Greens list of demands from the ALP

Balances of power are scary, yes. But it's hard to be afraid of the Greens railroading the government to do what they want when their demands to the ALP are full of all these terribly sensible, democratic ideals that put power in the people's hands. Here's the list they got the ALP to agree to.


- A Climate Change Committee

• A full parliamentary debate on Afghanistan

• A commitment to work with the Greens on dental health care investment

• Completion of a $20 million High Speed Rail study by July 2011

• Legislating for truth in political advertising

• A Leaders’ Debate Commission

• Establishing a Parliamentary Integrity Commissioner

• Establishing a Parliamentary Budget Office

• Restrictions on political donations

• A move toward full three year governments

• Specially allocated time for debate and voting on private members bills and a fixed and fair allocation of questions for Independent and minor party members in Question Time

• Referenda for constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians and Local Government

• A commitment for reform to provide above the line voting in the Senate

• Better processes for the release of documents in the public interest in both Houses of Parliament

• Access to relevant departments, including Treasury and Finance & Deregulation for Greens election policies.

And again

Hate leads to arson at the Murfreesboro mosque site in Tennessee. Why? Because of movements like the one beautifully skewered in this Daily Show clip. Warning - funny, but terrifying.

Also, Ted Rall's blog

is here and always worth reading.

Comics for truth

Ted Rall, Matt Bors and Steven Cloud, three of the great political cartoonists of our day and age, have gone to Afghanistan (or back to Afghanistan) to get the story on the ground.

Hooray for the genre. The thing about comics is that they fit into our soundbite world but without sacrificing any of their truth to do it, and such are our last hope.

Where the story always ends

A bunch of people stir up racist bigotry. And then a man gets drunk and stabs a Muslim cab driver screaming "Assalamu Alaikum, consider this a checkpoint".

That blood is on the hands of everyone who rallied against the Not Near Ground Zero Not Mosque. Seriously. Hate leads to violence. Don't you get that? How do you not care?

Oh yeah. You're stupid and evil. Goddammit.

Don't Be A Sucker

This 1947 film, Don't Be A Sucker made by the US War Department likens inciting prejudice to a shell game designed to bilk you out of your money and your freedom. I think that's awesome because very often people can't be convinced by humanitarian arguments, so pointing out that someone is fucking you over for their own gain (and your direct loss) might work.

Nice work, 1947!

Stupid or Evil?

Did the Daily Show just name check my blog? :D Not really, but it's freaking glorious television anyway, as they expose that Fox is actually funding the "terror mosque" itself.

Watch the election on line

ABC has full streaming coverage

Play the drinking game!

- take a sip every time you see a bar graph
- take a sip every time someone says "swing"
- take a swig every time they report an electorate result even thought less than 2% of the vote is counted
- any time anyone says something is still too close to call or we're in for a long night or we just don't know that yet, finish your beer
- if Tony Abbott wins, finish your hemlock

Best election summary ever

Warning: contains awesome cartoon politicians. From our friends in Taiwan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ_s6V1Kv6A&feature=player_embedded

Whoops, turns out you ARE refugees after all

Labour has been claiming that over 40% and up to 70% of Afghanis and Sri Lankans are having their refugee status denied. However, all of those went to appeal (through a body set up by the Rudd government) and the Australian reported yesterday that a minimum of 90% of these cases are being overturned on appeal, with some of the lawyers reporting 100% of them being overturned. Good thing we didn't SEND THEM BACK TO THE WARZONE THEN.

Yesterday the Australian also repoted that large sections of the East Timor government really don't want to be Australian's dumping ground. Julia's it's-like-Tony's-idea-but-not-really-I-promise Pacific Solution is not just evil but incompetent.

Once again, we have to choose between evil through stupidity or evil with intent. Elections: welcome to the suck.

Keith Olberman delivers the smackdown

There's one journalist left in America, and he delivers a pure and glorious smackdown of truth on the Not Near Ground Zero Not Mosque. Truth is beauty. I could listen to this forever.

"From the beginning of this nation we have fought prejudice, religious intolerance and our greatest enemy, stupidity exploited by rapacious politicians."

Stupid and Evil.

Whoever wins...

We lose. Australia loses. Democracy loses. Asylum seekers lose and they lose their lives and their family's lives, their hope and their freedom and their dignity. Hardly an original sentiment but a nice man did the photoshop for me:



The question then is what hay CAN we make. Elections force politics into the spotlight. Maybe we can change a few minds about asylum seekers. Maybe we can wake people up about climate change and gay marriage. Maybe we can chisel further into a balance of power to minor parties.

We win in tiny tiny increments. In blood-soaked, screaming increments, and they take everything we've got to get them, but if you can find them, they can stop you from going nuts or giving up. One day, we might just piss enough people off for the dam to burst and there will be real change. Until then, we keep woodpeckering away, beating our skulls against a gigantic brick wall...

Choke on my fuck, Gloria Jeans Coffee

Glorian Jeans coffe chain is owned by religious fuckers the Hillsong Church group. Part of their evil fucked up mission was something called Mercy Mission where they promise to help young women "in trouble" (eg drugs, unwanted pregnany, homeless) by forcing them to, in exchange for their "help", stop getting welfare, cut off all ties with their friends and family and go and stay in a refuge for two months until they agree to be shiny happy christians. IE its a fucking cult.

However, in happy happy white puppy schadenfreude victory dance news, The Age reports that they're now insolvent and have been forced to apologise to the women whose lives they damaged. It hardly makes up for it, but I like to see the bad guys get kicked in the balls however lightly.

"In December, Mr Irvine and fellow Mercy Ministry directors admitted engaging in false, misleading and deceptive conduct following an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission investigation into the practices of the Hillsong-connected organisation. They were required to pay $1050 and apologise to each person affected by Mercy Ministries' conduct, all young women with mental health and drug and alcohol problems."

Picking on weaklings: humanity's favourite hobby!

Know Your Nutjob

Some of them WILL be running the country. This awesome blog post runs down the parties, large, small, tiny and independent. Doesn't cover all the states but it was a titanic task getting as far as he did. Sheer brilliance!

Am I crazy or is Australia finally getting more politically awake? Of course, the more our ballots force us to choose between the pathetic and the puerile, the more we take to the streets and look for things to burn. But at the same time, people are using the net to get actually informed, and as a pull medium, that makes people look harder and think more.

As a great man said, You Can't Stop the Signal.

Well, good on the church

Not everyone in the church is as mad as George Pell or as blind as the Pope. The Uniting Church in Australia has always been working hard to tear down the barriers between denominations and between the secular and the sacred. And the August issue of its internal newspaper looks at its relationship to politics. It includes an article which talks about the generally left-wing nature of the church, which has the wonderful quote:

"The damage to the credibility of the Christian Church by Family First Senator Steve Fielding is incalculable" - Dr John Harrison.

Poor bastards have to not only deal with Fielding's evil, but that he does it while wearing their colours.

It also closes with a statement from a Uniting Church member from Labor, the Libs, the Greens and Family First, where they explain why their political work is an expression of their faith. Props for them for showing that their church is a messy place filled with very different philosophies (and that even the general versions of those philosophies can lead to completely different politics), unlike Pell who demands all his sheep follow his politics word for word.

To paraphrase Scott Adams - I'm not anti-religion, I'm anti-idiot.

Tony, seriously, wtf is wrong with you?

I mean, I set aside this morning to do some non-election writing and you open your mouth and come out with this insane bullshit about being the man with the hand on the button to turn back the boats.

It's actually not unexpected - Tony has been playing the "Action Man" card since the moment he put on the budgie-smugglers and showed off his six-pack. Being a call away from the navy is totally part of his spin.

The really sad thing is selling Action Man means he needs an enemy, and he says shit like this:

"I think reopening Nauru would send an immediate signal to the people smugglers and their customers or potential customers that the game is up,"

There are no words for how evil that quote is. You just turned refugees into criminals, Tony, because it made you feel like a hard man. It points to not just aspirations to ascend over however big a pile of blood and torture it takes but that same kind of psychopathic sexual joy from inflicting pain that John Howard had. We really really need to stop electing sociopaths.

Green advertisements

A lot of people are talking about the fantastic ad for the Greens mocked up for the Gruen Nation TV show on the ABC (which of course the Greens can't use.) They should have done better than their own ad which was just fucking awful.

Luckily, they HAVE done better than both of those with this bloody masterpiece. It's about the real cost of doing business - refugee business.

Voting

I like to keep this by me during election time. It makes everything so clear.

Same-Sex Marriage

Sometimes it's difficult to find the right argument, the one that gets to the heart of the matter as quickly and cleanly as possible. It doesn't mean your argument is weak or faulty or that your beliefs are foolish or wavering - sometimes you have trouble expressing something, no matter how much you feel it. Or you can't express it in a way that will convince others.

Such is the case, I find, with Same Sex Marriage. This Sunday is of course the big protest march about it, and I will be there of course (1pm in Queens Park, that's the one opposite the casino). But sometimes it's hard to convince people why it's important. Important enough to protest. Important enough to demand to be fixed, right the hell now.

Then this morning my flatmate was reading through The Sneetches. If you don't know it, it's a fantastic Dr Seuss story about a group of bird-like creatures called Sneetches who live near beaches. And some of the Sneeches have bellies with stars and some of the sneetches have no stars upon thars. And the star-belly sneetches are the only ones allowed to walk on the beaches while the plain-belly sneetches are second class creatures. Soon enough, a figure comes along and messes with the status quo. He charges a small fee to turn plain-belly sneetches into star-belly sneetches. Lacking a way to exclude others, the star-belly sneetches are miserable - until the outsider offers to remove their stars for a small fee. They all agree and then try to assert than having no star on your belly is the source of societal primacy. This causes the newly-star-bellied to be forced to revert, but before they can finish the star-bellied want theirs back again. The process devolves into chaos until the outsider is rich and the sneetches are all mixed up again - half starred, half unstarred.

Like most of Seuss' work the parables seem obvious but have a surprising amount of depth to them as well. It's not just an indictment of corportations controlling our low sense of self esteem, it's greater than that. To me, I see it as a total reductionist approach to all tribalism.

Humans are tribal creatures. We can't escape that and most of the time, there's nothing wrong with it. It only becomes problematic when we use our tribalism to justify our moral outrage (or when our moral outrage leads us into tribalism, declaring those whose actions we find immoral to be anethama and inhuman, but of course this blog would never stoop so low). At times like that it's important to not just realise that such outrage is silly to be fuelled by nothing but tribalism but that the tribalism itself is fundamentally ridiculous.

And that's really what this is about. There are some people in this world who think that only star-bellied sneetches should walk along beaches, because star-bellied sneetches are better than plain-bellied sneetches. It's all very silly of course, but these people seem to take it very seriously indeed. Their beaches are so very very important that to let a plain-bellied sneetch in would destroy the value of that beach. Of course, if a plain-bellied sneetch would only go and acquire a star, they would be happy to let them in to their beaches.

Some of us, however, think everyone should enjoy the beach. The beach is lovely, and the more people who enjoy it, the better. Some of us don't see any reason to care about the contents of a sneetch's belly. Some of us grew out of sneetch-like behaviour when we were six. Some of us think government and laws are for grown ups, not little children who don't want to share.

If you think laws are for grownups, do join us on Saturday. Numbers are a weapon.

Good link on Asylum Seekers

Tony and Julia are still doing the dance so we still need to hit voters with the clue hammer, and here it is, all rolled into one clear, simple document

Cardinal Pell hates the Greens

Sometimes I think there's nothing on earth more evil than John Howard, the man who liked to torture children just for the hard-on it gave him. Then I remember there's Cardinal Pell, a man of such cartoonish villainy that if you wrote him in fiction people wouldn't believe it.

I think what I hate most about Pell is he's so absolutely convinced of his power and his untouchability that he can be lazy in his evil. I mean, Wendy Francis hates the gays but she can't just come out and say it, she has to sit down for five minutes and pull an excuse out of her ass, something about how children without parents of both sexes will suffer. Something that looks vaguely sane and respectable. She can't get away with saying what she really thinks because then the diseased sickness she pretends is a working mind would be obvious to all.

Pell does though. Back in 2007 he told the world that Islam was a "violent, dangerous religion" that was Australia's enemy and John Howard was our holy soldier fighting against it. In the same article, he admitted he got this impression of Islam by "skimming over" a few pages of the Koran for "about half an hour".

Now he's decided that the Greens are Australia's enemy - being "anti-Christian" "stalinists" and sweet camoflauged poison" - because the Australian Christian Lobby sent them a voluntary survey and the Greens didn't volunteer to fill it out. Also they're a bunch of commies. For this reason, Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, urges the entire Catholic church not to vote for them.

For fuck's sake, it's 2010 and Pell is looking for reds under the bed. It's just not fucking funny any more, Pell. It's one thing to have the political arena filled with evil fuckers who want to fuck you with switchblades, but it's quite another to have to deal with someone who has all the mental sophistication of a two-year old AND wants to fuck you with switchblades.

Luckily, there's some dissention in the ranks, with some rational Catholics suggesting that maybe a Catholic bishop using his immense power to sway elections at the very least appears a bit fucking obvious. Meanwhile his position as Archbishop lasts for life, after which we can only pray God has mercy on his blood-stained soul.

Right to marriage

Before we go marching on Sunday for gay rights in Australia, here's conservative lawyer Ted Olson who ran the case against Proposition 8 explaining why gay marriage is a constitutional right in the US because "the right to marry is a part of liberty, privacy, association and spirituality, guaranteed to every individual".

Of course, Australia doesn't have a Bill of Rights guaranteeing due process to all. So we have nothing to fall back on, except public outrage.

Audience Participation - Indigenous Rights

Amnesty International needs bums on seats I mean email clickies to help raise awareness about the Northern Territory Emergency Response, which is a system by which every Aboriginal person in the NT loses half their paypacket in exchange for vouchers for state-approved goods. Because apparently we can't trust the darkies to know how to deal with big-people money. They might all rush out and buy copies of Twilight, for example.

Help Amnesty end this bullshit by clicking on the link and reading the info on this page.

Julia, Stand and Deliver WAS JUST A MOVIE

So was Lean on Me, and Mr Holland's Opus. Just movies, okay? You weren't supposed to base you education policy on them!

"I want to reward a teacher who is in a disadvantaged classroom who transforms kids' lives by making sure they're most improved," she said.

In theory, there's nothing particularly wrong with rewarding good teachers, but in practice, it kind of falls over and dies. Because good teaching is an intangible and trying to put a dollar value on it only works to further turn education into a business. In business, it can make sense to reward good workers. Of course, in practice it often just builds resentment and fucks up morale, but it CAN work. But a business often has measurable outcomes like how much money you make. Schools do not. Nor do they exist in perfect situations where teacher dedication magically creates good outcomes.

And finally, rewarding teachers like this creates even more stigma on bad teachers. When was the last time you heard about the government encouraging good nurses or good doctors, by singling them out? But teachers, they're societies punching bags. That's why we can get away with handing them societies' garbage bags, paying them for half the hours they work each day and then blaming them when they don't produce angels. And true enough, this "reward teachers" system comes with a big series of tests to make sure teachers are good enough. Again, there's this hideous assumption in all of Gillard's policies that teachers are just crap.

Julia, you get what you pay for. Pay teachers like doctors and you might get the best and the brightest. Make those passionate/insane few who do it for love and dedication jump through your hoops to prove they're good enough to do a job they've already qualified for will just piss people off.

But it appeals to the battlers, doesn't it Julia. Those gangs Tony is trying to round up, those wild teenagers with their long hair, that's not the fault of the parents or a massively poorly run and funded education system, it's just bad teachers. I think Julia liked the dog whistle so much she swallowed it.

Bigotry First

Boy howdy does Family First hate teh gay. Wendy Francis went so far as to twitter that gay marriage is emotional child abuse. The hilarious thing is it caused so much outrage they took it down and blamed it on an intern - standard practice in politics these days (cf John McCain's website faux pas in 2008). Then Francis decided she didn't mean gay marriage was like child abuse, it was like kidnapping:

"In the situation that we're proposing here, we are saying that a child will be taken from its natural parent and it will be put in a situation where it is with two mothers or two fathers that is actually not possible to conceive that child.

"So I'm just asking the question... in 20 years time are we really going to be facing another Stolen Generation where this child has been taken from their parents and placed in another situation that was not of their choice?"

Do we start with the homophobia, the racism or the sheer insanity of babies choosing their parents?

We could just point out that in fact we have the science anyway, and it says over and over again that having two mummies or daddies actually improves a child's life. Said families create children who accept other viewpoints and make strong clear choices for themselves. Sorry Francis, the experiment's already been done and teh gay is not only non-toxic, it's PART OF THIS COMPLETE BREAKFAST.

The question is, why does Wendy Francis hate children and want to stunt their development and reduce their chance for success by forcing them to be raised by heterosexuals?

Actually, the real question is, how can we call this a civilised society and yet Wendy Francis is allowed to not be kicked to death by angry, vomiting yaks?

Abbott promises evil with more evil

Abbott came to Brisbane to launch his campaign officially yesterday, presumably because he fears the rising shadow of Rudd.

Full speech from his campaign launch here

Summary here

His first priorities are:

Lift the carbon tax (because yeah, climate change is hilarious)
Reopen Nauru (because concentration camps are hilarious)
Stop Marine parks (because overfishing is hilarious)

As always, the Liberals are driven to be overtly, passionately, clearly evil, making them at least an alternatively to the inept, bumbling, evil by default and laziness of Labor. Evil or stupid...it's like a blog name or something.

Good news, everyone!

The Get Up guys won their court case, overturning Howard's electoral changes that allowed him to spring surprise elections on people. Now at least 100,000 people can be grandfathered into this election - woot!

From the mouths of bastards

GetUp's new ad lets Tony Abbot hang himself with his own ridiculous and horrible quotes.

Awesome.

What They Stand For

Universal sufferage can only work with universal education. So it's nice to see some genius has made a useful spread-sheet on where the parties (big and small) stand on the issues.

Check it out, and share it with others! Let's not have the same thing as 2004 when Family First got voted for because nobody knew they were a bunch of fundamentalist bigots.

Political Compass

...has been updated with its take on the current Australian election. Compass has its flaws but at least it has a good stab at breaking out of one dimensional political classifications.

It's test is also not perfect but if you're not sure where you stand on the axes, have a go and see what you get! Then do it a week later and aggregate your scores.

Why this blog exists

Reposted from last month on my LJ:

I'm not a great reader. Not anymore. Not since my depression shredded my attention span and the internet hoovered up the scraps and smoked them as a joint. I like TV though. And I like comics. I can read comics. And I like Transmet. If you like Transmet, you knew I was going to say that, because of the style of this post. Fucking Spider and Ellis are in my head, and they want me to write like this. And it feels good to do what they tell me. It makes me feel awesome.

I like Transmet and I read it a lot, for pretty much exactly the same reason I watch The West Wing over and over again. Because they're not about politics, they're about writing. An idiot I once knew told me that all musicians get boring when they start singing about being a rock star. He was completely wrong, of course; that's when they get interesting. That's why Billy Joel fucking rocks. And occasionally, you get that privelige with TV writers and comic writers. They sit down and they write about what they know. About the beast and the keyboard. About playing God and being tired. About the sex and the drugs that you never, ever get. About cadence, and floating opposites and latinate reversals and repetition and the endless shadow-boxing with your own ego. And the truth, and how to swing it so it doesn't chop your head off.

It's not an accident they're both about writing AND politics. On the streets of DC - a town where, for some reason, hope never dies - they write their truth on the streets, bore it into the concrete and the marble, the words of great men with even better script writers. And on a minor street off the mall, it says "Those who write history in words often forget history is MADE with words". Not all political entities are writers. But almost all wirters are political. We cling to it, because we recognise the bullshit, and the beast. Especially these days, when politicians tell stories, each inventing their own fairytale where they are the hero, six-foot-six of VIn Diesel-shaped tungsten with a dagger pointed at the heart of whatever you hate the most.

Tony Abbot wernt on TV tonight and told a story with big red arrows, invading Australia. Your country, he said, was under threat from Big Red Arrows. From Iraq and Iran and other bad places. What he means is he wants to put children in prison camps where there's no running water and no UN oversight because it gives him an erection the size of Kirribilli House - and he thinks it will also give him the House. The marthon running and the sex jokes didn't make everyone swoon for him enough, he wasn't everyone's favourite Action Hero, so he decided to get some bad guys to blow up while he's covered in Baby Oil and saying "Yippee-Kai-Yay". There weren't any real bad guys so he found some starving people with funny faces and no rights and cast them instead.

Transmet can sometimes be seen as being too over the top, too grand guignol to get at the truth. And sometimes, it's nothing but the truth, pure truth, wisdom from the goddamn mountain. There are people out there who will kill anyone they can to make you vote for them, and jerk off at the very thought of it. Beware of them. Do not accept their candy, or their lies.

But know this: they do fear the truth. Speak it, write it, tell it. In whatever form that takes. Because good writing makes people feel awesome, and no longer afraid. And when they're not afraid, they're much harder to fuck with.

I'm Not John Clarke

I just wish I was.

Miss Gillard, how does it feel to be the first female Prime Minister of Australia?

Can I just stop you there, Brian?

Sure.

I'm not just the first female Prime Minister of Australia.

No?

No, Brian. No. No, what I am, Brian, is the first red-haired female Prime Minister of Australia.

Is that important?

Well the media seem to think so.

Why's that?

Well, you know what they say about redheads, Brian.

What do they say?

Well, Brian, you know. They say...well, they say we're firebands, don't they?

Are you a firebrand?

Oh by crikey I am, Brian, yes. Absolutely.

What's a firebrand?

Well, a firebrand, Brian, your basic firebrand, is well, a firebrand is someone who is full of fire Brian.

Fire?

Fire, Brian, my word yes. If you were to try and tell a firebrand, Brian.

Tell them what?

Tell them anything. If you try to tell a firebrand, well...

Well what?

Well, well, then, you'd, you'd better watch out, Brian.

For the fire?

For the fire.

Why was Kevin Rudd ousted from the leadership?

Well, he couldn't be told, Brian.

And you can?

Well, we believe in making government open again to consultation and communication.

But with you still being a firebrand?

Of course.

Hmm. Originally you said you didn't want the leadership.

Yes, Brian, but I had a long consultation with certain key figures in the Labour party.

And what did that say?

They said they wanted me to be leader of the Labour party.

And what did you say?

I said yes, Brian.

And what was your first actions as the leader?

Well, I had to the fix the mining tax problem, of course.

And did you consult with people on that?

Absolutely, Brian. Of course we did.

Whom did you consult with?

Mostly the mining companies.

And what did they say?

They said could they pretty please have a much smaller mining tax.

And what did you say?

I said yes, Brian.

Any other big announcements?

Well, yes, yes, I did make a point that I was taking a hard stance against gay marriage, too.

Did you consult anyone about that?

Yes, yes, of course we did.

Whom did you consult?

The Australian Christian Lobby.

And what did they say?

They said would I like to win the next election

And what did you say?

I said yes, Brian.

Why was Kevin Rudd ousted from the leadership again?

Because he wouldn't be told, Brian.

Anything else?

Well, of course, yes. There was also the issue that he'd gone soft on climate change.

Gone soft?

Yes.

How soft?

Extremely soft.

Extremely soft?

Oh my word yes. He was practically a liquid by the end of it. He was leaking all over the place.

He seemed pretty hard about the mining tax.

Yes, Brian but he was very soft on climate change.

Should he have been harder about climate change?

No, he should have been softer on the mining tax.

So he was hard in the wrong places?

Yes.

And soft in others?

Exactly.

And he couldn't be smoothed out?

No.

Why not?

Well, he couldn't be told, Brian.

Was he a firebrand?

Of course not.

Why not?

He didn't have red hair.

Why do we need the Sex Party?

Well, you could say it was because Fiona Patten is bringing intelligent and lively debate to the table, and the internet, what with the article on Gizmodo about the extremely terrifying things the Labour government is doing right now what with the imprisonment of innocent people for breaking no laws whatsoever.


Or you could just point to her general distrust of religion in government as the only possible alternative to Creationists hijacking queensland classrooms to tell children about Noah casting Protection From Dinosaurs, 15" Radius.

When Dungeons and Dragons makes more sense than your religion, your religion sucks.