tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35416312024-03-14T18:40:34.576+10:00What the cat dragged inBoomer-bashing, media commentary and general bitternessPaul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.comBlogger868125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-82546621983010515752024-02-26T15:00:00.002+10:002024-02-26T15:09:49.763+10:00<p> <b>Zachary Rolfe and
(jaded) masculinity on trial</b></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p>An inquest seemingly almost without end is now finally
coming to some kind of end – meaning that the going around in circles, and in particular
that one big statement of the obvious, paradoxically repeatedly left
unresolved, will soon stop – Phew! Business as usual, in the male-dominated (at
the pointy end) policing of remote Aboriginal communities in the NT will soon –
and probably has already – resume/d.</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">I have only a very small sliver of sympathy for former NT
policeman Zachary Rolfe. My heart goes
out to Kumanjayi Walker’s family, and I am hoping that what I write here does
not add to their grief, or at least that if it does, some long-term good (= deep
cultural change) may come out of this whole sorry business.</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing">So, after that contextual disclaimer, here goes.</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">Plainly trigger-happy and testosterone-loaded as Rolfe was
(and presumably is, and always will be $$), it genuinely baffles me <i>as a man</i> that the inquest needed more
than about five minutes to establish this rather obvious fact, and then to move
on to less obvious – and surely more important – matters. Such as whether being trigger-happy and testosterone-loaded
is written-in to the position description (reading between the lines, of
course) of the immediate/critical response cop role that Rolfe held at the time. Or put another, more direct way: after all the key non-Warlpiri/Yapa health workers
had been evacuated from Yuendumu that fateful night over (their own) safety concerns,
who was going to be on the first plane back into Dodge? And should history repeat here (and without deep
cultural change, it undoubtedly, sadly will), are we really supposed to be
satisfied that this next time it will be Anyone But Rolfe – another “random”, another
trigger-happy, testosterone-loaded “bad cop” (and then years later, another
three million dollars, and counting).</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">I acknowledge that coroner Elisabeth Armitage presumably
also sees – or at least at the start, <i>hoped
for </i>– deep cultural change as a beneficial, if formally collateral outcome
of the inquest. But oh, how the wheels
have since fallen-off over the last 18 months, and the gendered sledge-hammers
been lobbed as slow-but-furious nut-crackers.</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">Exhibit one here is a text message sent from Zachary
Rolfe in March 2019 (about six months before Kumanjayi Walker was fatally shot
by Rolfe) to an unknown (but apparently not called before the inquest, possibly
because his context evidence may have required another three million dollars to
neutralise, by a thousand oblique cuts) recipient:</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;"><o:p> </o:p>“I'm out at Borroloola, a
random community on the coast, 'cause they're rioting. But we came up last time
they did this and smashed the whole community. So, this time, as soon as we arrived,
they started behaving.”</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 36pt;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p>This text message was tendered to the inquest in <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-14/zachary-rolfe-racist-texts-kumanjayi-walker-coronial-inquest/101437236">September 2022</a> and then again <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-24/nt-walker-inquest-rolfe-lee-bauwens-text-messages/103502602">just recently (in February 2024)</a>, for commenting upon by two different witnesses – Sgt
Anne Jolley and Sgt Lee Bauwens – which resulting in two strikingly different narrative streams at the inquest, despite both witnesses working for the NT Police at
all material times. It is too trite to say that the Good Cop was
(of course) female, and the Bad Cop (of course) male. More
specifically revealing here is the admonitory tone of, and strangely-chosen “gotcha”
word in the recent exchange b/w the (male) Counsel Assisting the Coroner
Patrick Coleridge (in September 2022, this role was performed by Peggy Dwyer) and
Sgt Lee Bauwens.</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">“Smashed” was strangely-chosen
as a “gotcha” word for two reasons, I think: because
Bauwen’s (notably defensive) contextual explanation of it as not connoting
violence rings plain and true (for this man, at least) and also because two
other words from the above text message<i>
are</i> actually of note, but were let slip through by the inquest, preoccupied
as it was with Admonitions of the Most Obvious. </p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">“Behaved” in its above context, is at very least, violence-adjacent,
with Rolfe seemingly bragging about the Aboriginal residents of Borroloola cowering
when they heard <i>he </i>was coming back
into town (whether they indeed reacted to this news, and if so, then how, of
course may be quite a different story, but again, this is a narrative that the
inquest passed over). </p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">Rolfe’s use of “random” also connotes violence in a more
abstract way, of the non-particularity of his vector through time and place,
aka his crassness and presumption as even a temporary resident of a remote Aboriginal
community in the NT. There is perhaps nowhere
in the world less “random” than Borroloola (or Yuendumu) [or conversely, more “random”
than Canberra, but I digress]. I can
attest to Borroloola's particularity as a whitefella who hasn’t even been anywhere near the place nor
knows any of its “inside” stories; but there is a wealth of even whitefella-on-whitefella
narrative out there (Hashtag Bill Harney, Roger Jose, Carnegie library), and if
you’re bi-cultural, these are only the surface gleanings ....</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">Rolfe perhaps also used “random” in a secondary, and very
male, sense – to glumly corroborate, <i>en
passant</i>, his relatively unimportant position in the NT Police hierarchy at
that time; a man (yet again?) shuffled at short notice from one temporary
assignment to the next place, as a (mere) gun for hire. If so, that’s the terrible beauty and nuance,
in a (cracked) nutshell, of what I’ll call Rolfe’s three-million-dollar text
message: one man’s jaded – and to me,
simply sad – obliviousness to time and place getting all dressed-up to become
Every Woman’s Admonition About That One Thing, spoken on infinite and futile repeat.</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;"><o:p> </o:p>$$ Unless perhaps Rolfe one day
might take up the Borroloola Cure – which worked a treat for the runaway Roger
Jose.</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 36pt;"><o:p></o:p></p>Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-68964077559028091982023-01-13T12:50:00.000+10:002023-01-13T12:50:27.725+10:00<p> <b>George Pell
repenteth, at eleventh-hour</b></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">The call for sainthood for the late Cardinal George Pell
should not be underestimated, or dismissed as premature.</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">True, some critics, including myself, did deride Pell
during his life for some distinctly un-Christian attributes, including: using
<a href="http://paulwatson.blogspot.com/2004/08/cardinal-george-pell-and-art-of-using.html">blackmail and backstabbing to advance his clerical career</a>, lying under oath
(repeatedly) to a Royal Commission (1), and, as a closeted gay man, being a
hypocritical homophobe. There is also
the matter of his expensive tastes, including flying first-class etc, but
despite the “camel through the eye of a needle” Biblical injunction here, I’ve
always been wary of protesting too much on this front, aka being a plain jealous
bitch. </p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">Anyhow, and famously, it’s never too late to repent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And very late repentance – as long as it is
accompanied by bucket-loads of humility – appears to hit the sweet-spot for
martyrdom, itself seemingly a sure-fire short-cut for sainthood.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">At this point, I’m sure that cynics are scoffing at the
very possibility of Pell’s late-life humility and repentance – despite the fact
of this staring them in the face, albeit somewhat buried in the detail of the
news around Pell’s death. </p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">First, to place things in context: the Catholic Church is the modern world’s
most successful real-estate conglomerate. Yet in recent weeks, by all accounts, Pell was
living in shared digs just outside the Vatican.
That is, not even in the worst apartment in the worst street in the
Vatican! For a (non-Indigenous) <i>Australian</i> – the modern world’s, if not
all of history’s, most opiate-of-the-masses real-estate addicts – to shun, as
too opulent, even a 3.5m x 3m studio with St Peter’s glimpses is, I think, humility
beyond all precedent. That’s “camping
out” – and <i>proud </i>– for you, Paul
Keating!</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">Unkind souls may interject at this stage, while granting
that the Catholic Church is generally able to comfortably accommodate its
Cardinals within the Vatican, that his move into shared digs outside the walls,
apparently only a few weeks ago, may not have been of his own making – quite
possibly because of his bloviating against his boss, the Pope, as “Demos” (2). Possibly so, but even assuming this – and
here comes my trump card – Pell turned the other cheek, as it were. That is, weeks ago and quite possibly for the
first time in his life, Pell did not play the wronged (or haughty) princess-bitch
by directly or pseudonymously denouncing or sabotaging those behind his real-estate
downward-mobility. Instead, he just took
it on the chin, if he didn’t actually <i>choose</i>
it.</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">As a fellow Australian renter, and so real-estate loser,
I feel that Pell should be saluted for his immensely modest forbearance here. Further – although I hope that here I am not getting
too far ahead of myself – when the day of his canonization duly arrives, I
propose that Saint George Pell be declared the official patron saint of renters
(a position which, according to Google, appears to be currently vacant, or at
least – as with the usual management of paedophile priests – one of a vague, dubiously-shared
responsibility).</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">Finally, a couple of miracles will of course be required before
George Pell can be canonized. Luckily
for his soul, and the rest of the world, I – being such an organised gay man –
have war-gamed this already. I have today
started saying my prayers to him, beseeching that I be delivered frometh and forthwith
the deep underclass of long-term Australian private renters, and passeth unto
that graceful state of a real-estate owner in Australia. Yes, I know that this will take a <i>miracle </i>– but that’s the point. </p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">If anyone else is in the same boat, and one day hits the
jackpot here (only after also saying prayers to George Pell, of course – we don’t
want any cheaters!), please send me a line, and I’ll then contact the Vatican
directly with some irrefutable evidence of the requisite two miracles:
title-deeds, aka the universal language of the Catholic Church.</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">(1)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]-->I
note that the mainstream media was very shy of pointing out Pell’s lying under
oath – perjury – during his lifetime, but it was copiously mentioned in many reports
of his death. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Surely it would have been possible,
and more tasteful, to have hammered this out – while staying within the legal bounds
– while Pell was still alive? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s
definitely a defamation-law article, if not PhD thesis, on this point. </p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">(2)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pell’s pseudonym as "Demos" was always a fig-leaf,
as a <a href="https://www.gloria.tv/post/JzHATzEE916K1UaLQ1k13Ktjm">Google search of {Pell and “explicitly heretical”} reveals </a>– note also the mouthful (and drama-queen) adjective "explicitly" here, itself quite a give-away, but this was prissy Pell <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">before</i> his redemption.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-11190480093012612582021-12-30T14:55:00.002+10:002021-12-30T14:55:17.491+10:00<p> <b>The domestic violence of being a renter
living alone during a pandemic – a 2021 place-holder</b></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I remember
exactly where I was at noon on Monday 23 March 2020.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first (and last) national Covid lockdown
was just beginning, and I was watching the staff of the swimming pool over the
road shutting-up shop from my front window.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Earlier that morning I had thought about having one last swim there, but
had decided against it – in the circumstances, there would be too much pressure
to make this a good memory. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Weeks before that
day, with a loose mood of panic in the air, I had had a more concrete insight
as to what was soon to become.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Via my
newly-acquired habit of reading the letters to the editor in “the Age” – with
the walls closing in, their gaucherie and banality was now food for thought – a
short letter from a man in his early 70’s (I’m guessing) who lived in Middle
Park (if my memory serves me correctly) caught my attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By way of background, at the time, someone in
the CW government had suggested that, with Covid known to take its main toll
out on the old, older Australians might care to limit their movements
accordingly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A plain enough and sensible
suggestion (aka “personal responsibility”, to quote the label of its recent
re-discovery, almost two years later), you may think (and certainly seemed so to
me at the time).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the baby boomer
letter-writer from Middle Park saw the matter quite differently:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“How dare the government tell me to stay at
home?” he thundered – and not rhetorically, it would seem. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And so the
sorting of the sheep from the goats for Covid lockdown purposes was set in
stone for the next 18 months (if you were a Victorian).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">There would never
again be another official suggestion, until very recently (and very gently), of
older Australians limiting their movements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Lockdowns, which wouldn’t be suggestions of course and although coming
in a near-infinite permutations otherwise, would henceforth and strictly always
be styled as demographically neutral.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Even though, of
course, they disproportionately affected certain groups, including younger
people and renters, and hence disproportionately favoured others – including Middle
Park retired baby boomers, whose main lockdown imposition probably was having
their café catch-ups now held on the footpath, under the guise of waiting-for-takeaways
and “exercise” (if you’re doing it holding a coffee-cup, and don’t live in a
nursing home, it was and is not exercise – it was a fiction or loophole that
you came up with, and a practise that Dan Andrews then predictably took his sledge-hammer
to in 2021 with the 5km/2-hour rule – a rule that seemingly mainly kyboshed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">actual </i>(solo) exercisers in regional
Victoria, like me – so thanks a lot, social-club “exercisers” of inner-city
Melbourne).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">For the record,
my entire consumption of, and spending on, takeaway food and drink during lockdown
was zip.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During what is supposed to be a
health emergency, with most travel banned, and with plenty of extra time at
home to prepare supermarket food (I also never went to a butcher/baker/specialty-food
store), the idea of gourmet, ready-cooked or “fast” food/drink being essential
(at least for anyone but a handful of hard-pressed shift-workers) is
absurd.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So in a nutshell, welcome to my Covid
lockdown nightmare, where just about everything that was open was trivial and eminently
forgoable, and most things I’d considered necessary were closed beyond
recourse.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">By “most things”,
I actually mean just one main thing – home heating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unless you’re a renter, you probably won’t
even understand what I’m talking about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So let me briefly fill you in – rented homes usually have poor heating,
and some are actually what could be termed “unheatable”. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My (cheap) rented home at the time, in
regional Victoria, was uninsulated (AFAICT) and had large rooms with four-metre
high ceilings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I knew this before I signed
the lease and moved in, but I also had a heating plan for winters:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>regular swim sessions at the pool over the road
would keep my outer extremities in operation, plus I would spend at least a few
weeks each winter in the Northern Territory, or somewhere else at least as warm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But under the pretence of a demographically-neutral
lockdown, followed by the inevitable border closures in the wake of the corrupt
Unified Security contract-induced second-wave, such “heating” was deemed much
too big an expectation, of course.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Through April
2020, and with winter bearing down, I did get some swims in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was an algae-encrusted fire-dam in a
state park out of town that I braved once.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I then remembered that there was a nice spot on the nearest clean-water
river, 45km away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Uncertain whether I
was allowed to drive my car legally there for exercise, I rode my bike, timed
so I would get to the river at the warmest time of day on the warmest days that
autumn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The river was nonetheless icy to
be immersed in, and I would do just a handful of 30-second or so “laps” –
punctuated by several-minute thaws on a rock in the sun – before getting on my
bike for home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a five-hour or so
excursion in total, for about two-minutes total of “pool time”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But that ratio – of 150 parts white-noise to
one-part “real thing” – seems about right to measure the passing of life <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in lockdown (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">my </i>life, anyway) over subsequent months. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Meanwhile, also in
April 2020, Richard Pusey infamously drove his Porsche at high-speed along the
Eastern Freeway in Melbourne, starting a chain of events in which four police-officers
were killed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was in a hurry to get
home and eat his takeaway sushi, apparently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Remarkably, I think, the<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
additional </i>illegality of this having been done during Covid lockdown has
been left wholly unexplored, as far as I’m aware.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or
perhaps the takeaway-food lockdown-loophole for Porsche-driving
property-investors (and so definitely not renters) is even larger than that of
the footpath social-club that was legislated for the convenience of inner-city
baby boomers, and so Richard Pusey had every right to expect no one and no law
get between him and his designer (and heated) home?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">At the very other
– my – end of the lockdown scale, there was – and in many ways, still is – the “car
crash” yet to process:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the long, cold,
unswimmable winter of 2020 and its grim domestic violence of man vs house, 24/7.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-24861644768306645212020-10-07T11:51:00.002+10:002020-10-14T10:03:25.449+10:00<p><b>Crime and crony
capitalism behind the Dan Andrews lockdown veil</b></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">There have been three distinct low points for me in the
last two weeks, in which the naked bankruptcy of the current governance of
Victoria has reached yet another fresh low.</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">On 1 October 2020, the Age reported what would appear to
be <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/carers-at-covid-ravaged-epping-gardens-claim-they-were-pressured-to-delay-testing-20200930-p560me.html">serious criminal behaviour by management at Epping Gardens nursing home</a> in
northern Melbourne. If true, this alleged
behaviour was unquestionably responsible for the wholesale further spread of
Covid-19 inside and outside the nursing home. Yet the Dan Andrews press
conference that morning ignored this gaping and systemic hole in his lockdown
framework, and instead blathered on about the usual random idiots Breaking The
Rules – as though a half-dozen job-lot of these was infinitely worse than apparent
manslaughter by management instruction at Epping Gardens.</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">Then Victoria’s legal profession earned itself a handy
half-million dollars per word, per lawyer.
If I’m not mistaken, no less than three counsel assisting the Coates
inquiry into hotel quarantine, summing up in the hours before the hearing
adjourned, separately stated that it was a “creeping assumption”, rather than
someone’s actual decision, that had led to the employment of untrained and unsupervised
(in any meaningful sense, given the stakes) “security guards” to police the
hotels – that is, to put the “quarantine” in quarantine. The same day, it was announced that Victorian
government had approved the doubling of the budget for the Coates inquiry, from
$3m to $6m. Paying for a wordy whitewash?
Of course there could not have been such a crude deal done, and any apparent
connection is just another creeping assumption fading into the beige.</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">And finally, just yesterday and today, a piquant example of
who Dan Andrews considers an “essential worker” – so essential that they have a
permit to broach the “ring of steel” between Melbourne and regional Victoria –
has emerged. <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-07/coronavirus-outbreak-mitchell-shire-fears-more-restrictions/12736860">Sales representative for a tyre company</a>. Yes, really – because getting the right
brand-name in a <a href="https://www.drive.com.au/news/how-tyre-manufacturing-changes-have-turned-an-industry-on-its-head-121165">“modern” font</a> on an otherwise couldn’t be-more-<i>generic</i> imported product is matter of a life
and death, even in a pandemic. And of
course this “essential” sales work couldn’t possibly be done remotely – after
all, how can a meal on (I’m assuming) the company expense account possibly be
enjoyed while stuck at home, and never mind that a Melbourne resident eating-in
at a café in regional Victoria is flagrantly illegal? But nothing to see here, says Dan Andrews.</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">Again, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about the Teflon-coated s<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">ales representative </span>by reading
anything into the fact that the Australian tyre industry, which Dan Andrews
would not say a word against, currently seems to be a cartel run by hucksters
of the same ilk who own most for-profit nursing homes. As long as you put “creeping assumption” in a
nice enough font, the public will continue to buy the toxic charade of Dan
Andrews as man acting in their own interest. </p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><b>Update 14 Oct 2020</b></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing">With news of the latest Covid-19 outbreak in Shepparton,
it turns out that the sales representative for a tyre company – who the ABC has
misleadingly labelled a “truck driver” *, which conveniently covers-up the
issue of how he got a work permit to travel to regional Victoria – has been
even an even better salesperson/liar than I had given him credit for. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing">No doubt Dan Andrews will be “incredibly disappointed”, or
somesuch, with the man’s actions, and then go on to say that it’s happened,
let’s move on, and we can't change the
past. Bullshit. </p><p class="MsoNoSpacing">I say it’s high time for the affected citizens of
Kilmore (hundreds of who have locked themselves at home, mainly of their own
volition, as I understand it), and now Shepparton, to take civil action against
the man and his employer (currently unnamed, but that shouldn’t take too much
longer to come out) for their economic and other losses, with the damages payout easily running into the millions. Once these defendants have been bled dry – hopefully bankrupted
into oblivion – the Victorian government could also possibly be joined as a
defendant, for its negligence in issuing a work permit to such a lowdown spiv and liar. </p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p>* He was labelled as the sales representative for a tyre
company by the mayor of Benalla in the above ABC link. If he was indeed a “truck driver”, he was an
unusually leisurely one – the detour from the Hume Freeway to the Kilmore café is
about half an hour just in extra driving time (his eating time was also a quite leisurely 45 minutes). There are, of
course, several roadhouses right on the Hume Freeway between Melbourne and
Benalla, all with ample truck-parking, should one just want a quick meal and an easy park. But no, our “truck driver” not only had all the time in the world but was such a gourmet flog that ordinary roadhouse
cuisine plainly wouldn’t do it for him.</p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><b><br /></b></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><br /></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p>Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-31796149298357883242020-05-11T15:54:00.000+10:002020-05-11T15:58:54.907+10:00<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Long criminal
record? Why not become an Australian mortgage broker today – and join a
lucrative industry soon to be even more glamorised in new feature film!<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Judging by <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/porsche-driver-bragged-to-a-mate-about-driving-at-300km-h-court-hears-20200511-p54rtv.html">Richard Pusey’s long criminal record, including jail time in 2008</a>, there appears to be few, if any, industry standards as to becoming – or
continuing as – a self-employed mortgage broker.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Richard Pusey apparently ran his own mortgage
broking business, Switch Now Home Loans, until about July 2019.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Why he left it then is unclear, but just today his
lawyer, as part of making a case for Pusey’s bail, claimed that Pusey had “stable
work” [same URL] – I’m guessing still as a mortgage broker of some sort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
But in any event – and even prior to Pusey’s raft of
charges arising from the Eastern Freeway tragedy (which are, of course, yet to
be heard by a court) – there is enough of a Pusey rap-sheet to damn Australia’s
mortgage broking industry for its acceptance of the serial criminal Pusey
within their ranks, and particularly for their apparent deafening silence, in recent
weeks, over Pusey’s association with their industry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Hey guys, exactly what crimes – if any – might cause
someone to lose their credentials as a mortgage broker?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or are such matters usually not dealt with by
“public auction”, but are negotiable by “private sale”, at the right price?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
One outcome of the Eastern Freeway tragedy is that there
is now absolutely no need for an Australian version or adaptation of Brett Easton
Ellis’ “American Psycho” (and sorry screenwriters, if you’ve been working on or
shopping a fictional such script around).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I suggest that “Australian Psycho” (as documentary or as thinly-disguised
fiction) has already just about written itself. Richard Pusey’s life and career
just needs a bit more detail – including as to his mortgage broker and (apparently)
Australian Federal Police mates – but I assume that these requisite supporting
characters (and enablers) will come out in the court case. <o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-42046387505114641892019-08-23T09:31:00.003+10:002019-08-23T09:31:29.345+10:00<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Pauline Hanson climbs
down on Uluru</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In Aboriginal Australia, the story’s perhaps never over
until there’s a moral, or at least a laugh to it, and so the fact that Pauline
Hanson has had to back-down, literally, on her (yet to be) televised stunt to
climb Uluru should come as no surprise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can’t speak for the elders who gave her “permission” to do
the climb, just before she actually tried to do it, but it appears to me that
they played her to perfection, in assessing the high-likelihood that she would
back-down, so proving them right about their amply-telegraphed decision to
close the climb permanently, from October 2019 (in opposition to which, of
course, was the originating and political purpose of Hanson’s stunt).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As well as admiring the elders’ shrewdness and
perceptiveness here, I find it hilarious (as well as thought-provoking) that
her “permission” was all part of the practical joke played on her – and so also
on a large cross-section of white Australia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As for the media figure who compared closing the Uluru climb
to closing Bondi Beach, fair call, mate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We flock to Uluru because it is iconic as well, and also because – of course
– it has a proverbial lifeguard tower, staffed by deeply-tanned Anangu, who
volunteer their time to see that (hopefully) no harm comes to the many often-clueless
peeps who get into a spot of bother on the climb.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, we like to “swim between the flags,
sort of” on dry-land, as well – to first get “their” permission, and then
proceed jauntily to take little or no responsibility for our own actions, as
many of us are, quite foreseeably, sucked out by the “rip”.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So it is indeed a sad day, folks, when the Anangu volunteer “lifeguards”
say that they are closing their tower of safety for good, and probably one-day
even removing the “flags” (viz safety chains) from white Australia’s carefree
(and in case you’ve forgotten, ICONIC) playground.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After
almost sixty years of being reckless and irresponsible tools – and then/yet (mostly)
living to tell the tale – how dare they spoil our lame, flocking feats with an
act of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">closure</i>, especially when the
sound of closure (and here a big thanks to their new <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kartiya </i>friend Pauline H!) is the distinct and humbling sound of
them laughing at us?<o:p></o:p></div>
<br /><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Disclosure:</b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Paul Watson has done “the climb”; see <a href="http://paulwatson.blogspot.com/2009/07/view-from-mt-ayers-it-is-shame-i-think.html">here</a> for the context.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-6630213902701363192019-07-03T12:16:00.000+10:002019-07-03T12:16:15.045+10:00<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Nose-picking and the
Bible – Important public service announcement<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Last night I had a visitation from St Paul – yes, that
Biblical New Testament one (and my namesake).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As you might expect, he’s been following closely the Israel Folau
controversy, which has motivated him to pass on, via me, some very important
information about getting into Heaven.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In summary, St Paul’s list of Things Which Preclude You From
Heaven – as famously paraphrased by Israel Folau on Twitter – urgently needs
another behaviour added to the No Go list (of homosexuality, drunkenness, etc):<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>nose-picking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Here, St Paul was at pains to explain why he’d left nose-picking
OFF the list nearly 2,000 years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Sure, it was – then and now – disgusting, especially when one saw others
doing it in public.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, St Paul went on
to say, he had indulged in a bit of it (when no one was looking, of course)
throughout his life, and so couldn’t bring himself to be a hypocrite by adding
it to the No Go list.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Plus, as he
thought 2,000 years ago, it wasn’t exactly a big deal.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
BIG MISTAKE, St Paul stressed to me last night.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He found out soon after he died that Heaven
has FINGER-SCANNERS at its gates, SO SENSITIVE THAT THEY CAN DETECT EVEN ONE
SINGLE INCIDENT OF NOSE-PICKING, however many decades and hand-washes have
passed in the meantime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course, when St
Paul passed through the scanner, the Booger-Meter (to use its technical name) lit
up bright red – and God, standing by the side, turned the same colour when he
told St Paul how disappointed he (God) was in St Paul’s behaviour.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Fortunately for St Paul – who couldn’t help but notice God’s
(immaculately clean) finger hovering over the switch that flicks the trapdoor
down to Hell – God informed him that, due to St Paul’s otherwise impressively
reformed character, he (God) would, on this occasion only, sentence him to
2,000 years in Purgatory/Limbo, after which his status would be reviewed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And just yesterday, you’ll be pleased to hear, St Paul was duly
received into Heaven, which also allowed him, finally, the free Wi-Fi required to
send his 3D holographic avatar with its life-changing message down to me last
night.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So overall you can see it was a CLOSE CALL for St Paul,
folks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And most importantly, now that
the message is out, he wants you to know that God from now on has a ZERO
TOLERANCE FOR NOSE-PICKERS.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you fail
the Booger-Meter scan at Heaven’s gates – for any picking whatsoever done after
you have heard the news of this Biblical revision – when your time comes, God will
just flick open the trapdoor down to Hell; no if’s, but’s or second-chances.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So it’s my job to get the word of this out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But folks, I can’t do this alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We need to set up a crowdfunding website to
pay for a big publicity campaign.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because
in these days of Political Correctness Gone Mad, we can’t even trust
school-teachers not to be nose-pickers themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Therefore, we need to get the message out direct
to the kiddies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m thinking of giant
billboards placed at the entrance to every school in the world, saying “In
Public or Private, Nose-pickers Go Straight to Hell” – that should make the
kiddies think twice before they besmirch their fingers. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And NO Politically Correct BULLY should be
permitted to suggest anything to the contrary whatsoever. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So time to get your wallets out, peeps.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Remember, Every Booger Is Sacred (we could even
crowdfund a song along these lines).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some
other handy mottos to keep you on the straight and narrow from now on are: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Clean Fingers Equal Clean Souls, and A Chaste
Finger Would Never Defile Your Nose (or Booger-Tabernacle, as St Paul prefers
to call it). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-90919049799598456512019-02-26T11:57:00.000+10:002019-03-02T15:40:15.683+10:00<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">“Only a madman …”
George Pell outed as gay man<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A perspective seemingly missing from the big media splash
around George Pell today is that, having been convicted of molesting two
teenage boys, he is presumptively a gay man.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A homophobic and self-loathing gay man, I stress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The former adjective has long and abundantly
been on the public record.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Re the latter
adjective, now is surely the time for some sweeping, top-down changes to
address the toxic consequences of the presence of so many self-loathing gay men
serving in the Catholic Church:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>such clergy
are inclined to rape boys in the closet, figuratively, if not also literally. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A secondary but still notable point is that
clergy who have sex with adult men – so breaking their vows of celibacy, but
not the law (in most countries) – can be, and have been, blackmailed by clergy
paedophiles, so protecting the paedophile (and blackmailer) from criminal prosecution.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
These very points were made only a few days ago, in <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/closet-vatican-80-per-cent-top-catholics-secretly-gay">media coverage</a> of a new book by Frederic Martel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In
the closet of the Vatican</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It seems, however, that the Catholic Church is going to
fight, kick and scream against the only – and admittedly bracing – remedy to
its homophobia within: an end to clerical celibacy, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">especially </i>per same-sex relationships (I note that one of the
primary drivers for instituting clerical celibacy about 1,500 years ago was to prevent the children
of clergy inheriting wealth that would otherwise flow to the Catholic Church; the
issue of such children arises usually, of course, from heterosexual
relationships).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Catholic Church’s recalcitrance here was very recently
shown by its defrocking/laicisation of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, mainly (I understand),
for relationships with young adult men; seminarians, specifically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am not going to defend McCarrick's molesting of junior
staff in his workplace, but any system that ranks such a crime as equal to, <i>if
not worse than</i> molesting children is sick – sick to its core.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet that is seemingly the Vatican’s take-home
message about McCarrick (who, I note, has also been accused of molesting
children).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The bottom-line is that McCarrick had, for the most part, a somewhat healthier (but
of course still illegal) conception of, and outlet for, his sexuality than George
Pell – think a gay Harvey Weinstein-type sleazebag, a mogul in swishing robes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Uniting George Pell with McCarrick, however, is their
adhesion to the Catholic Church code of silence around its homophobia within and
the rape of boys.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unless and until it comes
out of the closet itself, the Church will always continue to shelter clergy
paedophiles. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Update 2 March 2019 –
some thoughts on George Pell’s pending appeal<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Since everyone and anyone in George Pell’s cheer-squad have
already weighed-in to the rock-solidness of his acquittal in the wake of his pending
appeal (to be heard in mid-2019, I’m guessing), let me make a case for the respondents
here.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Commentary that has pointed out the unusualness of Pell’s
conviction – based on the uncorroborated testimony of one man – is not without
foundation. However, this is not an
ordinary case of one man’s word against another. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Pell chose not to give evidence in court in his own defence,
which of course was his right, and no adverse inference should be drawn from
this. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But Pell also chose (he was not compelled) to give an almost
one-hour videotaped interview to Victorian police at a Rome airport hotel,
which was apparently played in full to the jury during his trial in late 2018,
and excerpts from which were broadcast a day or so after news of his convection
became public.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This videotape was presumably adduced by Pell’s
defence. If so, this was a serious
tactical error, although in fairness to Robert Richter QC et al (whose bills to
Pell and his backers would amount to many millions of dollars), there wasn’t
much else to work with.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Here, Richter’s line that “Only a madman [would risk his entire
career for a quick sexual thrill]” is laughably easy to disprove. This is all the more true for high-flying males
such as Pell. While, as recently has
been pointed out, the rules of engagement for public disclosure of trysts between
adults changed noticeably between JFK’s
time in the early 1960s (when everyone kept schtum) and the 1988 US presidential
campaign, Pell was on notice of this sea-change. The career danger didn’t stop Bill Clinton
from thinking with his d*ck when it came to his dealings with Monica Lewinsky in
1995-1996, so in this sense Pell, who doubled-down on the danger-factor by
doing it with children, was actually, in 1996, a rather <i>typical</i> high-flying man
of his time, rather than a “madman”. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Going back to the videotaped interview, from the public excerpts
I’ve seen, I would guess that this weighed heavily for the jury as a factor for
<i>convicting</i> Pell. God knows what is in its other 50 minutes or
so, but in these excerpts, Pell is so shrill – so <i>woodenly</i> shrill – that his repeated denials ooze
inauthenticity. He seemingly soon runs
out of adjectives that are synonyms of “madness” (in its particular nuance
here), and – aware that simply repeating the m-word will get him nowhere – thus
can only flounder in loose cliché. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Pell’s body-language in the excerpts also confirms the
impression of a man who has only just that moment found out that his big-guns,
hitherto always infallible, have just run out of ammunition mid-discharge. I do hope that the full videotape becomes
public, so that it can be pored over, Zapruder-style, for its gleamings on Pell’s
state of mind at the time, in all its glorious, flaccid micro-aggression.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In summary, as far as the jury probably was concerned, this
wasn’t a case of one man’s word against another – courtesy of the videotaped interview,
Pell’s every adjective was ample corroboration for proving the prosecution’s
case beyond reasonable doubt. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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In all this, today’s unsurprising news is that Pell has now
dumped Robert Richter for his appeal, in favour of Bret Walker SC. No doubt Pell is hoping either that a stiff
new broom for the appeal will adumbrate some fresh synonyms for “madness”, or
(more likely) that his new main-man will exploit a small technical loophole that
will squeeze Pell through the eye of a needle and into a sort of freedom. If he is freed, I trust that the evidence
Pell has given several times under oath in recent years, as to his complete lack
of participation in widespread cover-ups of the activities of other paedophile clergy, is
comprehensively reviewed – with an eye to charging Pell with perjury (if
nothing else). I have closely studied the relevant testimonies here, and it
suffices to say for now that Pell’s form in the Rome videotaped interview,
while a career-best, was not a career-<i>first</i>.<b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-64864145425003745862018-12-27T15:48:00.002+10:002018-12-27T16:31:12.712+10:00<br />
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<b><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">What did the Berndts have to hide?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">So asked <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/i-want-to-tell-my-children-the-history-hidden-in-berndt-s-notebooks-20181211-p50lg3.html">Jan Mayman in a story on 16 December 2018</a> about the 30-year posthumous embargo <a href="http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-who-owns-a-familys-story-why-its-time-to-lift-the-berndt-field-notes-embargo-94652">placed in 1993 </a></span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;"><a href="http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-who-owns-a-familys-story-why-its-time-to-lift-the-berndt-field-notes-embargo-94652">by the will of Catherine Berndt</a> (8 May 1918 – 8 May
1994), on the unpublished writings of herself and her husband, and fellow
anthropologist Ronald Berndt (1916-1990). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Mayman’s article is
sceptical overall, and bluntly dismisses one possible explanation of why the Berndts
wanted to hide posthumously for 30 years, that it was only to avoid future criticism of
their research. However, Mayman takes at
face value the proffered alternative explanation by their literary executor and
UWA Adjunct Professor John Stanton (1950 –) that the 30-year embargo was
because of the Berndts’ “deep and abiding distrust of government of all
political colours”, as “innately hostile” to the interests of Aborigines.</div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">That may be so –
certainly Mayman, apparently channelling Stanton, cites in support of this distrust the 1980 (<a href="http://paulwatson.blogspot.com/2008/11/warmun-november-1979-as-fundamentalist.html">red-herring</a>) Noonkanbah dispute (a time when the Berndts were still in their
prime, and lobbied against the WA </span>government of the day) and the post-Mabo failure-by-a-thousand-cuts of legislated native title
(a fiasco which, coincidentally, started to play-out just before Catherine Berndt’s
death). That the Berndts therefore chose
2024 as a date by when governments would have got their act together on this
front seems implausible, however – certainly in 2018. Even during, if late in, her lifetime, Catherine Berndt surely
would have drunk, with the rest of us, the Paul Keating Kultural Kool-Aid – the potency of which peaked when the then PM made his celebrated
Redfern Park speech on 10 December 1992 – and then, before she died, surmised that either:</div>
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<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">(a)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">the Keating Summer would reach new heights as GenX
took over the reins from the mid-1990s, in which case the 30-year embargo would
seem small-minded and unnecessary, or <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">(b)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">the Keating Summer would crash and burn soon enough,
in which case a 30-year embargo was an estimation of the length of the consequent
Great Leap Backward, aka the Menzies-and-baby-boomer cultural overhang (which
started, of course, on 2 March 1996, almost exactly 30 years after Menzies left
office).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">As to the first hypothesis,
needless to say, it didn’t happen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
of more note, and whether or not Catherine Berndt foresaw this
eventuality, it would be patently unfair to label Catherine Berndt (or her
husband) as small-minded – which is a topic I shall return to shortly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">As to the second
hypothesis, with five-and-a-bit years still on the clock before 2024, I hope that
Catherine Berndt’s implicit optimism that the Great Leap Backward would have
finished its run within 30 years may yet be proved correct – but this is also a
topic I shall return to shortly <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">In any event, Mayman’s
main point is that five-and-a-bit years are a probably too long a wait for at
least one man, 81 y.o.</span> <span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">Vince
Copley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">The </span>Ngadjuri<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;"> elder’s moral right for the 30-year embargo to be
waived, so allowing him to access in his lifetime Berndt notebook material
relating to his late grandfather </span>Barney Waria (1873-1948) could hardly
be more compelling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That there is
arguably a corresponding <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">legal </i>right<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;"> also is put here (penultimate URL), although not by
Mayman, as is the fact that the embargo has been waived on two previous
occasions, by court order. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Mayman aside, t<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">he real reason, I think,
that UWA and its Berndt Museum/archive are being so intransigent in this case
is that the label “Pandora’s Box” probably understates the toxicity of the
contents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As noted, the Berndts, in
their day, were nothing if not broad-minded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One axis of this was the probably unparalleled geographic and
socio-economic diversity of their field-work, including New Guinea and a
pan-Australia cocktail of downtown Adelaide, Vestey cattle-stations in north-western
Australia and Arnhem Land (amongst other places).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">While apart from a brief sojourn at
Hermannsburg in 1944, they bypassed Central Australia in their Indigenous field-work, the
Berndts nonetheless absorbed, probably mainly via TGHS Strehlow, some of its
most sacred aspects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From work published
by the Berndts in their lifetimes, it seems plain<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that they had little or no appreciation of
the ethics of dealing with restricted/secret material, from Central Australia
(the area that I am mostly familiar with) and before the 1980s, at least.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Prior to the 1980s, the word “sacred” was
used by them as a seeming titillation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>While the Berndts’ offence here is hardly unique, they deserve
particular ignominy because their 30-year embargo compares so strikingly with
the clear (if unwritten) embargoes they knew, or should have known, they were
breaking regarding textual and photographic depiction of restricted/secret
material from Central Australia. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">By 1982, and with John
Stanton now on-board, the Berndts were notably more circumspect regarding Central
Australian material – the reproductions from there in the trio’s book “Australian
Aboriginal Art – a Visual Perspective” are confined to some semi-attributed
crayon drawings collected at Hermannsburg in 1944 and three Papunya
dot-paintings from 1976, 1977 and 1978, two of which were bought from an
art-gallery in Perth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">The copyright
declaration over that book’s reproduced visual material is a fudge,
however.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In lieu of seeking permission
and paying royalties to the artists, on page 6 there is a “dedicat[ion]” to the
artists in tandem with an assurance that their foregone royalties will accrue
to a fund used to purchase further works by Aboriginal artists for the
Berndt Museum (then titled the UWA Anthropological Research Museum).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seven years later, Stanton used a similar
formulation (just without the dedication bit) in his Kimberley-specific book
“Painting the Country” (1989).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
fairness to the trio here, it was not until the early 1990s – that Keating
Summer, again – that copyright generally began to be attributed to Aboriginal artists by
the tomes reproducing their work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Prior to t</span>his the siphoning of royalties was whitewashed in a number of creative ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Apart from the Berndt/Stanton dedication-and-worthy-whitefella-fund
model – which CP Mountford had pioneered with his “The Art of Albert Namatjira”
in 1944 – there was the popular copyright <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nullius
</i>approach, in which copyright was only asserted in the<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> text</i> (which was by non-Aboriginal author/s), such as in Jennifer
Isaacs, “Australian Aboriginal Paintings” (1989). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">Lastly, and back to the
Berndt Museum/archive’s toxic contents and the Berndts avuncular broad-mindedness
(except when it came to keeping the secrets of, and paying royalties to,
Aboriginal Australians) is a second-axis; as well as their geographical
promiscuity, the childless couple were promiscuous in the ordinary sense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In their New Guinea field-work (most probably
in 1951-1953), they dropped their anthropological gaze – and pants – when
researching sexual behaviour, and joined in the festivities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Further, this appears to be an open secret in
anthropological circles (to which I’m not privy).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My source for these twin facts is <a href="http://paulwatson.blogspot.com/2015/12/peter-ryan-last-of-alf-conlon-ites-it.html">Peter Ryan</a> </span>“Final Proof” (2010) p 91, which, while not naming
the Berndts, leaves them hanging rather awkwardly as (AFAICT) the only possible
pairing of eligible Australian anthropologists (Ryan also doesn't name the anthropologist-author whose book, with its salacious detail about the Berndts, he declined to publish).</div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">So the real reason behind
Catherine Berndt’s embargo probably had nothing to do with the Keating Summer
(and its denouement of many a stillborn career among my generation).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather, it relates to the
Menzies-and-baby-boomer Dreamtime Mark 1 (1949-1966) – before it was the long overhang
of recent decades, and when John Stanton was just a wee lad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sex in the early 1950s was a general embarrassment at best,
and so Catherine Berndt presumably thought, when making her will in 1993, that what
the Berndts did in New Guinea back then had to be suppressed until a time when settler
Australia hopefully had the maturity to handle the anthropological gaze being
inverted, or zoomed-in on our own (white) backsides.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">And, strangely enough,
2024 seems to be about on-track for this cultural turning point, from snicker
to sober.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which is not to say that, in
the meantime, Vince Copley should have to wait a moment longer for access to
the Berndt Museum/archive – his<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>“royalties”
are already and embarrassingly overdue.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<br />Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-57831318306664198152018-12-17T12:39:00.000+10:002018-12-17T12:47:46.694+10:00<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Ramsay Centre
announces – finally – it has secured a mistress . . . <o:p></o:p></b></div>
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. . . and the next step, in due course, will be a blushing
bride from within the G8.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Yes, that’s the bottom-line from today’s announcement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The non-sandstone University of Wollongong is
– of course – happy to take the cash for breaking the drought, and keep schtum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meanwhile the Ramsay Centre, well aware that
if, shock horror, it was seen to be marrying beneath itself, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">people would talk</i>, emphasises that this
is only a preliminary, and definitely not a monogamous, arrangement.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The secrecy in the lead-up to the deal being inked is all
class, too – a charming early window into the behavioural expectations upon the
mistress from now on. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If UoW wants academic
freedom, then first and foremost, it needs to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">behave</i>!<o:p></o:p></div>
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I would like to think that if the estate of some dead billionaire
came knocking at the doors of the main state galleries, offering buckets of
cash for them to administer an art prize with one stipulation – it had to be a
traditional Australian landscape of gum trees and livestock – the said main galleries
would laugh off the approach as “Nice try, but we’re not: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(i) your April Fool, or (ii) that desperate".<o:p></o:p></div>
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It will be interesting to see who will be the academics who
staff this joke.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But even more
interesting, I think, will be who the scholarship students are – and will be,
in a few years’ time. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I was a bright
young thing looking to start uni in 2020, I’d play along, firstly to land the scholarship
and then, and most importantly, to get a comprehensive inside story of the
course over the next year or more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then
voila, when the time was right, I’d have one of the juiciest (and, in the present climate, best paid!)
stories of investigative journalism in Australian history, all ready to roll. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-78265651263878056272018-07-09T14:36:00.000+10:002018-07-09T14:42:52.984+10:00<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXtNmijrtAlK-7HHMd-7w697ffdMPJsbfpTRKikq4lc5pb0iYDw6vUGojvgYhnCBAIp5VetaMNUok_tP9UQ-C3JNMzR59Jixn1Xbzg3TRn7Eb_N_KoSEorpnxr_f4mW96Y4B2MTw/s1600/IMG_8560.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXtNmijrtAlK-7HHMd-7w697ffdMPJsbfpTRKikq4lc5pb0iYDw6vUGojvgYhnCBAIp5VetaMNUok_tP9UQ-C3JNMzR59Jixn1Xbzg3TRn7Eb_N_KoSEorpnxr_f4mW96Y4B2MTw/s320/IMG_8560.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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<h4>
“Black Elvis” (Gnarnayarrahe Waitairie)</h4>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf0PDPm8gMk7hi6FPfKfQRdGOSPR5bjjNQc3K87Siz2zrK50mmc5RL8uLZrSHdgU8d1YGj2DrjUYOujz_ZP-H_Aw88FhjaDQJv3sbi-Cu8arDCaR9UdKJjzajd6gXCWi-humGBNQ/s1600/IMG_8562.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf0PDPm8gMk7hi6FPfKfQRdGOSPR5bjjNQc3K87Siz2zrK50mmc5RL8uLZrSHdgU8d1YGj2DrjUYOujz_ZP-H_Aw88FhjaDQJv3sbi-Cu8arDCaR9UdKJjzajd6gXCWi-humGBNQ/s320/IMG_8562.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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<h4>
Uncle Jack Charles, with Jason Tamiru on clapsticks</h4>
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Was lucky to be in Melbourne on Saturday for a rusted-on
winter treat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On a cold and grey day with a
howling south-westerly wind, I was expecting the courtyard between ACCA and the
Malthouse Theatre to be a wind-tunnel or vortex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As it
turned out, the afternoon’s festivities “Dhumba Narbethong” – an outdoor
program to complement the “<a href="https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/">A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness</a>” exhibition indoors at ACCA – met the weather halfway, as aided by, the impressive
South Face of ACCA, aka the Colossus of Rust, corralling the wind into a merely
bracing northerly. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Without sun or shadow, the monumental architecture of ACCA
and the adjacent red tollway tunnel smokestack receded into a matte background and
utilitarian shelter for a stage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On “stage”
– a campfire in the round but with a tacit backstage quadrant to the north-east
– were some remarkable performances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Songs
and stories that were intimate and relaxed – but on another level, commanded a
vortex to infinity, up and through that edge in the sky between the blue-and-white
wisps and the giant slate-grey sheets held mesmerisingly at bay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fourth wall as sheer matte-ness, and a
glimpse of the monumental form of one attenuated moment.</div>
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Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-73322220541870413112018-05-02T09:05:00.002+10:002018-05-02T09:08:28.546+10:00<br />
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<b>Notes on the origin of “b**ng”</b></div>
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The pejorative term “b**ng” for
Indigenous Australians is generally thought to be a peculiarly Australian
offshoot of the ultra-respectful “bung”, an Indonesian/Malaysian word
literally translated as older brother.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Until the other day, I hadn’t
thought about the word’s origins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had long
assumed that Australia’s equivalent to America’s n-word – although a case can
be made that Australia’s word rather trumps America’s in the offensiveness stakes # –
was home-grown and of unknown provenance. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After recently coming across a 1954 account of
the word “b**ng” being coined by a posh Pom visiting Alice Springs in August
1924, I looked up Wikipedia and then realised that the real story has become overlooked
or forgotten, in favour of a peculiarly Australian bullshit one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In short, the adaptation of “bung” theory is fanciful,
illogical and conveniently benign.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The real origin of “b**ng” is
set out in an article by Malcolm Ellis, “From Alice to Albert”,<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bulletin
</i>17 March 1954 pp 22-23, with the addition of some background context (not
about the b-word specifically) from his 1927 book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Long Lead</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Passing through Alice Springs
in August 1924, on the return leg of “the first complete double-crossing of [Australia]
by motor-car from Sydney to Darwin and back” Ellis – and his co-expeditionaries
Francis Birtles and JL Simpson, of the Bean motor-car company – spent a few
days there (this trip was – unusually for the time – neither a race nor a
scientific or other extravaganza).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Coincidentally, soon after
Ellis’ arrival from the north, Lord Stradbroke (1862-1947) and his party made a
grand entrance into Alice Springs, by motor-car from the south.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also known as the Earl of Stradbroke, he lived
mainly in the UK, but had a five-year stint in Australia as Governor of
Victoria 24 Feb 1921 to 7 April 1926. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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To further welcome Lord
Stradbroke, a major Indigenous ceremony took place that August 1924 night (on then-vacant
land that, in 1954, was occupied by the “Inland Mission radio-centre”), one that –
in the manner of a grand such occasion – was still seemingly fresh in Malcolm Ellis’
mind 30 years later.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there was also something
niggling Malcolm Ellis’ mind in 1954: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a
casually uttered snipe by Lord Stradbroke that day in 1924, when he passed by The
Bungalow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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In 1924, The Bungalow was (and
had been since 1914) a collection of dilapidated sheds behind the Stuart Arms
Hotel in downtown Alice Springs (which at the time had only six white residents),
which functioned as a home for “half caste” children.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Recoiling at the sight of its inhabitants, Lord
Stradbroke coined it “The B**ng” – a word which then stuck, and spread.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What happened next is
important to the nuances of how the b-word evolved. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Firstly, </span>Lord Stradbroke was right to recoil at the squalid
conditions in which The Bungalow’s inhabitants then lived.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, after his return to Sydney in 1924, Malcolm
Ellis wrote an influential, nationally-syndicated article which exposed these
conditions and four years later led to the Bungalow’s relocation, in better
premises ##.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But for Lord Stradbroke,
the squalid built environment of “The B**ng” and its location in the backyard
of a pub was synonymous with its human cargo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There was nothing else to say about or hope for them: b**ngs they would always
remain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Whatever else was going on inside </span>Lord Stradbroke's head that day, given the ceremony that night, he deserves nomination, I think, as a candidate for history's Least Honourable Guest of Honour ever.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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That a passing cheap-shot from
an English overlord has since been so effortlessly laundered of its provenance and
enthusiastically absorbed – complete with false, benign paternity – into the lowest
rung of the Australian vernacular is an intriguing window into the colonial insecurity
and inhumanity that lies shallowly beneath white Australia.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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# See the last line of the
Alex Buzo play, “Norm and Ahmed”<o:p></o:p></div>
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## Stuart Traynor, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice Springs:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>from singing wire to iconic outback town</i>
(2016) pp 236-239, 288.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-65471750505003977312017-11-15T13:40:00.000+10:002017-11-15T13:40:20.560+10:00<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Now,
for the plebiscite on the definition of bullying<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Readers of this blog may be aware that I
am a gay man, who has long – and consistently, albeit not recently – advocated
the case against gay marriage. A few
months ago, however, I changed my mind.
Six weeks ago, I voted yes, with some reservations. The most interesting part of my journey here,
I think, is how the “No” case has so successfully changed my opinion on this
issue over recent months – and how, just this morning, a ridiculous op-ed from
a “No”-case proponent has convinced me to cast aside my remaining
reservations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">So take a bow, Margaret Court and
<a href="http://www.theage.com.au/comment/winners-of-samesex-marriage-vote-must-now-govern-for-all-20171113-gzkmlf.html">Professor Patrick Parkinson</a> (among others) – through your hysterical invocation of the “No”-case proponents
as being bullied victims of the gay lobby, you have showed up the flimsy foundations
of your stance, and so – obviously unintentionally – swung my vote, at least,
to a “Yes”. You have allowed what seems
to be some kind of deep-seated personal insecurity (to put it kindly) to morph
into a pseudo-objective opinion on something that is (to put it politely) none
of your business. Oh, and also perverted
the meaning of the word “bullying”, and its English language cognates. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">In today’s op-ed, Professor Parkinson zeroes
in on the case of a man apparently sacked from his job in England for
expressing in public a very mild opposition to gay marriage. I suspect that
there is more to this case than Professor Parkinson grants – but it would be
impossible for me to drill down from afar into the objective truth here, so let’s
take the case study at face value. The
International Gay Lobby has ruthlessly crushed this poor man, Professor Parkinson
seems to imply. And possibly also countless
others? If so, great swathes of these “bullied
victims” are palpably silent. Perhaps Professor
Parkinson’s implication is that they are mostly too afraid to talk.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Gosh, poor dears. As a gay man, I presumably must have had little
lived experience of bullying. Losing one’s
job because of sexuality must be under Professor Parkinson’s logic, a still
rarer thing than being bullied for being a “no”-case proponent. Funnily enough, though, the former has
happened to me – as a law lecturer, albeit quite a while ago. (Conversely and
more recently, my earlier “no”-case public views, did not attract any criticism
that I would call out as unduly harsh). Perhaps
I should be your next international cause celebre/meme, eh Professor Parkinson?
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">But of course I jest here – my experience
of life-changing discrimination here is no different to the lot of many
millions of other LGTBI+ people in the first-world. And outside the first-world, of course,
things are far worse. I count myself lucky
for never been in serious fear of my life because of my sexuality, but there
have been many unpleasant incidents over three decades, including being spat at
in an outdoor café in central Melbourne, in broad daylight, two years ago, by a
~18 y.o. boy/man – whose ethnic appearance placed him as coming from what from
today can euphemistically be called the “No” suburbs. I was apparently guilty of wearing a
too-tight T-shirt – hence his spit (in my eye) and his yell of “Faggot!” to go
with it. Again, far too everyday an experience
to bother going to the police about; and the café staff just shrugged when I
told them what had just happened (in case they hadn’t seen it for themselves). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">In conclusion, go back to your sad lives
in your nice (and no-doubt “Yes”-voting) suburbs, Margaret Court and Professor Parkinson
(and the rest of you). Even after the
big news today about the “Yes” case winning the plebiscite, you can sleep
assured tonight that homophobia is alive and kicking (and spitting) in the
non-Anglo (and especially) non-Anglo <i>and</i>
poor suburbs. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">As ever, the rich get the poor to do
their dirty work for them. Ruling-class Anglo
homophobes who seemingly have conscripted an informal army of non-Anglos, and
especially their youth, to be their storm troopers for policing public morality
(and T-shirt sizing) is just the latest twist to the tale.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-45312100152227905392017-04-18T15:06:00.000+10:002017-04-18T15:06:13.858+10:00<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Real estate
bubbles, tree changers and cultural </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;"><b>“negative gearing”</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">If
the peak of the US stock-market bubble of the 1920s was the time when hotel
bell-boys everywhere were overheard exchanging stock-market hot-tips, then the
equivalent moment in Australian real estate will be when the word “investment” (in
connection with it) is drained of all nuance.
That is, <i>anyone </i>who has bought
<i>anything </i>at <i>any price</i> – lemon or not – has made, or is on their way to making,
a killing. Oh wait, that’s already happened,
at least in Melbourne and Sydney – and if the party there is over, no one
appears to be getting out in a hurry – yet.
But <a href="https://www.domain.com.au/news/why-treasurer-scomo-is-so-worried-about-australias-renters-all-of-a-sudden-20170413-gvk98x">contra to Andrew P Street</a>,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Melbourne and Sydney are just the visible tip of a nation-deep iceberg, on
which several generations of renters are foundering. And on their </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">–</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> our </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">–</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">shoulders rests </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">–</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;"> disproportionately </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">–</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">a huge
trove of cultural (as opposed to monetary) capital.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Back in money-land, t</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">here’s
a name for everyone’s-a-winner “investment” that requires no special skill,
timing or luck:</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Ponzi scheme.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Of course, not quite </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">everyone</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> is a winner – (we) renters are the perceived suckers – and
at the other end, not all “winners” are equal: </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">the earlier one has bought real estate, the
bigger one’s winnings, usually.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It
is a shame, I think, that renters (here, not including me) tend to accept their
individual lots, as one of the mandatory suckers, rather than collectively
assert their market (or voting) power to its fullest potential (that said, for
a certain strata of renters, including me, it is already “game on”; see below). Renters may not be a necessary ingredient for
every flip-for-capital-gain – and the more than trifling number of vacant
investment properties attests to this – but if <i>every</i>, or even many, investment properties were vacant, the
prospects for capital gain would evaporate.
Of course, everyone needs a roof over their heads, so limiting renters’
effective choice in withdrawing from this market. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">There
is more than one way to skin a cat here, however – and I believe that a chunk
of we <i>lumpen</i>-renters are one our way to
conspiring to send a powerful market signal, even if this has been done perhaps unconsciously and involves what I’ll call the econo-cultural </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">(as opposed to monetary)</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">sphere.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">This phrase is not a neologism, but I’m using
it here in specific counterpoint to the phrase “culture industries” et al –
which, if not oxymoronic, fails to account for (and here to invoke the same
parlance) creative </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">consumption </i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">– that
is, where and how people like me spend their time dreaming, gleaning and
fossicking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Living
well outside of the big smoke/s for the main reason of (much) cheaper rent (plus
I didn’t have a job in Melbourne to detain me), I have spent three years in a
box seat to take the national econo-cultural temperature. As I presaged above, there are ripples to
urban real-estate inflation that are felt well outside the commuter belts of
Melbourne and Sydney. Big-city (or even
second-string) property-owners whose careers or life-stage allow it thus cash-in
and sell-up, to go shopping with their hard-currency bonanza in regional
locations where lived was lived in, and so real-estate was traditionally bought and sold for, trusty “pesos”. This domestic “migration”, driven by
real-estate arbitrage, tends to be mono-cultural, and is a potent – and perhaps
under-appreciated – factor in spreading the cheer (or misery, if you’re a
renter) of the urban real-estate boom far and wide. And in turn, a definitely under-appreciated
cultural phenomenon – and not in a good way. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
net econo-cultural upshot in 2017 is that property prices in all but the direst
of dire country towns are actually quite expensive, thereby preventing, for at
least the last decade, cultural rejuvenation by artist/intellectual types
attracted by the local “peso” economy and social matrix (and moving there with only pesos in
their pockets).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Artist/intellectual
types who rent are thus pretty much stuck in their present real-estate rut,
urban or regional, with no better alternative.
Fitzroy/Darlinghurst garrets are long gone, of course, for committed
bohemians wanting to culturally <i>invest </i>in
their locale, but more recently, so are grungy outer suburbs and even
white-bread country towns. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">If
you’ve ever wondered why Australian intellectual life itself has been stuck in
a mediocre rut for at least the past decade, you now have the answer –<b> there is
no “fringe” to escape to any more</b>, and thus no<i> liquidity</i> in the cultural and consumption mix. There
is only urban vapidity and cupidity – a monoculture of greed that trumps, with
spades, the much-vaunted big-city multi-culture, both at home and away. In the cities, hyper-consumption converges
and finds its own level as teenage gangs invade ordinary suburban homes to
steal trophy cars for a ride to nowhere – an even more sliced-and-diced undercutting
of Uber at its own algorithmic game, if you like.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Meanwhile,
in the regions, a different sort of invasion and consumption convergence is
happening. A vanguard of (Anglo-Celtic Australian)
culture-deaf, real-estate arbitrageurs – as opposed to <i>refugees</i>, like me – slowly spread across the nation like a cane-toad
swarm. Though self-fancied and styled
as “tree changers”, they are on a mission to re-invent their new locales and
environments. But rather than resulting
in a heady – and not always comfortable, it must be noted – admixture of
bohemia with old-school country, these newcomers come to conquer, not to
settle. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Tree
changers” need, and bring, sophisticated weaponry to achieve this, of course –
with their killer advantage, one to which about nine out of every ten old-timer
locals will swoon or reluctantly succumb, being the middlebrow “urban” café. Believe it or not, these are still new enough
in many country towns, and the locals so hitherto unaccustomed to pure consumption
for its own sake, that a newly opened café, complete with brown interior tonings,
in one’s town achieves a social revolution – changing the town’s ~150 year-old social
fabric almost overnight to an all-encompassing, gimlet-eyed (and anti-social)
dollars-and-cents ledger. That is, into
a matrix the “tree changers” can effortlessly and comfortably assimilate – not
least because they spored and sooled it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">There
is some hope here, however – what I like to think of as a form of cultural “negative
gearing”; a collective action by boho renters.
Taking a leaf out of the property investor playbook, we selectively keep
<i>vacant </i>some of our cultural properties,
and so starve the market of stock. This
can work wherever you live. The aim, of course, is to accumulate private
cultural capital in the long-term. As we quietly do this, the hyper-consumption economy will eventually burn itself out – with one
urban home invasion too many, and no country towns left to colonise with middlebrow
cafés. When that day comes, culture,
sweet culture, will be the most valuable roof above all our heads, and floor
beneath your – and not mine – humbled lives. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-16011478893320183522016-11-30T09:04:00.002+10:002016-11-30T13:01:11.880+10:00<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<b>Death,
taxes and the inter-generational minefield<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
In the good old days – up to c.1979 – death and
taxes in Australia were not merely the twin certainties in life; they were
coupled together in a way which led to a clutch of secondary assumptions about
wealth accumulation, holding (or not), and dispersal/transfer within average
families. State death (and gift) duties
placed a kind of glass ceiling on capital gains, particularly over family homes
and other unproductive real estate (i.e. that was mostly or entirely vacant). Unproductive assets would hence tend not to
spiral up in value because, even if – and in those days it was a big “if” – the
acquirer “won” the game of speculation, there would be an eventual but (for
most) inevitable day of reckoning with both grim-reapers. For the middle-classes, at least, the taxman
would take a heavy cut (although the wealthy could more easily sidestep death
duties). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
This situation led to a virtuous circle in and for middle-class
Australia. Productive investments were more
or less neutral for estate-planning (being taxed in both life and death), while
spending one’s surplus wealth in retirement was gently encouraged – and here I
mean actually <i>spending </i>it, as opposed
to locking it up in unproductive real estate, such as renovations. On the other side of the ledger – from the
perspective of the adult children of the retirees – there was a distinct lack
of angst about all this, in a way that today seems almost inconceivable. But in days before real-estate price
inflation became rampant – and a present-day inter-generational minefield, of
which more about soon – it really was this elegantly simple. The younger folk bought their own houses
without reference to, or handouts from, their elders. That they could <i>afford </i>to do this was, in turn, largely due to a thriving real (as
opposed to real-estate) economy – when, once upon a time, retirees actually <i>spent</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Since the 1980s, a countervailing vicious circle
has taken hold. Real-estate inflation
has fed off the peculiarities within capital gains taxes (CGT), first introduced
in 1985, and a national regime very different to the old death duties ones. CGT has always exempted the family home and has,
since 1999, generally been levied at a much lighter rate than income taxes. Speculating (as it was once called, or “investing”
as it is now more usually known) in unproductive or negative-income real estate
has thus become a no-brainer for many. Expensive
home renovations, meanwhile, have become a similarly vacuous quasi-"bank" for both
storing and flaunting wealth – a curious phenomenon that surely no 1950s
futurist could have conceived of. This was a decade when
cutting-edge renovations meant an indoor toilet (fancy!) and a fresh coat of
paint indoors every twenty years or so.
Plus, if you were really serious about keeping up with the Joneses in
the 1950s, there was also a must-have accessory – an Albert Namatjira print
hanging on the lounge-room wall. </div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">In 2016, there has been a ground-up</span> re-writing of the middle-class
former rule-book from the death-duties era about wealth accumulation, holding
(or not), and dispersal/transfer within the family. The
young (and not so young) have become supplicants, while the old – baby boomers
and older – have become hoarders. When
increasing life-expectancy in thrown into this mix, the outcome truly, as the
saying goes, is on for young and old.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
“Spending the kids’ inheritance” is usually said in
a tongue-and-cheek way that belies its modern complexities, if not <i>de facto </i>impossibility. This loose phrase would not seem to apply to
money that is or could be got from unlocking the capital in the family home –
if this is seen as “spending” money at all, it is of the serious,
non-discretionary type; viz for entering aged-care, etc. So the family home’s value is largely sacrosanct
from discretionary spending – or properly hoarded, you might say – despite much
of this store of value usually being an intrinsic windfall. Retirees’ surplus spending money will thus mostly
come from other sources – primarily investments. However, because these monies are, on the
whole, lightly taxed, particularly if inside superannuation, there is also a
disincentive to spending them, compared to the good old days of death duties. A
tendency to “bad” hoarding, or miserliness, is thus structurally
encouraged. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
While the degree of this will vary with the personality
of each retiree – and so it is very hard to quantify on macro-scale – the
prevalence of this type of hoarding is undoubtedly masked by what I call
pseudo-spending: on renovations to the
family home, and perhaps also, more controversially, on staying on for one’s
twilight years as a single or couple in a large family home (or a modest family
home on a large or otherwise windfall value-increased block of land). The latter scenario involves deep emotional
factors, as well as complex economic rationalities, mainly to do with age-pension
eligibility and aged-care bonds. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
But for all this, the matter of retirees’ discretionary
spending in the real economy should not be overlooked. If this spending is perversely
light – which seems to me to be the case – then “the kids’ inheritance” indeed
comes to the fore, precisely because it is<i>
not</i> sufficiently spent. The adult “kids”
(apart from those who work in the tax-advantaged real-estate and renovation
industries) thus have fewer and less well-paid jobs (and pay more than their
fair share of taxes along the way).
Meanwhile, real-estate prices continue to inflate, largely driven by the
tax system. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Here, you may still think that this situation will
sooner or later resolve itself, and happily for all. The kids will eventually get their inheritance
– and the hoardier their parents were, the bigger the kids’ windfall will be, naturally.
But these are largely uncharted inter-generational
waters. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
As well as the present Xer-and-younger (born
on/after 1 July 1962, by my calculation) generations being, on average, poorer
than their parents, now and probably also at death, longer life-expectancy is
starting to see inheritances now commonly delivered when the “kids” are in
their seventies (if not, although still rarely, even older). For baby boomers – on average (much) richer
than their Depression-child parents, despite the latter’s frugality – this may
mean that the beach-house upgrade comes, annoyingly, a few years later than
would have been ideal.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
For retirement-age Xers-and-younger however, the
timing of the inheritance is of much greater fiscal significance, particularly if
they do not – <i>ahem </i>– yet have
significant real-estate equity. For such seventy-somethings, an inheritance
may well be a case of Too Much, Too Late:
a disruption to receipt of the age-pension (if that even still exists
for seventy-somethings from 2032) until the inheritance is spent on first-home
buying, which real-estate may in turn be occupied for a only brief time before
an aged-care bond comes knocking. That
said, here I may be privileging Xer hardship above baby boomer stresses. With thousands of baby boomers now turning
seventy every week, who am I to minimise the existential dread many must be
feeling at this milestone; still beach-house bridesmaids in Blairgowrie (and
Pittwater), and watching the biological clock ticking on their inheritance-dependent
close-ups in Portsea (and Palm Beach)?<i><o:p></o:p></i></div>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
In summary, my message to all those born before 1
July 1962 is: please <i><a href="http://www.theage.com.au/comment/millennials-should-start-paying-their-dues-instead-of-blaming-older-australians-20161122-gsunfh.html">spend</a></i><a href="http://www.theage.com.au/comment/millennials-should-start-paying-their-dues-instead-of-blaming-older-australians-20161122-gsunfh.html"> (as baby boomer Colin Stephen puts it, with a visceral spit)</a> your kids’ inheritance. That is, spend it on anything but
real-estate. And especially, don’t financially
“help” your kids to get into a late-stage bubble market <span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">in
real-estate </span>– this diverts dollars
away from the real economy, and so the chances are it depresses your kids’
wages and job prospects, if not also their lives in total. No doubt many of you privately like the idea
of your kids as anxious supplicants, whether before or after your death. If nothing else, this is presumably a
psychological pay-off for the vague spectre that haunted your own outwardly-affluent
childhood; that of your (now very-old or deceased) parents’ frugality demons
from their own inter-war childhoods. But
if you must, property-hoard away, boomers – you can renovate your way to property nirvana and tax-less fiscal immortality, but you can’t
hide from the other grim reaper.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<ul>
<li>NB: this post was edited and expanded at 1:45pm AEST 30 Nov 2016.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
--<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<b>Haiku
of reflection for home renovators<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Once-white, mottled old<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
shade-cloth mirrored in pool gleams<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
like polished concrete <o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
- Paul Watson</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="background: white; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-26100264552251195282016-09-29T21:33:00.002+10:002016-09-29T21:42:36.601+10:00<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>South Australia was
asking for it, says PM Turnbull<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The recent, and ongoing, severe storms in South Australia
have, of course, been accompanied by equally severe blasts of hot air from
Canberra, with PM Malcolm Turnbull, Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg, and –
curiously – independently-minded (or so I had thought) Adelaide-resident
politician Nick Xenophon being prominent wind-instruments here.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Not living in South Australia, and so not directly affected
by these twin barrages, I do not want to play the victim-in-the-eye-of-the-storm
card on their behalf. I am sympathetic,
but that’s almost beside the point, from afar. At ground zero, there are lots of emotions
going round almost randomly in these situations, which perhaps explains the straw
of blame that Nick Xenophon has chosen to cling onto. (As it happens, I also lived through an 8-hour
blackout yesterday, but that’s another, very local and minor story.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What I’m actually angry about is thus not the (media) storm
heaped upon the (real) storm, as an ill-timed double whammy. Rather, it’s the uncanny – and obscene –
similarity between South Australia and a rape victim in all this. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The PM Turnbull (et al) line is, quite simply “She was <i>asking for it</i>, flaunting her svelte, low-emissions
(40% renewable) figure like a Vegas stripper.
Or like uncovered meat, if you prefer the feline analogy. In either case, under this logic South
Australia got what she deserved. That
is, a shafting by moralising puritans with their pants around their ankles, who
in their own minds rationalise their thrustings as benignly teaching her a valuable
lesson. Viz that in future, by modestly
dressing herself in a carbon-saturated sackcloth of coal-fired electricity, she
will, oh so generously and Praise the Lords of Global Warming, be spared a
repeat rape.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But does the PM Turnbull (et al) line have a slight skerrick
of scientific basis? The AEMO has,
according to two out of three ABC TV (7pm News and 7:30 Report) reports this
evening denied that there was any link between the state-wide blackout and South
Australia’s choice of electricity-generation mix (or “attire”, to continue the
analogy). The third report said that AEMO
was still investigating the cause. This hedging
and dallying is revealing – of an ugly truth.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
South Australia plainly <i>does
</i>have a problem with its electricity, and that’s the Victorian
interconnector. The hyperbolic, if
mercifully short-lived price hike in South Australia of a few months ago, which
resulted from the Victorian interconnector being down for “maintenance” well
demonstrates the power relativities here, in both senses. I would have thought that such “maintenance”
would have been well-flagged in advance to those who would bear its brunt, so
allowing South Australia to put other contingencies in place. But perhaps I’m wrong here – and in
mid-winter, South Australia couldn’t even think about covering herself briefly
with her own non-renewable electricity, as she was too busy sashaying around to
notice the letter in her box from grim Victoria, telling her what was in store
if she didn’t get her act together.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was, fittingly enough, <i>protecting </i>the Victorian interconnector (and so stopping the blackout
<i>spreading </i>to brown-coal lickin’, and here
actually <i>morally-virtuous</i> Victoria) that
seems to have been the reason that the blackout went entirely state-wide. South Australia, in “aggressively” seeking renewable
electricity, has thus found itself a lightning rod for a whole set of nasties,
worse perhaps the worst meteorological storm. In trying to be a responsible adult on this
planet, and so to mitigate climate change, South Australia has found itself to
be at the whim of a sick-puppy Victoria, playing dog in its odiferous brown-coal
manger: “So <i>now </i>you want our dirty electricity do ya – so <i>beg</i> for it, whore”. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
The power imbalance behind the Victorian interconnector is,
of course, an inconvenient political truth, meaning that Victoria’s dirty
secret can’t be directly acknowledged by PM Turnbull (et al). Instead, there is a displacement of the perverse
moral superiority Victoria gets out of its sado-electrical relationship with South
Australia. Rather than being seen as a
weaker party to a contract who just maybe, and for once, could be cut a bit of slack,
South Australia right now is completely up Slut Creek without a Briquette, which
is exactly where her type always end up, isn’t it, Malcolm?<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-81592632922699931962016-06-29T15:22:00.000+10:002016-06-29T15:23:41.960+10:00<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Song title: “A walk
on the monopoly board (using real money)”<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">A
salute to the GenX highly-educated precariat* (with apologies to John Schurmann
and Redgum)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Mum and Dad and Caro came
to the auction round the corner<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">It was a long way from the
quote<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">My place was next to be
tarted up and sold<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">And baby-boomer neighbours
lined the footpaths as we* cringed against the fence<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">This photo from the
auction shows us shocked and scarred and lined<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">God help me – I was
already forty-nine<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">And can you tell me, tradie,
why I still can’t get to sleep?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">And why the sound of
auction clapping chills me to my feet?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">And what’s this regret that
comes and stays, can you tell me why it grinds? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">God help me – I was
already forty-nine<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"> * Or is it only me?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-604344024775245452016-05-22T14:29:00.000+10:002016-05-24T09:31:56.224+10:00<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<b>Newsflash: Gold Coast car
salesman is not a wanker<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
For the last six months, the <i>Australian </i>newspaper has been running an
intermittent-but-otherwise-red-hot, vindictive campaign to discredit David
Ridsdale (1). Their motivation for doing
so seems plain enough – to silence one of George Pell’s chief critics; and the
timing of the first three successive headline explosions has been exquisite in this regard –
wheeling out David Ridsdale’s past when the public heat would otherwise be on
George Pell’s present, per his Royal Commission evidence. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
As to why a loss-making newspaper would
allow itself to be used as a blatant PR mouthpiece for such a dubious – but deep-pocketed
– cause, you’ll have to ask Rupert or the Vatican. In any event, my interest here is less in the
tawdry underlying economics, but in the even more tawdry extremes to which a
story must be stretched, so as to be able to flog the sponsor’s message, disguised,
and so unnoticed, among all the lurid bathos. <i> <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
When I say “unnoticed”, I am not
referring only to the <i>Australian</i>’s
mass audience (if that is not an oxymoron).
The Fairfax Press and the ABC (/Media Watch) have been strangely
reticent to call the <i>Australian</i> out
on the anti-David Ridsdale campaign. I
acknowledge one substantial reason for this reticence – to do justice to this
issue, post 7 May 2016 at least, there is no alternative but to tread on the
finer feelings (or worse) of a man who here I’ll refer to as the Gold Coast car
salesman. I accept that this is a flimsy
pseudonym in the circumstances, and that what I write about him here is deeply
personal, unsolicited by him, and the words of a complete stranger. That said, I wish him no harm, and sincerely
hope that, by pointing out how he has been re-victimised by the <i>Australian</i>, this opinion piece takes
away one, rather than adds another, layer of his victimisation.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
More in the “it goes without
saying” category, I express the same sentiments in respect of David
Ridsdale. Quite possibly, adding more
oxygen to this story, from whatever “side”, is the last thing he wants at this
moment. In the interests of full
disclosure, I also note that, while this piece is also unsolicited by him, he
is not quite a complete stranger – either he or one of his brothers was my
Grade 1 classmate/playmate at St Alipius Primary School in Ballarat in 1971,
but in any event, I have not seen or been in any other form of communication
with David Ridsdale since 1971.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
***<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Where to start this story? The <i>Australian</i>’s
biggest story in their (ongoing?) PR vendetta series so far – a 7 May 2016
weekend magazine article by Trent Dalton – was centred on the abuse of the Gold
Coast car salesman by David Ridsdale in 1984, when the former was 12 and the
latter 18. The article’s title, “Chain
Reaction”, evinced a broader concern, however:
what happens when (male) child abuse-victim becomes an adult abuser of
children? Hetty Johnston, a professional
spokesperson for child abuse-victims was quoted on some of the nuances
here. Otherwise, Trent Dalton’s
interest in the theme was limited to a “chain reaction” of two – starting with
David Ridsdale’s childhood abuse by his uncle, priest Gerald Ridsdale, up to
1981, and ending, firmly (if by implication only) with the future Gold Coast
car salesman’s childhood abuse by David Ridsdale in 1984. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
However, there was also a passing
mention that Gerald Ridsdale also claimed to have been sexually abused as a
child. Should this story, in fairness,
start there? (Trent Dalton obviously thought not.) Or if Gerald Ridsdale’s
rapist (now presumably deceased) was himself abused – as would seem likely –
back further still, and so on?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Personally, apart from the
evidentiary diminishing returns, I don’t think that much is to be gained from
tracing such “chain reactions” well back.
Even if Gerald Ridsdale’s childhood rapist was still alive, and healthy
enough to be successfully prosecuted and appropriately sentenced, this would
seem to be a mere footnote in the scheme of Gerald Ridsdale’s crimes.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Quite possibly, Gerald Ridsdale
himself would regard my dismissive approach here as an injustice and
double-standard, saying to himself (and/or to anyone who cares) that (a) he
would never have become an abuser but for his own abuse, and (b) he would not
have offended so prolifically and for so long, had his own abuser been charged
at the “usual” life-stage, per the most common age-of-reporting scenario is when
the victim is middle-aged and probably at a low-point, mental-health wise (i.e.
in Gerald Ridsdale’s case, c. 1980). To
which I would reply curtly: “You had your chance then”, and c.1980, you blew it
on David Ridsdale (among others). (There
are also obvious large differences of scale between the offending of the two Ridsdales,
but to go down this path would be to marginalise the victims of once-off
paedophiles, so I won’t.) <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
***<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
We shall start in 1984, then, when,
as I’ve said, the future Gold Coast car salesman, then 12, was sexually abused
on two or three occasions by David Ridsdale, then 18. I emphatically think that it should be
unnecessary to go into the details of this, which Trent Dalton’s article does,
with some apparent relish. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
On this, I think that it is a
generally brave act for a victim of childhood sexual abuse to step-forward by
name, and so waive their otherwise cast-iron right of anonymity (and doubly so
for a male), but I query the collateral price they often pay, in terms of their
abuse being graphically described. While
this is presumably necessary in the text of court judgements convicting and
sentencing paedophiles (although I often detect a sense of gratuitous voyeurism
even in the penning of these), Trent Dalton’s resort to lurid detail is
initially inexplicable. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Additionally, Dalton also lets us
into the Gold Coast car salesman’s otherwise-private adult sexual peccadillo, which,
to be fair, does depend on our contextual knowledge of some detail about his
childhood abuse. By itself, I don’t have
the same reservations about this adult-peccadillo disclosure – a fact that my
headline, of course, robustly attests to.
Here, I should mention my philosophy that, should mortifyingly personal
(and <i>adult</i>) material “go” public, the
lighter the touch, the better. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Plainly, Dalton’s philosophy is
different; he thinks that adult sexual peccadillos should be milked for
tragedy, not comedy. But Dalton <i>needs</i> to set up the Gold Coast car
salesman in this (unhelpful to the victim, I would have thought) searing
light. The bare facts of the police-station and
courtroom sequel to the 1984 abuse, were they to speak for themselves, would
barely add up to a story, whether in 1994 or 2016, much less today’s
excoriating, drip-fed public scandal (and private/lurid tragedy). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
In short, David Ridsdale is indeed,
as Gerard Henderson loves to put it at every opportunity, a “convicted
paedophile” – meaning that as an adult (although at 18, barely) he was, on 5
October 1995, convicted of the indecent assault of the future Gold Coast car
salesman over events dating back to 1984.
In fact, David Ridsdale pleaded guilty to all this, and received a good
behaviour bond, in large part apparently because of the fact that he himself
was a victim of his uncle (although his age at the time and his prospect for
rehabilitation presumably also worked in favour of this sentence). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
This sentence was the lightest possible
one in the circumstances. If you (a)
haven’t read Trent Dalton’s article, and (b) haven’t paid much attention to mine
so far, you may think “Aha!” at this point:
David Ridsdale got a slap on the wrist, while the Gold Coast car
salesman got a life-sentence. And thus, no
wonder that the <i>Australian </i>is arcing
up here: Pell’s denouncer has dirty-linen
of his own, in receiving a cushy sentence, for an ultra-relevant crime to his
present-day reputation. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Actually, the <i>Australian </i>has said no such thing.
While it repeatedly stresses the general shade of David Ridsdale’s dirty-linen,
Trent Dalton’s article is very careful to not even hint that his good behaviour
bond was an unjustly light sentence. Instead,
Trent Dalton manages to insinuate that David Ridsdale’s guilty plea <i>robbed the Gold Coast car salesman of
justice;</i> apparently he only found out about this only recently, having
assumed for two decades (and Trent Dalton is careful to <i>imply</i> this only) that his case against David Ridsdale had been
quietly dropped, for some strange or sinister reason, by the Ballarat police
(an agency that the Gold Coast car salesman in the mid-1990s had already found
to be quite unhelpful personally). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
So, to get Trent Dalton’s story
straight here, David Ridsdale’s guilty plea, far from sparing the Gold Coast
car salesman the need to travel and re-live his abuse in an interstate
courtroom, a kilometre or two from the scene of the crimes, instead <i>exacerbated</i> his childhood abuse, by
thwarting his chance for closure. While
David Ridsdale, of course, had something to potentially gain (2) from his guilty
plea, to turn this around, as Trent Dalton does, as a re-victimisation of the Gold
Coast car salesman by David Ridsdale –
who under Dalton’s logic, somehow had the Ballarat police working under his
thumb – is perverse, in my opinion.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
But you can be the judge here. Is David Ridsdale a criminal mastermind, a
man who only the <i>Australian</i> is brave
enough to call out? Do Fairfax and the
ABC actively still hide David Ridsdale’s murky past, despite it being all over
Google (although without any hint of the victim’s identity until very recently)
since at least 2002 (3), because acknowledging it would wholly rescind his
bona-fides as a George Pell critic, and possibly also rescind the bona-fides of
<i>all</i> George Pell critics, as
co-conspirators with David Ridsdale?
This is the <i>Australian</i>’s
reverse Samson-and-Goliath bottom-line (editorially, if not also in
accounts-receivable). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
To be blunt, I have no doubt as to
whom I would rather have teaching or baby-sitting my (hypothetical) children
out of David Ridsdale or George Pell – the “convicted paedophile” wins over the
supposed moral paragon. No doubt the Gold
Coast car salesman sees this differently, but here I suggest that the New Testament
may have some interesting and relevant opinions on this dilemma. This hypothetical aside, I suggest that if anyone
honestly believes that George Pell has done more to arrest clerical paedophilia
in Australia than David Ridsdale, warts and all, then they are one sick puppy. Although such sick puppies are probably still
in a moral class above those who gang-up and demonise David Ridsdale simply for
the money. I’ll leave it to you to
decide who is in which moral category here. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
In a strange way, I’m actually with
the Gold Coast car salesman c. 2015 (when he had a breakdown) all the way on one
aspect – when Trent Dalton, Gerard Henderson, and John Ferguson have had an uninvited
and unwelcome wank right next to me (viz, reading the <i>Australian</i> at breakfast, if you must know), for taking such a
grotesque liberty with little-old me, every time I now see their names in
public now, for their gutless temerity, I shake with a near-bottomless rage. And if,
reading this now, you feel that I have also wanked right across little-old-your
own virtue, I’m terribly sorry – but to this I plead guilty also. The “chain reaction” goes on, I’m afraid.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<b>Disclosure:</b> Paul Watson is
(A) a wanker, who (B) would be an appalling salesman, who would not be able to
sleep at night unless he had informed every potential customer of each
potential defect in the merchandise. He
also (C) has a strong personal belief in Hell, otherwise known as the Gold
Coast, or in Paul Watson’s parochial moral compass, “Vatican II” – both Vaticans
being places where anything and everything is for sale, and very little is real.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
<b>Update 23 May 2016<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
I’ve just become aware that the ABC
– perhaps stung by Gerard Henderson’s hysterical cry of “censorship” on 12
February 2016 # decided to play “me too” with the Gold Coast car salesman’s
story, on <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-10/david-ridsdale-accused-of-downplaying-abuse-past/7401022">10 May 2016</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; margin-left: 36pt;">
# “<i>Meanwhile The
Age — plus the rest of Fairfax Media plus the ABC — has chosen to censor the
news that Pell’s chief accuser, David Ridsdale, is himself a convicted
paedophile. David Ridsdale pleaded guilty in 1984 [sic] to having sexually
assaulted a 12 year old boy when aged 18.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; margin-left: 36pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; margin-left: 36pt;">
<i>This was
revealed by John Ferguson in The Australian on 21 December 2015. But the
Pell-haters in Fairfax Media and at the taxpayer funded public broadcaster seem
to have determined that this news is not fit to print or broadcast</i>”.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
Personally, I would have thought
Gerard Henderson’s (and George Pell’s) connections with the late, paedophile-protecting, and ultra-conservative Bishop James O’Collins (a story that no
mainstream media organisation wants to touch, despite being well-enough
documented) are a much bigger case of “censorship” than David Ridsdale’s lone teenage crime.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
But on the topic of (arguably) minor crimes, I
also note two errors of fact by Gerard Henderson. The first, in the above quote, should read
“1996”, not “1984”. The effect of this
error is to separate in time David Ridsdale’s disclosures as <i>perpetrator</i> from those as <i>victim</i>.
In fact, of course, these were at much, if not exactly, the same time
(1994-95) – a point that deserves taking the time to stop and think "what if?". <b>What if </b>David Ridsdale had never made his dual disclosures to the police, re the Gold Coast car salesman and Gerald Ridsdale? I suggest that the outcome here in 2016 would
have been: (a) David Ridsdale would
today be a privately troubled middle-aged man, but not a “convicted
paedophile”, (b) the Gold Coast car salesman would today also be a privately
troubled middle-aged man (still depressed that the Ballarat police had fobbed
him off about David Ridsdale in 1994, but at least having had two decades since
without even hearing mention of the name of David Ridsdale). Oh, and (c) <b>Gerald Ridsdale would still be a free man – and quite probably, if not still
offending in his 80s, having racked up hundreds more victims in his 60s and 70s</b>. In other words, there would have been one, and only one, big
winner – be careful what you wish for, people.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
The second error of fact by Gerard
Henderson makes me wonder whether it, and the error above, were actually intentional. This one could <i>not </i>possibly be a typo. In his 21 May 2016 column, Henderson wrote:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; margin-left: 36pt;">
“<i>Also, the royal
commission declined to question David Ridsdale (one of Pell’s chief critics) on
Ridsdale’s pedophile conviction in 1995 — revealed in February by The</i>
<i>Australian</i>”. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
Here, the “February” reference can
only mean Henderson’s 12 February 2016 column – as quoted above (first quote) – which prominently referred to John Ferguson on 21 December 2015 as actually breaking the news. But most <i>Australian </i>readers, of course, would not also read this blog, or otherwise take the trouble to look back for Henderson’s February reference, so allowing his error, as to who "broke" (3) the story, to "stick". Has John Ferguson – who as “Victorian
Political Editor” was on a plainly extra-curricular assignment in the first
place – had some post 7 May 2016 reputation-saving second-thoughts about his
own complicity in the “chain reaction” that his December article started, and
so Gerard Henderson has kindly stepped in to muddy the first link in the chain?<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<b>Footnotes<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">1.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">See:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 18.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 18.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Pell accuser indecently assaulted boy at YMCA”,
John Ferguson (Victorian Political Editor, Melbourne), </span><i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Australian</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> 21 December 2015.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-left: 18.0pt;">
“Media Watch Dog: Banging the (loaded) Drum on
the ABC”, Gerard Henderson, <b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-left: 18.0pt;">
<i>Australian</i> website, uploaded 12 February
2016, 3:45pm.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-left: 18.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-left: 18.0pt;">
“Ghosts of the
past bring horror back to life 30 years on” and “Chain Reaction”, both by Trent
Dalton, <i>Australian</i> 7 May 2016.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-left: 18.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-left: 18.0pt;">
“Sex abuse royal commission fails test of
fairness”, Gerard Henderson, <i>Australian</i>
21 May 2016.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<span style="text-indent: -24px;">2. This was not a one-way bet. If he was more concerned about avoiding the “convicted paedophile” tag than the increased possibility of a custodial sentence, David Ridsdale would have been well-advised to plead not guilty, and take his chances with a jury. Had he a criminal-defence budget in the realms of the six or seven-figure sums that the Catholic Church has routinely spent in recent years defending its in-house paedophiles, I suggest that David Ridsdale would have been a fool to plead guilty.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-left: 18.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-left: 18.0pt;">
3. <a href="http://www.catholica.com.au/forum/index.php?mode=printpost&post=180128">The Australian dredges up some old news and proclaims a "scoop"</a>.<b><o:p></o:p></b><br />
http://www.catholica.com.au/forum/index.php?mode=printpost&post=180128<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-32403717888703219252016-04-18T11:18:00.002+10:002016-04-18T11:23:26.079+10:00<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<b>On chastity vs hands down deep pockets<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Celibacy is a “gift” to the
Catholic priesthood; a key part of a grand vow and voluntary choice for life
(usually). That for gay Catholics
celibacy is just baldly assumed should be an outrage. Such individuals are deemed to be in a kind
of second-rate priesthood; entered into involuntarily, and with zero trappings
or institutional support. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Of course, this has long been a
successful recruitment strategy for the priesthood and convents; for centuries,
it was almost a no-brainer. When puberty
made it clear the depth and type of one's sexual identity, and assuming one
wanted to remain a good Catholic, to enter the priesthood was a free
first-class ticket for life (and beyond) while the only non-sinful alternative
was a bleak, hard road. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
This balance has now been torn
asunder, of course. For the last few decades, very few gay Catholic adolescents
in the West have succumbed to the Church’s bluff. When one alternative in a binary “choice”
involves demonstrable psychological distress for life, discarding the very
binary framework, and instead entering into a life of “sin” is, I suggest, a profoundly
moral decision. To have taken the easy
road would be to encourage blackmail; and ditto for the hard road. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
This is at the heart of the
Catholic Church’s inability to deal with its deep sickness within. Without substantial fresh flows
into the priesthood, the whole system quickly becomes illiquid. The small numbers of new seminarians are much
more likely to be heterosexual – for whom the category of second-rate celibate
does not apply, and so in general are more fickle in their belonging. Incumbent gay priests are thereby doubly
deprived of young gay men to have uncomplicated intra-workplace dalliances with
(one of the tacit fringe benefits of the priesthood, it would seem).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
This crisis actually has already
passed; with the paedophilia epidemic of the 1970s and 1980s being a grim
marker of the transition period. Akin
perhaps to a butterfly flapping its wings causing quite something else, the
modern gay rights era has a causal relationship to the paedophilia epidemic of
my childhood. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
To attribute <i>blame</i> here would be ludicrous, I hope it goes without saying. The
thinking-in-centuries Catholic Church was caught wrong-footed and on the
hop. Equally, this rupture explains why
the Church must clamp down so heavily on even a small gesture of homophilia
within its ranks. Loosely speaking, the present-day
proliferation of out gay men and women is now a sort of rival priesthood to the
Church, albeit one without earthly trappings built-in to the job description. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Though middle-age gay ex-Catholics
are only a part of this diverse mob, their presence as secular traitors – who <i>should</i> have been priests – has been a
singular, and quite personal, tipping-point.
My age cohort bore the brunt of the paedophilia epidemic, as priests on
a sinking ship took out their fears and frustrations, indiscriminately. In the 1970s and 80s, it was probably a
desperate, double-or-nothing recruitment strategy, to keep some semblance of
business as usual. The hope at the time
must have been that, for gay Catholic adolescents with strong stomachs and love
of hypocrisy – which is to say, future leadership material – the old closet
bargain was still on. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
However, few, if any, of my
generation bought this – leaving the Church in a lurch. Its human capital now in probably terminal
decline, it has had no choice but to focus its efforts on the other sort of
capital – money. As this focus alone would
seem crass, the Church also kept some moral irons in the fire. Chief among these is that old chestnut, the
virtue of the celibate closet for gay Catholics, and the relatively-new, corollary
evil of the “gay lobby”. As a PR
strategy for a tarnished institution, this is beyond ridiculous. But for an organisation now bereft of a large
cohort of middle-aged leaders (or leaders in waiting), I can understand the
logic and attraction of this strategy for the ageing keepers of an objectively
rudderless real-estate empire and cash-box. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Like inbred third-world
oil-sheikhs, the Church both can afford the very best lawyers and PR lackeys (some
of whom purport to be journalists), and indeed nothing less would compensate for
the imbecility of the client. Accordingly,
the paedophilia epidemic grew a substantial industry of hangers-on in recent decades
– loyal retainers, if you like, with proven strong stomachs (through representing
guilty paedophiles, and discrediting and vilifying victims). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Having such loyal retainers, just
because the task one initially engaged them for dries up should not mean that
they are let go. This is the final,
delicious irony – that the Catholic Church has now effectively outsourced its
homophobia – a new and growing line of work – to expensive professionals. The emergence of this (secular and
self-perpetuating) “priesthood” was perhaps inevitable – a liking for first-class
trappings, and a lack of moral scruples allows a pleasing congruence between geriatric
cash-box keeper and up-and-coming cash-box donee. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Or put another way, the old game of
blackmail successfully continues in another guise. The sexuality of this new outsourced “priesthood”
scarcely matters, as long as they follow the homophobic script. It is easy money, I suppose. But for me, and I’m quite sure for a
disproportionate and growing number of my generation also, the hard road – staying
celibate from the financial tentacles of the Catholic Church – has never looked
so attractive. <o:p></o:p></div>
Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-62548639071427394562015-12-14T16:15:00.002+10:002015-12-14T16:28:18.653+10:00<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<b>Peter Ryan, last of the Alf Conlon-ites <o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
It is a shame that Peter Ryan, who
died yesterday aged 92, will probably be remembered as a man of three parts: young soldier, middle-aged publisher and
grumpy old culture-warrior, per the 1993-94 Manning Clark/Soviet Spy controversy. Actually, his public life really only had one,
long act.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
I have no doubt that Ryan’s military
service in what became PNG during WWII, in some ways, forged the young
man. But it was a Melbourne office military
posting to Alf Conlon’s DORCA #, in the later stages of WWII, which gave him a strikingly consistent
agenda for the rest of his public life. While
it is unclear who exactly Peter Ryan was a near-lifelong agent for, plainly he
was a toxic human being who used his cultural, commercial and official power to
destabilise Australian intellectual life over seven decades. For the most part, he did this smoothly and
expertly – but wantonly – leaving little trace of his interventions, but a large
penumbra of fallout.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />
# Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
The “Was Manning Clark a Soviet Spy?”
controversy was hardly subtle or without obvious risk of personal blowback to
Ryan – after all, he was Clark’s long-term publisher at MUP, albeit Ryan
started there after the “History of Australia” series was first
commissioned. Turning on one of one’s
own children (even if s/he is technically a step-child, but brought up by the step-parent
from a very young age) is rarely a good look.
So what prompted Ryan to this extreme in September 1993, and why did he
wait for two years after Clark’s death to plunge the knife in?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Part of the answer, I believe, is
that Ryan earlier had other balls in the air, and wanted to see first how these
others would fall, and thus align for posterity. Most importantly, Ryan’s lifelong mission was
to sanitise from the record the corrupting influence, to the present-day (if nebulously
so), of Alf Conlon’s WWII DORCA. While
this unit today is principally known for its connections to high-end political
intrigue in 1975 (per dismissal of Gough Whitlam by John Kerr, another DORCA
alumnus) and contemporaneous vaudeville (the Ern Malley hoax), it deserves to
be much-better known, through its successor ASOPA ##, as the principal
architect of Australian government Aboriginal policies in the 1950s. And probably ever since – that is, if the
machinations of Peter Ryan to suppress the DORCA/ ASOPA/Aboriginal policy
connection are interpreted as significant in themselves. It was only in early 1993, with the death of
Paul Hasluck, that Ryan felt the coast was clear, as it were, to change his
game from defensive subterfuge to open, peripheral attack. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
## Australian School of Pacific
Administration</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
Paul Hasluck notably loathed Alf
Conlon; equally Ryan never said a word against him. As Hasluck saw it, this was principally
because of Conlon’s loose-cannon role at DORCA during WWII, but later on, Hasluck
either never realised – or at least never admitted – that ASOPA, secretly but
very effectively, had hugely undermined him as Territories Minister (so notionally
also in charge of Commonwealth Aboriginal policy) between 1951 and 1963.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
It is here, in influencing Paul
Hasluck to never say another public word about Alf Conlon after 1980 (when MUP
published <i>Diplomatic Witness</i>), that
Ryan’s staggering modus operandi is revealed.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ryan, under the guise of an
improbable friendship, groomed the frail and elderly widower Hasluck, flying him
to Melbourne to visit Ryan at least four times in 1988-1991, so encouraging Hasluck
to take certain facts and opinions to his grave (on the face of it,
successfully so). While Hasluck was not
quite the last of that generation who could have, as a senior insider who was not
plainly a Conlon-ite, spilled the beans on DORCA/ ASOPA/Aboriginal policy, the
last such living domino – Harry Giese – dropped off in 2000, besieged by
controversy about his personal responsibility for removing Aboriginal children,
per the Stolen Generations. Whatever blame can legitimately be put on Giese
here, writing the child-removal policy was not one of them – that was the job
of the Canberra bureaucrats, who had a shadowy DORCA and US-military alumnus,
Nick Penglase, among them (Penglase also recruited Ryan to DORCA). Nor was Giese responsible for training the
welfare officers who (along with police) performed these removals in the Northern
Territory; these officers were, after 1956, ASOPA graduates.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
For now, I won’t go into the intricate
specifics of how Ryan groomed Hasluck, other than to say that Ryan was surprisingly
careless about what he blurted out in public sometimes. Perhaps this is the inbuilt flaw of a mostly
self-educated man, through circumstance elevated to work with Australia’s very
best and brightest – in aiming for a breezy camaraderie to compensate for being
out of his intellectual death, he instead made some jaw-dropping moves. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
While his grooming of Hasluck is
not one of these overt clangers, Ryan’s clumsy attempt to absolve himself from
personal responsibility for accepting CIA funds for MUP to publish, in 1969
under John Kerr’s Presidency of Law Asia, a book on – of all things – Asian contract
law is revealing. A furious letter to the
editor by that book’s co-author David E Allan [“Clear funds for law book”,
Australian 4 February 1999], calling for a retraction and apology from Peter
Ryan, was not answered in word or deed, as far as I am aware. Whoever Ryan (and possibly Conlon too)<i> really</i> worked for – and the CIA appears
to be the most likely possibility – plainly did not care about either loyalty
in human relationships or plain logical consistency. Following the party line was all; which ironically
made Ryan quite the undisclosed expert, of course, on Manning Clark’s supposed
communist infiltration of the Australian academy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
I believe that Manning Clark’s
supposed communist influence was also well-timed, in 1993-94, to distract from
the otherwise bigger, fresher, and more important Left-Right story of the day; Aboriginal
policy, immediately post-<i>Mabo</i>.
Twenty-two years on, I assume that Peter Ryan died yesterday with a
smile on his face – that in seventy years of manufactured disarray in
Australian Aboriginal policy, he was never once found out, despite often being quite
close to the action. In case it needs to
be spelled out, this disarray has been materially and psychically catastrophic
for generations of Indigenous Australians.
It has also been, I suggest, an intellectual vortex for some of our
smartest whitefellas; thinking they were boxing away their hardest in the ring
of public ideas, when the whole game was always secretly rigged. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
It is now time to start reversing these
disastrous 70 years, by telling some home truths, and wiping the smile off the
face of the late Peter Ryan, idiot, glove-puppet and traitor.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-61564596370158750402015-12-08T15:24:00.005+10:002015-12-08T15:44:33.649+10:00<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Mulkearns and
ecclesisatical responsibility; paedophilia and the National Civic Council<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 18.0pt;">
“Paedophilia is a continuation of
office and union politics by other means”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 18.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 54.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]-->-<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;">
</span><!--[endif]-->Apparent personal motto of Bishop James O’Collins, 1892-1983 <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">As
Gerard Henderson likes to remind us (1), supporting George Pell’s case that he knew nothing about
clerical sex abuse in his patch until the early 1990s, the two bishops who Pell
worked under during the decades in question (2) were “liberal” in contrast to the conservative Pell. Ergo, implies Henderson, Pell, despite having
senior roles in both dioceses, was plausibly locked out of the information loop
by his immediate superiors over two decades (1971-c.1991), regarding paedophile
priests. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It
is a strange and far-fetched argument when you think about it. Pell, whose career plainly prospered under
both these men, was according to Henderson nonetheless a victim of office
politics when it came to them not sharing certain information. If so, this was a tickle-with-a-feather, if
not downright lucky, type of victimhood for Pell. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">When
Mulkearns and Little both retired under a cloud at about the same time, Pell
could go from nought to a hundred on the issue; from being (under his own
account) almost certainly the <i>last</i> senior
cleric in the Ballarat and Melbourne dioceses to know about widespread clerical
sex abuse, to being the <i>first</i> senior
cleric (in the Melbourne diocese) to do something to address its effects. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">From
zero to hero overnight – I am surprised that Henderson doesn’t also add to
Pell’s list of victimhood slights by pointing out that Hollywood should have,
but hasn’t, already made a movie about Pell’s long decades of unknowing innocence, probably
because </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">Hollywood</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">is also infested with “liberals”.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Such a movie would gloriously detail Pell’s resolute fighting fibre when
he belatedly learns the truth, and conveniently gets the top job soon after, in
a third act that would be wall-to-wall triumph for the underdog Pell, who
fought so long and so hard against all odds. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">But I digress.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Speaking
of the truth, I am surprised that Gerard Henderson’s recent article didn’t
bookend the (according to him) weaselly liberal reign of Mulkearns at Ballarat
by his conservative, and similarly long-serving predecessor, James
O’Collins. O’Collins was, as I presume
Henderson is aware, one of the three founding executives of The Movement in
September 1945 (3). This highly secret anti-communist organisation
later morphed into the National Civic Council, which in turn by 1971 had dwindled
into something of a shell of its former nuts-and-bolts heyday – keeping
communists out of positions of infleunce, particularly in trade unions. By the eve of Whitlam, the union communist bogeyman
was barely a threat; if you believed in these things, communism was by then
doing its dirty work more insidiously and nebulously still, via a
liberal/left-wing counter-culture, whose agenda included sexual permissiveness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">From
the mid-to-late 1960s, this new enemy was always going to be difficult to fight. Nonetheless, some of The Movement’s younger warriors
have risen to present-day positions of power and influence, and in so doing,
have rarely if ever given an inch to the liberals; Gerard Henderson and George
Pell, for example. And let’s not forget
Australian Prime Minister until recently, Tony Abbott, although he undoubtedly
had to make more compromises than his mentor Pell in his rise to the top. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Were
it not for The Movement’s efforts over the decades, I’m sure that we’d now have had communist-mandated
Sodom and Gomorrahs on every street corner. What a terrible thought – a world where the sexual
frontier would involve consenting adults with no sexual hang-ups, and not good
old-fashioned child abuse behind closed doors, with associated team-bonding and
career-enhancing blackmail, by looking through the keyhole. But again I digress.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Going
back to May 1971, James O’Collins was then in seeming good health (4) when he handed over the reins to
Mulkearns as Bishop of Ballarat. O’Collins
choosing to throw in the towel at this point would, I think, make a very good
opening scene for a quite different Hollywood movie, although one I doubt that
Gerard Henderson and George Pell would have the stomach to watch.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">This
movie’s backstory starts like this: in
September 1945, the young and relatively junior O’Collins was not merely one of
three senior clergy co-founders of The Movement – he was also its points man within
the Church hierarchy (5) – effectively its founding CEO – although
officially he was just its chaplain. How
and why a provincial and relatively junior bishop got this role seems to speak
volumes about The Movement’s ethos and modus operandi; it was out of sight, out
of mind, as far as the main Church hierarchy was concerned. Like the 2000s US practice of extraordinary
rendition, the Australian and Vatican big-wigs didn’t want to know too much
about what O’Collins was getting up to, as long as he delivered the goods.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Funnily
enough, torture was a common element in, say, 2000s Egypt (as one country that
enthusiastically cooperated with US in delivering/accepting extraordinary
rendition) and the 1960s Ballarat diocese under O’Collins. To be fair, torture was an integral part of
the Egyptian-American pact, while perhaps it was only a sideshow for the
O’Collins-Vatican pact.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
see, in 1960s Ballarat, O’Collins was a battle-hardened general, who should
have been at the peak of his career. The
annoying itch for him, if not sexual, was that infiltrating the unions, and associated
malarkey, was fast becoming redundant – and what was an ageing, once
high-flying and ambitious man, now forever marooned in the provinces, to do
with a day-job that had once been so adrenal?
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
bored O’Collins’creative solution to his career ennui was to foster, over the 1960s,
a paedophile network within his diocese.
As you do, apparently. While
O’Collins may or may not have had a personal proclivity for raping chidren en masse,
its requirement for the strictest secrecy was plainly a pleasing use for O’Collins
of his highly-trained, pre-existing skill set, from The Movement’s cloak-and-dagger
heyday. His skills that otherwise would
go rusty. (And wouldn’t<i> that </i>be a
crime, he may well have thought.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is plenty of information available confirming
O’Collins as a knowing paedophile protector, one who was at least as culpable
as Mulkearns and Little are/were, on Gerard Henderson’s loaded account. In leaving O’Collins out of the story, while
digging a grave, as it were, for Mulkearns, perhaps Henderson may care to
explain what it all means that John Day was <i>promoted</i>
by O’Collins after paedophile allegations were known, while conversely,
Mulkearns, in the same position, effectively demoted Day to the small parish of
Timboon; a surely unprecedented move, at the time if not also now, for a Monsignor. [NB: I am not defending Mulkearns’ action in
this specific respect, only pointing out that it was significantly less culpable,
in my opinion, than O’Collins’ craven act in promoting known horrific paedophile
John Day]. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">At
this point, the Hollywood movie really hits its straps. By early 1971, O’Collins had apparently had
enough of running a secret Salo Republic-style child-abuse sideshow (if not main arena) within his
diocese. The secrecy side of it was no
doubt fun for him, a stimulating game to oversee, if not also play, but perhaps
overall it was becoming all a bit tawdry, especially while outside, the
emergent permissive society daily reminded O’Collins that the war against
communism that he had signed on for in September 1945 was now essentially lost,
or at least hopelessly side-tracked<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In
1971, O’Collins thus understandably wanted out – but he and the Vatican were in
a quandary: who could be trusted to take
over his job, and not to spill the beans on the sordid sexual empire that
O’Collins ran? A <i>liberal</i>, that’s who.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Mulkearns’
appointment after O’Collins may seem counter-intuitive; they were ideological
opponents, after all, and what was to stop Mulkearns spilling the beans,
cleaning up the debauched mess he inherited from O’Collins, and so making
O’Collins retirement very uncomfortable, at best? (And conversely, Mulkearns’
job perhaps a lot easier, depending on how he played his cards with the Vatican,
and vice versa). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">This</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> is the big
mystery in the movie – and sorry folks, I’m not going to spoil the ending now. But I will give you some hints about the
strange O’Collins-Mulkearns handover.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">On
Easter Thursday, 11 April 1971, just before Mulkearns took over from O’Collins,
the ambitious, and highly-educated young priest George Pell left Europe, and
his cosmopolitan student life forever, for workaday Ballarat. He therefore missed the opportunity to settle in </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">nicely</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">to his first diocesan appointment, at least, under his mentor,
O’Collins, and instead had his career left to Mulkearns’ caprices, although in
this – and every – respect, the Vatican obviously was Mulkearns’ boss.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">In any event, you might think: </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“silly George Pell and silly O’Collins for not
timing more career overlap between them here?</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Or not?</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">I’ll leave the contents of
the rest of this narrative arc to you.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In
guessing your own narrative sweep and ending here, you may want to consider a
couple of other snippets. One is that
O’Collins got to live on in the imposing bluestone Bishop’s Palace in Ballarat
until he died on 25 November 1983; while Mulkearns had to camp out (as Paul
Keating may have put it) elsewhere. What
this means as to the power relativities between the retiree and the nominal
boss, I’ll up leave to you, as likewise also the fact that George Pell lived
with O’Collins in the same Bishop’s Palace in for some years in the early 1980s. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Finally,
to bring up the current Royal Commission, yesterday lawyer Sam Duggan, for
Cardinal Pell, said that some words George
Pell allegedly said in 1983 (“Haha I think Gerry’s [Gerald Ridsdale has] been
rooting boys again”):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><a href="http://www.theage.com.au/national/george-pell-accused-of-joking-about-gerald-ridsdales-abuse-of-children-20151207-glhlmd.html">“it [made] no sense whatsoever ... in fact Gerald Ridsdale had [then] been out of Ballarat for the better part of a decade.”</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Indeed,
Sam Duggan seemed to have a point – that is, unless you know about the obscure concept
of ecclesiastical responsibility, a canon law doctrine in which a Bishop is
effectively still responsible for a diocesan priest’s actions, even if that
priest is sent to another diocese, or even another state.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">This
is quite undeservedly an obscure doctrine, in my opinion, as it seems to have
as many important legal ramifications as the notorious “Ellis defence”. I only learnt about it this morning when I
read this:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><a href="http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/sex-abuse-inquiry-dying-former-ballarat-bishop-ronald-mulkearns-may-yet-testify-20151207-glh3pc.html">“Father James Fitzpatrick, a former
director of the Catholic Enquiry Centre in Sydney, is expected to tell the
commission that he reported to Bishop Mulkearns in 1986 that a young boy had
spent the night there with Ridsdale [Gerald Ridsdale].<o:p></o:p></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<a href="http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/sex-abuse-inquiry-dying-former-ballarat-bishop-ronald-mulkearns-may-yet-testify-20151207-glh3pc.html">He had asked that Ridsdale be removedfrom the centre and will say “that the bishop [Mulkearns, whose Ballarat HQ was1000 km from Sydney] was the person who was responsible ecclesiastically for Ridsdale [in Sydney] and thatwhatever the bishop [Mulkearns] did with that information was his choice and responsibility”. </a></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Sam
Duggan’s “it makes no sense whatsoever” thus in fact makes quite a lot of sense,
to me anyway – Ridsdale (among others) was the poisonous gift ("chalice", if you must) that Mulkearns
was handed in 1971, and then could never, try as he might, shake off. Wherever Ridsdale was sent to geographically,
he was still Mulkearns’s jurisdictional problem (unless the Vatican laicised Ridsdale,
which was notoriously hard to do). I’ll leave the implications of this doctrine,
especially in regard to the consequent motivations two other main players in the
Hollywood movie, to you.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Back
to 2015, in fact – although I’m not positively sure about this sequence – Sam
Duggan had just yesterday heard the above lines about ecclesiastical
responsibility in the Royal Commission shortly <b>before</b> he uttered his lame “it makes no sense whatsoever” line. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
need to start paying more attention, Sam – you will now necessarily have your
own role in the great Hollywood movie I have referred to, when you will face
your own proverbial cross-examination.
And coming days in the Royal Commission will determine whether that role is
career-making or breaking for you.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><b>Footnotes</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">(1) “Cardinal must receive a fair go at royal commission and in media” </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px;">Australian</i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;"> 5 December 2015</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(2) T</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">he now terminally-ill Ronald Mulkearns b. 1930, bishop of Ballarat 1971 to 1997, Pell worked under him from May 1971 to late 1983 or early 1984; and the late Frank Little, Archbishop of Melbourne 1 July 1974 to 16 July 1996, Pell worked under him in a loose sense from 1984, when Pell became rector of Corpus Christi college in Melbourne, and then more firmly from 1986, when the then-Pope, without reference to Little, appointed Pell an auxiliary bishop of Melbourne, until he took over Little’s job in mid-1996.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">(3) A</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">ll three were senior clergy; the other two were Archbishop Mannix of Melbourne and Cardinal Gilroy of Sydney; see Paul Ormonde, </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px;">The Movement</i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">, p 134.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">(4) </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">Though </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">O’Collins</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;"> was then 79, he lived until late 1983. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">(5) See FN 3.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></div>
Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-71899619096089467722015-10-05T13:04:00.000+10:002015-10-05T13:16:07.475+10:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIc6XUmrdZIHoP9qCgoeYirLVmriOCp-VVgdHdk2mLsMcCMGMj6AUnVq49tMxg_iPk7n-ejBiaLONzedA1tIIbbYm3_5EYp7EFkhR5EHbZ8-tcMzHAM5GydLgz4abXphSRaeLSPg/s1600/Sen+Mitch+Fifield+handed+his+first+champers+on+his+first+Opening+Night.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIc6XUmrdZIHoP9qCgoeYirLVmriOCp-VVgdHdk2mLsMcCMGMj6AUnVq49tMxg_iPk7n-ejBiaLONzedA1tIIbbYm3_5EYp7EFkhR5EHbZ8-tcMzHAM5GydLgz4abXphSRaeLSPg/s320/Sen+Mitch+Fifield+handed+his+first+champers+on+his+first+Opening+Night.JPG" width="280" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><b>Arise,
Ye New Arts Minister</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I
happened to be in Mildura the other night (Friday 2 October 2015), to capture an historic occasion –
albeit in a Zapruder kinda way. New Arts
(and Communications) Minister Senator Mitch Fifield was at his first arts event
as Minister (or more precisely, and as it usually coincides, his first Opening
Night). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">That
day’s <i>Australian</i> had run a story on Senator
Fifield’s thinness on the arts ground during his first two weeks. Oddly perhaps, Senator Fifield’s reply letter,
published in the next day’s <i>Australian</i>,
did not mention his then-imminent Mildura appearance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">While
the main reason he was in town was apparently a CW-state meeting of arts ministers,
this coincided with the opening festivities of the Mildura Palimpsest Biennale.
While neither attendance seems to have
any reason for being a secret, I may be naively underestimating the throngs of
poets, at al, who may have one-to-one implored, or en masse heckled the new
minister, had they known where to find him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I
can report that Senator Fifield presents nicer in person than his press photos
make him appear (which look I’d call Country Town Beadle), gave a reasonable
speech, and then adjourned to the lawn near where I was sitting. I turned around to take a photo, which fortuitously was at
the precise moment he was handed, post-speech, his first glass of champagne.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
photo’s resolution is appalling, but the trio’s body language speaks
plenty, I believe. The senator, the
drink-fetcher (probably his spouse or a staff member), and Mildura Palimpsest
Biennale curator Jonathan Kimberley (in blue jacket) all appear to reverently
focus on the full glass of champagne. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">There
appears to be an unstated ceremonial aspect to the moment – the imminent first sip will make it all official, marking the point at which there is no turning back; a future
of frequent re-enactments of the same crisp scene, just with different
backgrounds and lookers/hangers-on, now awaits the senator. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Whether
this same, refilled cup contains a sweet elixir, heady-brew, or Lethean coping-juice
should be ascertainable, I’d guess, by about the one-hundredth performance by Senator
Fifield of his now<i> de riguer</i> little set-piece. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-49778857912160571782015-09-05T13:23:00.000+10:002015-09-05T13:23:01.603+10:00<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b>NT spending
Aboriginal-disadvantage money “as they see fit”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
The <i>Australian</i>
has recently run two front-page articles on the siphoning of CW money intended
to remedy Indigenous disadvantage:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]-->Amos Aikman, “Aboriginal cash siphoned” <i>Australian</i> 8 August 2015, and<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]-->Amos Aikman, “‘Close gap’ funds spent on desk
jobs” <i>Australian</i> 5 Sep 2015.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
In one sense, this is not an old story at all with
Nicolas Rothwell having made the same point several times over recent years (Rothwell
also has an editorial in the <i>Australian</i>
8 August 2015, “Scandal of underspending on Territory’s remote communities”, but it
is something of a weary understatement).</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b>Where the funds
have gone to</b> is, of course, the multi-billion dollar question. According to the page four <i>graphs</i> in Amos
Aikman’s article today (“‘Close gap’ funds spent on desk jobs” <i>Australian</i> 5 Sep 2015, the Northern
Territory government has received about 25% of about $1.3bn in IAS grants. That’s about $315m. However, Aikman’s<i> text</i> has this as a paltry
$31.5m. Whether the decimal place was a
subbing error or not, it is a convenient whitewash for the Northern Territory
government. Hence, my drawing attention
to it ASAP. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
While this has to be a brief post, here I also point out
the Northern Territory government’s apparent <i>mea culpa</i> in the earlier article (Amos Aikman, “Aboriginal cash
siphoned” <i>Australian</i> 8 August 2015):<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
“A spokesperson for Territory Treasurer Dave Tollner . .
. argued state and Territory governments
were free to distribute revenue <b>as they
saw fit”.</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
MORE TO COME<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-23660098602826231152015-05-02T19:53:00.001+10:002015-05-02T19:53:51.329+10:00<div class="MsoNormal">
<strong>Anzac
Day 50 years on, 50 years on</strong><br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One-hundredth
anniversaries are necessarily artificial re-imaginings – there will be no one
alive, with a cogent first-hand memory, to <i>listen
</i>to. And when there is no one to
listen to, talk is cheap and abundant – albeit within some <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/comment/right-to-freedom-of-speech-cannot-breach-employment-contract-20150430-1mwn9f.htm">strict limits</a>. That is to say, it is ubiquitous and
meaningless propaganda.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Book
browsing recently, I came across a fiftieth anniversary of Anzac Day
account #. With many WWI veterans still
alive in 1965, it was refreshingly unvarnished looking back to the long summer
of 1915 at Gallipoli. It could have, but
didn’t, dwell on the more cringe-worthy aspects of Anzac Day commemorations c.
1960 (a la the play “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Day_of_the_Year">The One Day of the Year</a>”),
and/or how, back in 1915, Incompetent British Officer X wasted the lives of Y plucky
Australians at Z beach, when instead ZZZ beach was, in hindsight, the obvious
weakness in the Turks’ defences.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My main recollection of George Johnston’s article is that
nudity at Gallipoli was a big thing – lots of nude swimming off the beaches (including
by British officers, whose competence was not specified), and later on,
presumably as the summer heat peaked, general nudity in the trenches. As with any good homoerotic idyll, then, the
late-autumn evacuation (a non-botched operation, by all accounts) was a dream
ending – from above, it was a sobering prod from the real-world, and from
below, a sweet, seasonal passing. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What George Johnston doesn’t indicate is how much of a
downright gay old time was had. While
accepting that what happened at Gallipoli sexually was always, quite properly, going
to mostly stay at Gallipoli, it could liberate the Australian national
consciousness in several ways to think that the silver lining at Gallipoli (an upside
of the sort that is found in many other awful and/or macabre situations, which
in no way minimises the downside) was <i>not</i> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">a vague, collective “us”</span> Finding Somebody to Ceremoniously Blame, but rather was young Australian men
improvising and doing it for themselves – assertively in charge of their own bodies,
despite or because of the dire situation all around. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Why George Johnston’s account, and its underlying implications,
have not gained traction over the last 50 years is not hard to explain. The Official Australian Anzac Account TM was
first penned by 30 y.o. Australian journalist (and later newspaper proprietor
and WWII Chief Censor) Keith Murdoch, who used it to advance his career greatly,
despite the content of the long letter he wrote clearly breaking wartime
censorship rules. In that letter,
Murdoch famously – and to date, everlastingly – stuck it to the British. More importantly perhaps, Murdoch’s loftily-praised
Australian soldiers were virile but otherwise apparently sexless, and also
mostly voiceless. Overnight, an
idealised, politically-passive (and fully-clothed and heterosexual) <i>volk</i> was manufactured – delivering
packaged readers to Murdoch, and packaged voters to the politicians who
clamoured around him.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One hundred years on, it is breathtaking how little has
changed. In April 2010, the Murdoch
press freely incited the murder of a police informer, Carl Williams, publishing
top-secret information without legal sanction.
It and its government and other cronies get away with this, and much
more, because Australia’s <i>volk</i> have
short memories – our democracy, like Anzac Day at 5pm, is a drunken
echo-chamber.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Murdoch’s capture, and privatisation of history has perpetuated
a false history that masquerades as communally-owned authentic populism – dangerous
as it is to say this (albeit it is now well after 5pm on Anzac day). The <i>real</i>
story – one piece of which is what George Johnston told – is not suitable for
private manipulation and profit. It is
also, therefore, genuinely <i>owned</i> by
all of us. Sketchy though it is, it is
time that we took pride in this story, and junked, once and for all, Murdoch’s wretched
Anzac crock.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
# George Johnston, “Anzac – a myth
for all mankind”, <i>Walkabout</i> April
1965, reproduced in <i>Walkabout</i> anthology
1968, pp 52-58. <i> <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<i><br /></i></div>
Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3541631.post-53993583774042899192015-03-11T15:10:00.005+10:002015-03-11T15:18:08.302+10:00<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Choosing
lifestyle<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Lifestyle”
is now surely a self-parodying word. Its
main current usage seems to be by real-estate agents hyping the location
virtues of otherwise perhaps unliveably-small inner city apartments – they are invariably
on “lifestyle strips”. Presumably
meaning an area with two or more copycat, hipster-rent-a-crowd cafés – so if
your apartment is not sufficiently claustrophobic, you can take the lift down,
to where you can soak up your new “lifestyle” in all its deafening, crowded and
bum-numbing glory. (If you’re under 35, I do appreciate that these things are
actually positives, and indeed the Most Risky Thing in The World for a hipster
to do would be to patronise a new café in which there is not already a “hipster
quorum” – a dozen or so near identically-dressed other hipsters sitting on
milk-crates, or similar stools cunningly and expensively designed for maximum
discomfort. And if there's a queue to get in, </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px;">I also appreciate</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> that this is to hipsters what the "Sanitized" strip on motel toilet seats is to Middle America - a ring of confidence, worth its weight in gold). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">A
secondary real-estate use of “lifestyle” is probably even more risible – it simply
means what until yesterday would have been called a retirement community, but
today, thanks to a few pieces of gym equipment thrown into a room, is now a “lifestyle
village”. You no longer move to such a
place to quietly live out your twilight years – sweating them out instead is a
much better deal. Oh, but I’m sure there’s
an in-house café too – thus meaning that the dwellings are unliveably-small (see
above), or if not, that your neighbours are not the inviting-you-home-for-a-cuppa
type, in which case you’re not really living in a “community”, in my opinion. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It
thus seems fair to say that people who <i>choose</i> “lifestyle” are gullible,
insecure herd creatures. And also, as of
this morning, Indigenous Australians living in remote communities – according to
Tony Abbott, anyway.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Presumably,
these </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px;">Indigenous Australians</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> have fallen for a real-estate spiel also; poor dears.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">It might have gone something like this:</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Move out of the town camp, and back to
your country. It will be a dry community,
so your less functional neighbours and relations won’t be there much. You may find it a good place to create some
art – and the local art centre is a big employer in town. If art is not your thing, there’s usually a
mining company sniffing around nearby – meaning there’s a fair chance, if you
don’t mind the lost land trade-off, of living sweet on royalty cheques. And if by some chance, your chosen remote community
doesn’t have any real economy, you will still live the good life, spending your
days and nights sitting on whacky, ramshackle furniture communing with your
neighbours, happily ever after. Best of
all, you won’t even need to move to ‘lifestyle village’ when you get older –
this community <i>already</i> has a few pieces of gym equipment no one ever uses. In fact, you’re probably sitting on it right now.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
Paul Watsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06743723957176728940noreply@blogger.com0