Club Troppo

I’ve been relying on historian blogger Christopher Sheil to keep us all informed about any new shots in The History Wars. But he’s let me down, possibly too busy perfecting his own unique brand of black is the new white sophistry.

Instead I stumbled on the fact that a new “History Wars” skirmish has broken out by reading Christopher “Pudgy” Pearson’s column In the Weekend Oz. Pearson’s article deals with an earlier article in The Bulletin by Tasmanian historian Michael Connor, which renews the attack on Professor Henry Reynolds, whose “black armband” view of indigenous history has made him a favourite target of the reactionary right. Connor accuses Reynolds of confusing and exaggerating the influence of the international law doctrine of “terra nullius” (almost to the point of fabrication).

Pearson also asserts that another historian, Bain Attwood, has recently published a similar critique of Henry Reynolds’ account of the historical role of the “terra nullius” doctrine (unfortunately not apparently available online), and that Attwood has also debunked Reynolds’ claims about the benevolence of the nineteenth century British Colonial Office:

Attwood ultimately concludes that Reynolds’ juridical history is “simplistic” and says of its black-and-white oppositional account of humane Colonial Office v racist settlers that “most academic historians have rejected this argument”.

Now I don’t have enough background knowledge about these claims to take a position on them (or the time to acquire it), but I notice that there are several historians who occasionally visit the Troppo comment boxes (e.g. “Currency Lad”), and I’d be most interested in their observations.

One specific area of Michael Connor’s article where I do feel somewhat qualified to comment is his observations about the High Court’s alleged misunderstanding of the nature and origin of the “terra nullius” doctrine in its seminal 1992 Mabo decision. Connor claims:
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I have an investment in a little cashbox that raises finance to invest in biotechnology companies. It’s had a couple of successes (e.g. C3 and Starpharma) and I’m hopeful that some of it’s current investments will pay off in the future. I received an email alerting me to a new investment it has just made: Biotech Capital completes tenth investment taking 23% stake in Continence Control Systems:

The Board of BioTech Capital Ltd (ASX:BTC) is pleased to announce that it has finalised an investment of $2,000,000 into Continence Control Systems International Pty Ltd. An additional $1,000,000 was provided by other co-investors. CCS is a company formed to commercialise a new treatment for severe urinary incontinence, the involuntary loss of urine from the bladder.

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Yesterday I said I’d post about national politics if anything happened to change my tentative intention to vote Labor at the forthcoming federal election. But I didn’t expect that to happen within 24 hours.

Last Sunday I watched Laurie Oakes interview Health Minister Tony Abbott about apparent ALP plans to reform Australia’s health care system by “pooling” federal and state funds and using them more efficiently. Oakes appeared to demonstrate pretty effectively that Abbott was just engaging in a typical pre-election fear and misinformation campaign, by claiming that Labor was intending to vest control of health care in an “unelected, unaccountable, undemocratic body runs the system in the same way the national health service in Britain is administered.”

Manifestly that wasn’t what they were proposing at all. The Australian Health Reform Commission announced by Opposition Health Minister Julia Gillard was just intended as a transitional and investigatory body. However, Tony Abbott comprehensively botched his attack on Labor’s proposal. It’s actually even more iniquitous than Abbott suggested, but Abbott’s presentation successfully obscured that fact (at least for this armadillo). Fortunately Oakes himself, having had his little bit of fun at Abbott’s expense, has explained the real issue as he sees it in his column in this week’s Bulletin:
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I’ve added a couple more blogs to the Troppo blogroll: Ambit Gambit, a blog associated with Graham Young’s Online Opinion ezine (sorry Gianna), and Andjam. I’ll be keeping a very regular eye on Ambit Gambit, because I have a high regard for Graham Young’s qualities as a political writer and analyst.

I’ve also gone a bit further with the project to add descriptive tags to each of the blogroll links. I’m down to “i” so far. Hover your cursor over each link and have a read (if you use an Internet Explorer browser). The idea is to make the Troppo blogroll as comprehensive as I reasonably can, with accessible descriptions of other blogs so that new readers can (if they want) use our blogroll as a gateway, to help them decide whether a particular blog contains the sort of material they might want to bother reading.

This article by Peter Hartcher in the SMH and this one by Michael Costello in the Oz both seem to me to offer incisive analyses of the state of play for the forthcoming federal election. Both suggest Howard may have the inside running (though offering slightly differing rationales), despite opinion polls suggesting Labor is currently marginally in front.

I’ve made a mental resolution not to bother blogging about federal election issues or Iraq for the immediate future, because there’s so much coverage of both issues elsewhere, and I’ve said just about everything I think is worth saying (from my own viewpoint anyway). I’ll probably end up voting Labor, mostly because the local Coalition member Dave Tollner is one of the biggest dickheads I’ve ever come across. The Labor candidate Jim Davidson, on the other hand, is an impressive, experienced performer whom I know very well. The comparative quality of the local candidates isn’t a bad basis to cast your vote when you think (as I do) that there’s very little to distinguish the two parties themselves. Howard’s dishonesty and social divisiveness are big negatives for me, but he’ll retire soon anyway, and I’d be quite happy with Costello as PM. Similarly, Latham’s “troops out by Xmas” stance is a black mark against him as far as I’m concerned, but I doubt that it will irretrievably undermine the US/Australian alliance, and Latham seems to be trying to carve out some wriggle room anyway. Otherwise, both parties offer only marginally different recipes from the neoliberal cookbook.

As the seat I live in (Solomon) is the most marginal in Australia, my voting decision carries more practical weight than most. I’ll post if anything happens to change my voting intention. I’d also be interested in hearing how other Territorians see things stacking up in Solomon.

I don’t know whether others have noticed it, but there seems to be a developing meme on the conservative side of politics lamenting the “decline of manners”, musing about its causes and what might be done about it. Of course, it might in part be a deliberate Tory response to Mark Latham’s ‘symbolic’ issue nonsense (reading to kids etc), but maybe there’s more to it. Then again, maybe there’s not.

The first I noticed of the emerging manners meme was this article published in the wake of the killing of cricketer David Hookes. It quoted John Howard (of all people):

John Howard said some members of Australian society had become too quick to resort to violence and people now felt less safe in public places than in the past. “Part of the problem is that there has been a breakdown in manners and courtesy,” Mr Howard told Radio 2GB.

“If you overlook the ordinary courtesies, that leads to an indifference to people’s wellbeing over time. I think if we were a more civil, polite country then we would have, in some cases, a little less violence.”

Then, two or three weeks ago, the Weekend Oz magazine published a feature by Shelley Gare on the ‘decline of manners’. It also quoted John Howard, this time suggesting that manners might be improved if more Australian kids worked at Maccas. Presumably they’d at least be taught to say “Have a nice day“!!!

Then, a little later, I turned on the Nine Network Morning program one day, and stumbled on a panel discussion about the ‘decline of manners’. It included RWDB bovver boy ‘intellectual’ journalist Andrew Bolt, who opined that the decline of civility might have something to do with ‘reality’ TV shows like Survivor and Big Brother, where contestants were ruthlessly ejected by popular vote, being treated as competitors and disposable commodities rather than real people with feelings.

Of course, what Bolt conveniently omitted was the fact that this competitive ethos of commodification of people is exactly what he and his neoliberal ilk have deliberately fostered for the last 20 years or so. The same bare-faced hypocrisy is evident in the response of the ‘evil’ Peter Saunders (the Centre for Independent Studies one), who was quoted in Gare’s feature and in the earlier SMH story):
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Shock! Horror! Mary-Kate has anorexia. But have a look for yourself. I reckon Ashley’s even skinnier. I blame that prick Morgan Spurlock. These girls need to get biggest mobs of Maccas into them without delay.

It’s taken me a while to identify a sufficiently worthy winner of the Blog Bile Award. But Paul from Paul and Carl’s Daily Diatribe has come up with this little beauty about a German-made doco on “the horrors of America’s brutal treatment of prisoners and heartless war crimes”. It’s a quality entry. Here’s a sample:

It’s funny how the sausage eaters seem to have to outdo everyone else in hysterical politcal extremism; in the thirties, there were no shortage of rabid propagandists, happy to portray the swinish Bolsheviks and their fellow travellers the evil Jews as the enemies of all that is wholesome, and create a right-wing state that made the others look like rank amateurs.

Now the tofu-wurst munching vegan near-beer quaffing square-heads seem determined to out-polemicise the likes of Michael Moore in portraying the USA as the source of all evil in the world, and to show up those effete Swedes and the dillatente French as mere hairy-arsed boys when it comes to being a nation of deranged far-left dingbats.

Congratulations Paul, and keep up the great work.

Strolling along the foreshore near Rapid Creek with “B” last evening. A mob of mildly agitated Aboriginal women approaches. One of them comes up to Jenny. “Dat thing dangerous, you know,” she says, gesturing towards the gleaming new high-tech aluminium automated ablution facility just installed by the Council near the Beachfront Hotel. It replaces the decrepit, dirty old brick dunny block that cost a fortune to clean and maintain. The new one is said to be self-maintaining. The doors fly open after 10 minutes use, and a disembodied android voice intones “Warning! Leave the cubicle immediately!” Then it cleans itself with jets of high pressure water and hot air.

“Us Aboriginal people can’t use dat thing, you know. Dat thing dangerous.”

Jenny looks bemused and says nothing. I can’t help myself. “I know what you mean. But I reckon that thing’s a tardis. You might be able to time travel in it.” Baffled, the woman shakes her head sadly and wanders off.

“Why did she choose me, I wonder?,” Jen muses as we stroll on across Rapid Creek footbridge. “Because you look like the sort of person who would sympathise with her concerns. I reckon that thing’s dangerous too. It freaks me out. I wouldn’t use it. I might go in to check it out, but I certainly wouldn’t have a shit in there.” Jen says “I wouldn’t even go in and check it out“.

On the other side of the creek two young policemen on bicycles are busy moving along the remaining members of the Aboriginal group camping there, shooing them back across the bridge towards the lurking tardis. Enlightenment slowly dawns. Too frightened to use the new loo, they’ve been crapping on the lawns instead, and a good burgher has complained. But Aboriginal people have always camped there, under the casuarina trees beside the creek. It’s their place. I hope the tardis time travels somewhere else, and they put back the old dirty dunnies.

Update - This morning I saw the same mob of women again, while on my morning jog. They were carefully examining the sister tardis down near Nightcliff jetty. By the time I passed there again on my return leg, they’d decided to time travel after all. Four of them stepped gingerly together into the tardis and allowed the door to slide shut silently behind them. One woman, the youngest, waited outside nervously in case rescue was needed. There’s safety in numbers. I didn’t wait to see if they finished their business inside ten minutes.

While idly traversing the blogs just now in a successful attempt to find an excuse (almost any excuse) to escape from exam marking for a while, I came across a post by Steve Edwards fulminating against the depravity of producers of a UK ‘reality’ TV show called There’s Something About Miriam, where a group of blokes were tricked into trying to crack onto a stunning-looking pre-operative transsexual by the name of Miriam.

I can’t say I share Steve’s reaction. As far as I’m concerned, anyone crass and greedy enough to participate in a ‘reality’ TV show deserves just about whatever they get. As it turned out, though, these blokes ended up doing very nicely indeed. Apparently they immediately consulted a lawyer after discovering that they’d unknowingly been groping a bloke, a gambit that apparently had the intended effect:
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