Secularism, Sectarianism, and Australian Democracy

The decision last week by Western Australian first term Senator Fatima Payman to resign from the Labor Party two years into her six year term and sit (for now) on the cross benches as a result of her stance on the Palestinian state issue has caused a problem for the Labor Party and an ironic triumph for the Greens.

It was not an issue I was planning to write about, but I have changed my mind, as the matter has considerable relevance for our national conversations in relation to both how we view our democracy going forward, and in casting a closer lens over our political history.

Let’s start with getting my own particular (peculiar) views and values out of the way. I am unashamedly a ‘narrow minded Italian Catholic conservative peasant from Footscray’.

Unpacking some of that, I have a lot of conservative Italian peasant values in my baggage. I am also pro-British monarchy and was a member of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy back when it was relevant in the 1990s, and self-identify as British to some degree (well, all Australian citizens were also British subjects til 1985).

I am not particularly church going and am quite skeptical about religion, if not outright sacrilegious in my outlook. However, I have regularly wandered off the plantation and given my primary vote to the DLP in the upper house in both state and federal elections in the past. This is not really because of my Catholic hard wiring, but rather because of my nostalgic sympathy for their hard line anti-communism.

In terms of polarising issues like abortion and the Palestine-Israel question, I am ‘middle of the road’, which means that I will not make friends on either side of the divide. On abortion, I am reluctantly pro-choice, which means that I will not be befriended by people who are serious about abortion on demand, and will be regarded as evil by the right-to-life mob. On Palestine-Israel, I believe that Israel has a right to exist, but so too do the Palestinians. The IDF needs to stop bombing the bejesus out of the Gaza Strip, and Bibi Netanyahu needs to be thrown out of office and prosecuted for corruption and possible war crimes. On the other hand, it is impossible to countenance the recognition of a sovereign Palestinian state whilst thugs like Hamas have an autocratic stranglehold on the political apparatus.

My positions, as someone whose vote is not influenced by either of these polarising issues, and who definitely is not about to join a protest rally on either side for either topic, are what I consider moderate. I do not really have a dog in those fights.

Senator Payman however, sees differently on the issue of Palestine, to the point where she felt it a matter of conscience to break Labor party caucus solidarity and both cross the floor of Parliament to vote against her party’s policy position, and to do so with public lack of repentance.

Her statements to her colleagues that she was praying for guidance as to what she should do were met with derision and leaked to the media. The modern Labor Party is quite secular, particularly when you compare it to previous generations, and the thought of someone earnestly praying seems alien to many senior Labor people.

She now has left the Labor Party, and is in talks with a number of Islamic groups who are disillusioned with Labor. Labor’s position on the current situation in the Gaza Strip is one which horrifies many Muslims, particularly those who have whole heartedly supported Labor for many years.

It appalls me as well, and I do not support Labor. That the Coalition, whom I usually support, albeit with a very healthy dose of skepticism, is attacking Labor for not being pro-Israel enough, disgusts me. Conversations with like-minded people suggests to me that our political leaders on either side of politics are being cowardly and dishonest on the whole difficult Palestine-Israel matter.

I was saying at this start of this post that the Greens have scored an ironic triumph with their tactics which have caused Senator Payman to leave the Labor Party. I say that this is ironic because the Greens are as secular as they come, and they have often come close to expressing intolerance of religion (particularly Christianity) in their public statements and behaviours (eg Senator Hanson-Young with her ‘Keep your rosaries off my ovaries’ t-shirt).

And whilst the Greens are secular, they may now have unbottled the sectarian genie yet again into Australian politics.

The informal alliance whom Senator Payman is holding talks with call themselves The Islamic Vote. She is also taking advice from mathematical maven Glenn Druery, the ‘Preference Whisperer’, who has spent much of the past 25 years manipulating the proportional representation system in Australia’s upper houses to get the members of minor and micro parties elected.

Some people might argue that this is solely a Labor problem as the disillusionment in the Islamic vote is exclusively going to affect the Labor vote and in safe Labor held seats, as the demographic in question tends to live mostly in Labor seats and vote consistently for Labor candidates.

Take that Albo! Haha.

But this is a bigger problem than that. It is a problem about how we as a nation have spent the past 120 years failing to have a serious conversation about the role of religion in politics.

As a general rule, Australians are quite secular and skeptical of both authority and religion. It is something that probably stems from the convict era, where a large part of the population were either convicts or descended from convicts, where the authorities were seen as oppressors and the clergy were often agents of the authorities (such as the ‘flogging parson’, the Reverend Samuel Marsden).

But despite that, many people do, at least nominally, still adhere to a religion. I for one still tick the Roman Catholic box on the religion question at the Census, even though it is rare you will see me inside a church outside of a wedding or funeral.

The sectarian genie has run amok through Australian politics at least twice since Federation.

The first time was during the First World War, when the Labor Party split mostly between Irish Catholics on one hand and Protestants on the other, on the issue of conscription for service on the Western Front. It took a decade for it to recover from that split, only in time for the Great Depression to annihilate the Scullin government.

The next time was in the 1950s, where the Catholic dominated Victorian branch of the ALP was effectively forced out by the Opposition Leader, Dr Evatt, and formed the nucleus of what was to become known as the Democratic Labor Party. The DLP was very successful in keeping Labor out of government federally until 1972, in Victoria until 1982, and in Queensland til 1989.

Much as I consider myself as anti-Labor, it is not healthy for a democracy to have consistently one sided election results for decades. Most governments do not deserve to be in power for more than three consecutive terms at most.

Nor is this a uniquely Labor problem, even though it has manifested itself most visibly inside the Labor Party. In recent years, congregations of various Christian evangelical churches and post Christian religions like the Mormons have joined the Liberal Party in considerable numbers. Their values, whilst conservative, probably belie the nominal Liberal values of individual liberty which are meant to be the driving force behind the Liberal party.

Previously, such people could find voice for their vote through the Family First Party or the Reverend Fred Nile’s Call To Australia – parties which cater almost exclusively to a sectarian Christian conservative social base.

And of course, whilst we like to talk about the separation of Church and State, as set out in Christ’s Give Unto Caesar commentary, the historical reality is that pre-enlightenment, the Church had an integral role to play in politics in the Western State. Christianity first came to prominence with the Emperor Constantine, who took a very active hand in determining doctrinal disputes and shaping it from an underground movement into an institution capable of assisting the Roman state to control civil society.

So where does that leave us? I did not vote DLP as my upper house protest vote at the last state election, but that was mostly because (as I have written previously in this blog) the DLP chose to act without integrity in their choice of candidates.

Parties like the DLP and Family First do appeal to people who have mainstream liberal-conservative values, but who may not have any particularly strong religious convictions. But their purpose is primarily faith driven.

If Senator Payman is successful in becoming the front woman for an Islamic based political party, it will simply be the latest twist in over a century of sectarian based disputes in the Australian political system.

It will not be a good development, as it will both destabilise the Labor Party as previous sectarian disputes have done, and also possibly become a political force which represents religious interests rather than those of the broader community.

Neither would be good for Australian democracy as a whole. We are better served by broad based popular parties with a greater degree of engagement in the community as a whole.

To that end, the conversation we need to have as both a nation and a community is one where we all (including people like me with my sly tendency to wander to the DLP box on the ballot paper) start to think about whether it is healthy for us to indulge religious interests at all in our political parties.

That also includes our politicians showing genuine respect for people who actually adhere to some faith, and to listen to the concerns of the community on significant polarising issues, rather than to be cowardly and prevaricating.

Otherwise, the Greens are going to enjoy their ironic current triumph as a pyrrhic victory indeed.

Will Artificial Intelligence Eliminate Wine Critics First?

This Shiraz has a bouquet of pepper, blackcurrant, and gun powder.

I never have quite binged on Evelyn Waugh’s novels, which is probably a good thing. I was 15 when I first read Decline and Fall, which I loved, but then was disappointed by his second novel, Vile Bodies. I suppose that 15 year olds do not quite get the irony and the self-deprecating social commentary about the mores of that era.

That did not stop me reading Put Out More Flags soon afterwards, and Brideshead Revisited at age 16. I was at university when I read the Sword of Honour trilogy, and read A Handful of Dust just after graduating.

By the time I read the latter, I had assimilated a good basic understanding of the underlining themes of repentance and redemption that drive Roman Catholicism, and which make up a large part of the subconscious hard wiring of myself and many other Westerners, even those of us who are only nominally Catholic.

And hence I finally ‘got’ Brideshead Revisited, a mere five years after reading it.

I have not reread it since 1985, although I think that I really ought to, and my copy of it is sitting on the desk next to me as I type, for reasons which are soon to become self evident.

Thumbing through it last night, I found the episode in Chapter Four of Book One in Brideshead where the narrator, Charles Ryder, along with his friend Lord Sebastian Flyte, decide to taste a large number of the wines from the castle cellar, aided and abetted by the family butler, Wilcox, and a book on wine tasting to guide their adventure.

Here, for your literary edification, is the passage in question:

“We would sit, he and I, in the Painted Parlour with three bottles open on the table and three glasses before each of us; Sebastian had found a book on wine-tasting, and we followed its instructions in detail. We warmed the glass slightly at a candle, filled it a third high, swirled the wine round, nursed it in our hands, held it to the light, breathed it, sipped it, filled our mouths with it, and rolled it over the tongue, ringing it on the palate like a coin on a counter, tilted our heads back and let it trickle down the throat. Then we talked of it and nibbled Bath Oliver biscuits, and passed on to another wine; then back to the first, then on to another, until all three were in circulation and the order of glasses got confused, and we fell out over which was which, and we passed the glasses to and fro between us until there were six glasses, some of them with mixed wines in them which we had filled from the wrong bottle, till we were obliged to start again with three clean glasses each, and the bottles were empty and our praise of them wilder and more exotic. 

‘…It is a little shy wine like a gazelle.’ 
‘Like a leprechaun.’ 
‘Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.’ 
‘Like flute by still water.’ 
‘…And this is a wise old wine.’ 
‘A prophet in a cave.’ 
‘…And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck.’ 
‘Like a swan.’ 
‘Like the last unicorn.’ 

And we would leave the golden candlelight of the dining-room for the starlight outside and sit on the edge of the fountain, cooling our hands in the water and listening drunkenly to its splash and gurgle over the rocks.”

It is rather funny, looking at those elegant yet crass words which were published some eighty years ago.

I was thinking of the wine tasting scene specifically because I just got back from a road trip to Rutherglen with my best friend and his 18 year old son, who happens to be my godson. Rutherglen happens to be my favourite wine region, with its fantastic big dry Shirazes and Durifs, destined to last for very many years, and its magnificent fortified wines.

I came back with five standard bottles of various dry reds, a magnum of a back vintage of Calliope (my favourite wine), and a bottle of fine fortified wine.

[Plus the inevitable hole in my bank account.]

I did look at a few tasting notes on my travail through the vineyards and cellar doors. I will share the brief description of various wines from one of the various cellar door newsletters I regularly receive from the region:

. Juicy mid palate with subtle tannin and savoury finish

. Ripe berry fruit and robust tannin

. A pristine core of black fruit, deep tannin, touches of clove and black pepper

. Succulent cherry structure and fruit, velvety tannins

. Joyous combination of red fruits, blueberries and spice on the nose. Blackberry, mocha and elegant tannins.

Similar descriptors was applied to tasting notes for wines at just about every cellar door we visited.

It does get me thinking about who writes those tasting notes, and how accurate they might be.

Last Friday, I was at the Kelvin Club (one of the private clubs in the city, and the only one to which I currently belong) for the monthly luncheon of the Bottle Club. Since retiring, I have decided to get more involved in the social life of my Club, and hence have started attending the Bottle Club from time to time.

The members tend to be about two decades older than I, far better travelled, wealthier (or at least better situated in their residential suburbs), and with far more experience and knowledge of wine (although in my usual circle of friends, I am one of the more knowledgeable wine buffs).

Someone at that lunch said something which got me thinking. Apparently where there is a blind tasting of wine, where you cannot see the colour (a flask with a straw), most people cannot tell the difference between white and red. Similarly, if you feed people strawberry flavoured ice cream which is coloured brown, people think that they are eating chocolate ice cream.

This was interesting, and combined with my trip to Rutherglen and pondering about the common sorts of descriptors on tasting notes, it has really got me thinking.

Could some sort of Artificial Intelligence program, such as Chat GPT, successfully take over the writing of wine tasting notes, or even of entire wine guide books? Would Chat GPT be more accurate?

Would anyone even notice?

Or care?

Of course, I am being a little spiteful. Wine critics and commentators get paid to both drink wine and then write about it. Wine consumers pay to drink wine, and then might, as in my case, occasionally blog about it for free. This does cause wine consumers to feel a certain degree of resentment about wine critics.

Hence, whilst I am usually reluctant to support the introduction of Artificial Intelligence into areas where humans should have an exclusive preserve, I think, possibly out of spite, that an experiment in getting Chat GPT to write wine tasting notes would be very interesting.

The Disney Star Wars: When Fan Fiction Gets Out Of Control

Ever since my Grade 4 teacher read The Hobbit to my class back in 1978, I have been a fan of Tolkien. I have lost track of the number of times I have read both The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings, and I have read The Silmarillion three times (most recently after many years in preparation for the Amazon Prime series).

For the most part, I have not bothered with the published volumes of rough drafts, nor the more recent rehashing (eg Hurin’s Children) of stories from The Silmarillion, although I did read Unfinished Tales once about 25 years ago.

So I can confidently talk about what is ‘canon’ in the Tolkien universe and what is not, although I would say about those people online who spend a lot of their time explaining why something is or is not so in the various movies to go and get a life.

Obviously I did watch the Amazon Prime series, and was disappointed by the anaemic story line. True, it was hampered in that Amazon only holds the TV rights to The Lord Of The Rings, and that it has not yet been able to acquire the rights to The Silmarillion (and the included story Akalabeth), which actually covers The Fall of Numenor in great detail. Amazon has had to rely on what it does own, which includes the detailed information as backstory in the various appendices to The Lord Of The Rings, as a guide for its series.

All the same, I am quite dismissive of it, particularly in the depictions of Elendil, Isildur, Galadriel, and Elrond, and in the concocted origins of the metal Mithril, to consider The Rings Of Power as mere fan fiction, rather than as even a halfway accurate retelling of Tolkien’s story.

We do get to wonder as whether fan fiction has a valid place in interpreting the work of popular Sci Fi/Fantasy authors and filmmakers.

When it comes to Star Wars, things get a little more complicated, given that in the 48 years since the original movie and the follow up Star Wars Christmas Special came out, comic books and novelisations of related stories in that Galaxy Far Far Away have been ubiquitous since the very start, some of which have long been endorsed and accepted as ‘canon’ by the original creator, George Lucas.

With Disney now owning the intellectual property of Star Wars, the potential for fan fiction to run amok is much greater (an example which does make me grateful that the Tolkien Estate is grimly holding fast to the rights to The Silmarillion).

Star Wars and Disney are a great fit for two major reasons. One is that, like the classic Disney stories, Star Wars does not have any sex in it, and very little if any romance. The closest we get is Princess Leia in a metal bikini in what we now call Episode VI. The other is that, just like Disney, Star Wars makes for great toys and related merchandise. You can grow from wearing a Donald Duck t-shirt to a Darth Vader t-shirt (Donald and Darth do share many similarities when you think about it, which is why I like both characters so much).

So it is not surprising to find Star Wars on Disney+. [It is a better fit than the Kardashians or documentaries about the Jonestown massacre for example.]

The recent Disney driven sequel trilogy had very little of originality to it, and indeed they discarded any of George Lucas’s suggestions in favour of a totally derivative and somewhat woke storyline which focuses on more potent super weapons which need to be blown up in the first and third sequels, along with a desperate escape in the second. Sounds just like the first trilogy really, except for the wokeness and some very loose superfluous storylines.

Now we have various Star Wars series, of varying quality, on offer through streaming. Some, like The Mandalorian, are quite clever and adept at harnessing ‘canonical’ back stories to create the sort of space western which could have come from the fertile imagination of George Lucas. Others, like Ashoka, not so much (although I am as always a big fan of anything featuring Rosario Dawson).

Last night, aside from watching the latest episode of The Acolyte (a prequel stand alone series which does not impress me), I watched a few short cartoon episodes from the other new offering, Tales From The Empire. Very underwhelming.

There were no space witches in the original Star Wars, nor in any of the prequel or sequel movies. Nor was there this sinister blue faced Admiral Thrawn. Using fan fiction to create such new storylines with such supposedly important new villains risks not just confusing the fan base about the ‘canonical’ narrative, but also contaminating the potential for making a decent fourth trilogy in future – something that I strongly suspect Disney and its shareholders would dearly love to attempt.

$180 Million Flop? Funding Film to Promote Art and Culture….

As I wrote a few days ago, I quite enjoyed Furiosa, the Mad Max spin off film.

Sadly, it appears to have been a flop, which is quite sad as I have always loved Mad Max, and the Roadrunner cartoons (which are the perfect manifestation of this genre).

News reports have emerged that the Australian and NSW taxpayer have been responsible for funding the bulk of this film, with estimates being that the Federal Government has stumped up $150 million and that the NSW Government has put up $33 million.

That is quite a lot of money to put into funding one movie.

The supposed benefits to Australia from funding such a film are two fold. The first is that having such a film made in Australia may provide employment benefits, particularly in the local film industry. The other is that films can contribute to the local arts scene and to Australian culture.

The first argument is a rather Keynesian one, and I am skeptical about it. Pouring a lot of taxpayer money into one film is unlikely to unlock a lot of economic benefits. Keynesian activities, such as subsidised film making, or Kevin Rudd’s various recession avoidance initiatives in the time of the GFC, or other expressions of government largesse, rarely end well.

The willy-nilly use of taxpayer funds with limited accountability does not result in outcomes of great benefit to the community, even though you might argue that the chancers who profit from the loopholes, as in the various GFC era schemes, might trickle their new found riches back into the economy when they increase their luxury spending.

And a lot of the really bad films made in Australia Cinema history are the Ozploitation films from the 1970s and early 1980s, when government policy allowed for extremely generous tax deductions for investment in film making. Like, have you ever seen the 1981 film Starstruck? The only good thing about it is the soundtrack.

The second argument is the somewhat elitist cultural one, that government needs to fund the arts. Our art galleries, operas, ballets, theatre companies, symphony orchestras etc possibly need to have government funding. Similarly our local artist and literary scenes.

This doesn’t always work well either. Some subsidised literary magazines appear to have a censorship agenda where they blacklist writers whose political views do not align with the editors. Quite a lot of the political myth making on television is tax payer subsided, such as some of the distorted views of political history espoused in such ABC miniseries as the 1988 classic ‘True Believers’.

In terms of my own artistic tastes, I am reminded of Dostoyevsky when he wanted to be good. He really wanted to be good and pious and god fearing. However he liked women, vodka and roulette too much.

In a similar vein, I would like to be the sort of person who goes to the Opera, the Symphony, the Ballet, and to gallery openings and exhibitions, whilst sipping a glass of wooded chardonnay in the intermission whilst my ABC bumper sticker wearing Tesla sits in the Arts Centre garage.

But I am not really that sort of person. I am from a working class background in Footscray, with mostly peasant origins (despite being 1/16 of a Count in ancestry). I have some rather bogan tastes, and would prefer to watch an action movie in the cinema and share a bottle of shiraz afterwards.

So, much as I deplore the use of over $180 million of taxpayer money for making a Mad Max film, I prefer to see the money spent on that than on other cultural subsidies like Opera and Ballet.

Because at least there is a very very good chance that I will watch the film.

Reddit – The Rebirth of Greek Tragedy as a Social Media Trainwreck

It took me quite a while to ‘get’ King Lear. Whilst familiar with Macbeth from high school English class, Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest from having read them independently in my teenage years [my initial copy of the Complete Works – I now own four (all unsurprisingly gifted to me) plus separate paperbacks of each play – starts with The Tempest], Henry V from seeing the Branagh production at age 20, and The Taming of the Shrew from going with some friends some time in the late 1990s at the Botanic Gardens for an evening performance, I did not really get into Shakespeare til age 28.

At that time, working for a few months in Box Hill, I had abundant extra time on the train to do some reading. So I packed a paperback of one of the plays each morning as my commute reading. I must say that I found most of them quite enjoyable, and particularly enjoyed the metaphysical nature of Hamlet [a play which is better to read than to see performed in my humble opinion].

But I did not at that time really get why critics generally rate King Lear as one of the four great tragedies. Back then, I saw the great tragedies as having some sort of dualistic moral dilemma: Hamlet has knowledge and innocence, as in the Fall from Grace; Macbeth has guilt and innocence; and Othello has love and jealousy. In my mind, Lear lacked such a dualism. Julius Caesar, with the dilemma of love and duty, more deserved to be considered one of the great plays than Lear.

As you might guess, I had not read any Greek tragedies at that stage, even though quite a few of them were sitting unread in my bookcases. The Clouds, one of the more irreverent comedies by Aristophanes, was the only Greek play with which I had any familiarity.

My opinion of King Lear changed when I first saw it performed live in 2005, which left me quite impressed. A good production of Lear, ending with him grieving Cordelia, can project quite a lot of tragic pathos. This did set me off on a binge of watching live productions of the plays whenever I could, and by now I have seen about two thirds of them performed.

I did get around to reading the Greek tragedies in my late 30s or early 40s, and that did cause me to finally ‘get’ how great King Lear really is.

Lear is the closest that Shakespeare has come to a Greek tragedy in all his works. The themes of vicious betrayal of and by your closest blood relatives is what we most commonly see in the Ancient Greek plays. The most vicious of those are the ones which follow the generations deep curse of the Atreides, seeing this royal lineage constantly caught in a god-ordered cycle of murder, sacrifice, vengeance and exile.

Medea, one of the plays written by Euripides, perhaps is even harsher. Spurned by her lover Jason, the embittered Medea murders their children in a fit of vengeance, then to be born off by the gods in a chariot pulled by dragons.

It perhaps is an understatement when, in the introductory voiceover at the start of each episode of Xena Warrior Princess, we are reminded that the ancient gods were petty and cruel, and plagued mankind with suffering. (Not that Xena, even with the Greek myths and histories to guide the script writers, ever bothered with verisimilitude.)

In recent months, I have become fascinated, like a kangaroo in the spotlight, with the sorts of stories republished in Facebook, and which originate in another social media platform, Reddit. These stories are, to put it nicely, quite horrible, and the most popular ones which my algorithm feeds me are about parents abandoning their children, siblings stealing each other’s spouses or significant others, and dysfunctional step families.

Many of the most popular ones are where, like King Lear (or Agamemnon, if you want to look back at the cursed Atreides of ancient Athens) a parent singles out one of their children for inexplicably vicious treatment whilst the others are given preference. Such mistreatment rarely goes further than neglect or abuse, unlike the actual infanticides (and parricides and matricides) of the Ancient Greek writers, but the general gist of the behaviour is similar: those who are closest to us, who we should most love and trust, are the ones who can hurt us the most.

Twenty years ago, we would have gone to Judge Judy to view the ersatz modern equivalents of Greek tragedy, but now we do not need to reach so far. Social media, in the form of Reddit (and its allies Youtube, TikTok, and Facebook), makes it possible for people to post their stories to a widespread audience in the hope that ‘random internet strangers’ will give their unbiased advice and wisdom.

Perhaps, we, just like the audiences in 5th Century BC Athens, have a similar need to watch these stories, and to be horrified and gratified at the same time by these narrators of these domestic tragedies.

But I do wish that perhaps, we would have greater opportunity to actually see some of those original great Greek tragedies performed live than we currently do.

Where Will We Be in 11 Years? Thoughts On The Uncanny X-Men Revival And Whether Life Really Hurts

It’s nearly time we were leavin’
We’ll have one more for the road
It don’t mean nothin’
It don’t mean nothin’

So we gather ’round the table
Raise our champagne in the air
It don’t mean nothin’
It don’t mean nothin’

‘Cause we’ve got
This night together, we’ll have
Here now forever
Ah, don’t tell me now, you can
Write me a letter
Where will we be in 50 years?
In 50 years?

Uncanny X-Men – May, 1985

I was walking past the Croxton Park Hotel in Thornbury the other day and saw on the upcoming gig guide that Radio Birdman were going to do a 50 year anniversary gig.

I had never listened to any Radio Birdman before, but I do have a friend who is a fan of them, and owns the vinyl of their album Radios Appear, which is how I know the name. My walk inspired me to listen Radios Appear on my Apple Music account the other night, whilst sipping some red wine.

I must admit that it was not really what I expected – it is a bit more punk than what I thought the name promised.

But they are just one of many of the classic Australian bands of my childhood and teenage years who are making a milestone anniversary or farewell tour. Just like TISM, who recently did a lot of guerrilla reunion gigs and released new music.

I guess that in their early senior years (all of these musicians would now qualify for the seniors card, as they are older than me and I am happily retired), a lot of those bands are trying to top up their superannuation balances by tapping into their ageing fan bases. After all, not everyone has been diligently paying 10 per cent into their defined benefit superannuation funds to max out their retirement benefits like yours truly.

One thing that grabbed my attention from the Apple Music algorithmic playlist when I was listening to a lot of music the other night was the addition of two new Uncanny X-Men songs. Given that I do occasionally play ‘Cos Life Hurts, the debut album from this archetypical bogan Melbourne band from the mid 1980s, it is unsurprising that the Apple algorithm would alert me to new music from that band.

And so, I listened to the online EP that Uncanny X-Men just offered the music world. It consists of two songs – It’s A Shame, and We Love It.

It doesn’t really do too much for me, though I suspect that Brian Mannix is doing a sly dig at the weaponisation of gender pronouns in We Love it, which appears to be a commentary on the contemporary world.

After all, the X-Men’s best work was almost 40 years – the bogan anthem Work (which is about not wanting to work, which is apt for a bunch of lads from Braybrook) and the poignant power ballad 50 Years, which was released just over 39 years ago.

39 years…. It is quite sobering to look and see how much time has passed since that ballad was released. I was a teenager in my penultimate year of high school and now I am nearing the end of a year of pre-retirement leave and about five and half weeks from officially starting my retirement. An ocean of water has passed under the bridge in my life since that time.

When, in May 1985, Brian Mannix asked us ‘where would we be in 50 years?’, we all felt almost immortal. I know that I did. Yet most of that time has already elapsed and I myself see myself increasingly confronted by my growing mortality. Only eleven years are left until that question is answered.

Brian Mannix has himself offered a tentative answer to that question in his 2018 solo release, Tomorrow:

I don’t have to do a thing tomorrow

Tomorrow might not come at all.

I suppose, as the title of their debut album 39 years ago reminded us, Life does hurt. But it is still well worth living and grasping to the last breath.

Compogate – Or Turning the Tables on Kathy Gallagher

I am rather embarrassed to admit this, but many years ago I was friends with a mad keen Collingwood supporter.  He was not typical of the rabid Collingwood supporter, mind you: he still had all his teeth, no tattoos, no criminal record, and had recently completed his law degree.

We were close enough friends that I was invited to his wedding, where we were all compelled at the reception to join him in singing ‘Good Old Collingwood Forever!’.   [It is to my lasting shame that I do know the words of that song.]

Apart from the rendition of the theme song, the reception was a pretty normal sort of wedding.  It was held in the hall next to his family’s parish church, there were the usual complement of groomsmen and bridesmaids etc, and all the right people made the sort of speeches about how great the newly weds were together.  [They divorced within a decade or so, in case you were wondering. Nor did I get invited to his second wedding as the friendship had died around the time the first marriage did.] 

And as happens at just about every wedding reception or gala dinner I have been to, the tables were numbered, although I do wonder whether or not my erstwhile friend was tempted to name them after Collingwood premiership coaches and captains.  It was not the fashion in 1991 to release doves from a basket outside the church, but it is just as well this idea did not occur to the wedding planner, as I don’t think releasing magpies from a basket would have ended well.

The news report that David Sharaz and Brittany Higgins have just officially gotten married in Queensland has got me wondering about how the wedding planning went, particularly the reception.

You see, the starter wedding of David Sharaz, current partner of Brittany Higgins, had some more bizarre features to ornament the wedding reception.  One was featuring official photos of the happy (not for long) couple holding rescue cats, rather than being surrounded by either the bridal party or close family and friends.  Another, more intriguingly given Mr Sharaz was a journalist at the Canberra Press Gallery, was that the tables at the reception were not numbered, but rather, they were named after Federal Labor Party leaders. [Although that might have had more to do with the fact that Mrs Sharaz mark 1 was a one eyed Labor tragic and staffer.]

You get the idea: the Shorten table, the Gillard table, the Rudd table, the Whitlam table etc.  I expect that the closest family and friends would have been put on either the Curtin table or the Hawke table, and that the C-listers would have been put on the Calwell or Hayden table.

I doubt very much that there would have been a Cook, Hughes, Lyons, or Latham table.

Knowing from news reports that Kathy Gallagher had been invited to this 2018 wedding, as she was regarded by Mr Sharaz as a dear friend, although she did not attend, has seriously picqued my curiosity.  Which table would she have been placed on if she had graciously RSVPed her attendance? Is she dear enough a friend to merit being on the Hawke, Curtin, Chifley or Whitlam tables?  Is she a little more than just a work friend, meriting the Keating, Gillard or Rudd tables?  Or is she just there as someone they wanted to curry favour to, and hence only getting placed on something like the Shorten table?  And what do they think of someone who gets placed on the Evatt or Calwell table?

I am not sure about the Forde table – probably where the doddering maiden aunt or embarrassingly drunken uncle gets placed in the far corner.

Which leads me to the issue which has been foremost in the minds of our Canberra Bubbleers this past year, given compensation payments and a certain defamation case – how well did Kathy Gallagher know David Sharaz, and when exactly did she find out about the allegations which were going to be raised around the alleged sexual assault of Miss Higgins at Parliament House in 2019?

This issue of foreknowledge is important to us taxpayers.  As Minister of State responsible for administering the Department of Finance, Senator Gallagher is responsible for making decisions under various Acts of Parliament, including those administering the Commonwealth’s worker’s compensation scheme (ComCare), and other related liability insurances (ComCover).  She also would be responsible for decision making on any Act of Grace payment outside of those liabilities.  

This means that she was responsible for authorising the confidential payment to Brittany Higgins in settlement of the lawsuit which she had bought aside the Commonwealth in relation to any injuries she may have incurred as a result of the incident in 2019.  She also would have been involved in the decision to settle the matter, although I suspect that under the terms of the ComCare and ComCover legislation, it would be possible to mount a vigourous defence in relation to claimed liabilities incurred where someone entered a Commonwealth premise outside of their normal working hours and in a severely intoxicated state.

As a decision maker in such matters, it would have been appropriate for her to declare any potential conflicts of interest and prior relationship with any of the parties privy to this settlement.  

However, it appears that Senator Gallagher has denied any fore knowledge of the 2019 incident before it was made public by Miss Higgins, and any imputation that her conduct in making decisions on the settlement were influenced by either personal friendship or political expediency.

Parliament House is a workplace where occupational hazards and incidents will and do occur  – and it appears that this particular incident has resulted in an exceptionally fast and generous compensation payout (it is a confidential figure so we do not know the exact amount).  However, in other cases, where there are incidents or workplace injuries which occur that do not involve high profile or well connected employees, they do not get the expeditious settlement of their workplace injury claims by ComCare or ComCover.

In this case, a settlement was reached which is both generous and expeditious.  If this is a reasonable standard, then other employees in Parliament and elsewhere deserve similar treatment?  And to what extent should the taxpayer wear the significant expense of this standard, which is in this case significantly beyond what victims of crime in similar cases can expect.

I consider that it well may be that this settlement was a reasonable outcome, and that it may have been appropriate for Senator Gallagher to make the decision herself rather than step aside for someone else to do so.  However, if she has misled the Parliament and the public about her relationship with Sharaz and her foreknowledge of the 2019 incident, then it is reminiscent of the Watergate scandal – Nixon was forced out of his job not because of the burglary committed by his henchmen, but by his involvement in covering it up.

Hence I call this current matter Compogate.

But I am dying to know answers to several current burning questions, namely: whether Senator Gallagher was invited to David Sharaz’s latest wedding, whether the tables were again named after Labor leaders, and which such-named table she was seated at?

Just Like The Road Runner: Mad Max Remains Fun And Relevant

As a child, I was fond of watching the old Warner Brothers cartoons, you know: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat, and of course the Road Runner.

Road Runner is an amusing cartoon series, where the laws of physics, particularly those of gravity, are defied, and there are frequent explosions and high velocity crashes as the Coyote pursues the Road Runner across the desert. Apparently this did inspire the most violence amongst children of any cartoon show, although I have no source to cite for this assertion other than one of my high school teachers.

The closest thing to Road Runner in modern cinema is the Mad Max franchise. The plot of each film consists of a Road Runner-like hero (Mad Max) defying the Coyotesque villains (all of whom seem almost to be mutants in their grotesqueness) in a race across a post apocalyptic wasteland involving high speeds, ultra violence, and many crashes and explosions.

One of the improvements over Road Runner in Mad Max is that the villains have some pretty good lines – particularly the Lord Humungus (the Ayatollah of the Rock and Rolla) in Mad Max 2. Not Shakespearean by any means, but the villains are quite entertaining.

I believe that Mad Max 3 (ie Beyond Thunderdome) might have been the last film I saw at the Grand Footscray, back in August 1985. [For those who are curious, the Grand closed down as a cinema in 1987 and became a bingo hall for a few years, and has since then been disused for very many years.]

It took 30 years for Mad Max 4 (Fury Road) to come out. Sadly, Mel Gibson was gone from the role that made him a star, but I did not mind seeing Tom Hardy step into it, and for Charlize Theron as the Imperator Furiosa (although as a student of Latin, I am offended by the incorrect gender usage – she should have been the Imperatrix Furiosa).

Now, almost a decade later, we have a prequel to Mad Max 4, Furiosa, which focuses on that most interesting of the supporting characters in that film. Anya Taylor-Joy takes over the role originated by Theron a decade ago, and does a great job of it.

Commentators have been talking about the failure of Furiosa at the box office, despite all the hype leading up to it. There probably will be some arguing that having a female lead is another of those instances of Go Woke, Go Broke, and perhaps that is the case, as it appears to be in the Disneyfication of Star Wars.

But that does not really matter to me. Furiosa is a very fun film, just as the Road Runner cartoons are fun. We have everyone having fun playing the roles of monstrous and narcissistic villains, and lots of car chases and explosions. The henchmen are, as they always have been, a heady blend of pathetic and grotesque, particularly Scrotus and Rectus (I laughed out loud when they were introduced).

The scene where the warlord Dementus comes with his bikie hoarde to the Citadel and tries to persuade the denizens of this fortress to displace their ruler, Immortan Joe, has the sort of soliloquy that is reminiscent of the Lord Humungus in Mad Max 2. It is not going to get Chris Hemsworth an Oscar nomination, but I enjoyed it just as much as when I watched the earlier Mad Max films.

And having Furiosa as the main character? I did not mind it at all, particularly as she has been given more depth than what we had previously known about her, and arguably more than Mad Max himself (although character development is not really that important or necessary in Mad Max).

And she does a fantastic job of shooting people, running people over, and blowing things up, which is what Mad Max movies really are all about.

Just like the Road Runner.

The McBride Case – A Plea For Mercy

The sentencing of War Crimes whistleblower David McBride to over 5 years in prison last week was a sad day for justice in Australia.

He is, to this point in time, the only person to be imprisoned in relation to the war crimes which were allegedly committed by Australians in Afghanistan.

Six months ago, when he pleaded guilty after his main defence, that his conscience overrode his legal obligations, was rejected by the courts, I wrote about the situation in this blog:

Australia’s Own Dreyfus Affair

As I conceded then, the law has been broken and it is the place of the courts to punish the law breaker in accordance with the law.

A couple of days ago, I watched the commentary by the popular political vlogger Friendly Jordies on the sentencing on his YouTube channel:

My political beliefs are on the whole, rather different from those of Friendly Jordies, but I think we do share a sense of justice and fairness.

David McBride has been dealt with very harshly by the courts in comparison to some legitimate criminals who commit rapes and similar violent crimes. His only crime came from following his conscience to do what he believed served a higher purpose of justice.

He is now being punished for that. Given that the decision was made to persecute him under the laws of the land, and to reject the legitimacy of the defence argument he raised, this is as it should be.

However, the issue of conscience, and whether there are other, extenuating, circumstances here beyond that of a typical lawbreaker, is something which really should be examined further.

I believe, given that the bipartisan decision was made to initiate and persist with the prosecution, that it is up to the elected leadership of the nation to determine whether justice has been sufficiently served now, and whether it would be appropriate to consider pardoning David McBride and releasing him.

An example has been made which will deter others from whistle blowing on national secrets which will trouble the consciences of the secret keepers. He is no on going threat to either national security or to the community. Showing mercy and pardoning him now would be a just outcome, and make us think better of our elected officials.

Broo removed from ASX

Discovered just now when checking my Commsec account that Broo is no longer listed on the ASX.

When a company is removed from the ASX or changes its code, the result is rather Orwellian: it’s as if it has ceased to exist and never existed. Finding information about it needs to be done by other means than just your stock broking app or the ASX website.

As it turns out, an announcement last Monday was made by ASX compliance that as it has been suspended from trading for two years, it is removed from the ASX list.

The listing itself was one of the few items of value remaining as a tangible asset to Broo. This makes it coming back in some form ot other that little bit harder.

Ain’t I glad that I did not participate in the float at 20 cents per share 8 years ago.