Author: Catherine (Page 44 of 54)

Victorian Senate Group A: In Which Australia Rises Up

August 19, 2013 / Catherine / 5 Comments

Starting from the left hand side of the paper tablecloth that we like to call a Senate Ballot paper, we have the Rise Up Australia Party, whose website has the cheery slogan “Keep Australia Australian!”.

Already, I am dubious. This is probably because I am un-Australian.

Their little flag-picture thingie adds a few more key words and slogans: Families, Education, Jobs, Business, Free Speech, alongside “Multi-Ethnic, One Culture”, which I’m not sure is grammatical, but I probably shouldn’t start insulting them before I’ve actually read their policies. I will note that I am always a little suspicious when “Free Speech” turns up on the front page of a party website, as in my experience this particular priority has a significant correlation with people wanting to say really nasty things and not have anyone complain about them.

Federal Election 2013: Partying with the small parties

August 19, 2013 / Catherine / 2 Comments

So, we all have our opinions about Liberal and Labor, more or less. Most of us are even vaguely aware of the Greens, Family First and One Nation. And who could possibly forget the existence of the Sex Party?

Hooray for us! That’s six whole parties we’ve heard of… but what about the other 33 charming little bagatelles currently decorating the Victorian Senate Ballot Paper? What of HEMP and Rise Up Australia? What of the Secular Party and Smokers’ Rights? And are the Democratic Labor Party and the Liberal Democrats offshoots of Labor, Liberal, the Democrats, or some other beast entirely?

For those of us who like to vote below the line, these are important questions which could keep us busy for far too much of the lead-up to the election.

Or perhaps I’m just taking this whole thing way too seriously…

Either way, over the next few weeks, I intend to work my way down the Senate ticket, group by group, visiting their websites, reading their policies, checking out their preferencing, and reporting back on what I find. My reports will be as partisan as all hell as far as commentary goes, because I’m a Bleeding Heart Greenie Feminist Lefty Pinko with no economic sense, and I’m not ashamed of that. They will, however, be as factually accurate as I can make them.

I will be working from the assumption that policies and mission statements posted on official party websites are a fair representation of what that party stands for – or at least, what that party wants voters to believe they stand for. In other words, I will not attempt to predict future behaviour based on what any elected representatives or random party members have done in the past, but I will feel entirely free to provide commentary on any subtext I believe is implicit in these statements.

My reasoning for this is simple: there are a lot of political parties out there, I have limited time, and I am not a political commentator. But I do have the ability to read documents and make some deductions about the person writing them – what he or she is trying to convey, and perhaps what this implies about his or her values. And of course, a look at where preferences are going can tell you an awful lot about a party’s true colours.

But enough of this introductory babble! It’s time to meet some of our small parties…

Reflections on Truth

March 10, 2013 / Catherine / 5 Comments

This is not a post I particularly want to write, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, and I think not writing about it would be worse. It’s about something that happened to me quite a long time ago, and I’m putting it under a cut, because it’s pretty personal, and it talks about sexual assault. And I’ll be screening all comments, for similar reasons. Also, note that some of the comments include people discussing their own experience of sexual assault, which may be distressing to read. I certainly found them so.

Book review: Genesis, in translation by Robert Alter

February 26, 2013 / Catherine / 0 Comments

I’ve been reading Robert Alter’s lovely translation and commentary on Genesis, and my, is it good.

He does two things that I really appreciate and don’t recall from other translations. First, his translation is very lively, in some way – he makes the people seem very immediate, and makes me want to keep on reading. Secondly, his commentary is brilliant at pointing out connections between stories in the lives of different characters, or within the lives of single characters. I hadn’t previously noticed the ‘everyone of importance goes down to Egypt’ motif, or the ‘everyone meets their wife by a well’ recurring theme. And – for example – what he has to say about Jacob’s story is just fascinating. At the start of Jacob’s story, we see him deceiving his father about his identity, by using the skin of a kid to mimic Esau’s hairier skin and Esau’s clothes to disguise his identity. Later, he in turn is deceived by his sons, who slaughter a kid and use its blood and Joseph’s clothing to make him believe that Joseph is dead. He is able to deceive his father because his father cannot see him – and he is deceived in the matter of a wife because Leah is disguised by darkness. And his story is full of duos in opposition – himself versus his brother, Leah versus Rachel, the two slaves he later marries. Alter points up these themes and patterns (far better than I have here, because I read this all about a week ago) in a way that really makes me grasp the sense of intent and purpose that went into putting together these books of the Torah, and choosing which stories should go where, and in what form.

(also, don’t ever be an elder son with urban inclinations. This never ends well.)

Film review: Les Miserables

January 4, 2013 / Catherine / 0 Comments

It was 41°C in Melbourne today. At 9pm, it’s still 38.2°C, which is just unpleasant and un-called for. But I’m on holiday, and finally neither exhausted nor in pain, and couldn’t bear to spend another day trapped inside the house.

Cinemas, however, have air-conditioning. As do shopping centres. Cinemas inside shopping centres are particularly useful, because they have air-conditioning, movies, and places to buy stuff for dinner afterwards (not to mention the 2013 calendar one had not yet got around to purchasing). So I decided to go and see Les Miserables. Continue reading

Politics in the People’s Republic of Moreland – the outcome!

October 31, 2012 / Catherine / 0 Comments

The People’s Republic of Moreland has elected its first ever Socialist!

I’m rather proud that she was in my crazy, crazy Ward (actually, I helped vote her in, on the grounds that she is the first sane socialist I’ve seen in ages and this should be encouraged. I didn’t expect it to work). I suspect she benefited mightily from the donkey vote, as I’ve never seen a member of the Socialist Alliance poll 10% before (or more than about 4%, if that).

We also got a Green, a Liberal (an animal rarely seen in Moreland) and an ALP member (usually we get three… their strategy of putting 9 different ALP members on the ticket and then all snarling at each other in public forums didn’t work so well for them).

Of course, if Informal had been allowed onto the Council, he or she would probably have one, as the informal vote was 16%, more than any individual candidate managed to poll on first preferences. I think people lost count or lost interest.

On the bright side, we didn’t get the really crazy woman with the evil emails and name-stealing or any of that. On the less bright side, we didn’t get Mo, the standup comedian, who would surely have been the perfect addition to this council…

According to the electoral commission, we were a particularly complicated electorate to count. Who would have thought?

I do wonder what brought this on, though. Local politics is usually much more sedate and boring than this.

Politics in the People’s Republic of Moreland – Election Shenanigans!

October 26, 2012 / Catherine / 3 Comments

This post will probably be of limited interest to anyone who doesn’t live within a few blocks of me (though it is, regrettably, rather entertaining in a train-wreck sort of way), but here goes anyway. I wasn’t taking these council elections very seriously until we got a charming flyer from one candidate (Jennifer Jacomb) informing us that only 6 of the 24 candidates in North East Ward consented to police checks and providing not just a BLACK LIST but a REALLY REALLY BLACK LIST, asking IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR, WHY WOULD YOU CALL POLICE CHECKS GRUBBY?

Other highlights of this flyer were the fact that of the people who did agree to police checks, they only endorsed the ones with non-Muslim names. Hmm. Oh, and also, it seems that the Greens candidates would not confirm if they and their fellow Greens would implement an anti-Israel Policy… or whether they would betray their party…

Isn’t it nice to have the concerned citizenry helping us make these decisions? Apparently, this candidate emailed all the other candidates demanding that they provide *her* with their full financial and banking details, as well as police checks and proof of literacy and English skills. Within 24 hours. This is, I understand, not technically illegal, but it is pretty obnoxious.

And then we have the candidate (sadly un-named) who popped into the printer just after another candidate had left, claiming to be with the first candidate and asking him to add a little something to that candidate’s flyer. The little something was a promise of more mosques in Moreland, because heaven forbid we have insufficient racism in our election. The candidate in question wants nothing of the sort, as it happens, but has been fairly classy in response.

Anyway, with all these shenanigans, I am suddenly much more motivated to vote in an intelligent fashion, rather than being somewhat random for once. It’s not so much who I want to get in as who I want to keep out. And with 24 candidates and 55 how to vote cards registered (!!! there are only four seats, for crying out loud!), it’s going to get very confusing tomorrow.

So, below the cut, you may find my brief notes on each of the candidates, as gleaned from my internet researches and studies of their pamphlets. I’ve ordered them as they will appear on the ballot, for your convenience.

Politics: Julia Gillard, Feminism and That Speech

October 9, 2012 / Catherine / 0 Comments

So Tony Abbott has suddenly decided that he is a feminist! Really! And he is shocked – shocked! – that the Labor Government can countenance as Speaker a man who sent sexist and unpleasant text messages.

Now, if this was the first time I’d ever heard Tony Abbott open his mouth, I would be mildly pleased to hear this. And it is certainly both interesting and pleasing to note that the head of our more right-wing major party feels the need to portray himself as a feminist if he’s going to get the votes out.

The trouble is, of course, that our dear Opposition Leader’s own statements have not been without their sexist moments. Or hours. Which are all duly recorded in Hansard, incidentally. And this does make his statements about Peter Slipper – who was, until recently, a member of his own party – just a tad hypocritical.

But that wasn’t enough. Oh, no. A mere week after the whole blow-up about Alan Jones claiming that Gillard’s father died of shame because of his daughter’s lies (yep, we have radio personalities with no sense of decency in Australia, too), Abbott commented that the entire Labor Government should already have died of shame because of Slipper’s actions.

Oh, no you don’t… Continue reading

Politics: Research Funding in the cross-hairs again…

October 2, 2012 / Catherine / 0 Comments

So apparently the government is worried about not getting into surplus in time for next year, and one of their bright ideas is delaying funding of successful NHMRC and ARC grants by six months or a year.

This may sound good in theory, but the thing is, people live grant to grant for their salaries – if you delay funding for a year or even six months, when you do finally get around to funding people a lot of them won’t be around to fund, because they will have gone and found jobs which they might actually get paid for. And no, Universities and Research Institutes do not have huge sums of money lying around just waiting to be used on salaries – most of the money they get is already being used for infrastructure (not much science gets done without electricity – or without mouse technicians – or even without admin people like me, though in all honesty, I suspect I’m only really useful because the paperwork from everything else is insane), or has restrictions on how it can be spent.

So yeah. This would be very bad for medical research, much as we all explained last year when the government suggested cutting NHMRC funding entirely. You can’t do good research on stop-start funding – you need continuity of people and of projects, and three years (the usual length of a grant) is not, in general, going to get a project from concept to in vitro studies to mouse studies to clinical trials. Usually, you are looking at decades for that progression. And you need at least some of the same people around for most of that time.

Anyway, please consider signing the petition below. And maybe writing to an MP or two. It’s bad enough having everyone needing to re-apply for funding every couple of years, having to campaign against silly policy on an annual basis is really not helpful. And, oddly enough, my colleagues would much rather be doing science.

http://adambandt-melbourne.nationbuilder.com/science_petition

Politics: Open Letter to Julia Gillard on the subject of the ACL, Marriage Equality, and Christianity

October 2, 2012 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Dear Ms Gillard,

I want you to know that the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) does not represent all Christians. It certainly does not represent me.

I’m a Christian, of the vaguely-Anglican variety. I don’t claim to be a very good one, but that’s another matter.

I’m also a feminist, a trade-unionist, a supporter of marriage equality and of the rights of asylum seekers, and a mild sort of environmentalist. I’m an unashamed lefty, and believe in equal access to education, food and healthcare as the foundations of society. I don’t believe that any of these opinions conflict with my faith – indeed, my political beliefs are informed by my spiritual ones.

I don’t know if my beliefs are more typical of Australian Christians than those represented by the ACL, but I suspect many of them are. Still, the Christians I know tend to incline toward the liberal side of the spectrum, so my sample may be skewed. In any case, I would not and do not presume to speak for all Christians. I can only ask you to understand that Christianity in Australia is not a monolith and cannot be represented by a single peak body.

I can only tell you what I believe.