Press to point out all of Labor’s misfortunes. The Loans Affair proved his favourite battlefield. After 15 November, he announced that the opposition would block supply until the government called for elections. That was not an easy task, as some of the Liberal Senators were against using such malicious tactics in the Parliament. Nevertheless, Fraser used his exceptional skills in gathering support from his own ranks. He knew that his Senators would resist voting against supply, so he asked them to delay it instead, leaving him enough room to play his game with Whitlam. When the Liberal premier of Victoria, Rupert Hamer, told Fraser that he and his Senators were strongly against continuing blocking Supply and threatened to shipwreck his plans, Fraser recognised that it was time to take a back step. He announced that they would allow supply if the government agreed to a double election in 76’. Fraser knew too well that Whitlam was too proud to back down at this stage, so he managed to continue his fight, this time from a higher moral ground. At the same time, he played his secret card, the Governor General. He sensed Kerr’s insecurity and inflamed it during his regular visits at Yarralumla. Privately, Fraser would inform Kerr that the Liberals were as one and were willing to go all the way, while publicly, he would make clear that it was expected from the Governor General to intervene. He guided Kerr all the way to Whitlam’s dismissal and he stood there at the end, accepting the vacancy. Fraser had no social programme as Whitlam did. Fraser had no crowds rallying and cheering his name. What Fraser had, was a political sixth sense in reading the psyche of his opponent and surgically attacking at the right time. Throughout this constitutional crisis, he managed to stay on track and navigate his way to the Dismissal, bypassing every little rift of resistance. In a world of intense politics, he had the perfect weapon for survival and success.

All these players in the crisis did their best to achieve their goals. Each one was pulling the Book in different directions, stretching the Law to its limits. Although their actions were still under the umbrella of the political intercourse, the constitution exposed its weaknesses and came close to braking point. When the Framers of the constitution drew up the document, they were trying to federate six colonies and guarantee that not one of the States or the Crown would be worse off after the fusion. The equal powers to both the Houses of the parliament and the reserved powers of the Governor General ensured that all the parties involved would be satisfied. As the constitution grew older, verbal conventions were established to fill in the gaps appearing after the text started showing its age. When in ’75 the system came under enormous political pressure, the conventions transformed to anecdotes that suddenly everyone could ignore. Against tradition, vacancies in the Senate would be filled by persons from other parties; Senate would block supply indefinitely; The Governor General would seek advice outside the Government and act without the Prime Minister’s advice. The constitution should be a document that sets the rules of the game. When the rules become too distant from reality, it is time for change. The constitutional crises of 1975 showed that the time has come to re-examine our supreme Law and make it more relevant to the new century.

In 1975, Canberra was on fire: strong words, calling for strong policies, by strong men. Fraser achieved his goals with his political virtue of flexibility and comprehension of his opponents. History judged Kerr harshly and the outcome of his self-obsessed reign was infamy and obscurity. E.G Whitlam engraved his name in history with his ‘Dismissal’, but he would have done so much more if he was a better player and if he had the party’s assistance. The lifeboat of our democracy, the failsafe for turbulent political times, our Constitution, failed us dramatically. Although the crisis was resolved, the potential for a possible alternate catastrophic outcome still brings shivers to the political establishment. It became evident that the constitution is in need of serious renovation. Nevertheless, we have yet to see a consensus on what the new structure ought to be. The incidents surrounding the Dismissal taught us a priceless lesson in politics; if you try to take them by yourself, they will hang you out to dry.

Heaven & Hell

2007-08-01T15:21:00.000+10:00

The Neoliberal storyline always played in my head at the end of an
executive dinner where two businessmen are chatting away over a good
port and a cigar, their pathetic excuses on why they are where they are
and not on the street, begging for food.

I find their arguments collapsing over a simple attempt to bring their
masterplan under the scope of the whole population of the earth, or just
the impossible task to practise neoconservatism in a family of two.

Neoliberals tend to forget about Africa; Africa at the end of the 18th
century, when its citizens saw the birth of liberalism as slaves; Africa
in the 19th and 20th century, when liberalism was built at the expense
of the exploitation and rape of a whole continent’s wealth; add middle
East, oil exploitation, cheap China labour etc, and you will realise
that the Aliens who are watching us, would see that while Liberalism on
paper makes a good read, in practice, it brings much misery and
destruction to humanity.

Now, lets apply the Neoliberal ideas to a family of two:
1) You watch the footy on a plasma tv, while he uses the small one in
the bedroom because you have a better job.
2) When he develops a beer belly, youhave the right to seek “comfort”
with the six pack next door neighbour.
3) You put tolls on the toilet door to pay for the cleaning
4) Your newborn will have to Work-for-the-Milk etc.etc

What makes us different from animals is our ability to develop social
skills and help one another to better ourselves. Neolibralism makes us
take the Road to Selfdom, obsessed with material, not emotions, cars not
fellow humans, and transforms us back to a self-absorbed cave man.

The Smiths, the Hayeks and the likes lived in another era, almost
another planet. If you bring 'em here today, show them da bomb or a
computer, they might withdraw their name from their tombstone.

The NeoLiberal economic theory could be applied nicely in a "small"
society, a village, 1000 people in one place. We free the economy, the
good ones will have 10 acres with beautiful tomatoes, the rest just one
with wheat. Then the less well off will get jealous, come up with a
better way to enrich the soil and next year they'll do 20 acres of
watermelon. Those who get sick will get help for the rich, as they are
their next-door neighbours, who most likely will get sick too in the
future and will be in need of some philanthropy.

Now put the Smiths and the Hayeks on a timeraft and bring them to 2007.
Send them to Baghdad to witness what one man with a gun and a jeep or a
remote rocket and a satellite can gratefully do to a family of unarmed
4, while sipping his morning coffee. Then draw a chair in the middle of
Wall Street Exchange and let him sit and watch how a bunch of funny
dressed blokes can move the capital of the whole Africa in a day by just
waving their fingers. Then ask the Smiths and the Hayeks: Do you still
think that if we let loose all this self-obsessed arrogant hungry
business Haynes to do economically as they please, the world will be a
better place?

Smiths, Hayeks and Howards: another place, another time...

The biblical paradise is here and now. We are so technologically
advanced that we can click a button and produce whatever we need to
survive. We have reached Eden. We can sit under a tree and watch the
time go by, or have sex or read Heywood. If we could evenly distribute
wealth and stop consuming like crazy (or like Americans), we would be
all Adam and Eve's cousins. Instead we choose to go the other way, where
everyone works 16 hour days, chained to a chair, with extreme global
warming.. kinda like Hell...

Labor Sucked Whitlam, not Kerr

2007-07-04T13:22:00.000+10:00

Labor was losing for 15 years before Whitlam, because they had split in two, far right and far left of the left and because they had no policies. Whitlam came from nowhere, no union history, or friends in the party, and started with a plan. He wanted to change Labor to become ‘His’ Labor. The Labor party would resist him and fought him all the way.

He had constant leadership challenges and the last one before the elections on 1972, he just won it by a couple of votes. The loser was Jim Cairns, later became treasurer and deputy PM, only to be the first to lie to Whitlam and do the first damage by starting the loans affair Part One. Whitlam won the election of 1972. His opponent, liberal leader William McMahon, was small, weak and could not stand the spotlights of the press.. Literally, all his interviews he had his hand covering his eyes!!!. However, it was Fraser who put him there..

(Big parenthesis)
Fraser ended up being a master of back stubbing. He instigated the leadership challenge in 1970, which saw William McMahon in the leadership of the party and PM of Australia, and as McMahon was no leadership material, they ended up losing the elections. Then Fraser did another leadership challenge against Bill Snedden and he lost, but then in 1975 he did his third challenge against Snedden and won the leadership. Finally, being an expert, he did the fourth one, against Whitlam and this time he won and became a PM. On the opposite site, we have Whitlam who won his position because he had a ‘programme’ that the people approved of and that people elected him for that in open elections, twice. You can see the difference…
(End of big parenthesis)

Whitlam follow his pre-elections promises to the letter (hear than Johnny?). Like “My Name is Ed”, every time he would enforce a new law, he would cross it out from a list from his pre-election campaign with promises he made. It was a machine running 200%. Two days after the election win, before the official election results, he started a government, with him and Lance Barnard sharing all the ministries, and stopped the conscription for Vietnam the same day. No wander how people loved him. If Latham had promised to withdraw our troops from Iraq, he would have won, as his counterpart in Spain did the same year.

During Whitlam, Labor did so many changes that were over due, that the number of legislation they put through was bigger than the total number of bills since federation!!! In addition, from “the other place”, the Liberals rejected as many bills, as the senate had rejected since federation! That is the level of obstruction Whitlam was facing.

So, what did the party did for him? Rex Connor lied to him, bringing the loans scandal #2. And then Kerr, who Whitlam trusted him (to do his job, at least), betrayed him. Whitlam was attacked from all fronts and had no support whatsoever, especially from his cabinet. On 11 November, Bob Hawke did not order a general strike; Labor was caught with their pants down, unprepared to act. It is the scene of the lions circling their prey. So Whitlam took a breath, said, bugger you all, and had his lunchtime stake.

Whitlam did what he was elected to do, lead. However, Labor did not follow. So, it was Labor that dismissed Whitlam….

High Court, the gap filler

2007-06-20T08:31:00.000+10:00

Justice Heydon, in Quadrant Magazine 2003, presented 400 reasons why judicial activism is bad. The rule of law is based on precedent that holds, like a chain, justice from the past to the future. It is like a mathematical acquisition, where if you get one addition wrong, the whole system collapses. Same in law, if you are influenced from society, power, money, personal believes etc, you end up drifting away from the system of justice, into politics, and the rule of law is broken forever.

However, Democracy is not a clear-cut system. Every country has its own variation, depending on its culture, history, geography etc. Sometimes there is a gap in the democratic process that need to be filled or democracy is in jeopardy. One example is Turkey. The popular elected parliament is always inclined to create laws that promote religion. The predominant Muslim population, with its well organised church groups, act as a powerful lobby, asking favours from the government in exchange of their vote. To the rescue of the majority of the people, who are not so much in to full-face veils, comes the Army (?!?) with its strong history of political interference with coups and blood. They publicly “warn” the government of the day to keep Turkey a sectarian state, or else.. Regardless how undemocratic this may sound to us, that is how democracy is upheld in that country.

In Australia, the gap was created by an archaic constitution, where if we would follow it to the letter, the system would collapse. This gap is filled by constitutional conventions and the High Court. An example is the Mabo ruling. The concept of terra nullius was racist and undemocratic. However, no government did anything to change it, following the historical and cultural racist attitudes of its constituency. The High Court moved actively to fill the gap in our democratic system. They had to take off their judicial robes and wigs to act as politicians and put the constitution in the right path.

It is unfortunate, it is a coup d’etat, it weakens the rule of law, but it has to be done. Until the parliament stands up to its feet and takes our political system out of the 19th century and into the 21st, we will see more of the High Court sacrificing the rule of law in order to save our democracy.

Australian Constitution

2007-06-12T09:14:00.000+10:00

Which constitutions in the 220 countries of this earth have a separate section to regulate binge drinking? Australia does in section 113. xxxx not just for QLD and Tooheys now available outside NSW.

For those who do not know, Alcohol is a drug called ethanol, and while in low and moderate consumption causes no harm, binge drinking is harmful. Same can be said for other drugs like Marijuana and gambling. Maybe we should put them in our constitution too. Why not add smoking? It is legal, isn’t it?

Section 113A
All rollies, packed, chewed or filtered tobacco passing into any State or remaining therein for use, consumption, sale, or storage, shall be subject to the laws of the State as if such tobaccos had been produced in the State.

But no, we got to keep tradition alive... Can't make such a radical change to the Constitution and take liquor out. Democracy might collapse..

Then I came to section 25. How dare we call ourselves a democracy when we have a constitution with a "Provision as to races disqualified from voting"? Read here all the history and pros and cons of Section 25, but regardless, a provision for RACES? We are so good in spreading Democracy abroad, can we spread some vegemite on our face too?

Dude! That is NOT cool! Seriously, you guys! That is NOT cool!

Aboriginal Holocaust in Tasmania

2007-06-02T07:10:00.000+10:00

The Aboriginals of Van Diemen’s Land lived for centuries in their country a happy and spiritual life. They found a way to compromise with the elements of nature and become able not just to survive, but also to create a culture and a society. In the beginning of the Nineteenth century, a new force of nature arrived on the island, the Europeans. The Aboriginals had to fight a new war for survival, and this time they would lose. In thirty years time, there would be almost no Aboriginal left on the island. It is irrelevant whether this was a genocide or just mismanagement of the colony’s affairs by the crown. The Europeans were the cause of this extinction and their action, or inaction, was a catalyst for the destruction of an indigenous nation who only wanted a place to stay, to feed their children and honour their ancestors.

The island Anthoonij van Diemenslandt, as the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman named it, separated from the mainland about thirty five thousand years ago. The native population survived and prospered by taking advantage of everything the land had to offer. For food, they hunted animals like kangaroo and possums and ate the eggs of ducks and swans. Their whole diet came from the land. The animals were free to roam in the open fields and reproduce. The Aboriginals had found the prefect balance to live in the nature and by the nature, in a harmonious and respectful way.

Before the English established a settlement in 1803, there were occasional visits by other Europeans on the Island. First the Dutch, who discovered the island as it lay on the naval route South of Australia towards New Zealand, and later the first British explorers and the French. There were no attempts for settlement at this time and all the witnesses of the first contacts were of a joyful nature, with the Aboriginals appearing to welcome the strange visitors and be willing to show them around their land. The French explorers went even farther by having cultural exchanges with the locals and by sharing a bit of their family ways and traditions in a spirit of friendship and acceptance. These were times “of promising warmth and openness, of recognition of a common humanity.” For a moment in time, it looked like two societies could coexist on the same land.

The British colonisation of the island started with small steps, but no grand plan. The dawn of the nineteenth century saw the dire economic situation of New Holland pushing the colonials to look outside Botany Bay for food and trade. The hunting of seals brought them closer to Van Diemen’s Land where the first fishermen established a station in 1800. Convicts started pouring in, usually of the worst kind; repeat offenders who were unwanted in Botany Bay.

The Aboriginals realised that these were different kind of whites. They did not arrive on the island to create links with them and they started coming in ever increasing numbers. Yet, this was no threat to their hunting grounds, as the initial establishments where only near the ports to assist fishing in the area. The first contacts between the natives and the colonials saw some tension and the occasional shooting, however nothing more than what was common from two civilisations colliding together. Furthermore, it was in the same volume as anywhere else in New Holland. The first twenty years saw a peaceful coexistence of the two nations with Aboriginals exchanging goods with the whites like sugar, tea, and blankets, while the Whites would receive sexual favours from Aboriginal women. The abduction and prostitution of females was a customary practice by the Aboriginals in their exchanges between their own clans. Even the native children would be seen playing games that would involve “kidnapping the girls”. The settlers, who were already classifying the Blacks as little higher than monkeys, would show no objection in accepting the sexual exploitation of women as a commodity, especially when there were very few female convicts in the settlement.

During this period, although there was some interaction between the two societies, there would be no real links created between them. It was more like an opportunistic exchange of goods than a true effort to create a base of friendship between the two worlds. That would have dire consequences further on when conflict would arise.

The island was very promising for the free settlers. They started building up in numbers and would occupy increasingly more land for sheep-farming. For their workforce they would use convicts and aboriginals, as well as children. The Aborigines did not cause them any major problem and they would occasionally trade with them. In addition, there were attempts to “civilise” the natives. They created missionary camps and brought in Aboriginals to learn the way of the white religion. They forced the natives to be dressed and sing songs they would not understand. In most cases, they were there against their will. All those attempts failed because the natives had their own understanding of spirituality that could not be explained in the bible. If only those attempts were made by reconciling the spiritual needs of the natives, we might had avoided any future confrontation. Instead, the only attempt to bring the natives closer to the White civilization not only failed, but was also perceived as unjustified kidnapping by the Aboriginals.

There were instances of positive outcome from this interaction of the two communities. Some Aboriginals who started working as servants, became accustomed to the British way, learned English and helped the British understand the natives’ way and land. Unfortunately for the British, those aboriginals ended up going back to their peers with valuable information about the white society that proved very useful in their fight against the invaders later on.

In 1810, the colony entered a period of economic downturn. The officers, in their efforts to cut expenses, let the convicts free to find their own food in the bush. That created a new lawless tribe that were free to do as they pleased. The bushrangers, as they were called, entered the aboriginal territory and took away everything they liked, food and woman, creating a discontent of whites around the aboriginal tribes. They created slave camps where they became the absolute ruler of any human with dark skin captured. The Aboriginals perceived the way the bushranger treated them as a direct attempt to destroy their society. They could not separate those individuals from the rest of the white population. This left a permanent stain in the memory of the natives and damaged any chance of harmony on the island. It was a major downfall for the administration, as the control of the convicts in the bush would prove difficult to re-establish in the future, and at the same time, the torture of the natives would create a permanent hatred against the all the Whites.

Besides all the confrontations with the Aboriginals, the numbers of settlers would steadily increase. They started using all the kangaroo fields for their sheep and that turned the situation in the bush to critical. Using the increasing mounts of free convict labour available to them, they annexed and fenced most of the land, closing the aboriginals off from any source of food. The Aboriginals felt that they were being put against the wall of famine and they had to fight back, not for their land, but for their lives. The settlers were counting on the lessons they learned about the natives from Botany Bay. There, they would push the Aboriginals away to use their land for agriculture and the Aboriginals would not come back, but disperse in to the bush. The Aboriginals, having an absolute knowledge of the land, would find another hunting ground and would avoid confrontation with the whites. However, in Van Diemen’s Land, there was an extra variable: There was a physical space limit at the island. The administration never considered limiting the number of convicts to an amount that the colony could actually support. The new shipments of convicts would arrive constantly regardless. There was no plan to allow some space for the natives to live. Eventually the Aboriginals ran out of hunting grounds and they were pushed into fighting back the invaders. There was no revenge, hatred, or savagery. The eminent starvation forced the natives to start war with the settlers.

Over the next decade, attacks would become increasingly frequent and not just retaliation against specific cruelty by whites, but methodical warfare against the Europeans. They would hide in groups near a settlers’ outpost, wait for days and monitor the White man’s moves and when the farmer would leave his house or when he would be by himself, the Aboriginals would attack. They would lay fires to distract the settler away from his house and to avoid confrontation. Then they would enter his property and take what they needed. In a flash of a second, they would disappear into the bush. If the operations ended up being successful, the settlers would not even see any of the natives. This rebel tactic was perfect for the Aboriginals as they did not have to confront the British face to face, but they would use their knowledge of the bush and the information they gathered about the habits of the Whites, in order to succeed in taking what they wanted from them.

This plundering would see the aboriginal life style changed as they started getting more used to European diet and habits like smoking, sugars, and drinking tea. The aboriginals were mutating to something like a homeless wanderer in an inner modern city. They lost their very nutritious diet with meat from the native animals and they became very dependant on European goods. The hunting culture of the Aboriginals had no knowledge of what is the best for them but what is easiest to catch and with the minimum of effort. In Van Diemen’s Land of eighteen twenty, the only thing that was up for easy grabs was European goods. That saw the gradual increase in incidents between the two nations and the demand for a solution. Settlers would form vigilant groups and try to hunt down the natives or push them away. However, the Aboriginals were still controlling the bush. They knew in advance of the settlers’ moves and would just move away and come back when the settler would get tired of hunting. If the settlers had adopted a rationing program near the edges of the settlements, where Aborigines would could come and freely take away food and blankets, without any other exchange or preaching, maybe the attacks would have stopped. Programs like that did exist to help currently unemployed convicts. However, no such policy existed for Aborigines and the more the natives would get hungry, the more they would resort in plundering attitudes.

When in 1825 Van Diemen's Land separated from New South Wales and acquired statehood, the settler’s voice became evermore powerful. They were asking for a solution for years but no one really cared about the prison island. Their new Governor, George Arthur, would now be their own man to talk to and to demand from. Arthur would immediately declare the settlements as a forbidden zone for Aboriginals and organise shooting parties were they had permission to kill on sight any native that would dare to come close to the White farms. Now the settlers had the legal go ahead to act as they wished against the natives, and this time with the help of soldiers. However, once more, the natives would not engage in a normal, open field, army fight, but they would hide, wait, and hit only when they knew that they could win. The superiority of the British army could not compete against the Aboriginals’ rebel tactics.

During this period of unrest in Van Diemen's Land, there were three different attitudes to the conflict and they all came clashing together in Eighteen Thirty, when they formed a committee to address the issue with the Aborigines. The settlers, living on the edges of the bushland and having to deal with the daily fear of the natives, would demand the extermination of the native population by hunting them down like animals. The crown would not even discuss anything that had to do with genocide of the native people. From the orders of the first fleet, it was clear that the natives would be left alone to live and their culture should be respected. London was too far away to hear the voice of desperation from the settlers. Britain wanted to hold high the label of the most civilised nation and there was no way that a convict colony would change that. However, the distance between Van Diemen's Land and London gave an advantage to the governors to interpret those orders according to their own wishes. After all, the only thing that the crown really cared for was that the colony was operational and inexpensive so they could keep on filling it up with more convicts.

Governor Arthur found himself in the middle. He had to obey the crown’s orders, so any solution that would involve extermination was out of the question. However, he had to do something to keep the settlers happy. He ordered the formation of the Black Line, a physical line of 2000 armed men that would sweep the island from one side to the other, pushing the aboriginals to a reserve created for them in Tasman Peninsula. This managed to keep everyone happy. It settled the crowds for some time, although they failed to push the natives into the reserve. They did manage to force the Aboriginals away from the white district, but only to see them returning in later years. Once more, the iron fist proved to be inefficient as a solution to their problems.

Governor Arthur had his own thoughts for accommodating the natives in a more respectful way. He created Aboriginal settlements in an effort to establish a place where they would be able to live without having to fight the whites. He became aware of the vastness of the problem they were facing in Van Diemen's Land and he blamed this on the early attitude of the settlers. Arthur believed that if there had been a different approach from the beginning, or maybe even a plan to buy the land of the natives as it had happened in other colonies, the hostilities would have been avoided. Regardless of his good intentions, his plan for enclosed settlements for the natives failed, as did all the ones that were tried by other governors before him. They badly managed the enclosures, which resembled prisons, where they imposed hard labour and christianity on the natives. They would not attract Aboriginals to come voluntarily and they would eventually close down. This was no reconciliation. Governor Arthur’s attempts to fit the British square peg into the Aboriginals’ round hole would never be seen in a positive light.

By the middle of the 19th century there would be almost no Aboriginal left in Van Diemen's Land. Aboriginals were killed slowly on a daily basis by vigilante groups of settlers. This was no organised war, planned in the king’s court. This was a front line dispute between the aboriginal tribes and the settlers. With a constant stream of newcomer settlers and the gradually killing of aborigines, Tasmania would end up void of its indigenous population. It was not the actions of the crown that caused this genocide. It was its inaction to stop its citizens from slowly destroying the people who lived there for centuries. Beside the big rhetoric of respect for the natives and besides all the available opportunities created by other Europeans for reconciliation, Britain did nothing to prevent this catastrophe.

Frank G. Clarke On Arthur 007

2007-05-01T20:53:00.000+10:00

Frank G. Clarke claims that Australia was settled to become a naval base and for that reason, a senior spy and strategic advisor was appointed as the colony’s first Governor. That argument has two problems, the evidence that argues that the convict problem in England was a strong reason by itself to colonise Australia and that even if a naval base was the main reason, Captain Phillip’s appointment was not on the merits of his foreign affairs experience but of his sense of leadership and social engineering

The establishment of a colony in Botany Bay helped to solve a big problem with overcrowded prisons in England, especially after the war of independence in the Americas. For 7 years, a number of committees were formed to solve the problem of where to send the prisoners now that America is not an option , but all attempts to create new settlement for the convicts failed ‘and there was, in August 1786, nowhere else to send them’ but in the East coast of New Holland. The committees for the convicts’ problems where considering a solution that would solve the problem of overcrowded jails and that would create a new colony that would expand the trading capabilities of the empire. Creation of new colonies and the use of convict labour were always going together. It seems logically that the solution for the overcrowding would incorporate the establishment of a new colony and vice versa. For there was the expectation of the new convict colonies to become economically self efficient, so the empire would not have to cover their expenses indefinitely . This was a long standing practice that England had adopted since 1717 with more than thirty thousand convicts shipped in new colonies all around the empire. Furthermore, it was believed that a good way of reforming the petty criminal was to give them a second chance with a new beginning in a new colony.

The problems that the government had to resolve were the convict problem but also economic stability and the foreign movements in the east. When Botany Bay was suggested by Joseph Banks, it was presented as a magic solution for all the problems that England was facing at that moment . A viable settlement, would stop other European powers from putting their foot in the pacific, would take advantage of the resources of the South Pacific, protect the east trading route and solve the problem with the convicts. The reason that this magic solution was the solution that was considered last was that it was the most distant colony of all the other locations on the table and on a newly discovered naval route. When everything else failed, Botany Bay came as the backup plan . However, that option was easily sold as the one solution for all the headaches that the government had. So although a successful settlement in Australia would further help with the British expansion to the East, that could not by itself stand as a reason to sail on such an expedition. As D. Mackay wrote, ‘Botany Bay was too distant from the sea lanes and too uncertain of navigation to serve any useful strategic purpose’. On the contrary, the magic pill called Botany Bay was sold as a cure for all the government's problems as a whole, not for just one specific reason.

Captain Arthur Phillip’s past as a spy would make him the perfect candidate for monitoring and analysing French and Spanish activities in the pacific. However, he was not given the job of a lighthouse keeper or military adviser to the Governor of New South Wales. He was appointed as the captain of the first fleet and responsible for the establishment and management of the new colony, a position much more complicated than just a foreign affairs advisor. In order to create a new self-efficient colony, whether as a dumping ground for the convicts or as a remote naval base, advance planning is needed with consideration of the future infrastructure needs of the colony. In addition, a governor with a strong personality that would have the ability to steer this genesis away from doom was essential. The distance for England it self meant that the governor could not rely on immediate advice from England. He would need to think for himself and be able to see through every problem that this new tough colony would come about. The reason that Captain Arthur Phillip was selected for that role was because of his past experience in captaining a fleet with convicts from Portugal to Brazil, his recent voyage to India, and his farming background. Furthermore, his character and leadership was seen as up to the task. ‘He had that steadiness of mind that can embrace the most trivial detail without losing sight of the main issues’ . He believed in the ‘Roman virtues of self-discipline, self-mastery and endurance’, and those qualities were in need for conquering a new unexplored land. Captain Phillip accepted this position with intentions, not to work against the Empires foes but with the sole objective of creating a self-efficient colony that ‘would become a valued part of the Empire, rather than merely a costly outpost of incarceration’.

There is merit to Professor Clarke's argument as convicts and slaves were used in every establishment of a new colony. British expansion was facilitated by the minimum cost of convict labour and their inability to complain about the harsh environment that they would come up against. However, there is a plethora of evidence that there were more reasons that pushed for the colonization of New South Wales beside British expansion, including the overcrowded gaols and the importance of expanding the trade with Asia. In addition, his thesis that Captain Philip’s selection was based on his clandestine past, falls short of the reality that wants the head of such a remote and complicated expedition to have much more dimensions than just being good with his cloak-and-dagger.

On Henry Reynolds

2007-04-17T08:09:00.000+10:00

The variety of theories over the years about the “legal rights” to claim Australia for the crown, proves how weak every single of those theories are. It seems that anything goes in a colony that is 6 months away from London. Canada and America were much closer and the crown could listen to the voices of despair from those indigenous citizens. No ‘Warawara’ could be heard from down and under. They could only hear “Veni, nullius vidi, vici”.

When approached separately, all those “legal” arguments can be very deceptive. They are so generic and are based on old unwritten laws that could fool you in to say: “yea, I can see that, that make sense..” What Reynolds did was to put all the theories together and ask from us to consider the legality of them. He gathered all these little harmless legal sins in to one big royal Easter Show, so everyone could tell who is the sheep and who is the goat.

Moreover, Reynolds added the voices of the other party in to the court. He put in detail what was the reaction of the first Australians towards the settlers and made us accept that there is another side to the coin of Australian settlement. Everyone on the “Terra Nullius” camp tried to turn a blind eye on anything that had to do with the ‘Blacks’. Elimination of the evidence is the best way to win an acquittal; just like not watching SBS News makes the carnage in Iraq non existing. Reynolds told us that there was a reaction, a fight, a compromise, and a genocide. Anything but the story of arriving in a desert land to find
that nobody was home.

If we look at what is the “legal truth” today, I think we will find the Mabo judgement that recognised Native Land before the arrival of the First Fleet. What does that actually means? Nothing, except if you are a mine owner. It was a way for the High Court to start the ball rolling and force the nation to resolving the issue. Not a lot happened since then, but there is always the hope that a new generation will come up and set the record straight.

I have to admit that before reading "The Law Of The Land", I was myself under the impression of a cut and run attitude from the Aborigines in front of the old mighty cannons of the Empire. Now I have a much stronger image in my head, an image of a nation fighting over the invasion for years and for generations, waterhole after waterhole. But also an image of a nation that was willing to intergrade/assimilate with the New, if only the settlers were a bit more accommodating to the Old, like not stealing their kids and raping their wives….

This is not for just for the sake of history. We are still treating our indigenous population as they did back then. “That an Indigenous child born today in Brewarrina, Western NSW, is going to have a shorter life than a child born in remote rural Bangladesh or Mozambique must give us something serious to think about.” (P. Glendenning, ANTaR).
Not recognising the past mistakes gives more leverage for the new generation to make new ones, or not to bother correcting the ones at hand.

No Rum in the Rum Rebellion

2007-04-09T14:29:00.000+10:00

In Australia of 1808, the Governor was overthrown and replaced by a coup d’etat known as the Rum Rebellion. The key players in this drama were the Governor (William Bligh) , John Macarthur and the Officers of the New South Wales Corp.

We cannot explain incidents like this by pointing the finger at one person only. The overthrown of a Governor is such an important disturbance in the colony of New South Wales that needs a couple of situations to occur at the same time.

Macarthur objections to Bligh’s governance attitudes and interference with the way money were made in the colony would have been enough of a reason for Macarthur to want Bligh out and maybe he could have gathered support for his cause from his immediate followers or beneficiaries.
However, that by itself would not have constituted enough power to spin the wheels and crash the ruler. You need the army’s bullets and the silence of the public for any coup d'état to have a satisfactory result.
So maybe they secured the public support by playing on their fear of luck of rum, something like the political games with the interest raises we see today. Maybe if you look deep you might discover some love triangle or square in the colony that sparked the rebellion.

One way to solve the mystery is by following the rule of deduction. You take away one by one the causes, until you find the one that was so crucial to the events that without it the rebellion would have never happen.

There was one disturbance from Bligh, which was so powerful and socially wide in the colony, that could have unified all the personal crunches into one strong voice: Bligh’s interference with the Courts. There was no parliament or agora in the early colony of New South Wales to discuses or solve problems. The courts were not only a place to serve justice, but also the arena where all the economical differences would seek solutions. If the Governor’s word was the constitution, the courts were the lawmakers. Above all, the courts were maned by officers of the NSW Corp. Those “gentleman” would gather and see that the economical affairs of the colony were in line with the general good of the colony (or the officers’ good generally!).
They would use their “gentlemanship” to protect their “King of Honour”: the collective understanding of rightfulness between gentleman. Bligh started bypassing the courts by creating his own courts, which were not manned by officers. His courts would overturn every decision made by the officers’ courts. Bligh was unplugging the officers from the biggest power source they had. It was Bligh who rebelled against the colony, not the colony against Bligh. It was Bligh who tried to over throw the Status Quo. That was a threat against every single person in Botany Bay. It was the unified banner that guided the rebellion. It was the umbrella under which every single personal grievance with Bligh found cover.

Bligh put the last nail on his own coffin when he sought to charge with sedition the officers of the court, the court whose decisions he never respected. That tipped Johnston over the edge and made him order the troops to march towards the Governor’s house. When Johnston’s was court-martialled for the rebellion, Bligh’s luck of respect for the courts hit home for the judges and helped for Johnston’s acquittal.

The day of the Officers rebellion, I imagine it as a comic strip with clouds of thought coming from every person marching towards Bligh’s house. They all say different things, they have different hopes for the outcome, and most of them have hopes of personal economical benefit. I also see Bligh looking through his window, blaming himself for tightening the officers belt a bit more that they were ready to accept.

Social Alzheimer's and Social Amnesia

2007-04-04T02:48:00.000+10:00

One of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s and Amnesia sufferers is memory loss. The same symptoms in quality and severity can be found in people with lack of social skills, people that life found them living by them self’s or who have a past of abuse. People that have not exercise the qualities of socialising, of interacting with other human being to learn what ticks us, what make us happy or sad. Those people end up being antisocial, too obsessed with them self’s and abusive to everyone around them.

Social Amnesia is a term to describe a situation where one abuses another and after five minutes, forgets about the whole incident and try to start a totally irrelevant conversation with usually a happy subject. To the eyes of the abused, the abuser is suffering from amnesia, as he seems to have completely forgot about the pain he just caused. The abuser tents to be an abuser because he does not understand that his actions cause such a suffering to others and he cannot compute the aftermath of such behaviour. To him, the abused is totally capable of having a happy-happy conversation. Moreover, the abuser feels quite relaxed and happy after abusing someone else, as all the tensions that were gathered before and caused his abusive behaviour, have been funnelled to the abused.

Social Alzheimer's describes the constant fear that an abuser has about being the target of evil from everyone around him. Alzheimer’s patients, especially at the end of their term, they develop fear about anyone around them as they cannot explain, understand, or remember anything that happened in their close environment minutes earlier. They are feared that they will not get fed or that their things were stolen. As the abuser lucks social understanding of relationships and can not recognise signals coming from outside, good or bad, he may become overcome with fear that everyone is out to get him. The abused get a shock when he is constantly accused of conspiracies or intentional malicious practises.

Both these symptoms are born by the weakness of an abused person to understand how the social structure operate in his environment and manage to successfully intergrade in a social environment like his family or workplace.

(This is my uneducated, unverified, undiagnosed understanding of life and people around me. My life, My labels)

Australian History Wars

2007-03-06T08:51:00.000+11:00

So who was first in the middle east, was it the Palestinians since before Jesus or was it the Jews since god promised them that land? In extend, who has the right to kill the other in today’s Jerusalem? In WW2, were the Jews less Germans than Hitler?

Should we put the “Convicts” armband on or the “Queen is great” one? I watched 5 min of “Bondi Rescue” last night and noticed that one out of every two phrases that everyone would use was “this is Australian” or “this is unaustralian, maaaate”. We are so desperate to create our own national identity that we are willing to hold on to anything that can by wrapped in a flag.

If we can cook Cook’s history the way we want to, then we can push our own agenda with ease. If we are a nation that was made out of the British empirical ingenuity, bravery, and intelligence, why should we ever abolish the monarchy?

On the other hand, maybe Australia was created by a lower class citizenry, fallen through the big cracks of an unforgiving and cruel 18th century society, disposed from their own hometowns to the other side of the universe. In that case, damn the queen and damn the founding fathers who named the queen’s orders as constitution of Australia instead of proclaiming a war of independence and three cheers for every single of the 25% of Australians who are born in another country.

These are the pick-your-flag-and-wave-it debates. Imagine finding the skeleton of Cook in the coast of Hawaii and start quarreling if it is the real one or not and if we should wrap it up with an Australian or British flag and then send it back to England or Canberra or maybe even invade Hawaii to claim that holy Australian beach. This could be our new Gallipoli 5-0!

Maybe it is our selective memory of our past that stops us from finding who we really are. When we accept that this nation was build by the sweat and blood of British ,Aboriginals, Chinese, Greeks, Lebanese etc, then we will see the true faces and hearts of the people who created Australia, regardless of what orders the first fleet had from the Admiralty.

To the pub, with no fear.

2007-02-08T13:03:00.000+11:00

Every time there is a story of a rape in the news, we have an after wave of despair and vigilante type of quests for the neck of the man-monster that did this. And then what?. After we punch back the guy who abused our daughters, after we stab and pull out the internal organs of the person who raped our wives, then what? Then someone else will do it again and again. You cannot fight evil. You can only protect your self from it.

So I ask all you parents and angered fellow citizens: What have you done lately to protect our young families from evil, whether it is rape, drugs or crime? Look at the mirror and see the real guilty person in this matter: YOU..

We put all the crap in schools like dancing and trombone lessons. How about some basic self-defense lessons for our kids?

How have you approach safe sex with your children? Just ordering them not to do it, will just not cut it. Your daughter will have sex again and again and again, with a dirty, hairy, pot smoking, ute driving looser, way before you even dream that she is doing it. So what are you doing about it? Have you put some condoms in your children bag? Do you think your child has $10 to spare to buy condoms? Have you slip in his back a card with the national hot line with info about drug use? Or condom use? Dial 1800 55 1800 for your self and ask them what can they do for your kids… Then put that number in their wallets so they can find out what ever they are too afraid or embarrassed to ask you.

Have you play a game of “call this number for a cash prize of $100”? You tell you child that if at any time he/she feels in trouble, danger, in a situation that is not comfortable, scared, drunk etc that if he calls you to pick him up, not only you will do it, not only you won’t ask any question as a rule, but you will give him $100 just for doing it.. And for a test run, ask him to call you anyway the first night and do a fake emergency and give the $100 too. Do you understand? Next time that your kid will end up in a tight situation, he will be ok to calling his parents for help, even if he is drunk, even if it is 3 am…

How about safe parking? Most of the rapes occur in car parks. They need to learn how to picture a parking spot in its night version. They might arrive at 7 pm, but they will leave at 1am and that spot that looks ok during the day, could be the darkest remote parking spot after hours. Take your kids for a parking run and play a game of finding the best spot, the one under the street light, close to the bus stop, close to the traffic light etc..

Another trap is their friends. Not if they will introduce them to sex and rock’n roll or not, but if they will be there to help them out when they pass out. Tell your kids to take care of their mates first, make them feel responsible for their friends if they need help, to stick together to care for each other and then your kids will ask the same from their friends in return. It is harder to become a target if you have some else to look after you.

Drink spiking is common in pubs these days. Make it a game during the dinner table, let each member have a bit of salt and aim to throw it in the others glasses while they are not looking. Who ever get distracted and leaves his glass unattended, will have to drink the salty water. Let them learn that there is always a danger with drink spiking and they should always be alert and never leave their drink out of sight.

Do not leave it to luck. Do something for your kids today. Do not let every assault or rape become a rant about the monsters, but let that be a reminder of your responsibilities as a parent to your kids.

Corporate Paedophilia

2007-02-05T09:01:00.000+11:00

Corporate Paedophilia: The sexualisation of children in Australia.
(from The Australia Institute)

Images of sexualised children are becoming increasingly common in advertising and marketing material. Children who appear aged 12 years and under, particularly girls, are dressed, posed and made up in the same way as sexy adult models. ‘Corporate paedophilia’ is a metaphor used to describe advertising and marketing that sexualises children in these ways. The metaphor encapsulates the idea that such advertising and marketing is an abuse both of children and of public morality.

In the past, the sexualisation of children occurred indirectly, primarily through exposure of children to representations of teen and adult sexuality in advertising and popular culture. The very direct sexualisation of children, where children themselves are presented in ways modelled on sexy adults, is a new development. The pressure on children to adopt sexualised appearance and behaviour at an early age is greatly increased by the combination of the direct sexualisation of children with the increasingly sexualised representations of teenagers and adults in advertising and popular culture.

This paper documents and analyses the sexualisation of children aged 12 and under in relation to three types of cultural material: advertising (both print and television), girls’ magazines, and television programs (including music video-clips). Other sources of children’s premature sexualisation, such as toys and material on the Internet, are not considered here.

***Sources of children's sexualisation***

A range of examples of sexualised children in advertisements are analysed in the paper as well as in an electronic appendix to the paper available on the Australia Institute website (www.tai.org.au). The essential point is that children are dressed in clothing and posed in ways designed to draw attention to adult sexual features that the children do not yet possess.

For example, in one advertisement a girl apparently aged about ten wears a chain pulled like a choker around her neck, with the ends dangling where her cleavage would be if she were older. Her hot pink tank top and black trousers hang slightly loosely from her child’s frame. Two belts hold the trousers up, with another chain hanging from a belt loop. An outsized ring on one of her fingers dominates one hand, and she wears pink lipstick and a pink velvet cap. She adopts the female full frontal pose which is familiar to us from images of adult women models – the head is tilted and turned to one side, the shoulders are tilted one way and the hips the other.

In a woman, the effect of the outfit and the pose would be to draw attention to the features that signal women’s sexual difference from men, in particular the breasts, waist and hips, as well as the lack of body hair. The lipstick would be widely considered ‘attractive’ on a woman, but the evolutionary basis for this is that it mimics the increased blood flow to the mucous membranes when humans are sexually aroused. That a pre-pubescent child is presented in this way to sell a product strikes many as The Australia Institute grotesque – and that the product is an eau de toilette directed at girls of primary school age only heightens the incongruity.

Girls’ magazines that are essentially children’s versions of teen and adult women’s magazines have appeared on the market in Australia since 1996 and appear to mark a substantial shift in children’s culture.

The three most popular girls’ magazines in this genre are Barbie Magazine (targets readers aged 5 to 12 years), Total Girl (targets readers aged 8 to 11 years), and Disney Girl (targets readers aged 6 to 13 years). Like the teen and adult versions, these magazines contain a large amount material related to beauty, fashion, celebrities or ‘crushes’. Aimed at children of primary school age, such material encourages the premature sexualisation of the readers. A content analysis of a sample edition of each of these magazines demonstrates that in the case of the latter two, approximately half of the content is sexualising material, and in the case of Barbie Magazine, fully threequarters of the content is sexualising material. Between them, the three magazines are widely read: data from the Roy Morgan Young Australians survey shows that in total, 34 per cent of girls aged 6 to 12 read one or more of these magazines. Readership peaks among 10 and 11 year old girls, 44 per cent of whom read one or more of these magazines.

The direct sexualisation of children, particularly girls, in advertisements and girls’ magazines occurs in a context where children are also exposed to highly sexualised representations of adults and adult behaviour in television programs, particularly music video programs screened on Saturday mornings. Although these programs are classified G or PG, the classification code appears to allow highly sexually suggestive material, particularly in the ‘program context’ of music videos, provided it is not a depiction of actual sexual intercourse. Girls’ magazines not only give a prominent place to music celebrities such as The Veronicas, Rihanna, and now, Paris Hilton, but girls are actively encouraged to mimic the videos. For example, in the September 2006 issue of Total Girl, girls of primary school age are instructed to ‘roll your body back and forth’ and ‘sway your hips side to side’ with stills of Rihanna, all flesh and tight black clothing, to prompt them.

When these three sources of children’s sexualisation are considered together – as children actually experience them – it is apparent that young children today, particularly girls, face sexualising pressure unlike that faced by any of today’s adults in their childhood. Such sexualising pressure has the potential to harm children in a variety of ways, and the paper draws on research from a range of disciplines to illustrate the risks to children of premature sexualisation.

***The risks to children of premature sexualisation***

Firstly, many studies have linked exposure to the ideal ‘slim, toned’ body type that is considered sexy for adults to the development of eating disorders in older children and teenagers. There is already some evidence that children in Australia are developing eating disorders at a younger age than previously. Even a ‘mild’ eating disorder can have significant effects on a child’s physical health. The idea that increased emphasis on body image for children might be helpful in the context of significant increases in childhood obesity is misguided, since negative motivations stemming from a sense of inadequacy can be very counterproductive. Positive motivations like self-acceptance are more effective in the promotion of healthy living.

Secondly, the sexualisation of children has psychological implications, although they have not yet been fully researched. Studies have shown that exposure to ‘appearancefocused media’ increases body dissatisfaction among children. Apart from contributing to the development of eating disorders, this may have further effects that are not yet fully understood. For example, it is widely recognised that body image concerns are a barrier to teenage girls’ participation in sporting activities. It is possible that as younger girls develop higher body dissatisfaction, this barrier may also affect their participation.

Psychologists have also noted that, given that precocious sexual behaviour is an attention-getting strategy used by some older children and young teenagers, the general sexualisation of children may escalate the level of sexual behaviour necessary to attract attention. It has also been observed that premature sexualisation can lead to other aspects of child development being neglected; if large amounts of time, money and mental energy are devoted to appearance this will distract from other developmental activities, be they physical, intellectual or artistic.

Two specifically sexual risks follow from the sexualisation of children, which reduces the sexual distinction between children and adults.

Firstly, children may be encouraged to initiate sexual behaviour at an earlier age, well before they have full knowledge of the potential consequences. Earlier sexual activity in teenagers is linked to a higher incidence of unwanted sex (particularly for teenage girls) and to increasing potential to contract sexually transmitted infections. Both unwanted sex and sexually transmitted infections can have serious long-term consequences.

Secondly, because sex is widely represented in advertising and marketing as something that fascinates and delights adults, the sexualisation of children could play a role in ‘grooming’ children for paedophiles – preparing children for sexual interaction with older teenagers or adults. This is of particular concern with respect to the girls’ magazines, which actively encourage girls of primary school age to have crushes on adult male celebrities. At the same time, the representation of children as miniature adults playing adult sexual roles sends a message to paedophiles that, contrary to laws and ethical norms, children are sexually available.

There has as yet been no sustained public debate about the sexualisation of children in Australia. This paper provides a framework for analysis of the issue in order to bring the phenomenon of corporate paedophilia and the risks it entails for children, to public attention. Although solutions are not straightforward, in the absence of any public debate the trend towards increasing sexualisation of children by advertisers and marketers appears likely to continue, with associated risks for children.

A forthcoming Australia Institute Discussion Paper will offer a range of policy measures that could reduce the risk of harm to children based on an assessment of the current regulatory frameworks covering the major sources of children’s sexualisation – advertising, girls’ magazines and television program.