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Photoshop anyone? Julia Gillard with other leaders at the Royal Palace in Brussels yesterday before the Asia-Europe meeting. Source: The Australian
Saw this photo while reading an article on theAustralian.com.au
I am fairly certain that some of those ‘world leaders’ are plastic mannequins… and wolfman up the back there is definitely a sticker that they have put on the blue screen background. Julia is the only one who looks remotely happy, and she is looking at the woman in the blue dress who has a guilty look on her… like someone who has farted in a lift.
The two guys who are fixing their ties look like they are racing and the one in the glasses is breaking into a sweat because of it!
The dude in the back row behind the woman in the red dress is sleeping. No doubt about it! The person between him and wolfman has accidently swallowed his dentures and is just trying to get through the experience without anyone noticing.
The only normal looking person in the front row standing between sweaty tie man and the lift fart woman. he is just happy to be included.
After several long weeks we are now starting to see what our next government will be like. The PMs Announcement of her new cabinet has been interesting to say the least and I would recommend Peter Hartcher’s take on it in today’s Herald. Here is a small excerpt:
“The stark and inescapable conclusion is that Gillard holds just one person to blame for the fact that a “good government” “lost its way.”… By holding all the other ministers blameless, she has also limited any recriminations in her ministry… By giving Rudd all blame, she has exonerated everyone else.”
One of the big changes has come in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship – the department responsible for mandatory detention, Christmas Island, ‘boat people’, processing asylum seeker claims, the proposed East Timor processing centre, TPVs, settling refugees and a few other highly political issues that dominated the election. The previous minister, Chris Evans, has been promoted to employment and industrial relations and has been replaced by Chris Bowen.
But who is Chris Bowen?
Chris Bowen: Minister for Immigration and Citizenship
I mean, it is a pretty important question when you consider that the Minister has a very unique role in that he personally decides hundreds of refugee applications as well as applications for community detention. Moreover he will be the person that helps cultivate a culture and tone within immigration; will it be suspicion or compassion? He will also advise the government on key immigration policies such as mandatory detention and the East Timor processing centre.
So… who is Chris Bowen?
To behonest, I don’t really know, but to remedy that I have started following him on twitter. Solved!
But more seriously he has written a few good opinion pieces including:
“Neo-liberalism is dead as people realise markets need regulation”
“The pennies we give for foreign aid are far too few”
Anyway, this is an excerpt from the transcript of his first parliamentary speech, note the interesting language and quotes he uses as you read it and if you pick the quote at the end of the excerpt and are the first to comment on it you will win a special prize!
"A breach of human rights anywhere is an attack on human rights everywhere."
As to being a voice for those without a voice, I believe a particular obligation falls on me—along with my friend the honourable member for Fowler—as the representative of the most culturally diverse area in Australia. Members of various cultural groups who have settled in the seat of Prospect have taught me more than any textbook ever could about the preciousness of human rights. To talk to someone who has had all three of his daughters executed gives you a very keen appreciation of the need to take a robust approach to human rights. A breach of human rights anywhere is an attack on human rights everywhere. To paraphrase Elie Wiesel: when human rights are under attack we must interfere. As an opposition backbencher, I do not have any illusions that I will be able to make a great material difference in this regard. However, I do want to make this one pledge: I will never be silent. Quiet and diplomatic representations in the corridors of the House will sometimes be the most appropriate way of dealing with a matter. At other times, perhaps, a louder approach will be necessary. Either way, I will not be silent.
Members of all religions or philosophies should be able to practise their beliefs in freedom. I include in this a group like Falun Gong, which has as its creed truth, forbearance and tolerance. They do not deserve to be tortured for espousing such basic beliefs as these. I will not be silent on the unspeakable suffering and heartache that is occurring in the Darfur region of Sudan. This suffering receives almost no attention in the Australian media but it is the biggest humanitarian crisis of the last 10 years. In an area as large as France, 70,000 human beings have lost their lives to a combination of hunger, disease and murder. If an event even 10 per cent as horrendous as this occurred in a Western country we would see massive coverage and massive action from the governments of the world.
Recently in Prospect we have received our latest round of migration refugees from the Sudan. It gives me an enormous sense of pride as I walk around Fairfield to see small Sudanese children in the uniforms of Fairfield Primary School. These children have endured far more in their little lives than most of us will have to endure if we live to old age. Yet, they are relatively lucky; hundreds of thousands of others are not. I will not be silent on human rights in places like Vietnam or Myanmar or anywhere else in the world. To have somebody imprisoned for a crime of `disrespecting democratic freedoms’ for expressing their democratic view is something I can never be silent about. I believe Australia and individual members of this House need to keep open the lines of communication with the governments of all nations. But we must have human rights as our highest priority in these discussions. As a nation we must say: `Here we stand; we can do no other.’
Thanks heaps to Matt who posted this on his blog. That is where I first saw it.
If you haven’t seen this then you really must. You might want to share whether you thought it was accurate or not after you have seen it – especially in regards to Julia Gillard’s maniacal laughter
Enjoy!
Three quick things I want to say today:
First things first. You should check out the new blog of a good friend of mine. His name is Blake and he is the manliest dude I know. We went camping once and he chopped down trees with axes and while cooking round the fire said that we should have bought a live calf to kill, skin and eat! He also goes spear fishing on his days off and recently went head to head with a reef shark over a potential kill. Blake won. He is like a real life version of Man vs Wild
Blake is also working at a Church in the inner west of Sydney and is thinkng of studying theology full time next year. His blog is called Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Secondly, yesterday afternoon I found myself accidentally reading MX on the train ride home from work. I was reading a short article that stated that drinking alcohol in moderation was good for your health. It then stated (quite outrageously) that people who do not drink alcohol had a higher chance of dying!
A higher chance of dying! I confess that I read it a few times to make sure that I hadn’t misread it because that is a big claim. I thought everyone had the same chances of dying regardless of their beverage behaviours!
Made me question whether MX was the quality, hard-hitting journalism that it seems to be!
Finally, I read this in today’s Herald, which made me chuckle audibly on the train. It is a quote from our spunky red-headed caretaker PM who was being accused of using focussed groups to come up with policy. She was defending the use of focus groups by saying that all politicians use them and then she came out with this gold nugget:
(AAP: Alan Porritt)
”Do people really imagine that Tony Abbott read every conservative thinker in the globe, consulted long and hard with experts, sat with his team agonising night after night, looked into the depths of his soul and came out with ‘stop the boats’?”
*SWISH* Nice one Julia. You can read the full article here
At the start of the year I read a biography of Julia Gillard while she was still deputy PM to Kevin Rudd. in it the author recounts a story where Julia is campaigning outside a supermarket in her electorate. An older gentleman approaches her, looks at her poster, looks at Julia, looks at he poster, looks back to Julia and then says: “Guess that was taken on a good day eh love?” To which Julia responds: “And who the heck are you? Robert Redford?!”
The woman has spunk!
Last Sunday night I preached on the Good Samaritan. My final point was that the only sustainable motivation for loving our neighbours is an understanding of grace as opposed to morality.
I said that morality is used by secular society as well as every major religion to get its followers to do good deeds to those who are poor. Morality is essentially this: I am a good person if I do good deeds and I will therefore be worthy to receive an award. In religion it often manifests itself in: you must give to the poor because the bible commands it or the Koran commands it or the Torah commands it. If you do this, you will be rewarded by going to heaven; if you don’t do this you should feel guilty!
I stated that morality is a weak motivator; it doesn’t take people where Jesus wants them to go because it is essentially a selfish motivation. If I do good things then I will get a good reward, but if doing good things causes me to sacrifice then I will not do it because the reward doesn’t seem to be worth it. You see this clearly in the Priest and the Levite who show us how far morality can take you: not far enough. Morality is a weak motivation for mercy.
I then went on to say that experience of grace is the only motivation; Jesus puts the law expert (and us) into the story as the beaten Jew lying on the road being aided by our enemy who had no obligation to help us. A real understanding and experience of this in the saving work of Jesus is the only motivation for grace because it is not selfish but responsive.
Anyway that is all preamble to my current thought that I wanted to share with you.
(AAP: Alan Porritt)
I was thinking about how to illustrate this and I didn’t come up with anything decent for the night but since then I have had the thought that maybe the weakness of morality brought down an Australian Prime Minister!
I am speaking of course of Kevin Rudd who famously called climate change “the greatest moral challenge of our time!” The implication being that if you were a moral person – a progressive person, a good person, then you would care about climate change and vote for him. Which Australia did in the Ruddslide that was the 2007 election.
But morality is a essentially a selfish motivation and so once the cost became real, once the implications of sacrifice came home, once businesses didn’t want to pay for a price on carbon; the reward wasn’t worth it and it fell by the wayside. We couldn’t even take the first step towards conquering the greatest moral challenge of our time. Morality is weak in the face of sacrifice. Now neither party has a real policy on climate change.
I am not saying that everyone in Australia needs to become a Christian for us to do something about climate change (indeed that might even be a step backwards considering that the Christian Democrat Party for example are self confessed ‘agnostics’ when it comes to climate change, are against the Kyoto Protocol, against a prince on carbon (ETS) and refuse to do anything that will have a negative economic consequence).
The reality is that we are stuck in a way of life that has a large negative environmental impact, if we want to change that then it is going to mean sacrifice. Calling something the greatest moral challenge of our time and appealing to morality is not going to work.
But then again a citizen’s assembly of 150 randomly selected people isn’t going to work either.
Anyway, what do you think?
So on Saturday Australia went to the poles and made their voice heard loud and clear with a collective “Meh”. Some are calling it a triumph of democracy, while some are simply terrified that a guy who wears a cowboy hat and still uses a lasso has the balance of power in the House of Representatives.
In many ways a hung parliament was the most fitting result when you consider the following:
- Both major parties spent the majority of the campaign trying to convince us that we couldn’t trust the other one. I guess they were just equally good at getting their message across.
- Both major parties had pretty much the same major policies, thus it is only fair that they get the same amount of seats.
- Let’s be honest with ourselves: neither candidate really possesses that je ne sais quoi, that X factor that makes a person into PM material.
- Federal elections, like primary school soccer, is not about who wins. It is about having fun on the day. It is like my wife’s year 1 class at speech day, everyone gets two prizes because you don’t want anyone to feel left out and start crying in front of all the parents and visitors.
So now the parliament is hung, at present it looks like 72 seats a piece with 3 independent MPs and 1 greens MP.
On the day I had the opportunity to work at a booth in Bennelong and although it was a very long day (7:30am-10:30pm) there were lots of enjoyable moments.
Most notably was when a man and woman came to my table and said that their surname was “tweedle”. You would not believe how hard I fought to not ask which one of them was tweedledum and who was tweedledee!
Although I lost the internal battle when someone with the last name “Cullen” came to my table. I asked if she was still living at the same address and then I asked if she was a vampire.
To say that she chortled would be generous.
We also had to ask what is probably the silliest question that we could have asked:
“Have you voted anywhere else earlier today?”
How dumb do the good people at the AEC think electoral cheats are!
Me: “Have you voted anywhere else earlier today?”
Them: “yes, down the road”
Me: “Well you know that you can only vote once?”
Them: “yeah I know, I am willingly committing electoral fraud”
Me: “That is a federal offence”
Them: “yeah I know”
Me: “yeah…”
Them: “So can I vote?”
Me: “No…”
They also say that it was by far the highest percentage of informal votes of any election. This is certainly true from the stacks of informal ballots that we had to discard at my booth. The surprising thing is that on so many of them you could see that the person had attempted to vote greens but hadn’t numbered all the boxes or had written the number 5 twice.
Makes you wonder what would have happened if more greens voters actually knew how to vote!
There is a possibility that we will have to go the polls again in a few weeks. Well if we do then I am not going to hold back, I am going to make fun of as many silly names as I can!
I am allowed to: I am a Smith!
