The Greens have announced Bob Brown’s replacement in the Senate, “winemaker, academic and former investment banker” Peter Whish-Wilson.
Here’s hoping he’s more committed to the progressive social and economic policy side of the Greens’ platform than I am the environmental side.
I’m a little concerned by this:
Whish-Wilson, who has a burly physique and a soul patch, said he plans to refrain from commenting on political issues until he takes up his Senate position in June.
I’d rather know more about his approach to social and economic policy – as, I suspect, would other Greens supporters – before he’s locked in for a number of years.
And whilst I doubt Brown would have approved anyone who was going to betray the principles for which the Greens have consistently stood, I’ll be watching carefully.
Few would seriously dispute that ANZAC Day is supposed to remind us of the sacrifice made by soldiers in war. About how tragic is every one of those deaths and injuries, and what a high price we should put on ever asking any soldier to take that risk again.
In other words, it should remind us and our elected representatives that war is not a slightly-serious decision that will make us feel big and important. It’s not an opportunity to extend our national influence or impress countries we assume are definitely going to sacrifice their own soldiers in gratitude for this downpayment if we ever ask them.
If our soldiers are ever to be sent to a war it needs to be an absolute last resort. Only somebody who’d utterly failed to grasp the significance of ANZAC Day – or who had stupidly confused it for a day celebrating nationalism – would sell their sacrifice so cheaply as to send them to an overseas military campaign where there was no serious plan for winning it or for what would happen if we did. It may well be that protecting the human rights of other people and establishing a long-term genuine free democracy may be a high enough good to be worth paying the extremely high price of soldiers’ lives – but anything less than that certainly isn’t.
If you genuinely valued soldiers’ lives as highly as ANZAC Day is supposed to remind you you should, then you would not send them until you had such a plan on your desk and had had serious people evaluate its prospects.
I can only conclude that certain recent leaders who sent Australians to die in wars that have left the countries in question in chaos and their citizens in danger not significantly better than what was there before our soldiers’ sacrifice – an outcome that was entirely predictable because no-one in charge of the campaigns appears to have seriously contemplated how they were going to rebuild the countries once they’d smashed them up – that those leaders (or that leader) must have slept through the ANZAC ceremonies they’d previously attended. That they did not listen to the soldiers’ stories. That they completely missed the lesson of what happened at Gallipoli. That they did not grasp just how valuable our soldiers’ lives really are.
Let’s hope that our current and future leaders are paying attention today. Never again. Lest we forget.
Friend and local pharmacist David Nolte, who discovered his body, says Ham felt responsible for the copyright controversy.
“He was a very sensitive person. It really cut him apart,” he said.
“He did say ‘That’s all they’ll ever remember me by’. It gutted him really … I don’t want to say it destroyed him or anything, but it really did cut him up.”
The hideously unjust and destructive “Down Under” case, and its effect on a man who gave so much to the country, call out for legislative reform.
The fact that Australia has – through absurd provisions in the Copyright Act that turn a musical reference into some sort of plagiarism, rather than an entirely artistically legitimate fair use, and that keep an almost fifty year old nationally-significant song out of the public domain – treated a man who made such an important contribution to our musical life so horribly, deeply annoys me.
Why is the length of time before a work enters the public domain so obscenely long? The life of the author plus seventy years? I mean, yes, I know why – because the US copyright terms were corruptly extended due to the lobbying of the Disney company, and because John Howard gave us the nationally destructive Australia-US FTA locking in those absurd provisions. But why are the rest of us, through our politicians, so committed to holding back the creation of cultural language? To locking down artistic works so that subsequent artists can’t refer to them and can’t build on them?
Why is a brief musical reference in a song not “fair use”? Great writers have always referred to each other’s work all the time with quotes and paraphrases. It’s keeping our creative heritage alive. It’s enriching our cultural life. It’s not “plagiarism”. They’re not simply trying to flog off an earlier artist’s work – they’re honouring it and its importance in the culture.
Greg Ham was a creative artist, not a plagiarist. Someone who gave to this country and enriched it, not someone who deserved to be ground into the dirt by shameless copyright opportunists and the broken system that enables them. It infuriates me that he died thinking that he was going to be remembered as some kind of cheap rip-off thief, rather than the significant Australian musician he was.
The Australian Law Reform Commission is about to review the Copyright Act – it might be worth making a submission. Copyright terms need to be shorter, and fair use like Down Under protected. It’s too late for Ham – but let’s not do it to another artist.
An unsolicited email arrived in my inbox this morning from young Queensland blogging solicitor, Leon Bertrand, who apparently believes the rubbish he reads in tabloids (and who seems to have some very odd ideas about how parliamentary democracy works):
Dear fellow Earthian,
As you know, the carbon tax will come into effect later this year, and I will have to pay more for my electricity as a result.
As you also are no doubt aware, the reason we are having a carbon tax is because we ended up with a hung parliament after the last federal election. This resulted in the Greens, who received 11.76% of the vote in the House of Representatives, being able to impose a carbon tax when the vast majority of Australians voted for a party against any such tax.
I am writing to you because I believe that you are one of the 11.76% that voted Green at the last federal election, at least partly because you were in favour of what you would call ‘action on climate change’ ie: a carbon tax.
Unlike other taxes I pay, I will not be receiving any services in return for paying the carbon tax. At the last election, I voted against a carbon tax because I didn’t want one. Opinion polls confirm that the carbon tax has been passed into legislation against the will of the majority of Australians.
It may be that I will receive some compensation for the tax from the federal government. However, many Australians will not be fully ‘compensated’, particularly those who lose their jobs as a result of the carbon tax.
Furthermore, the compensation package is increased government expenditure and will exceed total revenues from the tax, even before you factor in the costs of administering this scheme. I will therefore have to pay back much of that compensation in years to come with compound interest.
In the circumstances, I believe that it is only fair that you pay the portion or percentage of my electricity bill that is due to the carbon tax.
Please confirm that you agree to this perfectly reasonable request. Once you have done so, I will forward to you my next electricity bill, along with my bank account details so that you can reimburse me for the cost of the carbon tax.
Yours in fairness,
Leon Bertrand
An amusing collection of silly partisan claims (which I suspect will be exposed by the reality of the July 1 introduction of the carbon package) and an intriguingly unorthodox understanding of Australian parliamentary democracy, to which I replied:
Dear crank.
Tell you what. I’ll agree to pay your share of the carbon price when you agree to pay my share of the GST, which I and a majority of other Australians voted against in 1998. By now it amounts to a significant amount of money.
Interested?
Thought not.
Yours in consistency,
Jeremy Sear.
I’ll keep you posted if he genuinely turns out to be committed to the principle of people who voted for a particular policy compensating other people who voted against it. I suspect he isn’t.
Thoughts after watching a few moments of last night’s Q&A between Richard Dawkins and Cardinal Pell.
I concede that religion has motivated some people to do good things, and has motivated some people who were tempted to do bad things not to do bad things. So never let it be said that its impact on the world is wholly negative. There’s more to the history of religion than just the wars and discrimination.
It does worry me, though, when people argue that without religion they’d be completely unable to function as civilised human beings. Good thing it’s there to keep them going, but… that’s a fragile safety blanket.
Here’s hoping that if those people lose their faith they can still find a reason not to go completely off the rails. I choose to have faith in their humanity that they can.
The poker machine industry has claimed victory and has called off its controversial $40 million campaign that targeted worried Labor MPs in the Government’s most marginal seats.
Sweet, sweet democracy. That’s what it’s called when industries with money can successfully use it to crush popularly-supported reforms, right?
As the time for submissions to the Senate and House of Representatives inquiries into the I-can’t-believe-we’re-still-seriously-arguing-whether-we-should-stop-discriminating-against-gay-people marriage equality bills comes to a close, it seems to me to be a particularly pertinent time to revisit the fundamental question in the whole debate: why on Earth shouldn’t the law consider marriages between gay people marriages?
And that unavoidably comes down to this question: can you identify a single factor that is an essential element of heterosexual marriages that cannot be present in a homosexual marriage?
Here are some that sound like they might work, but actually don’t, because none of them are present in all marriages now:
Procreation: It’s very difficult to find a single person who will seriously argue that heterosexual couples where procreation is impossible (for example where the woman has had a hysterectomy) should be prevented from marrying. I’m certainly not that person. Unfortunately for advocates of the “procreation is essential to marriage” argument, if you genuinely believe that “procreation (or the possibility of procreation) is essential to marriage”, then you must believe that these are not marriages. If you believe the government should not recognise marriages where procreation is impossible, and you think the Marriage Act should enforce that belief, then you must be advocating for a change yourself to make procreation (or the possibility of procreation) an essential element. Because it isn’t in the present Marriage Act. Let’s repeat this: if you are happy with the Marriage Act recognising marriages between permanently infertile couples, then you cannot consistently oppose it recognising same sex couples on the grounds that they are also infertile.
“Uniqueness”: There is something “unique” about male-female pairings other than the ability to procreate. To which I can only ask: what precisely is “unique” about all heterosexual marriages? Nobody putting this line ever specifies what exactly they mean by this beyond “complementarity”:
Complementarity: A marriage must, this “argument” asserts, have a masculine participant and a feminine participant so that there’s the complementary benefits of each. Except that there are many masculine women and feminine men. There are many marriages the law recognises right now where both participants are masculine. Or both feminine. There is no requirement in the Marriage Act that men be “masculine” or that women be “feminine”, or that there must be a representative of each stereotypical gender role in the couple. It’s not a requirement of marriage right now, and nor is it “implied”. If you genuinely believed those complementary roles are essential before a marriage can be recognised by the law, then you’d have to be calling for a change to the definition of marriage to include that requirement, so all these non-stereotypical heterosexual marriages can be stopped.
Role models: The assertion here is that children have a “right” to a mother and a father. More specifically, to a parent with a vagina and a parent with a penis (even though many fathers are stereotypically feminine and many mothers are stereotypically masculine; apparently the essential element is that children need to know that their parents have different genitals). And this should be enforced in the marriage law (even though an increasing proportion of children in Australia have unmarried parents and the Marriage Act doesn’t affect them at all). Anyone who seriously argues that the law should somehow be creating such a “right” for children has to tackle (a) the number of children raised by single parents; and (b) all the laws where the state actually takes a parent away. For example, if you argue that all children have a right to a father where possible, are you arguing that having children should be a full bar to the criminal courts imposing a long custodial sentence on an offender? Because that’s taking away the kids’ access to their father, which you’re asserting is their “right”. Alternatively you probably should just concede that you don’t really believe that kids have a “right” to a father or a mother at all, even where it’s possible.
Approved by religion: The Marriage Act has long recognised non-religious marriages. Sorry, but the country stopped asserting that marriage must conform to religious teachings decades ago. If you’re seriously proposing that all civil marriages must be banned, then you can make this argument on those grounds. If you’re not, then you don’t really believe it. And even if you do, based on the number of civil marriages solemnised every year, clearly the law (and most Australians) don’t agree with you.
So, sadly, none of those objections stand up to any scrutiny. Can anyone name a single essential element of marriage that is absent homosexual marriages? A single one?
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