Following The Magpie's move to the blogosphere, Townsville now has another new blog on the scene.
This reminded me of a couple of stories from when I was a youth worker many years ago in the then outer southern suburbs of Adelaide.
Would you donate $5 to help build a statue of Julian Assange on Magnetic Island?
It can be foreshadowed that governments will craft laws that target citizen-journalist activities. Citizens’ unauthorised storing of leaked material could be made illegal. Another potential outcome could be state eavesdropping, monitoring and storing information on a broader spectrum of the citizenry than hitherto possible.Chilling - especially when you've just read this story from Stephen Martin at The Mirror:
Boy of 12 hauled out of class by police over David Cameron Facebook protestScary! Maybe the proponents of the Julian Assange Statue on Magnetic Island will need to re-think their personal security!
"Mr Jones said he had now won the trifecta he was the first of the 2010 MP intake to be mentioned, to be warned, and to be ejected" Martin RasiniAnd just like all class clowns, he seems to be proud of his achievements!!
Just before the QR Float takes over the media completely.Patrick Lion's Courier Mail post is well worth a read: Come on in. Take a seat at the Cabinet table. Let’s talk water.
Patrick Lion caught my imagination today.
I guess it won't be too long before there are many vacant seats at the ALP Cabinet table, however, I'd put a small wager there is now, and will be in the future, standing room only with the many advisers providing high quality advice by way of large numbers of options.
They have wound up the mis-allocation of taxpayer's funds to new levels.
What, The Magpie Finished?! FARK NO!
The old bird has simply moved to a new nest in the blogosphere, a universe where both you readers can move your lips while you peruse his regular load of old cobblers, or `column’ as it is known in some circles. In this smarty pants techno world, it’s now officially a `blog’, with regular `posts’ and guess what? You readers – yes, both of you – can have a say too. Just stick the tongue out of the corner of your mouth, crinkle the brow in concentration and – hey, knock yourself out, use two fingers if you like - tap out a message in the comment area provided. It will be published if it gets past the battalion of lawyers on alert for legal naughtiness.I know that The 'pie has been around the town a lot longer than I, has much better connections, knows a lot more about racing and punting and front-bar stuff and has a bit more time on his hands that I do - so expect to see his scoops regularly cross posted here.
The Magpie blog is also a work in progress, and will expand as the weeks go by with new links to some very interesting places. If you like, The Magpie will give you an email alert whenever he posts a new load of drivel, which will be at least every week, possibly more often. Just email him requesting same at townsvillemagpie@gmail.com
Bligh and Fraser sell Port of Brisbane … to themselves
According to the Brisbane Times, the Bligh government has just sold the Port of Brisbane to a consortium led by the Queensland Investment Corporation. This must have been a tough negotiation, given that the QIC website states
I also love one of his tags for the piece - "bonehead stupidity". It should be well worth following the comments on John's page during the dayAs a Queensland GOC, QIC’s shareholding Ministers are the Honourable Anna Bligh MP, Premier and Minister for the Arts, and the Honourable Andrew Fraser MP, Treasurer and Minister for Employment and Economic DevelopmentNote: As with the QR sale, it looks as if the government has retained about $1.3 billion of debt in the Port of Brisbane Corporation, which now has no assets, so the net proceeds will be less than half the announced price of $2.3 billion.
Alumni Association - Hon John Howard, former Prime Minister – Book Launch - Lazarus Rising
Date: Wednesday 17 November 2010
Time: Auditorium opens at 5.30pm
Location: Sir Geroge Kneipp Auditorium (Building DA026), JCU Douglas Campus, Angus Smith Drive, Douglas, TOWNSVILLE, Australia
Summary: JCU Alumni in association with Mary Who? Bookshop presents The Hon J Howard, former Prime Minister of Australia in conversation with Richard Lane and also launching his autobiography Lazarus Rising.
John Howard spent decades under media scrutiny, and while his credentials as a political leader, devoted family man and sports tragic are beyond dispute, in this autobiography he reveals much more about himself. In Lazarus Rising.
Howard traces his personal and political journey, from childhood in the post-World War II era through to the present day, painting a fascinating picture of a changing Australia.
We see the youngster who had to overcome serious deafness and who latched onto the family passion for current affairs and politics. From school debating, to a legal career, to the Liberal Party and life with Janette, it all seemed such a natural progression. Yet no one would say that Howard had it easy; not when his own colleagues sidelined him ... twice.
An economic radical and social conservative, John Howard's ideology united many Australians and divided just as many others. Lazarus Rising takes us through the life and motivations of John Howard and through the forces that have changed and shaped both him and the country he led for 11 years.And I just can wait to see how The Bully creams itself when they get the call for a 1-on-1 interview with the old war-
Lazarus Rising will be on sale afterwards and Mr Howard will be pleased to sign copies.
Presented by: JCU Alumni, Mary Who? Bookshop
Cost: No charge
Registration: Please register online at http://alumni.jcu.edu.au/netcommunity/JohnHowardTnsv
Contact: Everyone welcome. For further information please contact Viv Sonntag, Email: Viv.Sonntag@jcu.edu.au, Tel: (07) 4042 1850.
Bligh's local representatives are getting desperate by spamming the community far and wide.I for one am tempted to go just to see how many turn up (my bet is 18 not including the organisers) ....
The community could show their appreciation by sending a message to:
The community could picket this function.
- thuringowa@parliament.qld.gov.au
- mundingburra@parliament.qld.gov.au
- townsville@parliament.qld.gov.au
Cheers,
Slim
In exciting news today, a horse won the Melbourne Cup horse race. This horse travelled around the track at Flemington slightly faster than the other horses.And this amazing story gets replayed every year!!
Around the nation, some people won money because they bet on the winning horse. Other people lost money, because they bet on a horse that didn't win.
Sports reporters broke out the special occasion hyperbole, reminding their viewers and listeners that if one of the horses happened to win, it would be the most tremendously exciting and fantastic thing that had ever happened in their lives, and that they would be telling future generations about the glorious win of a specific horse in the 2005 version of an annual race, for all eternity. Because it would be that astonishing.
"Dad, dad," children of the future would say, "what happened in the 2005 Melbourne Cup horse race?"
And fathers would reply, "Children, children, don't you remember what happened? I tell you this exciting story every night!"
And the children would cry, "We know dad, but please tell it again because we love it so."
And fathers would tell the story. It was 3pm on 1st November 2005, and there were about twenty horses lined up at the start of a racetrack in Flemington, Melbourne. They ran around the track. One horse won by taking less time to do this than the other horses. One horse came second, one came third and so on. And there was much rejoicing/weeping, depending on which horse the various people had backed. And this went on for a few days until everyone remembered that for the rest of the year they don't give a shit about horse racing.
It was truly extraordinary.
Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) My question is to the Prime Minster. I refer the Prime Minister to the decision to locate onshore detention centres at Woodside in the Adelaide Hills and Northam in Western Australia. Will the Prime Minister rule out all other military facilities as onshore detention facilities?Set-up by Crissy Pyne I'd say!! Or maybe the Big Ewe had been picking-up a groundswell of local fear about Lavarack Barracks being converted into a detention centre???
Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) I thank the member for his question. I would refer the member to the statement and information that the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship and I released at the time that we announced these new detention facilities and also the arrangements for children. These are the government’s plans for detention. We wanted to be transparent about a long-term strategy to undercut the fearmongering about other sites that had been going on around Australia. If the member truly wants to inform himself about this, all of the information he requires was publicly available and transparent on the day we made the statement (my emphasis)
An Indigenous woman speaks out
Bob Durnan is an old ALP colleague who has worked in Indigenous communities in central Australia for the best part of 30 years. Like me, he has witnessed the tragic deterioration of living conditions in many if not most remote communities and town camps in the Northern Territory over that period of time. As such Bob is a strong supporter of many aspects of the Howard government-initiated NT Intervention, especially the income management system.
Bob has just emailed me a copy of what I think is a very important speech delivered to the Australian Alliance of Lawyers last Friday in Alice Springs by Bess Price, a senior Warlpiri woman from Yuendumu.
The background is the release last week of the Bath Report into children’s services in the NT, which revealed that not much had improved in that area since the “Little Children Are Sacred” report which triggered the Intervention in 2007. NT Minister Kon Vatskalis said last week:
“The communities out there are in total collapse. There is a crisis in the communities,” Mr Vatskalis said.
“Yesterday, I was thinking, I said where is the person like Martin Luther King to come out and say ‘I’ve got a dream?’, because I can’t see anybody in the Indigenous community at the moment coming out and saying ‘I’ve got a dream’ and lead the communities. There is no leadership.”
Ms Price is certainly an Indigenous leader whose voice needs to be heard more widely.
My mother and father were born in the desert. They lived their childhood out of contact with whitefellas. They were terrified when they first saw a whitefella. They taught me the Old Law that our people lived by. That Law worked when we were living in tiny family groups taking everything that we needed from the desert. It is Sacred Law. There was strong Law for sacred business. If the sacred Law was broken both men and women could be killed. There was strong Law for who we could marry. Men had the power of life and death over their wives. Young girls were forced into marriage. Men too had no choice in who they married. There was no law for property except that everything must be shared. There was no law for money because we didn’t have any. There was no law for houses, cars, grog, petrol or drugs – we didn’t have any except for bush tobacco which was shared like everything else we had. The only way to punish was physically, by beating or killing the law breaker. They couldn’t be fined, we had no money or wealth to take. They couldn’t be locked up, we had no jails.
Everybody knew what they had to do to make sure that everybody survived. We all knew how to make a living from our country. We lived from day to day. Everybody was taught to fight. We only had our family to defend us. We had no army, no police, no courts. Everybody needed to know how to use a weapon, women and men both learned to fight and knew they would have to do that sometime. We also believe that our Law Man can make magic, they can heal the sick but they can also make people sick and die by magic. That is what all my people believe. We kept the peace by fear of violence and magic.
Now we live in a world ruled by a new law that is not sacred, that doesn’t accept that magic exists. Now we are all equal citizens with human rights. Now we have property, houses, cars, grog, drugs, pornography. Now we live off welfare, other people’s money or we need to get a whitefella education and get a job. We still share everything and this keeps us poor. We can’t say ‘no’ to our family even when we know they are drinkers and gamblers and will waste our money or destroy themselves with it. Now too many of our men still think they have the power of life and death over their wives. My people think all property should be shared and we think whitefellas are just greedy and stingy. We don’t plan for the future, we don’t budget or invest – we share and consume. All this has happened too quickly.
The Bath report on the failure of child protection in the NT tells us that our kids live in a chaotic world where they are at terrible risk. My community of Yuendumu has been torn apart by feuding. These problems show us that government has failed but is also shows us that Aboriginal Law has failed too. Aboriginal organisations have failed as well. Aboriginal politics that focused on the ‘Stolen Generation’ and ‘Deaths in Custody’ also failed. Aboriginal politicians forgot about our women and kids, forgot about the violence on the remote communities, forgot about the problems we are causing for ourselves. We can’t just keep blaming the government without taking our share of the blame. That is the only way we can find our own way out of these problems.
Our old Law worked really well in the old days but it was not about human rights. It was about unconditional loyalty to kin, to family and following the sacred Law. It was about capital and physical punishment. There were wise old people who tried to make sure that there was justice. But they are all dying now. Those like my own parents who were born and grew up in the bush, are all getting very old and passing away. But even they could not stop the grog and the violence that came from the new world we were living in. There is nothing in our old Law that helps us deal with grog and drugs. All these new things that whitefellas brought in we have no law for. But we still respect our ancestors and we still want to keep our culture. The Two Laws, whitefella and blackfella, are based on opposing principles. My people are confused. If they go the blackfella way they break whitefella law, if they go whitefella way they break blackfella law. Our young men are caught in the middle, they are still initiated into the old Law but they live in a world run by the new law, that’s why they fill up the jails.
Con Vaskalis is right when he says that we don’t have effective leadership. We have wonderful old people who know the old Law but are confused and worried by the new. They are truly wise when they have real authority, when they are in small, family based communities away from towns. They are ignored by the drinkers and the young people who are rushing to take the benefits of the whitefella way without learning whitefella law. Too many don’t know either law now. We have Aboriginal people who speak out all the time but don’t live in the communities and don’t speak an Aboriginal language – who don’t have any idea what life is like for my people. We have Aboriginal people who others call leaders who we know are only looking after their own families, their own interests and not those of the whole community. We have very good people who want to do the right thing but are too worried and confused and who are continually grieving over the deaths of their loved ones.
We have white radicals and NGO’s with their own agendas who want to use us like political footballs. When we women talk out about our problems they either ignore us or tell the world that we are liars and trouble makers. Some of my people who carry on about human rights and attack governments every time they try to do anything new run away from their own kin and communities when there is trouble. They never find it hard to find a gullible human rights lawyer to back them up in public but they don’t do anything in their own communities to make things better for their own people.
Too many lawyers are only interested in the rights of the perpetrators. Because they are worried about racism and they don’t like a particular government they will do what ever they can to make sure that murderers and rapists and child abusers are protected from the new law. They will only advocate acknowledging traditional law when they think it will work better for their clients, the perpetrators. But they don’t know how the old Law worked. They never worry about the victims who are also Aboriginal and victims of racism, who have had their basic human rights ignored and trampled on by members of their own communities, their own families. It seems to us that human rights lawyers only worry about the black victims when the perpetrators are white. It is not somehow more acceptable to be raped, abused and murdered when the one doing it to you has the same colour skin.
Our problem is that we want to keep our culture. We want to respect our ancestors and their Law but we also want to be equal citizens and we want human rights. We can’t do that without changing our Law. But we need to change it ourselves, others can’t do that for us. Only we can solve our own problems and we will do it in our own way. But we really need the support of governments and our fellow citizens. You need to listen to the voices that are usually drowned out by the strong, the noisy and the powerful. You need to find a way to listen to those who don’t speak English, who are the most marginalised and victimised in our own communities. You need to listen to our own women and young people, the ones who don’t have a voice under the old Law. If you really want us to have human rights then you have to find ways to protect the victims of black crime as well as white crime.
Dale Last moved his Mayoral campaign up a notch today just as it looks as if Lez will have to do a humiliating backflip on water rates.
