Illusive Mind

I realize that one is not supposed to mention ‘refugees’ this election unless you are a covert agent for the Liberal party trying to wedge Rudd against the lefties and give mainstream (’racist’) Australian ‘battlers’ a reason to go back to the coalition.

Ross Gittins hit on the idea that Labor lefties sincerely hope Rudd isn’t as Howardesque as he is making himself out to be for the purposes of the election campaign.

One of the central issues in this election campaign is what Kevin Rudd would be like as prime minister. Much of John Howard’s campaigning is directed towards convincing us that, once he’d won, Rudd’s me-tooing would stop and the real man would be revealed.

But here’s the funny thing: what Liberal supporters fear, many Labor supporters hope for. They hope that once he’d won, Rudd’s me-tooing would stop and the closet socialist — any kind of socialist — would be revealed.

Michelle Grattan once wrote that the “sniff of power” would keep the left quiet during the election, so intense is their desire to see Howard ride off into the sunset, hunched over and dead with no-one shouting “come back!” Except perhaps for Peter Costello.

I think that nothing short of a ‘Howard-Lite’ candidate is capable of winning power in this country at this time. Perhaps there will be a time for a Goff Whitlam election but this isn’t it, not when the economy is on cocaine and Australian Working Families (AWFs) “have never been better off”.

But in earnest hope we cling to speeches made by Rudd such as the following made back in August 2006.

Industrial relations, asylum seekers and global climate change all needed the attention of Christians, opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said at a Christian conference in Parliament House in Canberra.

“There are of course many other (issues).

“But none can dispute that these three are significant,” Mr Rudd said.

On industrial relations Mr Rudd said the government’s controversial Work Choices laws damaged families.

“The key to family life is relationships and the key to relationships is the time to nurture them.

“These industrial relations changes have a capacity to make our family life increasingly time-poor and therefore relationship-poor.”

A compassionate view toward asylum seekers, Mr Rudd said, was part of a long biblical tradition of welcoming strangers.

“That is why the government’s current proposal to excise the entire Australian mainland from the entire Australian migration zone and to rely almost exclusively on the so-called Pacific solution should be the cause of great ethical concern across the Christian churches,” Mr Rudd said.

He described global warming as one of the great fundamental ethical challenges of the modern age.

“For me it is ethically indefensible for this government to have spent the last decade not only refusing to ratify the Kyoto protocol, but actively working with the government of the United States to marginalise it.”

So maybe you don’t bring up refugees in an election campaign lest you scare working family xenophobes. Nor do you harp on or even really mention or refer to the 2.2 million Australians living below the poverty line lest you scare off working family mortgage belt cashed up bogans. But, you certainly talk up industrial relations as much as possible, this hurts working families. And you can whisper platitudes about climate change thanks to Al Gore making saving ourselves from self-annihiliation vogue. But don’t actually detail the sacrifices people are going to have to make or you’ll scare the CUB crowd. (Though he better bloody not have ethanol in mind.)

Rudd calls them ‘Christian’ values though as an atheist I call them ‘humanist’ values and some philosophers might very well call them, simply, ‘minimal human decency’. However, the best way to push Rudd to the left is to vote for the Greens in the senate, the party who understands the urgency of the climate change crisis. The party who doesn’t have to kiss the ass of big business by pulling some kind of phased withdrawal of Work Choices.

Today thank the proverbial ‘lord’ we learn:

A PREFERENCE swap between Labor and the Greens is “all but a done deal” for the Senate nationwide and marginal lower house seats in every state except Tasmania, Greens leader Bob Brown says.

This is after the ALP’s unforgivable act of putting Family First ahead of The Greens in their preferences which is the only reason Steve Fielding was elected in 2004.

How can Steve Fielding of Family First win one of Victoria’s Senate seats with just 45,260 votes?

In short, because virtually every other party - including Labor and the Democrats - preferred Family First to the Greens and practically every other party.

STEP 1 1st preferences

Liberal/NP 1,048,172
ALP 873,649

Greens 205,920

Family First 45,204

Democrats 44,099
DLP 44,084
Liberals for Forests 41,289

You can see how the deed was done in all it’s horrible detail here.

This time around, incredibly, it’s going to be a challenge just to oust the Coalition from the senate. Which is why the ALP, Democrats & Greens are putting up a united front.

It’s about time there was some scrutiny of Family First. There is sure to be some public investigation of this malignant growth on our political system now that FF has disendorsed one of their Sydney candidates, Andrew Quah. He clearly did not have the ‘values’ they were after.

Family First is the epitome of one Australia’s nastiest exports, Dog Whistle politics. From their website:

FAMILY FIRST’s top priority is the health and well-being of families;
FAMILY FIRST believes families are the most important thing in our lives;
FAMILY FIRST raises the issues that really matter to families;
FAMILY FIRST gives your family a voice in Parliament, so the needs of families are addressed;
FAMILY FIRST is independent and represents commonsense, mainstream values and ordinary Australian families.

I can hear dogs howling down the street, this is the most obviously coded bunch of bullshit I’ve ever read. “Commonsense, mainstream values” ? Presumably that means they are against dark people. Families are the most important thing in our lives? What does that even mean? We know they’re against homosexuality.

Family First disciplined one of its workers at Dayboro, in the marginal Brisbane seat of Dickson, for answering “yes” to a question about whether Family First supported lesbians being burned to death.

But, given how important families are and all, I would’ve thought they would support IVF treatment and adoption for lesbians not burning them to death.

How does a pro-family party reconcile children behind razor wire in mandatory detention, or refugees unable to reunite with their families in Australia (especially if they’re from Africa)? It doesn’t. Because for the religious right, Christian values mean only two things, anti-abortion and anti-homosexuals.

I wrote the following to Senator Steve Fielding but am yet to receive any response:

Dear Senator Fielding,

You represent a party that “recognises and supports Australia’s international and humanitarian commitments in regard to asylum seekers.” http://www.familyfirst.org.au/documents/ASYLUMSEEKERS.pdf

What action will you be taking to ensure Australia does not continue to flout it’s international and moral obligations as a signatory if the Refugee Convention, in regard to the 72 Sri Lanka genuine refugees who face the prospect of languishing for years indeterminately on Nauru?

Do you regard it as morally just to punish genuine refugees by refusing to settle them in Australia in order to send a symbolic message to a third party (people smugglers)?

So we come back to Rudd’s re-branding of Christian values (minimal human decency). They are of course informed completely by secular humanist values otherwise we would be promoting murder, genocide, rape and unholy acts of human indignity were we rely solely on the bible for our ‘values’. Jesus had some good stuff to say about social justice, let’s grab that and leave the stoning to death shit to the homophobic, anti-women fundamentalists.

My favourite quote about mixing religion with politics is this one:

Mixing religion with politics is like mixing ice cream with horse manure. It doesn’t hurt the manure, but it ruins the ice cream.

Of course you can guess which one I think is the ice cream, and which one is just a bunch of horse shit. Whatever you believe, the great moral crisis of our time, possibly of all time is climate change. It is not interest rates, it is not gay men trying to get married, it is not union thugs.

Right Wingers would have you believe climate change is an economic question, it’s not. There will be economic costs and in the most consumerist, self absorbed, decadent, selfish, short sighted generation in living memory, talk of *gasp* “self sacrifice” seems akin to promoting self-mutilation.

Either we decide that it is right to spend a lot of money seeking to prevent catastrophic climate change or we decide that it isn’t, but we must make that decision on the grounds of how much we value people and places as people and places, rather than as figures in a ledger.

Geroge Monbiot

Imagine the refugee problem brought about by a global food deficit, seal level rises and complete disruption of regular weather patterns. Billions of people will be affected and they will be disproportionately poor. Here in the comfortable west, climate change affects us last and effect us least. But the humanitarian disaster that awaits us is so great that only a sociopath could fail to grasp the urgency of action.

I’m not sure it’s wise for someone who believes in the literal story of Noah and the flood to be holding or co-holding the balance of power in the Senate!

Don’t be hoodwinked by so called ‘Climate Change Realists’, vote for The Greens, it’s about values.

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