February 2006 Archives

Soon to be seen in 'Corporate Appointments ...'

Wanted: AWB Chairman. Main duties: Act as figurehead. Applicant must be able to open doors. Poor memory and deafness desirable. Misplacing diaries essential. Should look good toting a gun.

Salary - $1 million.

SWMBO is always telling me I have selective deafness and a lousy memory. Can open doors with the best of them. And I always look good!

Look no further!

Peter Costello's recent remarks about the Muslim community assimilating into the general Australian population (whatever that is) is an invitation for every red neck and shock jock in the country to 'have a go' at then. The most visible members of the Muslim community are women, and they'll cop the brunt of the day to day abuse.

I'd have thought that the way to encourage 'assimilation,' and make them not want to 'have a go' back, is to make the group feel welcome. Assist the early arrivals to live their lives as best they can in a foreign environment, let the second generation do the difficult job of straddling the two cultures, and hopefully the third will seamlessly fit in to the general community. This has worked before.

Perish the thought that the miserable conservatives that run the country would want the newcomers to feel alienated and seen as a threat to the general community, a threat which only they claim to be able to handle.

Are the managements of infrastructure companies completely out of touch with what the average person earns? The thought struck me the other day when the manager of Sydney's Cross City Tunnel refused point blank to lower the toll.

During a testy exchange with reporters, Mr Mulligan ruled out dropping the toll and refused to acknowledge that mistakes had been made or that the company could have done things differently.

"Is there so much anger from the public? There's a lot of noise," he said.

Perhaps this attitude is a manifestation of the economic divide. These management types would be on six figure salaries, only socialise with others in the same income bracket, live in the Eastern Suburbs or the North Shore and rarely travel to where the vast majority of motorists live. To them, $35 per week to avoid the traffic seems reasonable.

For those on the average yearly wage of around $50k, the toll is a impost they can not afford to pay. Hence the gridlock and the anger.

One of the few policy decisions of John Howard's that I admire (Ok, ok ... his only policy decision I admire) is when he took on the gun lobby after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. Conventional political wisdom at the time stated that the gun lobby's influence was substantial and political parties took them on at their peril.

Howard ignored the pundits and forced the states to certail the right of gun owners to possess automatic weapons, and the gun lobby was shown to be nothing more that a noisy fringe element. Has anyone regarded the gun lobby as a political force since?

In recent years, the lobby to be feared by political parties (apart from the Packer family) is the Religious Right, and both sides of politics are doing all they can to ingratiate themselves with the religious zealotry. However, I wonder if the influence of the conservative wings of established religious denominations and the fundamentalist churches is overstated.

The recent parliamentary vote on making the drug RU486 available is encouraging because it reflects the real influence of the conservative religious minority in the outside world. Freed from having to follow the party line, the politicians overwhelmingly voted to end the Health Minister's control over RU486. Progressive MPs substantially outnumbered their conservative colleagues.

The numbers in parliament reflect the split between the conservative and moderate elements outside it. Hopefully, the RU486 vote marks the beginning of the demise of the religious right's influence on the affairs of the broader community, relegating them to just another "noisy fringe element."

Afterthought: Well, maybe the Labor party isn't actively sucking up to the religious right, but they're not telling them to mind their own business, either. I think they should.

Why should we as legislators and the Minister for Health in particular, let the faceless unaccountable, undemocratic, unelected cabal at the Therapeutic Goods Administration supplant our role as accountable, elected and responsible representatives of the people.

A quote from one of the loudest critics of the 1999 republic referendum, Sophie Panopoulos. Then it was "Politicians aren't accountable or responsible enough to elect an Australian Head of State."

Funny how politicians become trustworthy once you become one yourself.

Disclaimer: This contradiction has already been pointed out in general terms by a least one blogger. (Can't remember who it was. Apologies for the plagiarism if it was you.) I just couldn't resist commenting on the poignant hypocrisy of Ms Panopoulos.

You'd have to wonder after reading an article on the state of the ABC by Michael Duffy in Saturday's SMH.

Duffy states that the ABC's charter needs to change, based on the performance of the TV service.

... ABC viewers now watch some of the worst television in Australia.

Of course, what constitutes "quality" is a matter of opinion, but there's no argument that ABC TV has deteriorated over the last five years. What I did find strange is that Duffy seems to think the "Educated Middle Class" (EMC) are captured by the ABC and are devoid of rational reasoning to the extent that they are incapable of watching anything else.

The ABC is the most important broadcaster for the educated middle class around Australia, many of whom listen to and watch little else.

and ...

The audience has stuck with the ABC for various reasons, but much of what it sees now is dross, such as The Bill and the endless cooking shows promoting prat British chefs and their books.

Perhaps they like "The Bill" and cooking shows? If not, it's strange that they haven't moved, since ...

... for a long time now, the most successfully innovative programs have come from American commercial television.

Duffy even goes so far to say ...

It can even be argued that businesses have the right to reach the educated middle class through broadcast media, which the ABC's near-monopoly largely denies them.

Those poor commercial networks! Being shunned by the EMC despite producing "successfully innovating" TV. What can they do?

I have a couple of suggestions.

They could review advertisement spacing. The problem with watching commercial TV is the advertisements. Average shows can cope, but quality programs are unwatchable when interrupted every 10 minutes.

Then there's program scheduling. Surely they can arrange programs to start and stop at the advertised time?

Or maybe there's nothing the commercial networks can do to lure away those rusted on EMCs, who regard most what they broadcast as mindless crap. Sure, there is good stuff amongst the crap, but can they be bothered to find it?

So, the EMC keep watching the ABC / SBS or switch off altogether. They hope that one day the ABC will have enough funds to produce some local drama worth watching.

Which leads us to where the ABC goes from here. Duffy states the ABC charter should be amended ...

[To allow] the limited funds available [to the ABC] ... [to] be devoted to areas where the free market arguably fails: regional radio, high-quality local drama and documentaries, and commercial-free news and current affairs and children's programs.

Alternatively, the ABC should consider running advertising in entertainment programs. As SBS has shown, much of the opposition to advertising is no more than dated fundamentalism.

Duffy states, quite correctly in my view, that the SBS has survived the imposition of advertising without too much damage. Of course, the adds are only shown between the shows and don't interupt the actual programs.

It would be preferable if the government just increased the ABC's funding to somewhere near past levels.

However, I'm relaxed about advertising on the ABC if it followed the SBS example.

I fear, though, that the government will use its Senate majority to alter the ABC much more radically than Duffy suggests. Only the EMCs, mostly conservative voters, stand in their way.

Only over his dead body, I suspect.

Packer Jr is making his mark. It's either a stroke of genius or a disaster in the making.

Recent comments by the Health Minister, Tony Abbott, indicate a note of desperation regarding the upcoming vote on whether he retains his veto over the use of the abortion drug RU486.

IN 1996, the federal parliament decided that decisions about abortion drugs were too important to be made by unelected, unaccountable officials.

I seem to recollect that this decision was the result of a bargain with independent senator Brian Harradine to get his vote for the full sale of Telstra. It was hardly a decision made on any great principal of accountability.

Abbott tries to rewrite history.

It's lately been alleged that the parliament's 1996 abortion drug decision was horse-trading for senator Brian Harradine's vote on the Telstra sale at the time. This is an absurd proposition, as a moment's reflection shows. The ALP, Greens and Democrats would have needed to be part of any such conspiracy because the Senate as well as the House of Representatives approved the changes on the voices and without a formal vote.

Seeing Harradine held the balance of power, the vote would have carried regardless of the combined votes of the Labor Party and others. It's a moot point.

Then there's this gem ...

HEALTH Minister Tony Abbott says that giving women access to the abortion drug RU486 could lead to a spate of "backyard miscarriages" and an internet-based black market in "medical abortion".

Bollocks!

He's suggesting that legalising authorising RU486, ie, making it available, would create a black market for the drug. This is nonsense. If anything, the 'black market' should be happening now under the restrictive regime. Abbott's statement would only be true if surgical abortion were illegal as well, arguably a situation the he and other religious conservatives would like to see. A return to the 1950s & 60s when 'back yard' abortions were common.

Phil 'deciding' how much extra leash he'll give the AWB commissioner.

It won't be enough.

I'm finding it hard to get too excited by the AWB 'Bribes to Saddam' scandal. Not that it isn't important, it is, and the government should take a caning for it.

It's just that it's a bit like the 'Children Overboard' episode. There's the foul odour but no hard evidence that the government unequivocally knew what was going on. I don't think this issue will make much of an impression with the 20% or so of voters who decide elections.

My feelings are summed up, much more eloquently than I could, by Mr Lefty.

Of course, for a smoking gun to be found, an expanded inquiry would have to find either a suicidal government MP or a public service whistleblower. And the public service is well aware of just what happens to whistleblowers.

So, sadly, I can't get too excited about this - we all know that John Howard could be found next to a bloody corpse with the bloody knife in his bloody hands, and voters would still have completely forgotten it by 2007. And if they hadn't, he'd co-opt it into the campaign (like the "trust" line in 2004) - "Labor will brutally stab your mortgage to death with higher interest rates!"

Swinging voters only get irritated when government actions start to directly effect them, or when a series of scandals occur that are so obviously attributable to government ineptitude. Howard's much too clever to trip up like this.

Even the IR issue is unlikely to get Labor over the line. High Court challenges are going to hold up its implementation for much of this year, and many workers are covered by enterprise agreements that expire after the next election.

So, in my opinion, the only thing that's likely to bring the government down sooner rather than later is an international financial recession. It's not impossible, a large spike in oil prices could do it, but I'd rather live with the miserable Federal conservatives than wish this on the nation.