Kill the beast, cut his throat, spill his blood....

The feeding frenzy going on round the Minister of Defence, Joel Fitzgibbon, is alarming. No matter what side of politics I have always been a bit alarmed when an Opposition gets the scent of blood. 

It seems that caution is thrown to the wind when a chink in a government's armour is spotted as though getting a minister to resign is a goal in itself.

I am of course not suggesting that incompetence should be allowed to go on unchecked, but has Fitzgibbon been incompetent? The Defence portfolio is notoriously difficult, and there is little doubt that there are those within the department who want him out.

This was true under the former government when the Minister was no less than former Liberals leader, Brendan Nelson. Howard resisted the temptation to sack him even though the (then Labor) Opposition were baying for his blood.

It doesn't seem to me that he has actually been incompetent. The fiasco of the SAS salary fiasco does not seem to me to be his incompetence but that of the public service. His relationship with a Chinese lady friend highlights the sort of carelessness that happens in Opposition which shouldn't happen in Government, and were it the case that we were talking about behaviour while he was a Minister rather than a Shadow Minister then it would be quite different.

Me old mate Alex seemed content not to be drawn into the Fitzgibbon imbroglio on Friday's Lateline but instead was unremitting about his innuendi that Rudd is in the pocket of the Chinese. He just kept repeating it and repeating it..."it's about Rudd, it's about Rudd...it's about (yes you guessed it) Rudd"

This practice of repeating it often enough until someone believes it  (the throwing of mud until it sticks) works quite well in politics. BUT it is pathetic!

Give us substance not innuendo.

Beneath all this the continuing slur that Chinese are somehow not to be trusted is ever with us. Doesn't actually do much for truth!

Kev and Bazz

I suppose it's good for us that the Pres and the PM seem to have hit it off so well. But the thought of another love story to rival George and John seems sickening!!

Absolutely null and utterly void

Recent publicity has been given to John Hunt who has publicly declared himself to be unbaptised.

It is an interesting sort of issue. In the Anglican Church we baptise infants on the basis of a decision that parents make about what they believe is in the best interests for their child. I am pleased that my parents did this for me and felt this was the appropriate thing to do for my own children. I baptise 20 or 30 kids in this way each year.
It does raise questions for me pastorally as it becomes apparent sometimes that there are questions about whether a parent or godparent is a serious believer.
Indeed some baptisms seem to have more to do with social custom, tribalism and even good old "any excuse for a party". This doesn't particularly bother me, I have always taken care to strengthen the opportunity that presents itself .
This is because I believe it is essentially a Godly event. Our intention will always be less than perfect, so I am glad it does not rely on parents and Godparents being perfect, or on the priest being spotless (PTL).
In the eyes of the Church (which appears to be the position of the Church of England) though an individual may reject the gift from God, this doesn't alter the fact that God has given it. Even when the recipient denies the exsitence of the giver!!
So I am interested to see Mr Hunt's certificate says

I hereby publicly revoke any implications of that Rite

with all due respect to Mr Hunt, he cannot revoke something which is not his to revoke. He can deny that it has any meaning, and does. He can exclude himself from any alleged privilege it confers, and does. And indeed he will not agree that this rite is a gracious gift of God.
But should he, for example, recant (which doesn't seem likely) the church will not and indeed cannot require him to be baptised again.

Personally I am always glad when people give this serious thought, and even when they decide not to go along with it. I have had at least a couple of Godparents decide that they could not commit in the way that was being asked. For each of them there are twenty more who will just say anything.
There are of course those who grow a little through the experience, as I hope I did. And those for whom it has been the opportunity for deeper spiritual relationship with God

Lies, lies and damned......

It's often said that you can make statistics say anything, and it's fairly true. The Advertiser's ludicrous daily "VOTE LINE" gives people an almost random question (yesterday's was 'Do computer games dull the imagination?') 91% voted yes and 9 % No.
There is a certain sense of irony about this since said paper is flogging CD roms of various games at the moment in order to increase paper sales.
But the totally ludicrous thing is that the paper reports there were only 20 callers. Now, these figures therefore must at some point or other be wrong. Because if there were only 20 callers then each call repesents 5 percentage points. Therefore if 18 people voted YES it would be 90%, or 17 would be 85%, 19 would be 95....No way can 91% happen.
Even allowing for stuff ups, and dither dathering (and because the phone system only allows you to answer Yes or No I can't see how that could be the case) all percentages would still have to bemultiples of 5.
Of course the real issue is that the sample is nonsense...it is too small and is self-selected.
The result is therefore meaningless on this count also.

What is perhaps as disconcerting is the question for today which is "Do you support the Liberal Party's plan to rebuild the Royal Adelaide Hospital?"
The qualitative difference in importance is striking.
Now I will guarantee that there will be 10 times more votes in the sample at least, which may signify that the result is more meaningful. But of course it will be fuelled on both sides by the political interests, and the process of self-selection (that is you decide yourself if you want to ring up) which means that essentially the self-interested and the politically-inspired are likely to respond vigorously (no way of checking if they ring twice, or more even)
Truth is it's a bit of a waste of time!

PS. There were over 600 calls about the RAH question...I sunsequently penned a letter to the paper

Anyone who has been inside the RAH surely cannot believe that more than 80%
of South Australians prefer that rabbit warren to be redeveloped in preference
to a state of the art new hospital.

Some, of course, may; and
clearly the Opposition is using this as a point of difference in the lead up to
next year's election.

Yesterday's phone poll would have us believe
that more than three quarters of South Australians think that it's better to
rework the tired old buildings; , but it makes us suspect (what we already
know) that phone-in polls are subject to blatant flooding by interested
parties and thus statistically irrelevant.

Cooperation - a new era?

During Q&A last week one of the participants (about to join Obama's media circus) noted that as the dust settled on the Obamaisation of American politics, one of the things that seemed to be emerging was a new political era in which political opponents try to work together rather than to rigidly oppose everything that the other side presents.
Only history, I suspect, will tell if this is indeed happening. But I think we see some possible signs of it in our own fair land and State. Whilst inevitably people are tiring a little of Kevin Bland (better that a leader should be bland than be carefree...government is essentially a conservative process), they are tiring ever more of the haphazard critique that comes from oppposition. Abbot for example couldn't help himself on the said program and just had to be cynical and snide. I think we are tiring of it.
I have blogged before that I think Turnbull is more cooperative than his role allows, and I suspect he too is tiring of just having to criticise the government.
Did the Queensland electorate, too, on Saturday reject an Opposition whose sole offering seemed to be not in new policy and/or vision but that they might get rid of long standing government who happen to have picked up a pretty rum situation?
Is this happening in SA...I tire of hearing Captain Marty never offering new initiative but simply whining about Major Mike. The Opposition spokespersons make fools of themselves (it seems to me) because their principal dynamic is not to offer a sense of new beginnings but a constant harping on about how awful the government is. Now that they are locking themselves into the ridiculous policy (for example) of revamping the RAH rather than build a new hospital...they are simply being driven by negative reaction to the government's policy instead of what is best for the state.
Add to that their other great gift...self and mutual immolation on the altar of political infighting...their political irrelevance seems assured.

Striking the balance

While by and large I am happy that the Senate is acting as a House of Review because no one party has an absolute majority, I can't help but feel that Senator Fielding of Family First has made a serious error of judgment with regard to the alcopops tax. 

(see one story here about the liquor industry allegedly not wanting tax already taken back!!! 

I'll believe that when I see it).

The issue about "alcopops" is not just and/or only about how alcohol products might be taxed, but also about whether we are the sort of society that wants to make the 'acquired taste' more readily and easily 'acquired' by those who presently have no stomach for it and who by and large are young, immature and at risk.

This is just bizarre. Why would you actually want to encourage those who don't like the taste of alcohol (basically because their palates are too immature) to start drinking by making it available in disguise.

Fielding is right on one level to say that the issue is bigger than alcopops but not taking this small step will not actually address that larger issue.

Many years ago

I have blogged before about the journey our family made in 1967 from up there to down here.
Today is the anniversary of our arriving in Australia. I was 14 and couldn't even imagine being 42, let alone 42 years passing since our arrival.
Life goes on, much has changed. There are of course many cliches that could be hurled around.
My previous blog asserts how profoundly Australian I feel, and how I can see myself living nowhere else. I don't even want to emigrate to Melbourne!
But, lest we forget, emigration is not without significant cost. The loss of a large extended family nearby (hundreds of them within 30 kms) I didn't realise until years later how much a loss this was.
My sister L has moved from the swamp (way on the northern side) to Goodwood (about 10mins away...on a good day) and I have seen her more in the last week than I have in the last three months, and it's nice. Our family here is not quite as large as it was in England, but it has now got very big too. As we get older we realise that this is all a bit more precious than we might have realised.
Incidentally eldest child is in the process of getting a British passport, and will be making the journey the other way in a few months. She will return, we hope. But many don't.

Grrrrr!

I did say earlier in the year that I would only groan once about daylight saving this year. But as I walked S to the train at 6.30 in the (much appreciated) drizzle it was DARK!!!!
And she complainmed about going to work in the middle of the night. And yesterday at least three people made similar observations.
I make the point (again) that on the penultimate day of Daylight Saving (April 3 or 4) the 'technical dawn' will be at 7.31 a.m. This is as late as it will get at the depth of the winter latyer in June-July.
No one imagines that whoever decided we would do this (and who did?) i.e. stretch daylight saving by beginning earlier and ending later will take the slightest bit of notice. But I feel for the people of Ceduna and the far west coast. It's just unnecessary. Grrrr!

Retreat

I am on "retreat" this week. This means I have gone away for a time of reflection. When you talk about it to people you can see some of them think...what a waste of time! Others are clearly thinking, what a bludge!
Yet others clearly wish they could make space & time, but we seldom do.
Others in the know also realise it is not a bludge, nor a waste of time. It is likely to have its gruelling moments...and I will miss the dog.
I also know that if I am to give out then I can't do this without taking in. So that's an important idea too.
Lest you think I am writing this from said Retreat, let me assure you that I wrote it before I went to automatically publish on Thursday (what a clever little sausage am I). See the week's gone already.

Lifetime warranty

What on earth does "lifetime warranty" mean?

Is it my lifetime? The lifetime of my children? Of the manufacturer?

Is it the lifetime of the product?

If so, what if I think it should have a lifetime of 20 years but it only has a lifetime of two weeks?

The idea of racing

Today in SA is the so-called Adelaide Cup Day, and we have a public holiday. I don't quite understand why. But who's complaining?

The racing 'industry' pulls a lot of weight in circles of power. I certainly don't understand this. While it's amusing, and culturally interesting I need to have spelled out to me just how this influential sector actually benefits the economy. In SA it would seem to be fairly small, it is difficult to think that it is therefore a major source of employment (though this is often a claim). It would seem that any employment spin-off is hospitality industry related, and that of ocurse is not a bad thing. But it is difficult to see it as much more than fleeting and casual.

I suspect that the real issue for us is that it is the idea of horse-racing that appeals to the Australian psyche. It is a little bit, but not too much, risque.

Today, because the weather is quite mild (last year it was in the 40s...and we moved it from may because it used to be too cold) people may go to the races. But so often we are fair-weather suppoirteres of horse racing.

But the most dedicated gamblers don't attend the racetrack I suspect, they are to be found at the TAB betting shops. I wonder if they care about the animals or whether it's just about the gambling.

The Reader

If you ever doubted that the right person won the Oscar then you should go and see The Reader immediately. Kate Winslett is amazing as Hannah Schmitz, the one time prison guard who has an affair with the young Michael (also very good) who later witnesses her war-crimes trial. [Ralph Fiennes is dull as ditchwater as the destroyed adult Michael...but maybe that was the point].

It is part of the current trend of revisiting the motivations of war criminals, and in particular the ambivalence of those who were involved in the Holocaust (see for example Robert Manne's excellent review of The Kindly Ones in the Australian Literary Review today. Manne rightly questions what ther moral point and responsibility of such work is. As does another review here)

What strikes me is the ambiguity of almost everything that happens. The woman who gives a sickly young man his first experiuence of being truly loved, and yet at the same time robs him of his innocence...to the point od total destruction really).

And a woman so driven by a sense of duty that she cannot even distinguish between right and wrong. At the same time this is played off against a tribunal which has its own sense of duty and this duty seems to shun the truth. Hannah becomes their victim because she is too proud to admit her own too obvious inadequacy. Michael is given the chance to redeem her.

"What is the point?" His law professor says to him... "if your generation will not do what my generation was too afraid to do?"

It's very good!!

Library protocol

As the tyres on my car were (not) being rotated today, I went to the local library for an hour to wait.
Whilst there reading a paper I heard tearing and looked out of the corner of my eye to see an elderly man obviously deciding that he had a right to remove a funeral notice from the paper. I guess he twigged that he had been caught out and stopped.
He got up and I assumed that he had decided that he could photocopy the entry and nto destroy public property.
I wasn't too surprised when eh came back five minutes later, looking as guiltless as anything. But carrying a ripped piece of newspaper in his hand.
He would of course be one of those who would tell us that young people had no proper respect any more.
Am I the only one left.....?