in gravyland

Powerful T-shirts from One Heart Home

Truth
Seek it, Speak it, Live it

Power to the Peaceful

Freedom through Peace

I’m fond of a good political T-shirt. I like to wear a message or two. It feels *hopeful* to walk around with a slogan on.

One Heart Home have a range of T-shirts these slogans (above) and more. I was given a “Power to the Peaceful” shirt for Christmas and I love it.

Go on, order one online…

PM’s office have spoof site ‘disappeared’

Sigh.

Richard Neville made a clever spoof of a John Howard speech, and posted it on a website called johnhowardpm.org. (PDF of the site here).
Then the Prime Minister’s office had the site ‘disappeared’ secretly. Neville was not informed. Melbourne IT just did it, then fessed up a couple of days later.

In the normal course of action, you’d normally expect the author of such a spoof to be asked to remove it. Didn’t happen that way here. A quiet word in the ear of Melbourne IT and it was taken down.

Secretly.
Gee they are pretty sensitive in the PM’s office, aren’t they? If you are strong and confident, you’d just laugh it off, you’d think. But no.

Poly the Pollie

The Podcast Network’s big guy Cameron Reilly has swung into action and launched Poly the Pollie — a plan to invite Australian politicians take a public lie detector tests about policy issues.

I’m thinking this is a great idea. And the first Pollie to be invited is our own Alexander Downer. See Cam’s invitation here and watch for updates on the progress of the project here.

I would so love to see this succeed.

Coalition shock: MP says something sensible about Childcare

From the Sydney Morning Herald article: Kelly’s plea to PM: fix child-care

A former minister and a close ally of Prime Minister John Howard has urged the Federal Government to scrap the “shambles” of a child-care system and start from scratch to build a national policy.

High-profile western Sydney MP Jackie Kelly said Treasurer Peter Costello should spend the $12 billion government surplus “wisely” by fixing the child-care crisis rather than spending it on tax cuts.

Ministers should also stop “doing their own thing” and work together to respond to the escalating problem, she said. “We need a cohesive approach.” Ms Kelly said the system of care needed to be treated by all governments “in the same way they treat male-dominated issues”.

“We shouldn’t have the Treasurer with a 30 per cent rebate solution, [Employment Minister] Kevin Andrews saying women should negotiate [for child care in their workplaces] and [Family Minister] Kay Patterson saying other things,” she said. “And we need [Education Minister] Brendan Nelson to start taking an interest in preschools.

“They all need to say, ‘OK, how can we do this?’ At the moment, they are just coming out with policies and asking women to fit in with them.”

Great. Hooray. Somebody in the government talking about childcare in a sensible, cohesive kind of way, rather than the old Howard/Costello approach of making the kids cheaper to run.

Jackie Kelly Speech to Fisher-Price Childcare Awards
SMH article: Kelly’s plea to PM: fix child-care

Gore goes Bush on Wiretapping

Wow, there’s something for me to get excited about in US Politics. I’d pretty much given up hope, having wandered off into quiet gloomy apathy.

Once-Nearly US President Al Gore has made a powerful speech claiming President Bush has broken and is breaking the law and the US Constitution by authorising wiretaps of US citizens without judicial approval.

I always felt that Gore was a bit too nice and pleasant when he had the presidency manipulated from under him. Now he’s found the passion. Here are some corker quotes showing Gore go on the attack.

He opened with:

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses.

It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored.

And later on…

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA’s domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution - our system of checks and balances - was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.”

Go Al! Wanna try for President again? I’m with you.

More coverage in The Nation and The Guardian.

Hope for David Hicks

Congrats David Hicks on your new citizenship.

No matter what you what they have alleged you have done, I hope your new country treats you better than this one has.

Law Council sez: “No”

I’m catching up a bit here. We must stop the politicians introducing stupid laws.

The Law Council of Australia has published a summary of their concerns over the Anti-Terrorism Bill (No.2) 2005.
The full document is here:

I want to pull out a couple of quotes. Thankyou Law Council for speaking so well and clearly:

Control Orders

Control orders should not be introduced into Australian law.

Persons not charged with or found guilty of a criminal offence should not be subjected by the State to such restrictions on their freedom.

Preventative Detention Orders

Preventative detention orders should not be introduced into Australian law.

Shoot to Kill

Police should not be entitled to cause death when seeking to detain a person the subject of a detention order. Such a person is not suspected of having committed a criminal offence. Police normally have this power when engaged in the process of arresting persons suspected of having
committed a criminal offence.

Sedition

The new offences erode free speech and may be unconstitutional due to their breadth.

Representation by a Lawyer

Communication between a person the subject of a control or detention order and his or her legal adviser should be completely confidential.

It is extraordinary that a person not charged with any criminal offence should not be entitled to at least the same level of confidentiality in communications with his or her lawyer as is provided for persons charged with criminal offences.

US Adminstration: Trust Overview

• Guardian: The US used chemical weapons in Iraq - and then lied about it
• Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force
  
• WHO LIED TO WHOM?: Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq’s nuclear program?
• Wikipedia: Plame Affair

Specific threat to our freedom

I so hope that John Howard’s announcement of a specific terror threat today, and his hurrying the anti-terror legislation through is not a cynical ploy to stifle debate and destroy our freedom.

But I just can’t trust the guy after all the lies we’ve been told.

Remember that the legislation was going to be pushed through on Melbourne Cup Day?

Please, members of the government. If you must rush this legislation through, put a sunset clause that kicks in after a month or two, and then let’s have a proper debate.

Voluntary Voting?

Um. Who cares if we have voluntary voting or not? Non issue, I reckon.

The only constitutional matter that really needs dealing with is A Republic of Australia. That’s the big issue, not messing with the voting system.

We’re Not Afraid (Again)

Tragic news from Bali. Again. Huge sadness in me. More bombs. I let it sink in today before saying anything. All my heart goes out to those impacted. And now I’m angry, not scared.

The only thing to do, I’m thinking, is to all of us to crank up something like the We’re Not Afraid campaign that was so successful after the London bombings.

Let’s leave our fear behind and go to Bali on our holidays anyway. Or go to Bali even more often, in a respectful way.

(I don’t mean making yourself into a target, by the way. I’m just talking about not letting fear rule our lives and change our behaviour.)

Um, Read The Diaries

Lib picked me up a copy of The Latham Diaries this week and I’ve been reading it this weekend.

After all the criticism, all I can say is — READ THE BOOK — don’t rely on the extracts in the paper of what the commentators say. It spans ten years of his time in Parliament and it is believable, interesting and real. It shows how somebody with ideals and beliefs about policy gets more and more dissatisfied with the culture of politics.

I think there is a lot of “shoot the messenger” going on in Canberra right now. Latham is now an outsider, a whistle-blower, and he is going to be criticized a lot by those in power. Watch people play the man not the ball as they avoid answering to Latham’s words and try and assasinate his character.

Whistle-blowers always get treated harshly by the establishment. It sounds like he is telling the truth to me. But every soul has their own reality. No doubt Mark’s view of events will be different to some.

Well worth the read.

Why was Scott Parkin removed from Australia?

I think we need to know why Scott Parkin was removed from Australia.

It looks like the government was trying to shut down free speech.

The government needs to explain this some more. Just saying “National Security” doesn’t wash with me.

Way Too Long

David Hicks is still held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by the US.

Isn’t it about time that he was either given a fair trial or released? Why doesn’t our government help this citizen of Australia.

New York Times article on Hicks and the GetUp! movement.

Getup! campaign to demand a fair trial for David Hicks. Go here and protest to our government.

crikey.com.au locked out

crikey.com.au has been denied access to the federal Budget lock-up by the Treasury. Treasury claim (rather stupidly, in my opinion) that Crikey is not “mainstream media”. But Crikey was allowed to attend last year.

Curious. Or political. Crikey now has about 20,000 subscribers plus about 100,000 regular website vistors. That sounds pretty “mainstream” to me.

Crikey has complained to the Commonwealth Ombudsman. We’ll see what happens.

Democracy != Internet Explorer

The Western Australia Electoral Commission website doesn’t work with Firefox or any other recent non-IE browsers. I was browsing to look for local government nominations, and I found that neither Safari nor Firefox could select the tabs on the Local Government page to select my local government, Fremantle. It does work with Good Old IE, though.

This site is not optimized for use in Netscape 6. Viewing this site through the Netscape 6 browser may lead to a restricted browsing experience.

That might be ok for a company, because they can choose to limit their customers to IE. But not for a democratic institution. I think this need to be fixed before the local government elections…

Update. Update. UPDATE!!

Larry Anthony sucks

Remember how the government, coming into an election, poured a whole lot of money into childcare subsdies? In the process inflating childcare fees and giving a huge cash bonus to corporate childcare operators. Well, the minister behind that move was Larry Anthony, at the time Minister for Children and Youth Affairs.

Well bugger me. Larry lost his seat in the election and now he’s been appointed a director of Australia’s largest corporate childcare operator, ABC Learning Centres.

This fully and completely stinks. This sort of thing should be illegal. At the very least there should be a code of conduct stopping a minister from stepping into a board role less than a year after being the relevant federal minister!

LHMU Childcare: Ex-Howard Minister joins board of ABC Learning Centres

ABC: Larry Anthony’s new job stirs conflict of interest claims

Toxic Dust Cloud, or Take A Holiday?

I’ll take the holiday thanks.

We live in South Fremantle, just a couple of streets back from South Beach. We live in a dead-end street. It is quiet. We can easily walk to the beach. Paradise? Yes, almost. As usual, in every perfect world there is something evil creeping underground waiting to strike :-(

There’s a old factory at the end of the street. It borders onto South Beach. That old factory is build on the site of a lead smelter that closed in the 1920s. Developers are now about to pull down the factory and prepare the land for construction of a whole lot of houses. Problem: the ground is unstable. The developer plans to dig out 5m of soil and filter it, taking out the big bits, and put it back, then add 0.5m of new topsoil.

The big problem there is the filtering. My understanding is that they are going to pick up the dirt and filter it with something. They are going to do it in the open, with prevailing winds blowing the dust into my house, garden and all our lungs.

Best practice for the developer would be to build something to contain the dust over the whole site but they aren’t going to do that.

Most likely we’ll have to move away from our home for a few months to escape exposure from the dust. To turn that big downer into something positive, we are thinking about a 3 month work break/sabbatical/exploration in Europe and Asia, maybe Vietnam, Japan, Italy, UK … plus a few more. We will see.

There’s a bunch of community action going on which we are supporting, including a Supreme Court action against the government to get the approval for the remediation plan set aside, and a really result by Adele Carles who ran against the sitting ALP member in the state election. At this stage of counting she has over 6% of the vote.

More on the whole issue at savesouthbeach.com.

Cane Toad Superhighway

Witness Colin Barnett the cane toad hopping down the canal and multiplying. Inspired stuff and hilarious.

And I just have to add in a link to a really beautiful ad that the greens put in last Saturday’s West. There’s a scan of it up at Kick and Scream.

What do the Iraqis think about more Australian troops?

There’s an announcement from the federal government today that we are sending more troops to Iraq.

In all the news reports I can find no reference approval or welcoming or anything from Iraqi authorities. Seems really strange. I though this might change after the elections in Iraq.