The best thing about Graeme Gilbert is that he spells “Grayam” differently from the way that I spell it. He’s using my name and he’s wearing it out.This man is as big a threat to our way of life as the Islamo-fascists he criticises.
I subjected myself to at least an hour of Gilbert’s bile last night as I travelled the coastal road from Grafton to Coff’s Harbour. Caller after caller rang up to tell us what a threat Muslims are to our way of life. They were short on specifics. It seemed to centre around what Muslim women allegedly wore. One caller wanted to know why he had to remove his motorbike helmet when he entered a bank, but Muslim women could enter wearing a Hijab with only two eye holes cut in it.
I’ve yet to hear of a bank held up by hijab wearing Islamic women, but to Graeme it was sufficient proof that Islamiscists could take over the country “without firing a shot”.
He declared that wearing the hijab was “unhealthy”. Why? Well, you could ask any doctor, apparently. Actually, it was to do with the risk of a Vitamin D deficiency. You need sunlight to generate Vitamn D in your body, and so obviously these women would be Vitamin D deficient.
Thank God for the Aussie tan which makes us not like these other unhealthy people. Melanomas before hijabs any day.
60 years after the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Graeme is witness to the fact that fascist tendencies lie in even the most peaceful and civilised of societies.
Gilbert declared that when Muslims are in our house, they should abide by our laws. That apparently means they should be just like us. No deviant dress thanks very much.
I’ve always loved the Sikh temple at Woolgoolga, north of Coff’s Harbour. To find this exotic piece of religious veneration in the middle of a dinki-di stretch of Australian bush has always said a lot to me about Australians’ broad and generous views of life. Listening to the Gilbert sewage and then driving past the temple put it in a different light.
For me it is a celebration of diversity. For people like Graeme, diversity is fine, as long as you behave just like the rest of us.
What distressed me most about Gilbert was that barely anyone rang in (it was talkback) to challenge him. They should have. I’d like to think if I hadn’t been driving, I would have. Not to abuse him, although he probably deserves it, but to show him up for the fool that he is.
Yesterday the Prime Minister was proposing tougher laws for those who advocate terrorism. Those laws won’t work. Arresting the perpetrators will only make their message stronger to those who want to hear it. The only answer to terrorism is to reassert our beliefs. Which is why John Howard ought to pay more attention to people like Graeme Gilbert. And why we all should pay more attention to people like him.
By asserting an exclusionary version of what it is to be an Australian they weaken our ability to oppose a curative world view to that of the fanatics.
If I have an opportunity next time I hear Gilbert, I’ll ring him up to put him straight. You should think about it too. He’s on the “Super Radio Network”. (I doubt whether they’ve heard about Nietsche or his concept of the Superman, but it fits). Ring him up and give him a good purgative. There’s not much I recognise as unAustralian, but he fits the bill. Oh, and keep sending those white feathers to Jason Gillespie.

While the National Party is busy demanding broadband access to every homestead, along with a tar seal on the road, two new dams for every property over 1000 hectares, and reticulated water everywhere but the Simpson Desert, I wonder whether Telecoms services in the city are really up to what the Nationals would call “scratch”.
Two days ago I was demonstrating one of our products to a potential client in Ferny Grove and had to use my dial-up modem. 19 point something Kbps was all it could manage. When I first got into this game I think my modem did 9.6 Kbps. My normal dial-up speed at home in Coorparoo used to be pretty close to 56 Kbps most of the time, and with broad band it’s 512.6 Kbs.
So Ferny Grove is caught in the Internet equivalent of the 17th Century. Not that cottage industry speeds are unique to Ferny Grove. When I stay in Forster I can’t do better than 24 Kbps or thereabouts, and I’ve had the same experience in the Sydney CBD.
Perhaps it is all a plot by Telcos to force us onto broadband. If so, it could be working.
Ross Honeywell, writing in Alan Kohler’s new online financial publishing venture, Eureka Report says:

Nielsen/NetRatings data shows that, in September 2004, almost 41% of all home internet users were broadband-connected. It also shows that, compared with Britain, France, the US, Germany, Sweden and Hong Kong, Australia has the fastest growth rate of broadband penetration. (Broadband growth in Australia was 87 per cent over the 13 months to September 2004).

All very well, but that still leaves almost two-thirds using dial-up access. Where’s the equity in speeds that leave you time to do the knitting while you’re waiting for today’s graphic rich sites to download. No wonder some demographics are so under-represented in Internet usage.

I’ve noted earlier how globalised terrorism has moved the front-line behind us in a war in which we are all footsoliders, whether we like it or not, and whether we approved of invading Afghanistan and Iraq or not.
I was dismayed to see the news reports that Jason Gillespie thinks we should call off the Ashes Tour if there is another bombing in London.
The chances of being caught in a terrorist bombing in London are lower than the chances of suffering a traffic accident there, so this is not just an unpatriotic statement, it is one of mindless cowardice.
If you were considering martyrdom as a way of toppling what you saw as a corrupt, weak and degenerate civilisation, what more proof of those three propositions would you need than this statement? Gillespie makes life slightly more dangerous for each of us, while doing his own chances of immortality little additional good.
In which case I have no hesitation in suggesting that we should all forward a white feather to Cricket Australia to send on to Gillespie. Their contact address is http://www.cricket.com.au/?s=contactus (which is only a submission form, so you might also like to try something info@cricket.com.au). And here is a white feather:

Serendipitously On Line Opinion’s September feature is:

Can our sporting stars be rich, famous AND virtuous?
Why should we expect sharp eyes and strong well co-ordinated limbs to produce model human beings? What do we expect from our sportsmen and women and are they delivering?
Please send submissions to the editor.

Looking at the disasters of the first half of John Howard’s career, who would have thought that second half would be so fortunate. Howard’s latest stroke of good luck is the new website http://getup.org.au/. The site claims to be part of “a new progressive movement in Australia” and is fairly transparently modelled on http://moveon.org/ in the US.
The site is the creation of “Jeremy Heimans and David Madden, two young Australians who have worked at the vanguard of the new online organising and campaigning techniques in the US” and boasts Evan Thornley, John Hewson and Bill Shorten on its board.
The reason why this site is likely to be good news for Howard is the same as the reasons why MoveOn was such a boon for the Republicans. By giving voice to left-wing opinion they exert a force on centre left parties which pulls them away not just from the centre, but their own working class constituencies. MoveOn was run by people who thought the reason that they lost the first time was because they weren’t singing the song stridently enough. Turn-up the volume, they reckoned, and people would vote for them. Voters didn’t. They changed stations instead.
GetUp’s site is slick, and to my eye, appears to be focus-group driven. It’s first campaign is called “Now you answer to us”. Australians are asked to sign up and send the URL for an online ad to their local member. The ad features a number of individual Australians warning the government that while it now has a majority in the senate, it must still answer to them, the people.
I’ve been saying for quite some time that the government has no illusions about what a majority in the senate brings (things like Barnaby Joyce – now there’s an intimation of mortality, or at least vulnerability). They know that a senate majority doesn’t give them the ability to do what they want, irrespective of community opinion. But it won’t be sectional online campaigns that they react to, but rather cold hard quantitative analysis carried out in the engine room of Crosby Textor. So what is the GetUp campaign about?
When you look at the site, the ad isn’t really directed at the government at all. It’s meant to recruit the people sending the URL around who will presumably look at the ad before forwarding. It consists of a series of one phrase statements from a variety of mostly young Australians. They say things like “If only one man controls the media, then we get only one side of the story”, “Don’t keep putting George Bush’s interests in front of Australia’s”, and “Australia is still a democracy”. From our focus group research, I’d expect these phrases to resonate with left of centre voters, not Coalition MPs.
So, at least at this stage of its life. GetUp is not about broadening the debate, but intensifying one side of it and recruiting foot-soldiers. Definitely a MoveOn wannabe. That’s not something Kim Beazley needed, but John Howard would be hoping they succeed.