Recognition where it's due

A great article by Evan Morgan in today's Bulletin about local legend Brian Doolan - it affords him the position and space that he deserves and most importantly, it affords him the respect as an artist that he seems to have no trouble attracting in southern Europe but that has been a long time coming at home.

Source:  The Townsville Bulletin

Billy says it all really:

"The pride that came out of me when the respect was shown from halfway across the world ... I haven't experienced a lot of it here in Australia and to get it over there was amazing.

That my friends is one hell of an indictment of Townsville!!

And what a man - his plan to change a few Palm Island kids lives and world view by taking then with him on his next trip to Italy is fantastic and, I reckon, right on the money - I dearly hope it can be made to happen.

All-in-all, a much better effort than The Bulletin's last attempt to write about the man!  Worth a read.

Worth a read

A couple of good links found today:

• Good on him:   School chaplains facing High Court fight.  A guy from Toowoomba has launched High Court challenge because he opposes the Commonwealth funding of chaplains in state schools.  But check out the story's student flood victims angle - I wonder how many school Chaplin's are qualified trauma counsellors?

• 22 Minutes at Helidon on Monday, January 10: Amazing pictures at the Courier mail showing how fast the floodwater's rose at Helidon here

• And finally, Murdoch link to hacking fallout deepens - just because I love stories that shine a light on Murdoch's ongoing abuse of power and because you won't see it reported in The Bulletin

Young Australians changing the world - with skateboards

I first got wind of this story via Truthdig -

... As soon as Australian skateboarders Oliver Percovich and Sharna Nolan dropped their boards in Kabul in 2007, they were surrounded by the eager faces of children of all ages who wanted to be shown how to skate. Stretching out the three boards they had brought with them, they developed a small skate school...

The founders’ success with their first students prompted them to think bigger: by bringing more boards back to Kabul and establishing an indoor skateboarding venue, they would be able to teach many more youth, and also be able to provide older girls with a private facility to continue skateboarding.

Check out skateistan.org and (coming soon to the Sundance Film Festival) the movie:



Following on from the theme developed in a previous post, the basis of their intervention is nothing new (in essence a youth development model), but goddamn it's a good one.  And the Doco don't look as if it'll be 'arf bad either.

All power to them, I reckon!  Fantastic stuff!

Update:  My 15-year old just nonchalantly told me that she's known of this mob for a year or two!!  Doh!

Could Wikileaks take us here? (or are we already there)

Found this good post by  Johan Lagerkvist at onlineopinion.com.au* discussing the implications of how the powerful might responds to Wikileaks, including this quote

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 protest

Scary!  Maybe the proponents of the Julian Assange Statue on Magnetic Island will need to re-think their personal security!

* Originally posted on YaleGlobal Online. Copyright © 2010, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, Yale University

Of Magnetic Island, Julian Assange and a Statue

Further to my earlier posts about Wikileaks, Magnetic Times has a great piece on Julian Assange's connection to the Island.  The comments that follow are worth a read too.

I wonder what would happen if someone set-up a facebook donations page for a statue of Julian Assange to be erected on Maggie Island ...? 

I'd probably contribute - after all, he's the only man who I can think of who has taken on the prevailing power-structures on a truly global scale - and won, I suspect!

Also worth a look - Planet Irf's regularly updated WikiLeaks hysteria ... post.

Come on in. Take a seat at the Cabinet table. Let’s talk water.

Regular contributor Dee writes:

Just before the QR Float takes over the media completely.

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.

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.

Flying free, making a racket and crapping all over Townsville's "opinion makers"

The Towsville blogosphere is exploding and The Townsville Bulletin and a few other of Townsville's high-and-mighty should be afraid - VERY afraid!!

Check out The Magpie's Nest:

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.

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

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.

Or better still, just get on his email list at townsvillemagpie@gmail.com

Welcome to the blogosphere Magpie - I'm looking forward to this!

Bligh and Fraser sell Port of Brisbane … to themselves

Regular contributor, Dee, prompted me to cross-post this piece from John Quiggin

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

As 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 Development

Note: 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.

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 day

An Indigenous woman speaks out

The following posted by Ken Parish at Club Troppo first caught my attention because it mentioned a common old firend - when I saw Bob Durnan's name I knew the piece would be worth reading.  Turns out it is a must read and is cross-posted in full below:

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.

Charges must be laid after the findings of Inquest into Mulrunji's death

In case you haven't seen it, Monique Bond has some spot-on suggestions after reading Coroner Brian Hine’s findings.  More here

Credit where it’s due

Regular readers of this blog will well know the problem I have with how The Townsville Bulletin portrays the youth crime issue and, in the process, young people generally.

But today they are running an excellent piece by Glenn Dawes, Assoc. Prof., Sociology and Criminology at JCU – I recommend it.

Congratulations to the Bulletin for publishing a balanced perspective on the issue. The big question now is whether they actually absorb any of the article and adopt a similarly balanced approach to their reporting of youth crime on the front pages in the future.

A coincidence or sinchronicity?

A got this through a feed from BoingBoing just after I'd read an item from Peter Martin about the PM's announcement of a 25% increase in tax on fags this morning:

Worth a read #7

- I'd love to hear Andrew Bolt explain the graphic on the left (click to enlarge) from "State of the Climate Global Analysis March 2010" by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center

-  Does Target know something about about the Rudd Government's income management scheme that the rest of us don't? From NorthCoastVoices

-  "Did the Tampa Stop Beazley Becoming PM?" by Andrew Leigh

-  "Nearly 300 allegations of sexual abuse have been substantiated by church investigations since 1996, ... perpetrated by approximately 100 priests... Just one priest has been defrocked as a result". And that's just Victoria they're talking about!! From The Age

-  See also: Seven key facts about the Vatican, the Pope and child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy by Dr Ben Mathews,  Associate Professor in Law, QUT in OnLineOpinion
-  Other forms of corruption - The Goldman Sachs Phenomenon by Eric J. Fry at TheDailyReckoning

-  And in a similar vein ... from Gary Sauer-Thompson at Public Opinion

In his The Non-Existent Hand in the London Review of Books Joseph Stiglitz says that he shares the view that most of the blame for the crisis should reside with those in the financial markets, who did such a poor job both in allocating capital and in managing risk (their key responsibilities), a considerable portion of it lies with the economics profession.

He adds:

The notion economists pushed – that markets are efficient and self-adjusting – gave comfort to regulators like Alan Greenspan, who didn’t believe in regulation in the first place.

They provided support for the movement which stripped away the regulations that had provided the basis of financial stability in the decades after the Great Depression; and they gave justification to those... Treasury secretaries under Clinton, who opposed doing anything about derivatives...

We should be clear about this: economic theory never provided much support for these free-market views. Theories of imperfect and asymmetric information in markets had undermined every one of the ‘efficient market’ doctrines, even before they became fashionable in the Reagan-Thatcher era.

He adds that the present crisis should lay to rest any belief in ‘rational’ markets. The irrationalities evident in mortgage markets, in securitisation, in derivatives and in banking are mind-boggling; our supposed financial wizards have exhibited behaviour which, to use the vernacular, seemed ‘stupid’ even at the time.

Worth a read #6

From Guest Contributor, MB who says her favourite newspaper headline was when Lord Nuffield, founder of Morris Minor Rootes Group died, the headline was: "Lord Rootes Dead."

Here are some headlines from the British tabloids.

• Man Kills Self Before Shooting Wife and Daughter
• Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
• Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers
• Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over
• Miners Refuse to Work after Death
• Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant
• War Dims Hope for Peace
• If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile ........
• Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
• Enfield ( London ) Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide
• Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges
• Man Struck By Lightning: Faces Battery Charge
• New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group
• Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft
• Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half Chainsaw Massacre!
• Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors
• Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead

Does Lindy Nelson-Carr know who she's dealing with

"When a government committee wants to conduct an enquiry based on a report, it is usually wise to do some digging into the source of that report. One major thing to watch out for is the credibility of the report’s author/s and if they happen to be dubious then you have a problem before you even start. It should be especially alarming, if the dubious source is a group of evangelists, anti-drug nutters, religious right fundamentalists, Drug Free Australia ..."

Our own Lindy Nelson-Carr Chairs the Social Development Committee of Parliament - a quaint tradition designed to keep backbenchers busy and which it seems is conducting an inquiry into Addressing Cannabis-Related Harm  that ticks all of these boxes.  This post by Terry Wright in the The Australian Heroin Diaries is a brilliant unpicking of Drug Free Australia and the report that Lindy's Committee is basing its enquiry on.

It got me doing a bit of my own digging about DFA - I didn't even know there were people still around (like DFA Director John Barich) that belong to the National Civic Council !!! See

Worth a read #4

You might be interested:

• "The fact that people can imagine catastrophe doesn't mean they want to think about it, or do what's necessary to address it when that requires importing a dose of the pain into the present." from Catastrophe thinking by Ezra Klein at the Washington Post



• Piers Akerman has been testing his vast capacity for self-parody. from John Richardson on YourDemocracy



• Murdoch and Google News from Stephen King in CoreEconomics



• Amateur hour in non-Labor parties by Scott Presser and The Three Horsemen of the Global Apocalypse by Dan Denning.  Both at On Line Opinion






• The little reported Labor on track to increase majority by Mark Metherell at The Age.  Also this (never-to-be-seen in the Murdoch press) just in from Pollytics.com



• Property and the Big Four Australian Banks by Greg Canavan at The Daily Reckoning



• Imagine that in 2004 you were a teenager living on Palm Island from Surely this is a dream become a nightmare by Tony Koch in yesterday's Oz - a brilliant summation of the issue.  Also see this page on tony-koch.com.  Excellent stuff



• If you were interested in the Bully's article today, JCU expert finds new human link, there's more here from Wired Science



• A scary thought piece:  Is America ‘Yearning for Fascism’? by Chris Hedges at Truth Dig



• 
  
  Via Your New Reality - Incredible. 'Condition 1' weather in Antarctica :

How the Corporations Broke Ralph Nader and America (and Australia), Too

I met Ralph Nader briefly in the 70’s when I helped organise one leg of his Australian tour. He struck me as a good man.

So I was interested to read How the Corporations Broke Ralph Nader and America, Too by Chris Hedges in TruthDig.com about the intentional marginalisation of Nader by corporate America.

Among other things, I was fascinated by the account of how the big end of town copied Nader’s own tactics, establishing “lavishly funded think tanks and conservative institutes to churn out ideological tracts that attacked government regulation and environmental protection … and … organizations to monitor and pressure the media to report favourably on issues that furthered corporate interests…”

Which got me to thinking about the plethora of right-wing think tanks established and funded by corporate Australia in recent decades to represent their interests over all others.

Judging by the daily column inches and airspace given over to the likes of the Australian Business Foundation, the Brisbane Institute, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, the Centre for Independent Studies, the HR Nicholls Society, the Institute of Public Affairs, the Lowy Institute, the Menzies Research Centre, and the Sydney Institute (to name a few) it is clear that the same tactic is a work here. Supported so enthusiastically by big media of course.

Other suggested reading:

• Think tanks, oil money and black ops by Clive Hamilton at the ABC’s The Drum
• The Intellectual Sorcery of Think Tanks by Sharon Beder
• Think tanks in the 1990s  by Georgina Murray and Douglas Pacheco

Best headline of the week - so far

Well, four best headlines actually.  They all relate to the same story and all are a good chuckle until you read the last one and find out what happened to the killer wombat:

• Flowerdale man attacked by wombat - from The Age
• Wombat mauls camper - from ABC Online 
• Wombat assaults 60-year-old man outside his caravan - from News.com.au 
• Man-mauling wombat felled by axe

Perfect timing

Easter Sunday - perfect timing for this announcement of an evolutionary discovery!!

Worth a read #3

Bits and pieces I liked this week:

• The QLD Coppers get it right for once while the AFP look after their own
• Would you invest your heard-earned in the proposed KISS CoffeeHouse Melbourne.  Can you imagine what the coffee would be like?!
• Now this is the sort of coffee story I like: Why Dark Coffee Is Easier on Your Stomach
• I want one:  A British James Bond fan fed up with being tailgated has invented the ultimate revenge gadget - a moped that fires 5m flames.
• I want a pair of these too: Metal Detector Sandals – kick back and earn a fortune
• Get your cameras out:  Carbon cutting film comp for Magnetic
• From one of my favourite blogs, Pure Poison:  Why are voters so stupid