ABOUT THE ABBOTT GOVERNMENT ONE OF THE MOST PROLIFIC PRODUCERS OF LIES AND DECEIT IN HISTORY
Sunday, February 22, 2015
ABBOTT THE WARMONGER IS IN FACT MORE LIKE THE COWARDLY LION. SHIT HAPPENS HE ONCE SAID REFERRING TO AUSSIE SOLDIERS THAT HAD BEEN KILLED. Photo by Tony Abbott Village Idiot
Tony Abbott is pushing for greater metadata retention powers (image from theconversation.com)
Is Tony Abbott trying to use an
ill-informed myth about the link between metadata and child sex abuse in
the hope that the Opposition, the Senate, and the electorate will allow
him to do what he wants? Dean Laplonge reports.
Tony Abbott has stated there is a link
between metadata storage and protecting children. In an attempt to
secure support for legislation that will require companies to store
metadata for two years, he has claimed the new law will assist with
investigations into child pornography and child sexual abuse. “We know
that access to metadata has played a role in preventing and
investigating terrorism offences. But it’s also vital to investigating
major crimes that destroy lives in this country – and no crime is more
abhorrent than crimes against children.”
The connection he makes between crimes against children and terrorism
is intentional. Both topics generate intense emotions of fear and
anger. The mere thought of either occurring can lead people to insist
that anything and everything must be done to prevent and stop them
irrespective of whether the actions taken are illegal or curtail
individual freedoms. The threat of terrorism has been used to justify
wars. The fear of child sexual abuse has been used to gain cross-party
support for the introduction of cyber predator laws in several Australia
states – laws which allow police officers to masquerade as children
online in an attempt to entrap potential paedophiles.
Abbott’s sudden concern for the well-being of children is at odds
with his recent response to the Forgotten Children report issued by the
Australian Human Rights Commission. This report concluded that the
detainment of children in immigration detention camps breaches
Australia’s international obligations. It recommends that all children
in immigration detention be released and calls for a royal commission
into the issue. Abbott labelled this report a “transparent stitch-up”.
On the one hand he views the fact that children in detention are
suffering as less important than his and his government’s reputation,
but now he claims to be working to protect children.
The children mentioned in the Commission’s report are real. This
report does not talk about potential harm to children who might be
placed in detention in the future. It cites examples of doctor’s reports
on how actual children are suffering because of their detention now.
The children to which Abbott refers in his latest comment are imaginary.
His concern in this case is about the potential and possible sexual
abuse of unknown and, as yet, invisible children.
This is not to say that children are not victims of sexual abuse. To
help Tony Abbott better understand this issue too, however, we should
consider what experts in this field have to say on the matter.
In her ground-breaking and challenging book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, Judith Levine argued that
“Projecting sexual menace onto a cardboard monster and pouring money
and energy into vanquishing him” renders children “more vulnerable both
at home and in the world”. This is because the vast majority of child
sexual abuse is perpetrated by somebody already known to the child, and
often from within the child’s own family circle.
In their 2012 article
“Reconstructing the sexual abuse of children: ‘Cyber-paeds’, panic and
power”, UK academics Yvonne Jewkes and Maggie Wykes argue that the
relocation of child sexual abuse to the virtual space has effectively
silenced reporting on sexual abuse in the domestic space. “Anxiety
around ‘cyber-paeds’ has become a smokescreen diverting attention from
the real sites of sexual harm to children: men in paternal/familial
settings and a socio-economic context that constructs children as
sexually desirable,” they write.
Another UK academic, Mark O’Brien, has argued that the response to
internet child pornography and child abuse constitutes a moral panic. He quotes
from professor Stanly Cohen’s work on moral panics about youth cultures
in which a moral panic is defined as something that is “presented in a
stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media” and when the
“moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other
right thinking people”. The outcomes of the current moral panic about
online child sexual abuse are, according to O’Brien, an absence of
balanced scrutiny of the issue, a reluctance to debate the difference
between voyeurism and practice, and opinions presented as fact.
Katherine Williams wrote in the Journal of Social Welfare and Family
Law that laws which are introduced to respond to online child
pornography seek to preserve a specific ideal of sexual morality. She
notes that such laws are often introduced without evidence to support
claims about what they will achieve. Instead, assumptions are made about
who is viewing the images, what these images are being used for, and
how they relate to the actual sexual abuse of children.
Professor Carissa Byrne Hessick from the College of Law at the
University of Utah argues for disentangling child pornography from child
sex abuse. She suggests that while “child sex abuse is often a messy
intrafamilial problem,” we just don’t want to think about or deal with
that. The idea of a stranger posing a threat to “our” children is oddly
more appealing.
Looking at child pornography laws in Canada and the USA, Robert Danay
has addressed the claim that any resistance to government intervention
to restrict usage of the internet is simply a ploy on the part of
paedophiles to organise and elevate their status. He writes that
such a suggestion is based on “hysterical misinformation and has masked
some of the real harms that stem from our current child pornography
prohibitions”.
Finally, Ludwig Lowenstein’s review of
“Recent research into the downloading of child pornographic materials
from the internet” discovered that “Research concerning the use of child
pornography by paedophiles had been mostly anecdotal, and the few
empirical studies on the topic had been plagued by inconsistencies in
definitions and problems involved in sampling methods and procedures”.
The ideas I have summarised here are not exhaustive or by any means
extensive. There is a lot of work being done to investigate a range of
related issues, including the effectiveness of online tools to monitor
the circulation of child pornography, the use of sexting and
pornographic selfies as methods of communication between young people,
the impacts of the construction of child pornography on children, and
the construction of the paedophilic gaze through laws that nevertheless
claim to be seeking to put an end to viewing children as sexual objects.
The point I seek to emphasise is that the research does not state
conclusively or even strongly that internet child sexual abuse is the
biggest threat to children or that metadata laws solve this particular
cultural problem. Child sexual abuse occurs; of that there is no doubt.
How, where, and by whom are, however, matters of interest and debate, at
least among those who seek to investigate this issue seriously.
Tony Abbott is no expert on this subject. It’s doubtful he has
considered the issues of internet child pornography and child sexual
abuse in as much detail as these researchers and writers have. Despite
extensive search through journal databases, I was unable to find any
peer reviewed article or even newspaper article written by him on this
particular subject. He nevertheless deems it appropriate to speak about
it in a way which puts forward his views and opinions as if they were
unchallenged facts, and as if he does know what he is talking about.
Granted, the topic of child sexual abuse is highly charged. Even the
presentation of other people’s ideas here is likely to result in
personal abuse against me. I believe it important, however, that a
serious and considered debate about this issue take place before we rush
into accepting any new law which will allow greater government
monitoring of our private communications but which has not been shown to
be able to solve a problem to which it has now been linked.
Abbott has claimed that a report detailing the suffering of children
in detention camps is politically motivated. I wonder if he will now
dare to make the same claim about the facts concerning internet child
pornography and child sexual abuse that I have outlined above. Are these
people who read, investigate, gather and analyse data, and then write
up their findings telling tales to get at him and his government? Or is
he seeking to use yet another ill-informed myth in the hope that the
Opposition, the Senate, and the electorate will allow him to do what he
wants?
Author’s biography
Dean Laplonge is a cultural theorist whose research and consulting
work explores the relationship between culture and everyday practices.
He is the author of GenderImpacts (https://genderimpacts.wordpress.com),
a blog which explores the impacts of gender on the way we think and
behave. He is also the Director of the cultural research company Factive
(www.factive.com.au) and an Adjunct senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales.
"Because the prime
minister is the prime minister and he is an Australian citizen and that
is a far as the conversation is going!" Doth the lady protest too much? When Tony Magrathea
called the office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet last week to ask
why he had received no reply to his correspondence regarding the PM's
potential dual citizenship, the response was quite extraordinary. Sydney
bureau chief Ross Jones reports.
IRONY is a funny thing — unless you have no sense of humour.
Tony Abbott’s various attempts at stand-up comedy have gone viral for
all the wrong reasons. He might have been funny when he was whipping
right-wing university students into a self-righteous frenzy, teasing
girls by punching the wall next to their head, but he’s lost the spark. Now he’s all dull, dull, dull.
But, just when it seemed all was lost, Tony pulls out the irony card from his sleeve.
Voila! (Cue white dove.)
"We’ll deport dual nationals who act against the interests of this country!"
Canned applause.
It gets better.
Cut to the office of Prime Minister and Cabinet, 13 February 2015.
The phone rings.
Good morning, Prime Minister’s office, Diana speaking.
Hi Diana, my name is Tony Magrathea. I make a phone call every day
trying to find out what’s happened to the letters I’ve sent and letter that Terri Butler sent….
And what are the letters in regards to, sir?
Mr Abbott’s renunciation of British citizenship papers.
I’m not, I’m not going to transfer you to the department but I
will advise you the request that you are asking is ludicrous and we will
not be answering.
Why is it ludicrous?
Because the prime pinister is the prime pinister and he is an Australian citizen and that is a far as the conversation is going.
I am recording this for the Senate enquiry, just to let you know.
You have already had a response, sir.
I’ve had an FOI saying...
You have been provided with a response from the department, I am
not going to get into a discussion…..This is a ludicrous question, this
is a ludicrous question Sir and I am not going to have this discussion
with you.
This will be published.
Publish whatever you would like Sir, thank you
Two words stand out in this conversation. The use of the term "sir"
– a horrible word given it’s usual context of oppression, made worse
because Diana knew Tony’s name – and "ludicrous" — a word seldom heard
in mainstream Australia.
Ridiculous, maybe; absurd, possibly, but think back to when you last
heard ludicrous in general usage. I have a friend, an Engishman, who
uses it, but that’s about it.
Receptionist Diana used it three times.
The PM’s office is an incoming call centre. Like all incoming call centres the operators have scripts.
Once upon a time it was easy to be brushed off by Abbott’s
assurances. When the dual citizenship story first started most people,
reasonably enough, thought it was a desperate and underhanded attempt to
hop on the birther bandwagon and take a cheap shot at the PM. Driven by
sore losers.
But it’s got so bad the PM’s call centre now has a script to deal with enquiries. Ludicrous.
Make life much easier for Diana if Tony would just show his Form RN.
Listen to the full recorded exchange between Tony Magrathea and feisty prime ministerial receiptionist Diana, below:
“It’s clear to me, that for too long, we have given those who might be a threat to our country the benefit of the doubt.
We are a free and fair nation. But that doesn’t mean we should let
bad people play us for mugs, and all too often they have: Well, that’s
going to stop.”
When I heard Tony announce this I thought here we go, he has finally
realised that he is not up to the job and is going to step down.
Silly me.
Tony was of course talking about the terrorist threat from asylum seekers, immigrants and the unemployed.
“There’s been the benefit of the doubt at our borders, the benefit of
the doubt for residency, the benefit of the doubt for citizenship and
the benefit of the doubt at Centrelink.”
Considering we are spending billions on it and being asked to give up
some of our most basic freedoms, just how big a threat does terrorism
pose to the Australian way of life? Crikey reveals some pertinent facts.
As of September 4 2014, since the 1978 Hilton Hotel bombing in
Sydney, there had been 113 Australian victims of terrorism. That
includes Australians killed overseas in terrorist attacks as well as
non-Australians killed here, such as the Turkish consul-general murdered
in Sydney in 1980.
During the period 2003-12, between 700 and 1000 women and children
have been killed by their partners or parents in domestic homicides.
There have been over 22,800 suicides in that time and around 66 deaths
of indigenous people in custody.
In the same period, nearly 1700 indigenous people died of diabetes at
a rate, on average, about seven times higher than non-indigenous
Australians. If we’d invested a little of the money we spent going to
war in Iraq or inflating the budget of the Australian Security
Intelligence Organisation on programs that lowered indigenous diabetes
to just twice that of non-indigenous Australians, around 1200 lives
would have been saved, or around 10 times the death toll of terrorism.
The real threat to this country is not from terrorism. It’s from
politicians who choose to reward their donors and put their party in
front of the people’s best interests. It’s from economic illiterates
who think a surplus is a political goal within itself.
Inaction on climate change is a real as opposed to imagined threat
that will cause enormous hardship and suffering if not addressed
immediately.
Cutting money from health, education and research is a real threat to our future prosperity and well-being.
Ignoring domestic violence, defunding support groups and preventative
initiatives will see this scourge continue to destroy families and take
lives.
Defunding indigenous programmes will see the gap widen rather than close.
Rescinding gambling reform laws will contribute to the tragedy of
family breakups and suicide. Gambling addiction was a contributing
factor in nearly 130 suicides
in Victoria over the past decade, according to figures released by the
Victorian coroner – more Australian deaths in one state than have been
killed worldwide by terrorism. Yet dumping reform was one of the first
acts of our previous so-called Social Services Minister.
Despite obesity being a growing problem, this government fights
against food labelling laws. It resists taxes on alcohol and
anti-smoking campaigns. Just whose interests do they represent?
In a time of supposed debt and deficit disaster, Mr Abbott is
spending hundreds of billions of dollars to keep us all afraid whilst
ignoring urgent issues that will save many lives.
It is you Mr Abbott that is playing
us for mugs and you are right, it’s going to stop. You have asked your
party to give you the benefit of the doubt that you wish to deny all
others but it will not save you. Whether by your own volition, at the
insistence of your party, or through the electoral process, we will
remove this clear and present danger to our country.
Is anybody still listening to Tony Abbott? Jennifer Wilson doubts it very much, and with good reason.
I woke up this morning thinking that I don’t feel as if we actually have a real government, or a real Prime Minster.
Tony Abbott seems to be increasingly decompensating under the stress
of discovering he’s so unpopular with his party he had to face the
prospect of a spill motion without even a challenger for his leadership,
and that must be a rare political event just about anywhere.
(Decompensation, psychology: the inability to maintain defense
mechanisms in response to stress, resulting in personality disturbance
or psychological imbalance).
After the acute trauma of the spill motion passed, everyone involved
needed a little time to collect themselves, pass around the talking
stick, and begin the process of healing. Instead, Abbott went right out and sacked Philip Ruddock as his Chief Government Whip, on the grounds that Ruddock had not adequately warned him of growing backbench discontent.
This is amazing. The rest of us knew all about it, but the PM’s office didn’t?
I’ve had doubts about the efficiency of this office for quite some
time, after all, they’re supposed to be there for Tony yet every day
since he took office things for him have traveled increasingly south. At
first blush, it appears the PM’s staff are incompetent on a Monty
Python scale.
Perhaps their secret agenda is to ruin him, or I have been watching too much In the thick of it. Either way he should sack somebody in that office and hire Malcolm Tucker, but instead he went after Ruddock.
I don’t care much what happens to Ruddock: I will never forget his
days as Immigration Minister in the Howard government during which he
instigated a powerfully successful campaign to demonise and criminalise
asylum seekers arriving by boat, largely through the use of language he
adopted from Nazi anti semitic propaganda of the 1930’s. Without Ruddock
we would have no Morrison. He might look like a hurt old man, but I’m
not fooled.
Then there were Abbott’s belligerent attacks
on President of the Human Rights Commission, Professor Gillian Triggs,
after the Commission’s report on children in detention was tabled in
Parliament on Wednesday. In a typical conservative shoot the messenger
and make so much noise that everybody will forget the message tactic,
Abbott railed long and hard about Professor Triggs, while entirely
disregarding the appalling findings of her report.
With the stubborn determination of the utterly cloth-eared stupid,
Abbott keeps the three-word slogans hiccoughing off his far too evident,
lizard-like tongue: boats, mining tax, carbon tax, boats, carbon tax,
mining tax; we are open for business but not for boats, carbon tax,
mining tax. I wonder to myself, does he or anyone in his office really
think there are still people out here even listening to this drivel?
It is a measure of the collective desperation of Abbott and his staff
that they continue to cling to this cringe-worthy robotic recitation:
they have totally failed to come up with anything new, for all the
millions of tax payer dollars we’ve spent on them.
The zeitgeist as far as I can tell is one of trembling, panicked
uncertainty: what will their leader say next, how much longer can this
go on, how can they make it better without looking like the ALP. This
latter possibility seems to be the very worst thing they fear could
happen to them.
It isn’t, though. Worse things are happening every time their leader
opens his mouth and puts both feet in it. But hey, it’s good for the
ALP.
There’s been a cute white rabbit appearing in our garden for the last
few days, and like Alice in the wonderland, I’m thinking of drinking
the potion to make me oh so tiny, then I can follow White Rabbit down
his hole.
But wait! I’m already there!
The final straw is the sudden wheeling out of Margie. You know he’s a dead man walking when he rolls out the wife.
With Tony Abbott sacking Philip Ruddock as Liberal Party
chief whip yesterday, it is certain Tony Abbott has weeks, not months,
left in the top job, says Bob Ellis.
In his film of Richard III,
Laurence Olivier, felled by arrows, writhes and twitches on the ground
while Richmond’s soldiers jeer him. Tony Abbott is now in a similar
twitching and writhing.
The numbers on Monday doomed him, but the Ruddock sacking brought forward the day of his execution. It may occur, now, before Chan and Sukumaran’s, in ten or 11 days’ time.
What is going on in the Prime Minister’s head? If the sneered response "brain damage" can be discarded – and maybe it can’t – it has to be to do with his Catholic upbringing and the consequent abiding habits of mind.
Under Catholicism, you ‘wipe the slate clean’ by Confession, and a
number of Hail Marys, and all is well. You admit, with words, your sin,
and expiate your sin with words and are then, being cleansed, allowed to
sin again.
And to Tony Abbott, the words matter, only the words matter, and the deeds that follow can contradict them.
There will be"no more captain’s picks"; yet the meeting was brought forward, Credlin retained and Ruddock removed. He said "good government starts today", and a shambles ensues. It is revealed that child abuse occurred on Christmas Island, and like the Catholic church, he denies it, says he feels no guilt "whatsoever" and proposes to martyr Gillian Triggs for unveiling the truth: suicidal children, buggered by their guardians and bashed for talking about it.
And now we see Ruddock, past hero of ‘border protection’, auteur of the 2001 win, sacked.
It was almost certainly to do with his expression, and body language,
when he revealed on Sunday it was Abbott, not he, who had brought the
meeting forward, and it was, though he did not say is, a ‘captain’s
call’.
It is likely now that Turnbull has about 47 votes, and five or six more will come across by the middle of next week.
And another spill vote will be put the following Monday, or Tuesday, or Thursday.
And Abbott and Hockey will go to the back bench and an early election
occur, if the poll numbers surge, and they will, towards Turnbull,
around Anzac Day, on April 30 perhaps; or soon after a well-crafted
Budget comes down, and the Coalition’s numbers reach 49.
It is certain now Abbott has weeks, not months. He has tried the
patience again of those who doubted him already and lost their regard
forever. And now he is done and finished.
After surviving what he describes as a near death experience on
Monday, Tony Abbott with feigned penitential self-indulgence, declared
that Tuesday 10 February was the beginning of good government.
With tempestuous dexterity he decided that all the previous ideological
wrong he had committed on the Australian people would be overlooked. A
new start would take place the following morning.
Well I’m all for forgiveness. “Let’s celebrate” I said to my wife.
She was as equally delighted with the prospect of good government as I
was. Lunch and a bottle of Merlot was in order. We were both so happy
that overnight the Prime Minister had had a near death experience that
convinced him good government was not only possible, but necessary. And with a quick fix personality transplant it would be accompanied with good leadership.
What a waste of a bloody good bottle of Annie’s Lane, Clare Valley, it was. It became apparent the next morning that the good government we had become so excited about was indeed premature.
It seemed there was some confusion as to what Tony Abbott had
promised the South Australian senator Sean Edwards. Was it a promise for
the subs to be built-in SA, or was it just a ploy to get his vote in
the leadership spill?
Good government had made a less that conspicuous
start. A bewildered Defence Minister, Kevin Andrews, could not shed any
light on the difference between a tender and a “competitive evaluation process”.
The PM in a fit of calm reassurance and good governance suggested that
if Labor was in power the subs would be built by Putin or Kim Jong-Il.
The fact that the latter was deceased seemed irrelevant. The conspiracy
theorist in me somehow thinks that the Japan Trade Deal and building the
submarines might be interwoven.
On top of that the Prime Minister for good government
and the Treasure wishing for it, were singing from different hymn
sheets as to policy and future budget direction. Hockey seemed to be
saying that good governance required that the existing policies of hitting the poor to help the rich was indeed good governance, where as the Prime Minister was suggesting that political expediency was good government at work.
And after much controversy and public disdain they cannot tell us whether the Medicare co-payment is in or out. Good government necessitates the explanation of policy, not the absence of it.
On Wednesday there were 40 youth leaders in the gallery for question
time. “What must they be thinking”, I thought? The Speaker and the
Government have turned Question Time into a disservice to the Australian
people. Is this what he means by good governance? By this stage I had given up that good government was remotely possible from this lot.
The following day in an answer to a question, the Prime Minister
repeated his oft-repeated lie that “every family in Australia” had
received $550 as a result of the repeal of the carbon tax. And silly me
thought that lying wouldn’t be necessary now that we had good government.
In another display of good government (or in this
case bad government), Government members walked out on a reply speech by
Bill Shorten to the “Closing the Gap” annual report. The Government
became outraged when he dared to suggest that the $500 million taken
from “Closing the Gap” programs should be reinstated, suggesting that he
was being blatantly partisan. When Tony Abbott raised matters of local
political controversy in speeches during visits by Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono, the Queen, and President Obama . . . they sat in muted
silence. Perhaps they thought, that’s good governance.
Anyway, Indigenous leaders clapped the speech while the PM suggested
they should take on more responsibility. “He’s good at that”, I thought.
Then on Thursday we had the Prime Minister’s hysterically belligerent
reaction to the Human Rights Commission (HRC) over its damning report
into children in detention, saying it should be ashamed of itself for
conducting “a blatantly partisan politicised exercise“. A good government
might have taken a more considered and diplomatic approach to a report
they have had since November. However, Abbott made it clear his
government would continue to shoot the messenger Gillian Triggs, who
seems to be the target because she is a trifle upset about the way in
which successive governments have treated our fellow human beings. He
said we should all be grateful for the job Scott Morrison had done.
“Goodness”, I thought; I hope he didn’t include me.
Abbott’s behavior since his declaration of good government
rather reminds me of the tennis player whose only reaction to adversity
is to hit the ball harder when thoughtful measured dexterity is what’s
needed. Or the boxer who brings on his defeat quickly by being more
aggressive than the fight requires.
He then followed that up in question time with that word never to be
used out of context. As if his week hadn’t been bad enough he uttered
the word holocaust when he attacked Labor over some deplorable jobless
figures:
“There was a Holocaust of jobs in Defence industries under members opposite … that’s what there was,”he said.
He certainly apologised very quickly but good government
wasn’t being backed up with good judgement. His performance in question
time was that of a punch drunk man desperately trying to impress his
followers with his pugilistic acerbic tongue, rather than sagacious
intelligence.
That wasn’t to be the end of it. He then went on to openly talk about
two males facing terrorism charges. Comments that prominent lawyers
said were highly likely to prejudice their cases. In an effort to
inflame the terrorism debate both Abbott and Minister Dutton, in what I
assume is their version of good government principle, used low rent grubbiness to say the two men in question entered Australia under Labor’s watch.
His week wasn’t made any better when US think tank ‘Council on Foreign Relations’ declared him “the least competent leader of any rich democracy and appears unaware of how poorly he comes across at world events.”
“Abbott has proven so incapable of clear policy thinking, so
unwilling to consult with even his own ministers and advisers, and so
poor at communicating that he has to go,” wrote the CFR senior fellow Joshua Kurlantzick, a US specialist in south-east Asian politics.
Maybe good government by the captain of team Australia might right the ship.
If this wasn’t serious it might be considered funny. At a time in our
history when the benefits of a never to be repeated resources boom have
come to an end and new ideas are needed to re invigorate our economy.
When some of the economic revenue answers stare us in the eye and new
green industries await good government approval. When science, education
and technology can provide many of the solutions. When indeed what is
required is not only good government but good leadership we find ourselves being led by a man who has never really grown up.
When our voices are silent against unfair, deceitful and dishonest government we get what we deserve.
Good government was just another lie by an incompetent lying fool.
PS. For those who think this piece might be a little sarcastic for
their taste I give an unconditional guarantee that is fully intended.
This article was first published on Jennifer’s blog No Place For Sheep.
