Author Archives: Paul Watson

Isolated and angry?

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“Isolated and angry” an apt descriptor of Far South Sydney’s [pen]insular white trash? Err, no it actually refers to residents of geographical middle Sydney.

Of course, The Australian‘s headline is meant to refer to cultural, rather than geographical isolation. But other than in respect of skin colour, how different are the residents of the two Federal electorates of Cook (which takes in Cronulla) and Watson (which takes in Lakemba)?

Academic James Jupp seems to think that they are strongly differentiated by levels of education, and therefore employment and income:

“The Lebanese have been left behind compared with other groups such as the Chinese, Vietnamese, Greeks and Jews,” says James Jupp, director of the Centre for Immigration & Multicultural Studies at the Australian National University. “Their level of education and therefore their level of employment and employability are lower than average … they are still in the classical ghetto situation. So there is a lot of resentment there: they haven’t done terribly well and they feel that they are not being treated like Australians and that they are being picked on.” (same URL)

What made Cronulla different was that those taking part were much better off, better educated and from more respectable homes than the miners who enforced White Australia more than a century ago.

To me, the 5000 or so white pride rioters on Sunday didn’t look like they had too many, if any, university degrees between them. And sure enough, the respective proportions of adults with post-secondary education aren’t strongly differentiated (the figure for Watson is 36%, which is about the national average, while Cook’s figure of 45% is left in the dust by the electorates of Melbourne (51% – but with a higher unemployment rate than that of Watson, BTW) and Sydney (60%).

So the residents of Cronulla are slightly more educated than those of Lakemba. What Jupp fails to account for is where this extra education was hiding on Sunday. Also missing from Jupp’s analysis is that the economic success of the “Chinese, Vietnamese, Greeks and Jews” compared to the Lebanese must logically also be observed in respect of Sydney’s Anglo-Celts (to use home ownership and tertiary education rates as two concrete measures here).

Terror arrests ¢â¬â a hypothetical

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Suppose you’re at a rollicking pub. An obviously very-drunk man is staggering about, brandishing his car-keys. From what you can understand from his slurred speech, his intention is to shortly drive home.

Do you:

(a) try to gently talk him out of it? (even at the risk of fruitlessly consuming a good chunk of your social night)

(b) bundle him into a taxi? (some low-level physical wrangling will be required, plus searching through the guy’s wallet for the fare)

(c) call the police anonymously, and have him arrested for attempted culpable driving? (the logic behind him being charged with a more serious offence than ordinary drink driving is that the latter, by definition, hasn’t caused death but the former could cause death. NOTE: the offence of “attempted culpable driving” is made-up here, but please assume that, as is generally the case, its penalties are on the same scale as for actual culpable driving)

(d) do nothing? (this could be for principled reasons to do with inchoate offences being necessarily outside the reach of the law until they crystallise into something firmer, or equally because you can’t be bothered)

If you answered (a), then you’re a left-liberal WASP, unreconstructed since pre-1979. Which means: seriously, you’re kidding yourself go back and answer (b), (c) or (d).

If you answered (b), then nice try, too. It’s definitely more realistic in 2005 than (a), but common-sense legal short-cuts and citizen self-help are out, out, out. September 11 would have only, at worst, been four planes crashing into nothing-in-particular, otherwise. And the type of low-wage, couldn’t-give-a-fuck-bots who manned US airport security on September 11, 2001 are all the more plentiful four years on, of course. Being the “muscle” is their job, isn’t it? That is, even common-sense, low-level wrangling is best left to the “professionals” (sic).

If you answered (c), then congratulations. (And now that you’re feeling so chuffed and snug-as-a-bug-in-a-security-blanket, why don’t you go park your car in urban France. That’ll show’em!)

If you answered (d), then you have fundamentally misread the situation, and hence are now in big trouble. Your high-principled/social-life-first mindset has resulted in a glaring blind-spot YOU are also in that pub dangling around keys/swizzle-sticks/whatever, albeit unconsciously, but in a manner that looks glaringly criminal to everyone but you (and the very-drunk other guy, whom you are now of course going to join in Goulburn SuperMax).

Don¢â¬â¢t execute the Bali bombers . . .

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. . . instead make them listen to the latest novelty ring-tone, on endless loop

I’m not sure if such an idea has yet crossed the minds of this Indonesian/American odd couple, but once you start using music in the services of ideology which is what Abdurrahman Wahid and C Holland Taylor propose then why be modest in its application?

Okay, using cheesy pop to prevent mass murder has a charming naivet© about it and a cost-effectiveness to boot, given that the tactic necessarily goes head-to-severed-head against Saudi billions in the battle for the hearts, minds and ears of Indonesian Gens X and Y. But Make Love Not War (to the tunes of an omnipresent soundtrack) has been done before, and failed miserably case in point, the boomer counter-culture of the 60s, 70s . . . and today.

Plus “Dewa”, Wahid and Taylor’s pet band for their love-spreading agenda, seems a top-down imposition in this age of bottom-up manufactured music celebrity. Indonesia already has “Indonesian Idol”, and it seems an affront to the wallets of that country’s young to not have had the opportunity to pay to vote for Dewa’s rise to the top. These days, democracy is all in the delivery and if you don’t pay for it, you probably aren’t getting it.

More generally, ex-President Wahid has lately had form in the Wacky Ideas department although again, the possible involvement of the Indon state (or kleptocracy, to be more precise) in the 2002 Bali bombings shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

As for C Holland Taylor, he’s one of those dime-a-dozen Yank carpetbaggers currently found in this part of the world former US telco executive missionaries saving a far-flung outlier . . . but for or from what, I’m not so sure. For capitalism? Most probably. But in the end, Indonesia like Telstra most of all needs saving from itself. That is, give it earplugs, not music sepulchral silence is so-o-o underrated these days.

What the world needs now is another (Bob Dylan) like I need a hole in the head. So don’t tempt me or Indonesia’s exploding ring-tone generations, either.

Welcome from the Australasian Family Association

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For those who don’t know anything about me, I used to be a regular solo blogger here. I’m now pleased to join the illustrious Troppo crew as an occasional (monthly) guest blogger.

As a special treat for my first guest post, I’ve sworn to avoid all of my previously-known hobby-horses. In fact, this wasn’t as hard as it seems, because just this very morning, I saw the light, in the form of the Australasian Family Association, a group founded in 1980.

You’ve probably heard of them; if not, their name fairly accurately sums them up, as standing for all things wholesome, and against all things not. More specifically, they’ve identified a particular threat to the ongoing existence of wholesome family life in Australasia: the model-boat-in-a-bottle building fraternity.

Now, I’ve long thought of the said hobbyists as just a bit, you know . . . icky. I’m not exactly sure why. Sure, for the most part, they do it in the privacy of their own homes, but I once saw a man fondling the said object in a city display window . . . just like that! . . . and there were CHILDREN around everywhere, and no warning sign, or anything. Plus, there are model-boats-in-bottles EVERYWHERE on the Internet, and no one seems to care.

Anyway . . .
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