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Beating the drums of jingoism
Volume 29 #16
September 30, 2014
Having consulted our crystal balls… The Australian Labor Party (ALP) has voted at its annual conference to disband, following the disastrous federal election campaign in which it lost the few seats that remained from the previous disastrous federal election campaign. Bill Shorten, a focus group organiser appointed to oversee the party’s dissolution, was asked how he felt about the demise of a political institution over a hundred years old. He replied, ‘Our research was showing that for some reason the public could not distinguish the ALP from the LNP.’ In a prepared statement, prime minister Tony Abbott welcomed the end of the Labor Party, saying that confusing and contradictory voices only serve to weaken the national resolve that society needs to face the challenges of terrorism, unionism, environmentalism, illegal refugees and single mothers. At a press conference held in parliament’s Secure Bunker One yesterday, the Minister for the Interior was presented with a prearranged list of questions by Year 12 cadets from News Corp Ltd. In his replies, Mr Brandis strongly defended his role in the abolition of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Details of the asset sales to Rupert Murdoch are secret under a commercial in confidence clause, but the shell of the national broadcaster will be based overseas for tax purposes and renamed the Fox Universal Cartel Korea. In local news, the internal passport checkpoint in Ewingsdale Road has been upgraded to permanent status. Pending the installation of x-ray machines under the government’s five-year plan, all citizens passing through the checkpoint are required to carry their possessions in transparent plastic bags. Council has approved the development of a plastics factory in the West Byron estate which will create dozens of new jobs. Also upgraded this week is the checkpoint on Main Arm Road, where the joint AFP-ASIO sniffer dog training camp will be established. Citizens unwilling to use the checkpoint are encouraged to gather at the Showground near the Muslim Containment Facility where their concerns will be addressed. And that’s the end of the news. Good night and good luck.
The Byron Shire Echo Established 1986 General Manager Simon Haslam Editor Hans Lovejoy Photographer Jeff Dawson Advertising Manager Angela Cornell Production Manager Ziggi Browning
Nicholas Shand 1948–1996 Founding Editor
‘The job of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ – Finley Peter Dunne 1867–1936 © 2014 Echo Publications Pty Ltd – ABN 86 004 000 239 Mullumbimby: Village Way, Stuart St. Ph 02 6684 1777 Fax 02 6684 1719 Byron Bay: Level 1, Byron Community Centre, 69 Jonson St. Ph 6685 5222 Printer: Horton Media Australia Ltd Reg. by Aust. Post Pub. No. NBF9237
Last Aid
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THURSDAY EVENINGS 6.30pm–8.30pm Oct 16–Nov 27 TO ENROL – Contact Byron Community College at www.byroncollege.org.au or call 02 6684 3374 Participants will learn to be of genuine service to others, who may be family or friends, who are dying and who have chosen to die at home. Any person can attend this course, and it can, if you wish, lead on to full training as a volunteer carer for Amitayus (formerly Byron Hospice Service). This course is run as a personal, interactive, and safe exploration of the many issues that may arise around death and dying, grief and loss.
10 September 30, 2014 The Byron Shire Echo
T
he minor earth tremor you detected around Bathurst cemetery last week was Ben Chifley turning in his grave as Tony Abbott invoked his memory (though not his name). Abbott appropriated Labor’s most memorable image, the light on the hill, in Labor’s most respected venue, the United Nations General Assembly, to celebrate his pawing at the ground to Washington to give the okay for Australian war planes to bomb Iraq. The man has no shame. It was only two days ago in the same city that our prime minister publicly gave his finger to most of the world by very publicly rejecting the invitation to participate in the World Climate Change Forum. His office, he said, was too busy attending to affairs in Canberra, presumably to do with preparations for the Great Humanitarian War. Well, hang on a minute. The previous week he was happy, indeed insouciant, to go to Arnhem Land while dealing with the same matters of state, apparently managing to both walk and chew gum without overdue exhaustion. And of course such dilettantes as Barack Obama and David Cameron, among numerous other leaders, considered the meeting of sufficient importance to interrupt their schedules. In any case, Abbott had been asked to attend long before ISIS had even appeared on the radar, and then decided to come to New York at very short notice anyway. It was hardly a matter of dropping out at the last minute. And it was not a trivial issue; UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon said flatly that it was the defining issue of the age, and Obama said that from all the immediate threats such as ISIS and the Ebola epidemic, climate change was the one that would shape the contours of the cen-
tury. And he implored the world, and particularly both the emerging giants and the developed nations, to act. Abbott was presumably included in his absence. But Australia did not leave an empty chair; the indefatigable Julie Bishop filled in, if only as a cheerio call. She did reiterate that of course Australia was concerned and was doing something. She did not mention Abbott’s triumph in becoming the first country in the world to abolish putting a price on carbon but she was adamant that Australia was definitely doing something. Especially it was talking about economic growth and competitive-
Both his critics and his supporters have been demanding that he produce a narrative for his muddled government. by Mungo MacCallum ness, presumably meaning coal. As if on cue, Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane appeared in Canberra with a fantastic (literally) report which apparently foreshadowed a Utopian dream of supplies of cheap coal – he almost added, as did Abbott quoting Chifley, for the general betterment of mankind. The message of Australia’s dismissal of climate change as a problem could hardly have been more blatant. But Abbott’s deliberate snubbing of Ban Ki-moon and Obama, not to mention the other 120-odd leaders of the New York meeting, egregious as it was, should not be excused as an aberration. Both his critics and his supporters have been demanding that he produce a narrative for his muddled government, and the signs are that he is finally preparing one and here it is: stop the world, I want to get off. Or, in more active mode: up you Jack. In spite of his fervent de-
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Throughout Byron Shire
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votion to what he called ‘like minded countries’ (by which he really means the United States) his government is turning determinedly isolationist – or as he might see it, sturdily independent. Not only do we no longer need to observe accepted international standards of behaviour, we now glory in rejecting them. And who to exemplify the new paradigm than the man most ambitious to succeed Abbott, at least according to his growing coterie of boosters, better than Generalissimo Scott Morrison. Morrison does not go into nuance: he has spelt his credo out in stentorian terms: the Aus-
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tralian parliament will be the one and only arbiter and other authorities need not apply: ‘We are a sovereign country. We get to decide what our rules are and what our obligations are.’ Echoes, as the long suffering noted, of John Howard’s defiant: ‘We will decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come.’ In the past, successive governments have at least pretended to follow the International Convention on Refugees; however much they worked through it and around it, they insisted that they were not actually breaching it – they bowed to international law. Morrison is happy to tear it up, although he still claims, absurdly, to follow the letter while ignoring the spirit, let alone the various recommendations. He has, effectively, placed (or displaced) asylum seekers outside the pale. Christmas Island will be wound up: many of the hapless
inhabitants will simply be repatriated, or if they can’t be repatriated, stuck in some undefined limbo. The so-called winners will be given the endless uncertainty of Temporary Protection Visas, or, if they are really lucky, given what are to be called Safe Haven Enterprise Visas and sent to the remote regions to work, courtesy of Clive Palmer Mining Enterprises. From Nauru, some will be sold to the corrupt and poverty-stricken shambles of Cambodia, the destination favoured over the far more salubrious Malaysia – which was, of course, the solution proposed by both Julia Gillard and an independent panel of experts, but rejected in horror by Abbott as being outside the now irrelevant convention. These victims will, of course, be volunteers – take it or leave it, since the rest will presumably be left to Nauru and Manus Island or whatever other hellhole Morrison can conjure up to rot, and who cares what they, and the rest of the world, thinks. Up you Jack. Not a lot of light on the hill here. And so the pattern is starting to develop: we’ll take part in the wars, at least when they’re America’s, but that’s it – the rest is jingoism. The spirit of Chifley, the humble visionary whose optimistic belief in both domestic and international peace and goodwill was a beacon of hope, is to be cynically stolen by the present reality of a man who thrives on conflict and aggression in defiance of the United Nations and their ideals. But if he is serious about channelling his much-loved predecessor, it would behove him to study the history: Chifley’s ‘light on the hill speech’ was made, not on a moment of bravado, but on the eve of the 1949 election. It resulted in Labor’s disastrous defeat and consigned it to 23 years of opposition. Perhaps, after all, there is hope.
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