Monday 26 June 2017

After a few days confined to my bed with a virus I’m now well and ready to continue the quest for a better government, a better Australia and a better world.

1 Australia’s Minister for Australian Values and Dog Whistling, the Right Honorable Peter Dutton uses the English Language in the manner of a dishonorable coward who wants to deter people from becoming Australian citizens. Well, ones of a certain ethnicity and religion, that is.

My daughter’s partner is Italian. His parents immigrated to Australia after the Second World War and have worked, paid taxes and raised 6 children in country Victoria. Although their English is poor, forever engrained with the thickness of mother tongue, my daughter gets on famously with them.

Under Peter Dutton’s proposed changed to our citizenship laws they would flunk the test. The English language test that he has been talking about is at the same level that a whole lot of universities demand for entrance.

Labor rightly has called it a bizarre act of snobbery from Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Dutton. It is more than that. It is a coded message. It tells a whole lot of immigrants who are already living here permanently that they will never get to pledge allegiance to Australia. It also tells a whole lot of Australians who were born here that if Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Dutton had their way they would prefer it if you weren’t here.

It is a message not of welcoming, but of discouragement. It is a message deeply entrenched in nationalism, nativism and xenophobia. One that does not pretend otherwise.

But since we are talking Language here let’s examine Dutton’s use of it.

In an interview with Ray Hadley last week he said they were talking about English and the learning of it. I’m quoting Katharine Murphy in an article for the Guardian. It’s necessary because she so subtly destroys Dutton’s case.

”It’s a very different period, Ray, from when people came to our country post the second world war in the late 40s, early 50s, there wasn’t the support that is available now, people were working in cutting cane or tobacco or working as tilers and whatnot.

People who are coming to Australia today are coming here to start a new life, they have the ability to learn online, all of the support around improving their English language proficiency, which wasn’t there 30 or 40 years ago.

There are some communities here in Australia, as we’ve seen in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, where no English is spoken and you know people don’t abide by many of the Australian laws.

Now, I’m saying that that is coming to an end and we want people to speak the English language. We want them to improve their English language over time. We want them to demonstrate that they’re adhering to Australian values …”

After a short interlude in which Dutton characterised Bill Shorten (Labor is opposing the package) as being a puppet of his party’s left faction, who were the puppets of the Greens, and out of touch with ”what I think is a commonsense approach that would be supported by everyday Australians” we were back again to the English test.

“We are making the test tougher – there’s no question about that – but this is the prize of Australian citizenship and when people say, well, you know, you’ve got foreign fighters, Australian citizens overseas, why do you allow them back?

And I think as we’ve discussed before, they come back because they are entitled to come back under the Australian law and the Australian constitution because they are Australian citizens and that is why it’s incredibly important on all of those levels to get this change through the parliament.”

You might need a minute to take all those feelings in, so feel free to stop reading for a bit while that settles on you.

Just pretend you are listening to some hold music and when you are ready we can work through his points in turn.

If we take Dutton at his own words, we have:

Rationale one: it is easier to learn English now than it was for postwar migrants because of the internet, and ”all of the [unspecified] support”.

Rationale two: not speaking English in ”some [unspecified] communities” equates with law breaking.

Rationale three: speaking English is a demonstration of adherence to Australian values, ipso facto.

Rationale four: a tougher citizenship test would somehow stop foreign fighters coming back to Australia, or perhaps screen out the foreign fighters in the first place – it’s not entirely clear.

These arguments, to put it mildly, are more front-bar wisdom than fact.

If you are any the wiser as to why theses changes are so urgently needed perhaps you can enlighten me in the comments. Until then they shall remain what I believe they are. A crude but blatantly conservative move to exclude people who don’t speak English.

It’s all about white superiority of the ”them and us” kind that should be condemned. But it is what you would expect from a man of his ilk.

2 But on the subject of Gonski, I am still of the view that Shorten played a bad hand. It would have been far better to accept, after fighting for a few concessions, the Coalitions legislation but lay claim to Gonski and empathise the fact that the right never seem to have any ideas of their own.

As it is now they can only offer improvements that in the economic climate may not be possible. When Gonski finishes his second report on the classroom I’m sure teacher overload will be an issue.

One thing Labor could think about is employing final year students as teacher’s assistants. With the required scores a youthful presence in the classroom would be popular. They would be one-year positions so that you have a constant flow of students gaining work experience. Some might decide they don’t like it but for others it could be a pathway into a teaching career.

3 Words and the way they are used matter. Hear are a couple of examples. The first one is Michelle Rowland speaking about the latest media diversity proposals.

”This is Groundhog Day! When I was eight months pregnant, we were here moving this exact same amendment to extract the two-out-of-three rule repeal from this. My daughter is now six months old. She is meeting all of her developmental milestones. Yet, this Government in four years—a big, fat nothing has been achieved in this space. I will not take lectures from those opposite wanting to talk about Labor being stuck in the past with a 1980s mentality when we have those opposite building a 19th-century copper broadband network.”

4 Emma Husar, Labor MP for Lindsay who has a child with autism took exception to Pauline Hanson’s view of teaching them.

“Even on the days that are hard – when you’re frustrated, and your disability makes you angry – you are still better than she is on her best day.”

5 At the same time moderate (yes, moderate) Liberal Simon Birmingham was desperate to have his Gonski legislation passed. In the Senate, Labor asked the Education Minister eight times to repudiate Pauline Hanson’s remarks, and eight times he refused. If you cant get a moderate such as Birmingham to repudiate her senseless remarks then it shows just how far the Liberal party has swung to the right. What’s a vote worth.

Well on that subject you have to conclude that both Hanson and Xenophon are both Conservative teasers. The both have their roots in the Liberal Party.

6 Before I became ill I was canvasing leadership and where Bill Shorten fits into the scheme of things. Predictably there were those who thought that what the Australian left needed was a Jeremy Corbyn or a Bernie Sanders. Thinking about this I wondered about how he was portrayed by our media.

After all, when you say things like this …

“Isn’t it now clear that, because of this Government’s policies, when the Parliament adjourns, millionaires will win, parents with children at the King’s School will win, but pensioners will lose, people with rising electricity prices will lose, weekend workers will lose, children at public and Catholic schools will lose? Why does this Prime Minister only ever look after the big end of town and punish everybod.”

… how could it be interpreted as anything else but Sanders and Corbyn speak. Clearly he is always on about inequality but our ears aren’t attune to what he is saying.

7 Amidst all the talk of a crisis in energy and what we should do to tackle Climate Change a debate that has now been festering for over a decade. One that has incurred it’s share of full frontal lying and lying by omission we can witness just how far the conservatives will go to hide the truth.

Are you aware that the Government has not published any emissions for six months?

Yes, that’s right.

Two quarterly emissions updates have gone missing. Why is the government keeping the facts hidden from us?

Previously, we had five consecutive quarters of increasing emissions in Australia. Last time data was released in June 2016, there had been a 0.8% increase in emissions compared with the previous year (NGGI 2016). Now you can be assured that if our emissions were going down then the Government would be shouting so from the top of Mount Kosciusko. So we have to assume that they going up. Going up to a point where the Government would be embarrassed to release them.

My thought for the day.

“After arguing about Climate change and the Environment for more than a decade Australia still doesn’t have a clearly articulated and legislated policy on climate change. Why?”