Wednesday, August 31, 2011

The Hazards of Followship

The Malaysia deal is over, sanity has prevailed, and what's more, it's prevailed in a way that should give many people comfort that there is still judicial oversight in this country. It gives me comfort, but it is completely soured by the knowledge that no one will learn anything from this whatsoever. On immigration, the Gillard Government will continue to fall, continue to walk the low road, and continue to drink the poison milk suckled from the breast of internal party polling in the seat of Lindsay.

Nothing, it seems, will stop their inexorable trajectory towards complete moral oblivion. Not even this international level embarrassment will convince them. It's taken less than a day for someone to mention a legislative response to the HC's decision, like that will somehow improve the Government's standing. What's hidden within that suggestion is that the Government will have to legislate WITH the Opposition on immigration, because the Greens will certainly have no bar of it. That would be the ultimate humiliation, the ultimate defeat and the ultimate betrayal of progressive politics.

There's also mention of a return Temporary Protection Visas and of course, Nauru. It would be funny, except that it's not.

There is, of course, the possibility that the Court's decision will hamper all offshore processing, but we'll have to wait for better legal minds than mine to assess the judgement before we know that. If legislation becomes the only avenue to persist with this nonsense, I have no faith in cooler heads prevailing.

The only positive, and I presume that it will be a small percentage of people that will view it as a positive, is that the Government will still have to take the 4000 refugees currently located in Malaysia. This, combined with the Court's decision, is actually a fantastic result: The intake from Malaysia will come by plane, so I suppose by some sort of punch drunk logic that will make it acceptable to the boat hating residents of this nation. It makes no sense, at least to me, but whatever.

By now, the Government must know they are going to lose the next election. It is only a matter of by how much. Isn't it time to just dump this political folly and fight against the 'prevailing' view on asylum seekers? If you're in an arsehole contest with Tony Abbott, you will lose, so why even participate? I for one am sick of this chicken-shit kowtowing to opinions based on myth and fear. If this government had spent the political capital they had in 2008 to educate the public and work to change opinions they would not be in there current mire, at least not on this issue.

That is the lesson. Don't follow, lead.

But that is obviously too much to ask.

Monday, August 15, 2011

A Continuous End of Days

So, the world is ending or something.

The tin-foil hat squad are storing bottled water and salted beef in an uncompleted underground bunker they've been digging since the 1980s. The US is apparently dead, even though it isn't, and the revolution has apparently been fought on the streets of London with hoodies and bad dialogue. A revolution based on free sneakers and X-boxes, the revolution will not have fallen arches; the revolution will pwn noobs.

This same but different set of news events has sent many opinion writers scampering to their screens to explain the crisis and to lament our inevitable doom. That's fine, it's actually rather engrossing if you get into the spirit of it, but does it achieve anything? Well…, no, not unless making people scared and/or depressed can be counted as a result. Hand wringing is great, I've wrung a few hands in my time, but it's ultimately self-indulgent and pointless. Nothing is more ineffective against a riot than writing 'moral decay' on an imaginary piece of paper. You cannot house people by saying 'moral decay', neither educate nor employ them. You cannot write policy with the words moral decay. You can however, fill column after column in papers around the world and on the internet with end is nigh hyperbole and get a lollipop from your editor.

This is all fine as long as it's only journalists participating; when politicians get involved in the collective navel-grazing about a perceived cultural decline, strap on your concrete worry boots. When this happens you see the introduction of ground breaking social policy, such as convicted rioters being evicted from social housing, because there's nothing that benefits disaffected youth like homelessness to go with unemployment and their parents' smack addiction. "Where are your sneakers now you chavvy fuckwit?"

You get British Prime Minister David Cameron pining for the lack of grounded father figures. That's right, all the rioters were clearly fatherless, quite obvious in fact. Solution? Here’s your government appointed dad (business hours only), complete with pipe, slippers and an after-hours hug machine. That will quench the local youth's near limitless thirst for sneakers and smashing in a bus shelter.

All this of course rests on the notion that the riots were conducted completely by some shadowy underclass, disconnected from mainstream Britain, and ignores the fact that many of the convicted looters have middle class backgrounds. It also ignores what started the riots, which was that the police shot someone that they maybe shouldn't have and that the media did the rest giving the riots 24hr coverage. By convincing everyone that the world has gone mental led people to the obvious conclusion: "Let's go mental."

It's pretty obvious that there are numerous causes, and that different actors had different agendas. To boil the riots down to no dads and moral decay is bullshit, and it serves no one but the people spouting it. The fact is that there's probably no solution, or if there is, it would be completely unacceptable to the current structure of western society. This is a by-product of our lifestyle, we might just have to live with it, or move into a nice bunker.