Well, we have a proper election on our hands, complete with increasingly stark choices between the two contenders. Mark Latham is smoking out John Howard, making it hard for him to maintain his lofty prime ministerial stature.
Howard is claiming that Oz has ‘international responsibilities’ in Iraq, and so we cannot remove our forces at a time of our own choice. This was, we should recall, an illegal war according to international law, and so this reference to ‘international responsibilities’ comes a little late.
And Latham is on a winner here. Iraq does smell like Vietnam in the desert, and Australians will want an exit strategy. I’m old enough to recall the footage from Aden as British troops fought a dirty war before they left. Middle Eastern villages can be just as messy places to fight as tropical paddy fields.
What is really at stake here, as Australians realise more and more, is Australian sovereignty. Either we set our own limits on what our forces do, or someone else will. 800 men really do not matter much to the US, except for the symbolism, but they are a significant part of our national military force at a time when there are apparent threats to Oz and Australians (by terrorists, among others).
With his ‘how high do I jump’ approach to the US in Iraq, the FTA, our sidelined intelligence services, our stand on Kyoto and the way the Australian military is being integrated into the US force structure (eg new strike fighter and new – or second hand – battle tank), Howard is steadily shifting Oz thousands of kilometres north-east to sit somewhere just off California. Latham’s reluctance to go all the way with this meta-policy is reminiscent of Curtin’s decision to put national interest over ideological loyalty in 1942 when he started the whole shift away from imperial Britain and towards the US.
So real issues are emerging in this election. I don’t expect the mass media to point this stuff out to the electorate (too much hard work), but the voters – so used to the claustrophobia of a political system in which the two main parties varied only on detail – must be noticing the fresh breeze of choice.
Wars always have ramifications far beyond their initial causes. Indeed, if they are big enough, and Iraq looks big enough, they change everything. Howard should have thought a little harder about all this before he sent off Australian men and women to a war a long way away for no apparent benefit to this country. If Latham gets in, and learns fast on the job, the conservatives could be out of business for years. Since he is probably the most intelligent aspirant for the top job since Keating, if we exclude the hapless Hewson, he could hang around for a very long time. Unlike Keating, Latham can set his own style as PM.
As for the US governor – I mean ambassador – he’ll be replaced when President Kerry comes to office in Rome – I mean Washington.

The source of my ALP polling information now tells me that they have Campbell Newman on 34% this week, so he’s up a little again, but apparently not enough to worry them.
Still, polls can be deceitful things. None of them predicted that Sallyanne would lose, until the one with the ultimate sample on the day. Tomorrow the Courier Mail is apparently publishing a poll. That will give us a much better idea of how good my source is.
Went to a breakfast this morning that was addressed by Campbell Newman. The most telling point during the morning was made by Bruce Flegg, the new state Liberal Deputy Parliamentary Leader. Apparently the cabbie who drove him in to town said he was going to give Campbell a go because he was “trying” for his vote. There has certainly been a smugness and complacency on the Quinn side of this campaign, perhaps driven by relief that former Lord Mayor Jim Soorley is not the candidate. While most in Brisbane probably aren’t antagonistic to Soorley now, my source tells me that ALP polling had the ALP losing up until his resignation approximately 12 months ago.
The advertising campaign has been interesting this time around. Most of the weight from both sides has been on positive ads, which unfortunately seem to reduce to claims that “my tunnel is bigger (or better) than yours”, but there have been a number of negative ads. When an ad no longer runs you can reach one of two conclusions – it has run its course, or it has been irritating the voters. As a result you can guess at what the other side’s polling might be saying.
One ad that is no longer running is one that features Campbell and his team after alleging that he has “Tunnel vision”. Maybe the ad has been withdrawn because it annoyed the punters, or maybe because it has run its course. There is another possibility. When you look at the team it reminds you that the Lilberals in Brisbane have struck a more significant blow for women’s involvement in politics than the ALP has managed to do anywhere, Emily’s list notwithstanding. 5 out of 8 of the sitting councillors are women, and it is quite obvious in the ad. I think the Liberals could have made more of this.

Leaked ALP polling says that the Liberal Party is due for yet another hiding in the Brisbane City Council election this Saturday. As of the week before last Labor had Liberal Lord Mayoral Candidate Campbell Newman peaking on only 32% of the vote. His vote’s alleged to have risen a little last week and to be down again this week.
Now you have to be careful with leaks, even if you have seen the documents, which I haven’t in this case. This is presumably a first preference vote, meaning that after distribution of Greens and other preferences it will be much higher. With a total Greens vote likely to be around 9%, it won’t be much higher. (Mind you, both Liberal and Labor are doing their best to drive this up with ads accusing the other of unspeakable crimes like lying and misrepresentation. Most voters regard politicians lying as being as natural as snakes hissing.)
The Liberal Party has lost at least one ward at every council election since 1991. At the last election they won 41% of the two-party preferred vote. If these Labor figures are right, then they’ve lost ground since then which could put the ward of Toowong within reach of Labor.
I’ve experienced a couple of things around here where I live that show why Labor is traveling so well. A week and a half ago I ran into a neighbour who was taking his little girl off to feed the ducks. I’ve lived around this area all my life and have never heard of anyone feeding the ducks this side of the Botanical Gardens before. Turns out that a fairly barren and uninteresting piece of park with an open drain in it which is officially called Coorparoo Creek has been turned into a wetland – the sort of place local Aboriginal tribes must have regarded as a restaurant going on the amount of fast food swimming in it. Couple this achievement with a burgeoning of bohemian looking European outdoor dining areas in other parts of the ward where there used to be only Lifeline bins; kilometers of bikeways; urban beautfication projects; and rubbish collected regularly and reliably and no wonder most people in Brisbane think our city is heading in the right direction.
The other thing was the arrival of an official council information brochure in my letter box asking for my views about the beautification of the Coorparoo shopping center. Not only is this a care-taker period when the Council and its officers should not be canvassing new initiatives, but as far as I can see this initiative is actually part of a list of campaign promises. How do you campaign against an administration which is prepared to so ruthlessly and unethically use council assets? Especially as no-one seems to care.
It’s not quite right that no-one cares. The Courier Mail has been campaigning on a number of council issues, including rates and the secretive nature of a council that suppresses flood maps and hydrological studies on the basis that residents won’t be able to understand them. But for these issues to bite all of the media need to be reporting the same problems as election issues, and the CM has been a lone and honourable voice. Everyone else has labeled challenger Campbell Newman as “stunt man” merely because he obligingly gives them an illustrative news item every day for their evening news bulletins.
The Liberals have made some campaign errors (but I won’t talk about them as I’ve offered some advice over the last 4 weeks) but no matter how good your campaign it is virtually impossible to win if there is no mood for change whatsoever.
So, despite that fact that ALP Lord Mayor Tim Quinn doesn’t appear to be working too hard in a job that just fell into his lap, it’s possible (on his polling – I’m not making a prediction) he might even increase his margin. Maybe Campbell Newman should take some time out and throw some bread to my local ducks. It must feel like he’s standing waist deep down in the mud next to them at the moment.

It used to be the case that being described as a “discriminating gentlemen” was a compliment, reflecting the fact that to be successful we all discriminate each and every day and hour of our lives. There is nothing wrong with discrimination.
There is a problem with inappropriate discrimination, which is where the law has stepped in. It has not been lawful to advertise for men to be bricklayers, or women to be receptionists for quite some time. Funny thing though, the majority of people in both those occupations tend to conform to the pre-existing sexual stereotype.
What has happened? Well, hopefully the legislation has had some educative role – employers now think twice about what qualifications are absolutely required of applicants – but in practical terms, if there is discrimination it has just gone underground and become invisible (a statement which relies on the assumption that there were men who wanted to be receptionists and women who wanted to be bricklayers).
I don’t have a problem with laws that say you should hire people in androgynous roles on the basis of merit rather than sex. Afterall, there was a time when a secretary was invariably male, a tradition which mostly continues today in roles such as “Secretary of State”. But what about situations where gender is in fact a qualification?
What has prompted these musings is the case of the Catholic Education Office in New South Wales. The CEO asked for an exemption from the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) so that they could offer 12 teaching scholarships to men in an effort to increase the percentage of male teachers in their schools. It is well accepted that boys at school are suffering because there is a lack of male role models at school as most teachers these days are female. This is a case where discriminating between teachers on the basis of gender would appear to be a legitimate activity. Boys have a need which can only be filled by people of a particular gender.
The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) refused this application and the Federal Government has moved to change the legislation to allow it, much to the chagrin of the Labor Party and the Teachers’ Unions.
Now HREOC has approved a compromise proposal. The CEO will now offer 24 teaching scholarships – twelve for men and twelve for women. Fair enough you say, a non-discriminatory solution. Well, not quite. Read the HREOC press release here and then continue. This solution still needs an exemption from the act. Why? Because, even though it assumes equality, it is only in terms of numbers, not ability. The twelve men could be inferior in ability to the twelve women who missed out on scholarships by finishing just behind the twelve women who win them.
But there is a logical problem for HREOC here. Something is either discriminatory or not. I have a bit of trouble seeing the practical difference between the discrimination they are prepared to licence and the discrimination they are determined to ban. Given the tens of thousands of teachers in the NSW Catholic School system, the difference between 12/12 and 12 only is negligible in its effect on the system. I’m with the Federal Government on this one. There is absolutely nothing wrong with discrimination as long as it is done for the right reasons.

The accusations hanging over the heads of several Rugby League and AFL players of serious misconduct highlight the problem we have currently with providing role models for our young males. This problem occurs in the midst of something of a crisis of male identity, illustrated by the high levels of anti-social behaviour, violence, drinking, drug taking and suicide afflicting young males.
With the decline of traditional role models, such as the omnipotent father and the trusty local priest, we increasingly look to the mass media and sport for our ‘heroes’. As literacy declines, our heroes have become less likely to inhabit novels and more likely to be characters in movies or on TV. As role models they have the advantage over sportsmen in that they are often depicted in much more complex contexts than sportsmen (who are almost entirely focussed on winning), but they are also inherently problematic because of the genre form and the need to entertain.
Once our heroes were characters read about in books (and before that, heard of in stories and songs; now they tend to be viewed on the screen. The content as well as the form of ‘heroism’ have changed. To start with, the movie/TV hero is usually much less complex than literary heroes, who often have to overcome their weaknesses or self-contradictions to act heroically. All too often movie/TV heroes are inherently heroic and simply seek or find themselves in situations which allow or require manifestation of their intrinsic heroic qualities. The famous western ‘Shane’ is a good example. Because movies/TV are ultimately so reliant on spectacle and action to ensure communication with the audience, this heroism is typically expressed through violence. Clint Eastwood, who became famous playing violent anti-heroes, eventually deconstructed this reliance on violence in movies like ‘High Plains Drifter’ and ‘Unforgiven’.
In real life, violence is always problematic. Things are never black and white (despite President Bush’s Old Testament terminology and the US military’s habit of calling their enemies ‘bad guys’), and any use of violence leaves a legacy of resentment and anger that can last for generations.
There is a clear and growing link between the popular heroes and violence. For instance, the US Marines still show that classic film of archetypal hero John Wayne (who famously avoided exposure to real life violence in WWII) ‘The Sands of Iwo Jima’ to new recruits.
But as worrying as this connection is, at least Wayne typically played a man with a conscience placed in a difficult situation who had to resort to violence. Contemporary ‘action heroes’ are more likely to be cold killers (even robots, as in the first ‘Terminator’ movie), verging on psychotic (‘Rambo’), totally cynical (any Vin Diesel role) or definitely crazy (most Mel Gibson movies).
These are hardly healthy role models.
But where else do the boys go for inspiration? The police? Businessmen? Politicians?

John Howard’s announcement of an extra $400 million for the Oz intelligence services is another sign that the tiny international terrorist movement is winning its war with western civilisation. That is $400 million that won’t be going to fix the crisis in hospitals or to improve our declining school system or to deal with salinity.
And it is going to a set of organisations which do not have a strong record of success. Indeed, in perhaps the most important decision made by the Oz government in decades – to go to war in Iraq – they were completely sidelined. As the government has admitted, it was on US and British intelligence that Oz went to war.
Terrorism is greatly affecting the long-term development of global relations. It has been a major factor in turning the most powerful nation on earth into a much more militaristic power (although its rise has coincided with the most imperialist administration in decades). Spending on the military in the US has now returned to the levels of the Cold War years, with the US moving into new and dangerous territory, such as development of new nuclear weapons and the militarisation of space.
The old Cold War foe is also turning towards authoritarianism again, President Putin using the threat of terrorism to keep criticism of his growing power under control. Terrorist acts in Russia are more likely to be by Chechnyans, but Putin like the Chinese just lumps all violence against the state into the terrorist category and thus stands firm with the US position. This is an untenable and fundamentally dishonest alliance.
The US, Australia and other countries previously proud of their liberal tradition are becoming more and more like authoritarian states in order to suppress terrorism. Protection of personal rights by law is under threat, and the US has flouted the most basic legal rights in setting up its concentration camp in Cuba (as even David Hicks’ US Marine lawyer has pointed out).
Easy travel and communications, the essentials of globalisation, are being fettered by constant checks and surveillance. Whatever its problems, it is globalisation that has fuelled the latest phase of wealth creation in the west and allowed our extravagant lifestyle to continue. The war on terrorism acts as a massive tax on the whole western world.
The constant expectation of violence, made all too immediate by the mass media, makes us all jumpy and depressed. To point out that violence is always happening due to natural disasters and accidents does not help because we feel like targets, like victims.
If this continues for much longer, the terrorists will have disrupted western civilisation more than even they could have dreamed. It is perhaps time we turned to more systematic analysis of the problem to isolate the actual fanatics from their financial and ideological support. In particular, it is time we really asked WHY these terrorists are behaving like they are. Bin Laden and the other leaders might be the usual megalomaniacs, but for young men and women to give up their very lives speaks so readily of a hostility and despair that must be understood.

The news that the AFL now has its own sex scandals should provide little comfort to the administrators of rugby league still struggling with serious sex abuse allegations in two of its premiership clubs the Canterbury Bulldogs, and Melbourne Storm.
Any distraction will be temporary, and so it should be.
Rugby league today is in crisis, no matter how much its national and club administrators continue to pretend otherwise. It is a crisis of confidence, the real consequences of which won’t be felt for some years when mums and dads, and school sports teachers, make decisions about what code of football (if any) boys will take up.
The behaviour of a minority of players even if no charges arise from the most recent, widely publicised, incidents sets the worst possible example for the code.
As highly paid professionals, the players concerned must accept much of the blame.
But the games administrators cannot escape blame and responsibility as well.
In my long and varied career I have met few more competent, visionary or effective leaders than the late Senator Ron McAuliffe, who for 20 years dominated rugby league in Queensland. It was my privilege to work with him closely for some of that time when he was President of the Queensland Rugby League.
Some might say he ruled by fear. Others would say he was a dictator. If he was, he was a largely benevolent one.
The club, state and national players in his era were not fully professional, with most holding full time jobs, but many had high profiles in the media and community.
I cannot recall one incident in that whole period that would be even remotely comparable with those now causing so much damage to the game.
I can recall a couple of transgressions that did not involve criminal behaviour but did not set a good example. In one case, the Senator simply told the selectors the player concerned was never to be chosen again. No publicity. The player never played rep football again and his career ended prematurely.
I suspect many players did fear the Senator more than a few officials did so as well.
But he was also respected, and that’s the real difference between Ron McAuliffe and far too many officials today.
The game might now be totally professional, but its officials regularly fail to meet the standards that ought to be expected of professional administrators running multi-million dollar enterprises and that is what rugby league clubs are today.
There are a few exceptions the Brisbane Broncos being among them.
But too many of the game’s administrators provide weak leadership and tolerate poor discipline off and on the field.
Since the departure of Ken Arthurson and John Quayle, the leadership at the top has largely been inadequate and all to frequently found wanting. The game is today paying a heavy price and hundreds of thousands of young players, and fans, rightly feel let down.
By all means address behavioural and other issues concerning players but the game needs to have a hard and honest look at its officials as well.
It will not be a pretty sight.

My prediction made earlier in this blog that all three major leaders of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ – George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard – would lose office by the end of this year is looking good. I did not predict Spain’s Aznar’s fall (because I didn’t think about him), but he is the harbinger for the others. His government lost office it seems because he took his country into an unpopular war and was then less than honest about certain outcomes of that action.
President Bush is looking very fragile against the stolid John Kerry in an election in which the usual introspection of the American electorate will most likely decide the outcome. Bush’s economic program, one of the most rapacious in decades in its impact on the less wealthy and the environment, has made the US extremely vulnerable to global forces, as indicated by the downright frailty of the US dollar.
So for Bush, who planned the war before 911, the Iraq war has turned into mostly a negative thing.
Blair will be undone by his own sanctimonious posturing. The increasingly Churchillian British PM set himself up as that rare thing, an honest political leader, but has uttered an unending stream of lies and quarter-truths since before the Iraq war started. Now even his personal life is under scrutiny as his self-conferred sainthood wears ever thinner.
And Howard’s main problem is his innate conservatism and lack of imagination. He is in the end very much a one trick pony, banging the fear drum whenever things get tricky. His limitations got him and his country into the Iraq war and now when the fear card loses its effect, as it eventually had to, he looks like the tired old hack he always was.
The complete enervation of Howard’s always shabby cabinet was shown yet again by the pathetic effort by Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, surely one of the most incompetent senior government ministers in recent decades, to explain the differences of opinion over the link between Iraq and the bombings in Madrid. He is totally out of his depth when it comes to anything that requires even minimal use of the old grey matter, reverting to snide slag offs at the opposition or at the inconsiderate journo asking questions he can’t answer. The only thing that bothers me about the idea of Downer disappearing from the screen is the prospect of even more didactic discourse from Professor Rudd.
As for the rest of Howard’s ministerial mob, aside from Abbot and Costello they come across as well and truly passed their use by date. And the problem with the two bovver boys is that they were always toxic. They only ever smile when someone else is getting hurt
Maybe there is another Tampa out there somewhere, but Howard is not facing the likeable, conservative and ultimately mediocre Kim Beazley this time.
The Iraq war is historically important. It may go down in history as the end of an era when military force was considered a serious option for resolving deep-seated socio-economic problems. If it also brings about the political demise of possibly the most inept US president ever, the most slimy British PM in ages and the most limited Oz PM since Menzies systematically decimated the potential leadership of the Liberal party, well that’s a bonus.

Yesterday’s decision by the newly elected Spanish Socialist government to withdraw its troops from Iraq might decrease the chances of another Al Qaeda (assuming it was Al Qaeda) attack on Spanish soil for the short term, but it has to increase the chances of an attack on other countries in that same period.
Al Qaeda appears to have originally based much of its strategy on the belief that Western democratic nations are weak and do not have the will for a sustained engagement. US actions in Afghanistan and Iraq post 9/11 should have challenged that assumption, which up until that time would have appeared a reasonable one. However, those actions by the US do not disprove the theory, just elongate the time scale over which it acts.
The more nuanced version, which the Spanish Socialist action tends to prove, is that while the West is weak, its weakness may be sporadically punctuated by resistance. The engineer in bin Laden will presumably want to continue to empirically test this theory on the resolve of voters in other Western countries facing election.
However, what appears to have worked in the case of Spain may not work elsewhere. It requires an Opposition that believes that withdrawing troops immediately is an option and then wins the election. I say “appears to have worked” because it is still an open question as to whether it has really worked in the case of Spain. Oppositions who do not expect to win often promise things that those that do don’t. The new Spanish government’s pronouncements have some “weasel” words in there that might allow them to change policy now they are in power.
The Australian reports that new Prime Minister Zapatero “said barring new developments in Iraq before June 30 – the date the United States has promised to hand power over to an Iraqi provisional government – Spain’s 1300 troops in Iraq ‘will return home’. The other occupying states will be contacted for consultations on withdrawing the soldiers, he said.” Other reports say that he has said he might leave them there if Iraq were under UN control.
At the same time John Howard appears to me to be fighting a losing war of words about whether Spain was targeted for its involvement in Iraq. Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty says it was. The Prime Minister cites head of ASIO Dennis Richardson who apparently says it wasn’t. There is no doubt that Richardson is in a better position to make this judgement than Keelty, and no doubt that Keelty has spoken out of turn, but the chances of the PM winning this argument are slim.
There is one possibility for him however. Labor frontbencher Kevin Rudd has backed Keelty against Richardson. This offers a possibility for subject change to the PM. The implication of this is that Rudd thinks that ASIO isn’t up to the mark. The PM or Ruddock should be running around today asking Rudd whether he has confidence in ASIO, and if he doesn’t what plans Labor has to “reform” ASIO. Labor’s key weakness is still foreign affairs and security, and it is a weakness that poisons public confidence in its strengths. I’d be interested to see whether Rudd has a consistent and logical policy on reform of ASIO although the organization has been a Labor bête noir since before the days of Whitlam and the Murphy raids.

Over the weekend I watched a trio of war movies on TV. “The Battle of Britain” was about perhaps the most important battle of WWII, “Thirteen Days” was about how we avoided nuclear war in 1962, and “The war of the Worlds” was about a fictional war with invaders from Mars. There is a trajectory in these films in that we go from international war to potential global war and then to speculative interplanetary war.
I believe in history as the result of individuals acting within social, economic, political, etc structures determined mainly by prevailing institutional arrangements and technologies. So in a sense WWI and WWII were inherent in the rise of mass industrial society and the roots of the Cuban Missile crisis lie in the invention of the atomic bomb.
But movies always focus on people, and in this they remind us that sometimes the actions of individuals – for good and bad – make all the difference.
Many argue that the Battle of Britain was the decisive battle in WWII because if the British had been beaten and invaded then the US would not have had the unsinkable aircraft carrier from which to eventually launch an invasion of Nazi Europe. If the Germans had achieved air superiority, the argument goes, they could have crossed the channel and at the time their army was vastly superior to that of Britain. Others, however, have claimed that even with air superiority, the Royal Navy, which was still Britain’s trump card, could have prevented an invasion. Fortunately, we’ll never know.
The battle was going Germany’s way as their planes concentrated on the British air bases to wipe out the defending aircraft, but then one of those strange history-making things happened. An off-course German bomber dropped its bombs on hitherto safe London, the British bombed Berlin in retaliation, and an outraged Hitler shifted his main attack onto London in response. This gave the hard-pressed British Air Force a chance to regroup, and they then successfully defended Britain. So if those German bombers had not got lost…
But the reason why the greatly outnumbered British fighters were able to defend Britain was because of the early warning system that included radar and observers and efficient operations teams. This system was the result of research into systems organisation which is an aspect of perhaps the most important long-term trend in history. That is, more and more efficient organisation through the systemisation of activity of all kinds.
‘Thirteen Days” was the kind of film Hollywood rarely makes these days, a well-made and reasonably accurate historical reconstruction. It showed just how close we came to nuclear war – Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defence at the time, recently admitted how very, very lucky we were to escape the Cold War without it going hot. Luckily, the Kennedy brothers held out against the generals, and an agreement was made to avoid war. We now know that Soviet local battlefield commanders did have permission to fire their short range nuclear missiles, so if he US had invaded Cuba, well…
The Cuba missile crisis scared the shit out of everyone, resulting in much more careful communications between the Soviets and the Americans, including the construction of the famous ‘hotline’. So the crisis made the start of ‘accidental’ war much less likely, and marked the end of the early phase of the Cold War. Some kind of crisis, and perhaps war itself, was going to happen sooner or later, but fortunately for humanity, John Kennedy and Nikita Kruschev led their respective nations when it did.
The 1950s movie “The War of the Worlds”, loosely based on HG Wells’ terrific tale, has a subtext of Cold War fear. The more recent “Independence Day” is also a version of this story. It was President Reagan who said once that what humanity needed was to threatened by an alien species so we would combine against them. He had a point.
What we need to do is make the intellectual leap to realise that we do in fact face the choice of recognising our human solidarity, or face complete disaster. All our major problems, from terrorism to global warming, require that we start thinking like one species, not like separate nations.
Watching the reconstruction of the least of these battles, as Spitfires and Hurricanes fought ME 109s and Heinkels – all mostly flown by boys who should have still been in classrooms – as below London burned, I was reminded of the terrible cost in life, limb and material of modern war. Even without nuclear weapons we just cannot afford such mistakes any more. But in the end war is not avoided through accident, and systems of maintaining peace must be built to ultimately replace our systems of war. And to this, we really do need to dedicate many more of our resources to fixing the causes of war.