5 posts tagged “politics”

In the understandable excitement about the parliamentary apology to the stolen generation earlier this week, this interaction between the Deputy Prime Minister and the Member for O'Connor got lost in the mix.

A bit of background information for anyone living overseas before I start my brief rant: Australia is in the grip of a very bad drought and has been since 2002. Things are getting so dire that farmers in the Murray-Darling basin may have no water allocations for irrigation this year.

Our illustrious PM's solution?

He wants us all to pray for rain.

Yep. Apparently like a gospel sideshow peddling faith-healing miracles and rain dances he thinks that if the nation pulls together and prays things will get better.

No worries, Johnny. Just one question though. If the power of prayer is a solution for the drought why did we need to invade Iraq to eliminate WMDs to engineer regime change?

Couldn't we have just prayed Saddam Hussein out of power?

Boing Boing carried a post today on how other countries deal with gun control.

It's an interesting post, but the part that grabbed me was Guav's comment about how the statistics shown do not reveal the true situation. He (or she) argues that overall firearms deaths were decreasing anyway long before semi-automatic rifles were banned. And you know what? That statement is correct. He (or she) also claimed that overall homicides and suicides have remained the same regardless of the ban. Looking at the statistics this is also correct.

What he (or she) fails to point out is that the ban on semi-automatic firearms was never supposed to eliminate all homicides, suicides or make a significant dent in firearms deaths (most of which are caused by handguns, not rifles). What the ban was supposed to do was stop mass shootings such as the one that occurred at Port Arthur and the massacres that preceded it (Milperra, Hoddle Street, Queen Street and Strathfield).

And guess what? It succeeded! Prior to the ban Australia had a mass shooting every couple of years. Compare that to what has happened in the ten years since the ban - one mass shooting (and that was using a legal semi-automatic handgun which wasn't covered by the ban anyway) resulting in the deaths of two people.

It irritates me when people think that one law is supposed to be the panacea that cures all ills of society. Banning semi-automatic rifles was never supposed to stop all killing, it was supposed to stop all killing by semi-automatic rifles, something it was spectacularly successful in doing.

For the record, I'm not suggesting that this is the guaranteed way to solve all gun massacres in every country. Australia is in the unique position where the importation of illegal firearms is much easier to prevent than other countries due to its ocean borders. What I'm saying is don't try to pretend our success is a failure just to support your own personal politics.

Kevin Rudd is now leader of the Australian Labor Party - Huzzah!

I've always liked Kevin (and his deputy, Julia Gillard) since seeing them regularly on that morning show on channel 7. Finally an articulate leader of the Labor party who could reverse this anti-intellectualism that seems to have gripped politics over the last ten years! And while I absolutely loved the Mark Latham's quip of 'conga line of suckholes' in reference to the government, it's nice to have a lefty leader who doesn't look like he's happy to punch out the next person who is... well... the next random person he punches out. And let's face it, bugger all people voted for Kim Beazley the last god-knows how many times so it's about time the Labor party figured out he was never going to win an election for them.

Kevin's first announcement is that he's going to stick two fingers up to the factions and install the front bench of his choice, a decision which has been a long time coming in Labor if you ask me. It's little wonder they couldn't win federal elections when they were so busy with institutionalised in-fighting.

Hopefully Kevin will be what's needed to win Labor the next election. His erudite manner will hopefully win over disenfranchised Liberal voters who would otherwise be loathe to vote Labor, and the fact he comes from the leftist faction of the Labor party might win back a few traditional Labor voters who have changed to the Greens over the years.

Good on you, Kev!

This week the Federal Court declared the city of Perth belonged to the Aborigines...

... Or at least that's what the shock-jocks and tabloid papers would have us believe. In fact all the Federal Court did was declare the Noongar people might be able to claim Native Title over certain areas in and around Perth, and even then it would be only if those spaces have no other ownership claims and aren't in use by non-Aboriginal people. So rest easy people of Australia your beaches and parks are safe, no matter what Philip Ruddock would have you believe.

In essence this decision (and Wik and Mabo before it) is all about crown land. Land that has never been owned or used regularly by white Australians during the 200+ years of European settlement. Land that otherwise belongs to Queen Elizabeth II - and let's face it, indigenous Australians would get a fair bit more use out of it than she does. What's more they won't be able to chain off the beaches and charge admission even if they are granted native title because native title simply doesn't give the same rights as freehold title.

If people are so damn scared of this decision why not look at recent history? Uluru (formerly Ayers Rock) was given back to the traditional owners quite a few years ago. Did they lock up the rock? Did they shoot trespassers on sight? Sorry, but no. Let's face it, the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara haven't even forced tourists to stop climbing Uluru, even though their spiritual beliefs are against it. They politely request that people not climb, but leave it up to the visitor's judgement in the end. And the area is still welcoming tourists just as it always has.

To put it another way, given that native title has existed for over a decade now exactly how many parks and beaches that were previously used by white Australians are now off limits? I can't think of any.

So what's there to be scared of? Not selling as many papers or losing the next election it would seem. Nothing else.

For a more in-depth explanation of the Noongar decision, this SMH blog explains everything you've ever wanted to know about native title but were too scared to ask: The native title scaremongers are restless again

And the ABC have been covering this issue as well: Ruddock's 'scare mongering' on Noongar claim is 'empty rhetoric': WA Professor