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T-Bear2

Listed below are comments made by T-Bear2 between Tuesday, 21st April 2009 and Wednesday, 24th June 2009.

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Should Poms be denied the vote? 4:24pm on 24 Jun 2009 Well, if the Australian government proposes to simultaneously drop the requirement to pay taxes, sure, take the vote off British-premanent residents. What's the saying; taxation without representation is tyranny? Or, of course, this stupid idea could be quietly forgotten, as it inevitably will be.
A tale of two Gordons 07:08am on 16 Jun 2009 PM Rudds use of the anachronistic and Uber-daggy, 'Fair shake of the sauce bottle', was neither cute nor funny but an alarming demonstration of calculated dishonesty. Go through the mental exercise: imagine how thoroughly convinced K Rudd must be that the electorate would reject him to stoop to such unnatural speech in the false hope of adding `popularity? Only then to repeat the same silly phrase, 3 times, in one interview? Goodness. I suggest a general point is demonstrated by this: the Australian PM so often sounds unidiomatic because what tumbles from his mouth is so often a knowing deception about who he believes he actually is. Great doubt must attach to the character of politicians who take such lengths to hide their true self. To conceive of and perform these bizarre fictions the level of self-absorption must be extreme.

And another thing ... the substitution of `fair suck with `fair shake in the PMs silly rendering of sauce-bottle-slang has to do with whiting-out an extended connotation of the original wording which came to mean a certain sex-act performed on a particular male part. Nothing remotely good can be said about this sort of language coming from a head of national government. It is embarrassing twaddle.

The more I hear from K Rudd the less I am able to listen. It has become genuinely painful.
Costing the Earth? 3:02pm on 05 May 2009 If the Australian government genuinely believes there is any chance that the global climate is heading toward a catastrophic `tipping point' then there is (surely?) no way that PM Rudd would have delayed his proposed Emissions Trading Scheme? Put differently, it seems the Australian government must currently be convinced of the absence of sound reasons to be alarmed about medium term effects of present levels of carbon emission? The alternative thesis is unthinkable: PM Rudd is willing to risk the future of the planet to win a domestic political argument against the Australian opposition leader, M. Turnbull? As much as I may disagree with PM Rudd, I am certain he is not that reckless!

Unfortunately, the contention that carbon emissions pose an immediate and existential threat has taken such hold in our cultures and attained such institutional weight the politics of the matter is presumptively inertia-bound. An important question, then, is what do our political leaders actually believe? If PM Rudd, for example, were to be frank with the Australian people (as he should, given the massive social-economic restructure implied by an ETS) I suspect he would have to admit he has no idea what the world's climate will actually look like in, say, 2030. But, given the point at which the climate change debate has reached it is no longer acceptable for leaders to rely upon the so-called `scientific consensus on the issue. National leaders must base momentous decisions such as these upon their own understanding of the issues. In any case, PM Rudd's postponing his ETS surely indicates, whatever he actually knows, the PM believes the matter has no present urgency to it.
Making arguments on race 11:04am on 21 Apr 2009 Hi Wollemi,

Here we go round the prickly pear at 4am in the morning ...

No one doubts the good intentions and good works that you refer to but I (and many others) shrink at the idea of any government in any country having an express consitutional power to enact discriminatory laws aimed at particular racial groups. No other modern democracy has a constitutional power of the type which is legally unnecessary to the task of enacting social progressive laws aimed at assisting disadvantage minorities, such as certain aboriginal communities.

Anyway, enough from me on this point. You are welcome to hold the opposite view.

T-Bear2 is exhausted!
Making arguments on race 10:02am on 21 Apr 2009 Wollemi ... You are half wrong and half right.

The striking out of `except aboriginal race' was done to cut the direct borrowing of that wording in the original s51(xxvi) which was taken from the Kansas-Nabraska Act - that controversial little piece of legislation which left the question of slavery to state governments east of the Kansas-Nebraska line in pre-civil-war USA with slavery in new territories west of that line to be regulated by Federal law, which could abolish slavery.

So, although, yes, the spirit of the 1967 referendum in Australia was that it should be for the benefit of Aboriginal people nationally, the actual change made to the Australian Constitution gave the national government its current power to make racist laws, which has been used to the detriment of Aboriginal people on many occasions since then - changes in politic climate of the ensuing 40 years being as they were ...

So, yes, though idea behind the 1967 Referendum was laudable, the outcome is an example of a road to `hell' (racial laws, discriminating against Aboriginal Australia) being paved with good intentions. In particular, the Racial Discrimination that you correctly say disallows racist laws is currently overridden to the detriment of Aboriginal people only and under s51(xxvi) in the so-called `Northern Territory Intervention' laws. This, Mr Wollemi, illustrates the overriding force of bad constitutional law over well-meaning legislation, such as the Racial Discrimination Act.

There's just no doubt about it, Mr Wollemi, we have an emabarrassing racial consitution.
Making arguments on race 08:57am on 21 Apr 2009 The stumbling block for all arguments that Australia is not a racist nation lies in the Australian Constitution, which came into effect on 1 Januray 1901 and gives the national governement an express power to make racist laws. The offending section of the Australian Constitution is s51(xxvi), which remains on the books and has been frequently (and recently) used to enact laws that treat the Australian Aboriginal population in ways that the general population could not subjected to. To be clear about it, s51(xxvi) gives the Australian national legislature a power to make laws with repsect to: `The people of any race, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.' This makes Australia the only `liberal democracy' on Earth that retains an express constitutional manadate for racial laws, personally embarrassing as that is - I being from Sydney. There is also no doubt that for greater part of our `modern history' (the past 250 years)Australia has been one of the most racist nations about; see for example Encyclopedia Brittanica's general article on `Racism' which ranks Australia with pre civil-war USA and pre-Mandella-released South Africa as one of the 3 most racist nations in modern history. So, and acknowledging all of the genuine points about Oz having become (since about the mid 1980's, in my estimation) a quite tolerant, multicultural country where diverse migrant populations get along well (and have greatly enriched each other's experience) there remains the problem of that damn `race power' in our founding document, that permits ongoing dealing with the Australian Aboriginal people in ways that the general population could not be subjected to.

T-Bear2

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