Her desperation for "positive outcomes"
is over
Fatimah Alazami, 5, drowned in the boat tragedy off Sumatra. She was the youngest of Sydney man Achmed Alazami's three daughters, who also perished.
From SBS Evening News (24/10/01): UNHCR says genuine asylum seekers driven by desperation.
MICHEL GABAUDAN, UNHCR IN INDONESIA: The total number of refugees we can resettle remains a very small proportion of the total number of refugees we have, and we have witnessed in recent years that refugees stay in very poor quality refugee camps for a very long time without much hope and therefore they do try to find better alternatives to their life and I think that`s a legitimate expectation of any human being.
COMPERE: 44 people survived the sinking. But Canberra says that`s no guarantee of entry to Australia.
PHILIP RUDDOCK, IMMIGRATION MINISTER: My view is that that would be the wrong decision because it would send a very clear signal to others that simply embarking upon these dangerous voyages can lead to more positive outcomes.
Edited transcript from the ABC's The World Today, 24/10/01
PERVEZ MUSHARRAF (Pakistan President): Hundreds of thousands of refugees want to cross over into Pakistan. And our dilemma is that we already have about 2.5 million refugees here in Pakistan, and you can compare this when you think of Australia not accepting even 200 refugees.
JOHN HOWARD: A few hundred is not going to make a difference when you're dealing with 2.5 million. [italics ours]
REBECCA CARMODY: The Prime Minister wasn't the only one talking numbers today. In the wake of the deaths, the Immigration Minister, Philip Ruddock, revealed that Australia would accept 40 of Indonesia's recognised refugees. This comes after the United Nations claimed that about 30 of those who perished had already been classified as refugees. Some had apparently been waiting for resettlement for up to two years, but ultimately they gave up.
PHILIP RUDDOCK: I mean the point I've made on a number of occasions now is Indonesia, for most of the people who travel there, is not an insecure or an unsafe place where people are going to be persecuted. What people are looking for is to be a refugee in a country of choice, rather than security and safety and sanctuary from persecution.
REBECCA CARMODY: Democrats Immigration spokesman Andrew Bartlett says the fact that there were genuine refugees among the dead makes a mockery of the Government's use of the term 'queue jumpers'.
ANDREW BARTLETT: Well, what that demonstrates categorically, from the Democrats perspective, is that the so-called queue that refugees are meant to stay in doesn't work. Nobody that's actually been through the process, been assessed, would dare - would even contemplate risking their life in such a serious way unless there was still no serious hope - genuine hope for them.
REBECCA CARMODY: Why can't they, though, as the Immigration Minister argues, stay in Indonesia where it is safe?
ANDREW BARTLETT: Well, it may be safe in the sense that they're not going to get tortured, but it's certainly not any sort of viable future for them. They have no security, no opportunity of rebuilding a life, and that's the whole point of refugees, it isn't just to escape persecution. You can escape persecution by just going to anywhere and just sitting in a corner and starving.
REBECCA CARMODY: Heart rending stories told by survivors have made front page news today, including that of an eight-year-old girl who lost 21 members of her own family, and a mother whose three daughters drowned. Mr Ruddock says they could be brought to Australia on humanitarian grounds, but he worries that to do so would be setting a dangerous precedent.
PHILIP RUDDOCK: One would have to weigh up what the import of that would be, because a lot of the people smuggling is in fact fuelled by expectations that people will reach Australia. And when you realise those expectations you encourage others to embark on voyages which are equally as hazardous.
ANDREW BARTLETT: What sort of message is that, that if they go and jump on a boat and sink and half of them drown then that's their way in? I mean this is how ridiculous it's getting. That the Government's suggesting seriously that somehow or other if we take people who just managed to survive drowning at sea, that some other people might try and drown at sea as well so they can get into Australia? I mean, you know, it's beyond the joke.
From Mark Forbes, Sophie Douez, The Age, 25/10/01)
Mr Ruddock said it was "facile" to say that refugees attempting the trip from Indonesia to Australia with people smugglers were desperate. "Desperation from what? They are safe and secure now, where is the desperation? he asked.
Why they call him "Little Johnny"
Isn't it strange that the same people who support Major Magoo's pro business party, the party that believes being a business person is the highest calling, are outraged at boat people who have resourcefully gathered enough money to pay for their transportation to Australia on unseaworthy boats? No, it's not strange, it's hypocrisy of the highest order. Or simple racism.
The unofficial death toll of the sinking of the boat with no name at this writing is 353, with a mere 44 survivors. It happened on Friday, but four days elapsed before Australians heard about it. The photos and stories of the survivors are all over the media, but only because they were rescued and returned to Indonesia. Had they been rescued by the Australian Navy, there would have been no photos, no interviews. It would have been a media black out, or business as usual.
The Australian editorial (24/10/01) says:
"Clearly, the mainly Iraqis who died on the latest boat were victims of the scourge of people-smuggling. Neither Mr Howard nor Kim Beazley, nor the Senate, are responsible for this trade in flesh and blood, in hope and despair. But Mr Beazley is plainly correct when he says the Coalition's boatpeople deterrence policy has failed. Mr Howard denied anyone was responsible, yet Philip Ruddock was all over the place, shrugging his shoulders in the morning then blaming the Senate in the afternoon. He even offered a shameful depiction of the dead asylum-seekers as queue-jumpers."
And he would have done so with his clipped, precise manner of speaking, indicating as it always does, the need for an industrial strength enema. Then again, in his cartoons, Peter Nicholson always depicts him as a corpse.
But it's not Ruddock we're talking about here. It's the banality of evil incarnate, John Howard.
Little Johnny and his Anvil Choristers turned up on talkback radio hammering their one-mind-several-clones, slur-besmirched outrage. They will spend the rest of the election campaign carpet bombing Beazley's remarks, or at least until the polls show they'd better turn, zombie-like, to a different roundelay of chest-beating stretti.
Although John Howard jumped at the chance of mingling with the lint in Dubbya's pocket, he failed to engage Megawati at APEC. Just as he failed to get through to her during the Tampa crisis. Is he frightened of her? Or is she simply contemptuous of him? Probably both. And here he is trying to con Australians into believing the security of this country depends on his re-election. As in everything he has done in the last five and a half years, the asylum seeker crisis shows his incompetence. Above all, it shows his lack of understanding and compassion.
An example of his obscene smallness is reported in The World Today, above. He wondered what difference it would make by taking a few hundred asylum seekers when two and a half million are massed at the Pakistan border.
The comment had been aired earlier on the news. When John Faine put Howard's comment to Bob Brown, Brown said succinctly: "That's why he shouldn't be Prime Minister."
Indeed, the utter inhumanity of the man could not be made plainer. His nickname "Little Johnny" has never referred to his height. Rather, it has denoted the smallness of his vision, the meanness that lies at the bottom of his littlest of hearts.
He simply does not comprehend the humanness of the asylum seekers. Or, for that matter, the hundreds of thousands of Australians for whom his Thatcherite policies have meant increased hardship. They are not living, breathing, feeling people, but unknowable quantities, to be dealt with according to the limited scope of his provincial mind. If he cannot put himself in someone else's shoes, he has no right to govern. To properly lead a nation, a leader has to encompass everyone, not just a demographic he or she favours.
But this failing is not Howard's alone. It is symptomatic of the Illiberal Party and the direction it has taken since the wets were gradually wrung out to dry. With the election of Jeff Kennett in 1992, the Illiberal Party officially became a Thatcherite subset, a party antithetical to democracy and to a flourishing civilisation.
The asylum seeker crisis also shows John Howard's generational adherence to the White Australia policy. When, in 1976, Malcolm Fraser consulted his party about letting in Vietnamese boat people, John Howard was the lone dissenting voice. Since then, try as he might, he has never been able to shake off this innately bigoted position, choosing instead to hide it by espousing compassion and decency while implementing policies directly opposed. John Howard is the quintessential Janus-faced politician. Both faces are blind and neither betrays the other, because -- and here is the tragedy of the man -- neither is aware of the other.
Today, there are thousands of his supporters celebrating the drowning of the refugees, the many who flooded talkback radio with their admonitions to shoot, to maim and, prophetically, to drown. These same people without doubt recoiled at the Palestinians celebrating the terrorist attacks on America, never dreaming that on a scum rating of one to ten, the Palestinians were nowhere near as despicable as they. And every one of them will be voting for Major Magoo.
The desperate perseverance of these people, Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians and others, many of whom have relatives already living in Australia, is astounding. And utterly beyond the comprehension of the government or its supporters.
We all knew it: Bush stole the election
I've always disbelieved conspiracy theories because the idea that two or more people acting in concert to promote misinformation, a distortion of reality, or worse were incapable of carrying it through. The reason? Acting on behalf of impulses contrary to the well being of mankind inevitably involves people of dubious character with little interest in noble ideals. And dubious character usually means that at some point, one or more of the conspirators will opt to short circuit the conspiracy, usually out of greed.
Perhaps I have been hoping against hope. Perhaps conspiracies at a very high level are conducted with utmost cooperation. After all, those who run the world have but one goal in mind: to continue to run the world. (As distinct from controlling it. To run a business effectively, you want to guide unwitting consumers to your till, not impose controls over them.) And after all these years, there are few among us who would argue against a conspiracy regarding the Kennedy assassination.
At some point one has to forsake the safety of the middle road when all that lies on it are ... lies. The risk of course is that the fork one takes turns out to have, at it's end, a lair of raving loonies.
The world is in such a mess at the moment, that it is perhaps time to investigate all the forks. At worst, one can always return to the middle road.
The rise of globalisation has fostered right wing governments who appear to act in unison. They obfuscate and distort as if they were following the same script. Here in Australia, the Howard Government has taken to a fine art the wilful misinterpretation of whatever the Opposition says or does. They twist the words and then hammer the twisting relentlessly. When interviewers attempt to return to the subject of the original question, the interviewee simply continues to hammer. Scarcely a line out of Howard Government ministers does not refer to the same old denigrations, regardless of whether they fit a reply free of non-sequitur.
They are not even above enacting, or attempting to enact, laws to fit their policies of physical and thought control. Think about it. Balaclavas and dogs on the waterfront. Industrial laws to neuter the voice of workers. The patient, concerted attack on the ABC, with the ever present threat to reduce the news services to pap. The obscene use of taxpayer funds to promote lies and misinformation concerning its policies. The emergency laws enacted to bring in the Army at a moment's notice to stop protests, or in simple terms, to quell dissent. And the Border Protection law, meant to protect racial purity by keeping out the unclean, but which also has sinister connotations for Australian citizens.
An article in The Age, Newspapers withhold Florida poll analysis on the withholding of the poll count that a media consortium had undertaken after the Florida recount debacle led me to a web site that opens a can of worms, with each worm sporting a ballot with Al Gore's name on it, the total of which declare that he won the election.
How on earth will America deal with a bogus President in the midst of a so-called war against terrorism? Good bloody luck!
The web site, Make Them Accountable, takes up where The Age article left off.
During the post-election furore in America, the Bush camp sought to manufacture opinion by contesting, as contributor David Podvin says, "every pro-Gore recount, including the obviously valid ones. The Republicans then accused the vote counters of being biased because most of the challenges were resolved in favour of Gore. By using this approach, the Bush partisans successfully intimidated the counters into bending over backwards to show 'fairness', resulting in thousands of legitimate Gore votes being disqualified or relegated to a pile of disputed ballots." They used every possible angle to achieve their ends, finally resorting to a gross manipulation of the heretofore sacrosanct Supreme Court to give them the final nod.
"It was the old baseball manager's trick of crying about every call in order to pressure the umpire to give you more than your fair share,"
This is the same tactic used by the Howard Government, ad nauseam. They are all in on it. It is, in plain fact, government policy.
And it works. First, by playing to the lowest common denominator in all of us, and then by numbing our minds with incessant repetitions of whatever political lie the government is promoting (wealthy schools need more money), or whoever the government is currently demonising (non-white asylum seekers). Eventually the electorate gives up and accepts. This tactic has worked for centuries.
It would appear that left-wing governments are not to be tolerated. Whitlam's government was, not to put too fine a point on it, ordered off the stage by the CIA. The Hawke Government fell in line with the planet lords by betraying its roots and opting for economic rationalism. They were allowed to put a social face on their policies, but they still sold off the Commonwealth Bank, introduced HECS, and so forth.
After Bush was declared the winner, a media consortium, consisting of The New York Times, Dow Jones (Wall Street Journal), The Associated Press, The Washington Post, CNN, The Palm Beach Post, and The St. Petersburg Times, commissioned a recount of all of the Florida ballots in question in order to lay to rest once and for all doubts over his legitimacy. But the consortium recount has now been suppressed. Podvin says:
"Contrary to a recent claim by the New York Times, the terrorism of September 11 was not the crucial factor that determined whether to release the results to the American people. Prior to that time, the de facto majority shareholders in the publicly traded New York Times Company reportedly intervened on the side of quashing the recount results and convinced the other participants to shelve the story. The executive claims that the most important decisions at the Times are made by the influential money centre banks that exercise actual voting control of a majority of stock. These banks are extremely pro-Bush. In addition to their control of the Times, they have substantial financial clout with the Washington Post Company, Dow Jones and Company, and the Tribune Company. As a result, the banks exert tremendous influence on a majority of the Consortium."
Are we talking conspiracy here, or what? A broad global conspiracy of economic management requiring the subservience of "freely elected governments" (that is, governments like the Coalition put there by the influence of the team-playing media). Don't forget the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) of a few years ago, a trade pact which sought to place the interests of international corporations above the sovereign laws of nations. It is a beast currently in hibernation, but it will be back. See: Power Grab: the MAI.
HH may be among the last to twig to all this, but already the twig is a branch.
For more outrageous conspiratorial ideas, try nomorefakenews. Perhaps it's time to take to the forks and to hell with the spoonfed road to Big Brother.
Toot targets terrorism's trigger
Well here it is, folks, the real source of woe on this planet. And it lies with the male of the species. Of course women have known this since the beginning, but curiously, most men have never even considered the possibility. I hate to betray my sex, but the world would be better off without us. But then the world would not be the world. Or so say the theorists who pose that earth is nought but a planet of spiritual criminals sent here for crimes committed on loftier planes. Gadzooks, what foul deeds could we have perpetrated to deserve the likes of John Howard?
Why macho males come out fighting
US researchers on rats suggests that male genes cause men to become belligerent and get into fights.
Male brain chemistry is to blame for most masculine conflict, whether it be football violence or wars, according to the researchers at the University of Akron in Ohio.
If male aggression turns out to be genetically programmed rather than socially inspired behaviour, it will fuel a debate that philosophers have pondered for centuries.
The Akron researchers said the Y chromosome that determines maleness contains genes that when stimulated reduce levels of serotonin. This is an important chemical neurotransmitter that carries messages between neurones in the brain and influences mood.
Modern anti-depressants called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) make use of this process to boost serotonin levels in the brain.
The team, led by Jonathan Toot, carried out an experiment in which "intruder" rats were introduced into an established rat colony. Male intruders were attacked an average of 2.6 times and received 1.8 scars over a period of 15 minutes. But female intruders were neither the perpetrators or victims of any attack.
The researchers found that in males decreased serotonin in a part of the brain called the amygdala was linked to increased aggressive behaviour.
The researchers said it still needed to be determined whether the heightened aggression in rats related only to the Y chromosome, or to a combination of the chromosome and testosterone.
DPA, from The Age (23/10/01.)
Where's Me Tablets!
by Gort Slypesunder
•• The great20grand-daughter of Attila, Family and Community Services Minister Amanda the Hun, has once again proved a worthy successor to her great10grandfather, Louis XVI. Scoffing at Labor's rollback of the GST with the arrogance we've come to expect of the Illiberal Party, she spoke for all closet aristocrats by diminishing the fiscal needs of the rest of us concerning the costs of burying our loved ones: "You only die once so, really, this is a very small percentage of the GST."
•• It made page one of The Australian, just to remind supporters of Major Magoo who they are voting for. F. Coppinger of Mooloolaba, QLD took the First Word honors, astutely covering the problem:
"Those of us who are blessed with a memory span longer than that of a mullet will not forget the arrogance, inequities and trickery of the present Government."
•• It's not often you see a Muslim cleric break into laughter or even a smile, but Major Magoo's deployment of troops to Afghanistan brought chuckles to Abdul Salam Zaeef, the PR face of Mullah Omar's primeval Taliban. At a press conference in Islamabad, the throwback to a knuckle-scraping heyday said: "I think America is the superpower, America is enough for Afghanistan, there is no need for Australia to come." While the joke was not exactly up to the standards of a Woody Allen, everyone present still thought it a hoot.
•• "Brown left high by the dries again" reads Terry Plane's header in The Australian (23/10/01), referring to the debacle in South Australia. The wettish Dean Brown was dudded again, when "good bloke" farmer Rob Kerin was voted to take over from Premier John Olsen, who was forced to resign for reasons that can basically be summed up as typically corrupt Illiberal Party practices. Let's face it, the party that exists solely to benefit big business, to featherbed the future of its own members and to boondoggle voters cannot be expected to act otherwise. We wish Kerin well in the few months he has left as Premier.
•• Good to see at least half of the marvellous Zeitgeist Gazette team back in action. David Salter's Saturday column in The Age, "The Media's Week", contains the biting satire he and Richard Walsh delighted readers with for the Zeit's brief duration. The online satirical newspaper failed because 1) there is no money to be made on the Internet for such projects, and 2) the generation that will spend the time reading copious amounts of information on their computer screens is yet to reach puberty. The time and effort it took to produce a daily edition required a hefty subscription fee, beyond the means of most readers. I believe it was Salter who coined the term, "The Prime Miniature." Certainly no description better suits John Howard. The Zeitgeist Gazette archives remain on the net. Worth many visits.
•• On a local note, seat belts on school buses have once again been deemed too expensive. The Review of School Bus Services found that while only 30 of Victoria's 1600 school buses had seatbelts, it would cost up to $42 million to fit new buses, let alone refit the existing 1570. Had the Howard Government put a generous proportion of its vast PR outlay in the last five and a half years towards the safety of our children, we parents could be rid of the anxiety we feel every time they go on an excursion.
•• The ABC screened "Breaker Morant" the other night. Been awhile since this important film made the rounds. Acting superb all round, especially EdwdWoodwd. Struck especially by Bud Tingwell's rendering of John Howard in a previous incarnation. Perhaps a modern version could be made, replacing the three defendants with people sheltering asylum seekers. And Johnny could play himself.