Author: Catherine (Page 1 of 5)

A practical post

November 17, 2015 / Catherine / 2 Comments

Vox had an interesting article about the meme that the media ignored the Beirut bombings in favour of Paris. Essentially, the article points out that, actually, the media writes quite a lot about bombings in Beirut, and Kenya, and Turkey, and Tunisia, and Bangkok, and elsewhere.

It’s just that nobody reads these articles.

As a case study of sorts, here’s what my Saturday looked like. I woke up when my German penfriend sent me a text saying ‘Terrible things happening in Paris’, and when I opened Facebook (which I realise is not actually a news aggregation service, but does work quite well as one in most circumstances) to see what was going on, all I could see was posts about how everyone was ignoring Beirut. Which was interesting, but, actually, I really wanted to know what was going on in Paris! It wasn’t that Beirut didn’t deserve attention, it was that for me, I know and love Paris, my family has friends there and I have friends from there. So to me, what happened in Beirut is awful, but what happened in Paris is personal. Reading about it hurt.

Would I have gone conscientiously in search of articles about Beirut without the comments on Facebook appearing? Probably not. I am actually rubbish at keeping up with the news outside of certain highly specific areas, which is why I use Facebook as my personal news aggregator. And I do not deny that this is a failing on my part. Because I can’t follow everything, I tend to follow things that are local and that I might be able to have some effect on, and things happening in countries where I have friends – so yes, Europe, the Americas, and also Tunisia and, in the past, Mozambique.

But I do wish, a little, that I could have just grieved for Paris without having to feel guilty about all the other things I wasn’t grieving for. It’s an odd thing, and I don’t know how to express it without feeling that I am belittling someone else’s pain.

I’m not sure what the answer is. I think we are more affected by things we have a personal connection to, and I think that’s OK, so long as we don’t forget that our personal connections aren’t the whole world.

Anyway. In the spirit of inclusiveness AND of practicality, I was going to make a list of places where terrible things have happened recently that you may or may not know about, along with some charities that are trying to address them. But of course, most charities do not address events specifically, and also, a lot of terrible things have happened in a lot of places recently, and it’s difficult to know where to start – or where to stop. (Vox, in particular, linked to quite a few good ones in that first article above.)

And, frankly, there are enough articles out there about terrible things that humans are doing to each other. I think we need more articles about humans trying to help each other.

So here are some charities that are doing interesting and inspiring work in a variety of places who need it. I apologise that I don’t have any exciting African charities on this list – I will try to find and add some in the next few days, but most of the ones I could see were fairly generic.

Feel free to add your favourites in the comments.

Of Paris, and of Fear

November 14, 2015 / Catherine / 0 Comments

I’ve spent most of the last fortnight thinking about Paris. With the huge project I’ve been running at work coming to an end, I can start looking ahead to next year, and I’ve been thinking about taking some long service leave, even a visit to Europe. Then, I’ve been playing with a project where I’m writing short stories set in Paris, so I’ve spent a lot of my spare time recently reading histories of Paris, learning about the old geography of Paris, and its now-underground rivers. On good nights, I’ve been dreaming about Paris.

And then this morning I woke up and heard the news.

News reports are now talking about more than 120 dead – some sources are saying as many as 160. Seven coordinated attacks. Terrorists who blow themselves up rather than be arrested. Daesh is taking credit.

I am heartbroken and I have no right to be.

Bothering politicians about Abyan and Nauru

October 19, 2015 / Catherine / 2 Comments

What are lunch breaks for if not to ring the Prime Minister’s office and mumble in a somewhat tongue-tied fashion about the need to bring Abyan back to Australia for treatment?

Well, one thing they are for is letter-writing! As is my usual habit, a copy of the email I just sent to the PM is below the cut. It is not perfect, and yours doesn’t have to be perfect, either.

The important thing, if this is something you care about, is to write *something*. Keep it polite, and probably try to be briefer than me because I always write way too much, which may not be the best way to get read. But the more people who write, or who ring, or who tweet, however incoherently, the louder the message. And feel free to borrow any phrasing that appeals to you from what I’ve written. That’s the other purpose of putting this letter here.

I’ll write to Peter Dutton, Bill Shorten and Richard Marles (Shadow Minister for Immigration) after work, and if their letters are significantly different, I’ll post them below.

Edited to add: My friend P wrote a really excellent letter to both Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Dutton, very different to mine, and considerably better worded, in my opinion!. She has given me permission to post it below as another handy example. I am also adding a link to a very thoughtful article by Julian Burnside on how to write to MPs. He mentions several things that would never have occurred to me, and is collecting replies – and non-replies – from MPs. Definitely a strategy to consider.

Handy contact details:

Malcolm Turnbull – (02) 6277 7700; malcolm.turnbull.mp@aph.gov.au ; @TurnbullMalcolm
Peter Dutton – (02) 6277 7860 or (07) 3205 9977; minister@border.gov.au ; @PeterDutton_MP
Bill Shorten – (02) 6277 4022 or (03) 9326 1300; Bill.Shorten.MP@aph.gov.au; @billshortenmp
Richard Marles – (03) 5221 3033; richard.marles.mp@aph.gov.au @RichardMarlesMP

Abyan and Najma

October 17, 2015 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Note: This post is about sexual assault. It will not be graphic, but it will probably be upsetting to read. I’m finding it pretty upsetting to write. I’m putting the whole thing behind a link, so that people can choose whether they want to read it.

Thought Experiment

September 15, 2015 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Let’s, just for a moment, consider the possibility that Malcolm Turnbull has been entirely sincere in the various small-L-liberal things he has said over the years. That he sincerely supports marriage equality, that he wants a republic, that he wants action on climate change, that even one child in detention is too many, all that stuff. We’ll leave his economics out of the picture for now, because that’s not what this is about.

If he does believe all these things – and I’m quite willing to believe he does – and he is now Prime Minister, what, precisely, can he do about them? Without, that is, ceasing to be Prime Minister. Which is the catch, really, isn’t it? I mean, theoretically, he has the power to make huge changes, but in practice, I don’t think he can actually do that and continue to lead a Coalition government. Even setting aside our current fashion for changing our Prime Minister at the drop of an opinion poll, there is only so much the party room can tolerate. One cannot lean too far outside the boundaries of what is acceptable to the Party.

And this, I think, is one of the big failures of the political party system, at least in the larger parties – the incredible pressure it imposes to compromise, to conform. No matter how idealistically you start out, at some point, if you want to be pre-selected, you are going to have to get the votes of your fellow party members, and this will mean compromise. Then you have to get the votes of the public, which may mean more compromise (though not necessarily in the same direction). How many of your ideals do you have to trade away in order to get to a point where you can act to them? Is there, in fact, such a point? Or are you more tightly controlled the higher you get in the party?

Have we set things up so that by the time you reach the top job, nothing is left that is not open for negotiation?

Well, perhaps not quite. Certainly, your Party will have certain core values that are non-negotiable. Maybe. But again, those values change over time – consider Malcolm Fraser’s policies on refugees versus Howard’s. Howard was, of course, Fraser’s Treasurer, so both sets of policies were Liberal dogma during Howard’s political lifetime. But something evidently changed in the interim. Still, if one had entered the Liberal Party in the Fraser era because one sympathised with the Party’s ideology, one might have felt rather compromised by the time Tampa rolled around…

Then again, this example is also one of change occurring within a Party. Someone clearly drives this change. Is it the Party Leadership? The Party Membership? The Chief of Staff? The polls? A bit of all four? Does this mean that Turnbull does, in fact, have the power to change the party from within, if he chooses to use it?

And which policies can be changed, anyway? Which values are ‘core’ to a party, and which are subject to negotiation? How fast do these core values themselves change?

And would you, if you were a Prime Minister in our current climate be willing to take that risk?

I suppose it would depend on why you sought power, and what you thought you could do with it. I mean, if you think you really can push through some vital and fantastic legislation that the country needs, so long as you stay around long enough to do it, that might be a reason to compromise on the stuff you felt was less central.

Then again, the fact that you think certain stuff is less central also tells us a bit about how sincere you are about it and how much you really care…

I’m hoping that Turnbull will work to change the conversation in the party room around marriage equality, around refugees, around climate change. If he does, that’s definitely a useful thing. But I think he has already signalled where his priorities lie, and for him, promoting fiscal conservatism clearly trumps promoting social liberalism. (I note that nobody anywhere has claimed that Turnbull is anything less than sincere in his economic opinions.)

Assuming he really is sincere on the social liberalism side of things, perhaps he feels that getting conservative budget measures through is the only way he can ‘buy’ tolerance for considering these other issues. This does not seem unlikely. But I’m pretty sure that’s a price that he is very, very happy to pay. I’m sure he’d like to be the PM who presided over Australia becoming a Republic that allowed Marriage Equality. It would be a lovely legacy to leave. But he wants to be the PM that brought Australia into a new economic Golden Age (for a value of Economic Golden Age that I personally find terrifying) more.

If he makes compromises, it won’t be on the side of economics.

New Prime Minister

September 15, 2015 / Catherine / 5 Comments

So, we have a new prime minister. Again. I’m still neck deep in the year of insanity at work, but a new Prime Minister is something that’s going to bring any political blogger, no matter how sporadic, out of the woodwork.

I’m not going to miss Tony Abbott. His policies were a mixture of the cruel, the stupid and the dangerous, and we are definitely better off without him. The question is whether Malcolm Turnbull is actually going to be an improvement.

On first glance, it doesn’t look too promising. Certainly, Turnbull is more personable than Abbott, and he comes across as more intelligent. He is certainly more electable, which is, of course, the whole point. His personal views on climate change and marriage equality are quite pleasing to the likes of me – he does seem to understand and accept the science behind climate change, and he feels that gay people should be allowed to marry. However, Turnbull is also clearly a very canny political beast. He has been biding his time for a good while now, and it must be remembered that to become PM, he must have been able to attract votes from across the party. Turnbull may be personally liberal and pro-science, but he is even more pro-being Prime Minister, and he is far from stupid.

Turnbull was smart enough to play a waiting game through Abbott’s government, smart enough to call a spill at the right moment – and as we saw in tonight’s press conference, he is smart enough, to avoid questions about marriage equality and follow the party line on climate change and refugees if that will keep him in power. He has said that he will lead a more consultative government, which sounds a lot to me like code for “no captain’s calls” and possibly also code for “you over there on the right, I’m on your side, too”. And this means, really, that Turnbull cannot make decisions based on his personal opinions if these are strongly opposed by his party. (Frankly, I can’t fault that – it’s how you are supposed to run a government in a party system, so I have to give him credit for this, even though I would personally be happier if he enacted the policies that I liked, and to hell with the party room. But it would be hypocritical to complain about that after taking digs at Abbott for doing just that in areas that I didn’t like…) The best we can hope for here is that we do now have a senior voice in the Liberal party that is in favour of these things, and that Turnbull might be able to use his platform to persuade others… though probably not if it will get him voted out of office. I may be being unfair here, but I don’t think it would be wise to underestimate Turnbull’s cynicism.

One definite positive is that Turnbull doesn’t seem to share Abbott’s old-fashioned views on women, so I suspect we can expect a few more women on the front bench. He is not just pro-choice, but sufficiently so to be willing to offend the Australian Christian Lobby by telling them so, and he does get some respect from me for that. However, I am not actually a single-issue voter on this subject. Actually, Tony Abbott basically trained me out of any tendencies towards single-issue voting, by demonstrating with stunning thoroughness just how many political issues there are out there that are deal breakers for me, some of which I had never even realised might be in question (making people wait for Newstart and a compulsory fee to see the doctor being two of these). So, while it is pleasing to know that Turnbull sees himself as socially progressive and fiscally conservative, I have now had my eyes opened as to just how socially regressive fiscal conservatism can be in its effects, and am wary. (Which is not to say that fiscally conservative but socially progressive is not still preferable to fiscally conservative and also socially conservative, of course).

Another positive is the vague feeling I have that Turnbull is less likely to embarrass Australia on the international stage, though I don’t have any really concrete evidence for this. Just a feeling that he is a bit more media savvy – and smart enough to let Julie Bishop, who is really rather brilliant with the media (she seduces me every time and I don’t want to like her), work her magic if he is not.

It’s after midnight, so I’m not going to look at Turnbull’s policies tonight, but I’d like to mention something that did give me a bit of hope, and that is Turnbull’s intention not to call an election yet, and to serve out the term until late next year. I think that is the best news the left of politics could have. Frankly, right now, the nation is riding a wave of ‘no more Tony Abbott’ euphoria, which would probably be sufficient to ensure a Liberal victory in an early election – especially as, let us confess, Shorten’s greatest achievement to date has been Not Being Tony. Unfortunately for him, Malcolm is also Not Tony, and he has both policies and charisma, both of which Shorten is a bit short on (so to speak).

Waiting until the end of the government’s term is good for the right as well as the left. For one thing, it will give Turnbull a chance to show his true colours, and what he is capable of doing, both good and bad. This is information we need when going into an election! But I would also suggest, tentatively and with perhaps a little too much optimism, that this is an opportunity for the Labor party. Standing for Not Tony is no longer going to be enough for Labor, and, frankly, nor should it be. A victory on that basis was never going to get Labor past a single term in any case.

With Turnbull at the head of the liberal party, the ALP now has the opportunity, and I think the obligation, to do some serious soul searching. This is the time for new policies. This is the time for setting out what the ALP stands for. This is even the time, dare I say it, for a change in leadership, if that’s something they want to do. After all, this is probably the one window of time during which the Liberal party can’t attack the ALP for changing leaders and being unstable. In another six months, it could be a different story. They should seriously consider using this window.

As for Turnbull’s government and what it will be like, well, that’s not my area of expertise – none of this is, let’s face it – but I have a few thoughts. For one thing, I suspect it will be very, very polished in its approach to the media (unless, of course, Abbott goes the white-anting route, but I’m actually rather hoping he will not. We’ve had enough stupid political infighting for one decade). For another, I don’t think there will be many changes in policy. Turnbull has said a lot about the Abbott government’s failure to communicate and sell their policies (I think he is wrong about that – I think the general public understands the policies just fine, and genuinely doesn’t like them), so I think we can expect a lot more talk about what these policies are and why we should accept them – but he has also said now and in the past that he supports those policies. He’s going to follow the Abbott course on refugees, economics, workplace relations and climate, at least until the next election.

Marriage equality looks like an easy win on the surface, an easy source of votes, but Turnbull is not going to do that, either, because those votes are on the left, which already likes him enough to hold their noses and vote for him even if he does not move on this. Championing marriage equality would, however, alienate the right, who are already pretty dubious about him. Turnbull may feel positive about the idea, but he isn’t going to risk his career for it, not after waiting this long to get where he is. What I think we can realistically hope for is a referendum that will be written in a way that is more likely to succeed than the one we would have got from Abbott. We may get personal statements in favour of marriage equality from Turnbull too, and perhaps a voice in the party room, but we won’t get more than that.

Overall? I think we’re looking at the Howard government Mark 2. I think that is Turnbull’s natural style, and I think it’s also a political era that the Liberals would like to return to anyway. It speaks of stability and security and the 1950s, which is what the Coalition is all about.

Now, if Turnbull gets re-elected in 2016? Well, that might be a different story. I suspect that this would be the point at which Turnbull might risk pushing more of his own views on climate change and marriage equality. But don’t look for economic policies rooted in social justice from Turnbull. That’s not what he stands for, and to do him justice, he has never claimed otherwise.

I’m going to finish with a quote from an opinion column by Tom Switzer from back in February, the first time we all thought this was going to happen, because I think he’s pretty much written my entire article in one paragraph:

If Turnbull replaces Abbott, he’ll need to remember he will be leading a party that is the custodian of the centre-right tradition in Australian politics. Winning the centre is the business of politics, but doing so at the expense of your own political base is suicidal – as Turnbull found out last time in 2008-09. To be a successful centre-right leader, you need to have the courage of your (conservative) convictions.

In other words, it could be worse. It could be Abbott. But let’s not get too excited just yet – Turnbull may be on ‘our’ side on some matters, but he’s not going to act on that. Not in this term.

To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice

June 15, 2015 / Catherine / 3 Comments

Today marks the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta. There are articles about this everywhere, but for those who have managed to miss them, the Magna Carta was a charter originally signed (or rather, sealed) by King John, which set in stone certain fundamental rights of law, and limited the power of the King so that he was no longer above the law. This was a radical move, and in fact, the charter was signed under a certain amount of duress, nobody stood by its commitments, and it was quickly annulled by the Pope… Still, it had great symbolic as well as practical value, and after John’s death in 1216 it was rewritten several times, was part of a treaty in 1217, and in 1297 it became part of England’s statute law. It is considered to be one of the foundations of our legal system.

Disclaimer: I’ve never studied law, so do not expect great legal insights from this post. On the other hand, I did major in medieval history, so if you find history intensely boring (how can this be?), you might want to skip the next three paragraphs. I promise we’ll get to the politics/law stuff after that.

Australia Day

January 26, 2015 / Catherine / 9 Comments

The National Australia Day Council (we have a council for this?) apparently think that we ought to stop everything at midday today and sing the Australian National Anthem.

It’s hard to know where to start, frankly. The satire practically writes itself.

I mean, I love the idea of asking the nation to pause for a minute of silence and then to sing a song that includes the line ‘for those who’ve come across the seas we’ve boundless plains to share’. We should absolutely do that. Actually, I’ve been to quite a few rallies and the like for asylum seekers that have done just that. I’m a little surprised to see Tony Abbott getting in on the idea, but hey, how can this be a bad thing..?

Thinking about Charlie Hebdo

January 12, 2015 / Catherine / 10 Comments

I’ve been trying for several days to write about what has been happening in Paris. To me, these attacks feel very close to home – much closer than the siege in Sydney last December (which, as far as I can tell, sprang from an entirely different, and rather more common, set of motivations). While I haven’t been to Sydney for years, I was in Paris earlier this year, and spent several days exploring the Marais area, which is close to the Charlie Hebdo offices. A very dear friend of mine was in the Marais at my behest the day before it happened. And then there was the hostage situation on Friday, which occurred just a few hundred metres away from where I stayed on my last visit. Paris is a city where I have always felt at home when I’ve visited, but it has also always felt like a wonderful dream to me.

So reading about the killings, about reactions to the killings; reading all the anger and fear and distress and horror that comes out of it hurts not just because I feel for the people living in Paris right now, but also because it feels like a loss of innocence. It feels personal. I know I have no real right to these feelings, but that’s how it is for me.

This post is not going to be an organised post. While I feel compelled to write, I don’t have any conclusions, or any words of wisdom. Just a lot of confusion and a lot of sadness. And a lot of things I just don’t understand.

Frankly, I find the whole situation unfathomable. While I understand on an intellectual level what has happened, a part of me simply cannot grasp how it is possible for anyone to think that killing people for writing a cartoon is the right thing to do. Interestingly, when Cherif Kouachi was interviewed, he consistently refused to acknowledge having killed anyone – he had ‘avenged the prophet’, but he avoided the word ‘kill’, except to repeat that he would never kill a woman or a civilian. Evidently, despite what he had done, Kouachi had difficulty with the idea of killing outside of a war context – and so journalists and cartoonists are re-classified as non-civilians in order to justify his actions. This makes me angry, but also incredibly sad. The whole train of thinking – the whole denial of having killed anyone, even at the same time as admitting to have done so – says to me that he wasn’t conscienceless – he just let his conscience be overruled by his religious beliefs.

And in doing so, he has destroyed the lives of the journalists and police he killed, he has destroyed his own life, and he has almost certainly made life harder for those who share his religion, even while they abhor his extremism.

(There is, clearly, a distinction between ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islamist’. I know Muslims make this distinction. Do Islamists?)

I don’t understand how he could do that. I don’t understand how he could possibly think his God wanted him to do that.

One article I read suggested that in fact destroying Charlie Hebdo was never the goal of the attack. The goal, it is posited, was rather to polarise Europe, and divide Muslims from non-Muslims, in the hope of creating more supporters of Al Qaeda. The logic is that one organises a big, public act of violence, and the inevitable backlash against the Muslim community will drive Muslims into the arms of extremism.

I find this possibility horribly plausible, and even more repellant than the attack being simply an end in itself, because it requires a mind that is willing not only to kill ‘enemy’ civilians, but also to injure its own in order to further its agenda. And yes, there have been ‘reprisal’ attacks on Muslims. Of course there have been. People feel attacked, and so they attack back, and it’s incredibly hard to break the cycle, because you need everyone choosing to be thoughtful in order to fight this strategy – and only one person willing to be a violent idiot to promote it.

(Incidentally, I see that the head of Hezbollah is being quoted as saying that islamist violence is harming Islam far worse than the cartoons ever could. I’m torn between thinking “Good on him” and thinking, hang on, since when is Hezbollah non-violent…?)

I’m trying to be hopeful that this won’t work.

It was heartening to see Mourad Hamyd’s schoolmates proclaim his innocence, and that they, at least, saw their classmate as a person first of all, and not as a stereotype. (Hamyd, who turned himself in after he saw his name in the media, was released without charge on Friday)

I was glad to see the article about Lassana Bathily, a Muslim shop assistant at the Jewish grocery store attacked on Friday, who hid and protected fifteen people during the siege, and then escaped to provide the police with information about what was going on inside.

Finally, I love the #jesuisahmed movement, celebrating Ahmed Merabet, the Muslim policeman who was shot defending Charlie Hebdo’s offices, is also a beautiful one. I was ambivalent about the #jesuischarlie movement, simply because while I feel deep sympathy and solidarity for those killed or hurt and their families, I really do find a lot of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons pretty objectionable. (Speaking of things I don’t understand, why do people draw cartoons that have no purpose but to offend? I honestly don’t get the appeal.) But Merabet embodied Voltaire’s words – he may not have agreed with what Charlie Hebdo had to say about his religion, but he defended to the death their right to say it. A true martyr for free speech, if that’s what you are looking for.

This is how we fight extremism. We see the people around us as our brothers and sisters, and we help them, defend them, and care for them, regardless of their religion or colour. Just as these students did, and just as these two men – and many other men and women like them – did.And we refuse to grant prejudice a toehold.

And right now, we grieve for the dead, and we grieve for Paris.

A few more articles about Charlie Hebdo that I think are worth reading…

The Charlie Hebdo Massacre and how we think about religion

Dismantling Prejudice and Misconceptions

Understanding is the least we owe the dead

Cartoonists don’t live by the sword, we live by the pen

Drawing the Prophet: Islam’s hidden history of Muhammad images

And another massacre that has gone under the radar, because it happened in Nigeria

Islamic extremist attack in Nigeria named the deadliest massacre in history

2014 in Review, and a New Year’s Revolution

January 3, 2015 / Catherine / 2 Comments

And not only that, a new look for this blog! I’m not totally happy with it – blue codes right wing in Australia and even if it didn’t, I’d prefer red or purple – but it’s ridiculous to buy a premium account just so that I can have a pretty colour scheme! (Also, of course, if I make my blog too pretty, there’s the risk that some people will dismiss it without reading it. Bizarre thought. But I’m pretty sure that pink and purple stripes do not shriek “serious political blog!” to those passing by. Alas.)

So. 2014. The first full year under the Abbott Government.

Look, I’m not going to re-hash all the things that Tony & Co did to make me weep or gnash my teeth in rage last year. If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a couple of months, you already know what they are – and if you don’t, there are hundreds of blogs out there that have already summed up this first year, with greater or lesser degrees of delight or woe. No useful purpose is served, I think, by depressing ourselves further on this score.

Instead, I’d like to look at a few things that gave me hope in 2014. Hope for Australia, hope for the state of politics, and just generally an increased sense of hope in my fellow Australians.