The plebiscite

In democracies, by definition, plebiscites must be almost always:  deceitful, deceptive, manipulative & unhelpful

 In a democracy we delegate responsibility to our elected representatives...occasionally we have a Referendum...when matters are so great that it is good to get whole-community consensus
Plebiscites, it seems to me, are when our elected representatives are so weak-kneed that they lack the courage and conviction to do what they were elected to do.
To not be too cynical, it is the sort of thing our Lords and Masters ( for they are largely male) do when they are too lily livered to actually make a decision...God forbid that they might actually declare their hands!

Sooooo....the dilemma we now face in the Parliament which looks increasingly hung is this:

• Turnbull has declared that there will be a Plebiscite  before the end of the year
• Shorten, whilst not committed  to a Plebiscite, suggests that there should be resolution of this issue within 100 days

What it seems to me.....neither of these luminaries rate this issue as primary within their present HUNG PARLIAMENT scenario

Even more importantly, neither Shorten nor Turnbull, can actually effect their agenda...

So my, SAD,  suggestion is that the expectation about Marriage Equality is not going to be addressed by either Turnbull or Shorten...they will both have their reasons.

None of them will resonate with people on either side.

I suspect it will make Australians seem like Luddites. The people of a generation  a hundred years or more ago!

Not firing at the same target

The trouble with being in government is that invariably you have to be thinking in a longer time frame than the attention span of the electorate really allows. So it is always easy to chip away at short term pain that is necessary to achieve long-term goals.

Thus the Rudd government's mining tax is a long term strategy aimed at changing the structure of mining tax in the long term. I am not convinced that the mining interests will win out. A recurring theme of more serious analysis is not that Brazil and/or Russia are just waiting to jump in and attract the clients who find Australia's tax regime too high...but that other mineral rich countries are desperately hoping that the Rudd government will be successful because far from stealing our clients they are keen to follow.

This is quite a sophisticated argument and doesn't lend itself to the 30 second grab...it requires one to hold more than one idea in the brain at any given time.

The trouble with being in opposition is that quite the reverse is true. Your task is to make immediate attack and create a sense of concern about the day to day competence of the government. Of course the criticism is that such critique is short sighted, and lacks any long-term gravitas.

So in a sense both criticisms are valid, but they are fundamentally different. They are not firing at the same target.

This is what I think the electorate is tiring of at the moment, lots of discussion that sort of sounds the same...or as though it's about the same subject. But they're actually firing in different directions

I'm more out of touch than you are

The latest politcial game is "Who is the most out of touch?", in trying to expose Turnbull as an elitist he was pilloried in this AFL Grand Final week for not knowing which team he supports...and plucking "The Roosters" out of mid-air. Not a bad try, unfortunately the nearest thing to 'roosters' are probably the Swans, or the Eagles or the Crows.
Does it matter? It seemed to, because it showed he lacked common touch. I remember a former Archdeacon, Alan Daw, telling some of us younger clergy that it always paid to know what was happening in the local footy as it gave you an immediate intro...not bad advice, at times it has worked. Malcolm could learn from the Venerable Alan
Now the Opposition is throwing it back...The Government is out of touch
This is just as tiresome, and is I suppose to be expected.
Parliamentarians are almost always by definition going to be 'out of touch' with their electorates. As relatively high achievers, from fairly well-educated backgrounds, with a certain degree of success under their belts...they are always going to be rather alienated from the so-called 'battlers'.
Indeed I suspect most of them would have no idea what it is like to be ina house where there is simply not enough money to see the week out.
So we do the best we can.
My advice is that these ruling elites should at least find various key voices who can speak into their ears to give them a hint of what it might be like for those who are doing it tough. This is much more fruitful than the "who's most out of touch?' argument

Bread and circi

In the end sport is a game, it is not welfare, education or health.
Its attraction is that it figures prominently in the public imagination.
That fact alone should tell us that it has more capacity to raise its own funding than any other sector of the economy.
The dilemma for politicians is to resist the temptation to feed the circus side of the 'bread and circuses' equation in order to appease the seemingly insatiable public desire for sporting prowess
So, in the wake of the Olympics, it is good to see the pursing of lips and biting of tongues on both ends of the politcial spectrum when the possibility of increased funding for sport is raised.

Watershed

There is no doubt that an apology will be made, to whom remains to be seen, by whom and with whom (to use a liturgical formula) is also up in the air.

A lot of people still don't get this, that this is not a personal apology at all. It is a nation apologising for not holding itself properly to account, and presuming to treat people as though their lives and their opinions, their wishes and their values were of little or no worth.

So though there were people to blame, and some more than others...that is not the point; but rather that we allowed it to happen.

Given the fact that it is Government and not the Crown that is going to apologise it is probably important that both political parties are seen to be acting in concert. I am a bit disappointed that the Liberal Party has not opened themselves to this more wholeheartedly (here) If ever there was a case for bi-partisanship it is now. It is not unreasonable, I suggest, for Nelson to know the wording...the government should perhaps be deliberately inviting input ...but if they are too backward in coming forward it will be pretty poor.

On demand

The Victorian Parliament plans to put the question of decriminalising abortion to the Parliament in order to remove it from the area of Common Law to Statute Law. One of the interesting facts about the discussion is that the assertion is frequently made that there are no accurate statistics of how many abortions are performed in Australia.
This seems incredible in a country which works well bureaucratically and has a sophisticated health system.
Only in our own state of South Australia are providers required to report abortions, and by projecting these to a national level the extrapolation is that there are about 50 to 80 thousand each year. [Though some more conservative groups quote figures in excess of 100,000...]
What this exposes, I suspect, is that it serves the purposes of certain interests to not accurately report abortion.
One can speculate why this might be so; but given that these sort of approximations indicate that abortion is the most commonly performed medical procedure surely there needs to be some accurate information gathering . Then certain other questions might be more accurately answered like:

• is 'proper counselling' actually being offered to those who seek abortion? Given that this is a major premise on which abortion-on-demand is offered, surely we need to know whether it is taking place effectively
• is there good follow-up to those who have had to endure the trauma of abortion? There is a lot of evidence to suggest that abortion is simply not the sort of thing where you pop into the surgery one day in between the other events in your rather hectic life
• do we know how many people have multiple abortions? And what that means for an individual, but also for social health.

Hmmmmm! yes these questions (and others) are rather hard. One might begin to see why it is easier not to ask them!

The widening gap

One story today about the widening gap between the brighest and the dimmest students, and/or the richest and the poorest schools (here), should come as a surprise to no one.
There would seem to be little doubt that the general gist of this is true.There is a certain sadness about the fact that a country that has had, in the recent past, a well-functioning public-sector school system is allowing it to go to rack and ruin.
The article cited here states that state governments whilst needing to be committed to the state systems nevertheless sometimes prefer the private system.There are many and complex reasons for this.
I well remember (for example) M, the founder of a relatively new SA school (now schools), saying of the need for Governments to continue funding private schools..They could not afford to stop funding them. This would seem to be true. And as more and more parents have fled the state system, the need to continue funding private schools has become even greater.
I have no particular problem with this. Other than the rather serious one that, no matter what, some parents will never be able to afford to pay for their children's education , no matter how cheap.
And as long as there continues to be a skimming off of high quality teachers to the private system, either by higher pay or just be better conditions; the state system will continue to be run down and down.
By way of a side issue (but relating to the skimming) , long term teaching colleague-D- who recently retired from over 30 years in the state system to a smaller job in a Lutheran School.
He sighed as we were talking, because his commitment to the State system is profound, you know it is just nice to have a level of enthusiasm and respect from the students, with politeness.
There was a sense in which he felt he shouldn't be saying that. But we both knew it was true.
Bit sad really

Climate change

The shrinking (North) Polar ice cap-1979 -2003

Interesting reflections emerge about the climate change debate. Although its become the "in topic", several more serious commentators are noting that in the last 5-10 years the actual science has become more sharply honed. Such a one was Alan Dupont on Margaret Throsby this a.m.
His keen observation is worth listening to.
Observing the political scene one could be forgiven for thinking that the sort of opportunistic vote-seeking politics that both our major parties go in for will not be a good mindset for actually dealing with the problem.
If I hear the idiocy of our PM saying we are not signing Kyoto because other people (chiefly the Yanks we should note) are not signing; and it makes no sense unless everyone signs it, then I swear I shall scream! Little J is such an opportuntist and ballot-box responsive that he will never do more than cobble together a policy which will win him what votes he can (see here).
This simply is not good enough, we will need leadership which will lead not just that which will push from behind, or follow the most popular line.
Where is Adolf when you need him?