Monday, November 09, 2020

Just the thing to get kids reading

A Hardy Boys reboot series is about to premier. Unfortunately, in this version, they won't be in a pop group. 

https://nerdist.com/article/the-hardy-boys-trailer-hulu/

Friday, November 06, 2020

Blogging over breakfast

Even if Donald Trump loses the election, it would be a misreading of the results to assert that it is a repudiation of his party's policies.

A Biden (or possibly Harris) Administration will not be able to achieve very much. The legislative branch will remain gridlocked.

As someone who has affection for the United States and its people, it grieves me to see it so divided.

Sunday, November 01, 2020

Besmirching your heritage

Generations of Australians were avid readers of The Bulletin, a political and business magazine that was published from 1880 to 2018. It was controversial but respected, which contributed to its longevity. Among its significant contributors were Barbara Baynton, C.J. Dennis, Dorothy Mackellar, Nettia Palmer, Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Patterson, and Ethel Turner, all of whom were respected literary figures, and the respected political journalist, Laurie Oakes. 

The Bulletin lives on as a Facebook news site, but aside from sharing the name, it is a pale imitation of the original. It touts itself as an independent, unbiased, non partisan news source, free of the sinister tentacles of Rupert Murdoch, and the alleged Liberal Party bias of his newspapers and cable television network. 

Unfortunately, their answer to this is to publish puff pieces about the Australian Labor Party. It's poor form to accuse your rivals of bias, and at the same time appear completely oblivious to your own. The administrators don't like their views being challenged. Disagree with them, they'll belittle and block you. 

They also engage in gutter journalism, perpetrating rumours and gossip that portrays their political opponents in a negative light, and their spelling and grammar is poor. If this publication was in print, frankly, I wouldn't even use it to line my cat's litter tray. 

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Things that make you go hmm

So much for that alleged News Corporation protection racket that its papers run for the Liberal Party. Its attacks on the Victorian Labor government's mismanagement of the pandemic has had no affect on its approval ratings, according to an opinion poll released late yesterday. Of those surveyed, Labor Premier Daniel Andrews holds an approval rating of 52 per cent. Liberal Opposition Leader Michael O'Brien's approval rating for his handling of the pandemic sits at 15 per cent. The Labor government has given the Opposition plenty of material to work with, but it seems that O'Brien is not cutting through with voters. 

Saturday, October 24, 2020

Racists, racists everywhere

YellowTerror.jpg
Actual racism, 1899

Full disclosure. I am a supporter of Advance Australia, the far right, reactionary conservative version of the progressive political activist group, GetUp. This is from a recent member newsletter about one of their campaigns against the Australian government's Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Bill, which they claim unfairly singles out China, and is therefore racist: 

"We’ve now heard it all from the Chinese Communist Party.

Taking chutzpah to a level beyond the stratosphere, the CCP regime’s ambassador to Canberra, Cheng Jingye, has labelled a respected Australian Senator a Nazi.

Seriously? 

Our country is not the one with the concentration camps for Muslims, organ harvesting from the bodies of political opponents, forcing women to abort their babies and wargaming the invasion of neighbouring countries. 

Senator Eric Abetz is chairing the Senate’s inquiry into Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Foreign Relations Bill which seeks to shine a light on CCP interference in Australia.

In the course of the inquiry, Senator Abetz has highlighted the CCP’s concentration camps for Uyghur Muslims, which the respected Economist magazine labels a “crime against humanity.”

He has pointed out that Chinese nationals living in Australia are afraid to speak because they know their relatives will be targeted by the CCP’s equivalent of the Gestapo.

For pushing back on CCP interference in our universities, politics and strategic infrastructure sights, Ambassador Jingye accuses Abetz of “Goebbels’ tricks,” referring to Hitler’s propaganda minister.

The supreme irony is that it is Jingye’s CCP under his dictator boss Xi Jinping that has become the master of propaganda to cover up its atrocities and its plans to expand its empire.

The CCP’s ability to lie and get away with it would make Goebbels proud – especially the way the CCP has completely hoodwinked the left in this country.

As noted CCP watcher Clive Hamilton pointed out to the Senate inquiry, the arrogance of Australia’s intellectuals had opened the door for the CCP to march into our universities.

Meanwhile Abetz is making no apologies and hit back at the Ambassador.

“The unattractive belligerent and indeed aggressive tone of His Excellency’s response confirms why so many in the Chinese diaspora live in fear of the Chinese Communist dictatorship even here in Australia,” he said.

Sadly the clueless Left in this country have swallowed the CCP propaganda and have sought to turn the tables back on Abetz, accusing him of “racism” for asking witnesses to the Senator inquiry whether or not they would denounce the CCP.

Calling on witnesses to denounce a regime which runs a gulag for Muslims should is something you would think the Left would applaud Abetz for doing.

But such is their hatred of conservative Senators that they would rather side with an evil foreign regime than with their domestic political foes.

GetUp immediately labelled Senator Abetz a “racist” and started an on-line petition against him, which by the way, only garnered 23,000 signatures despite GetUp boasting a membership north of half a million people.

“No one deserves to be bullied based on their background or what they look like,” GetUp’s petition says. 

Tell that to the Muslim women the CCP forcibly sterilise or force to marry Chinese Han men as part of their campaign of ethnic cleansing.

The kids at GetUp are so blinded by their hatred of who we are as a proud Western nation that they will flip morality and truth on its head.

The sooner Australians wake-up to GetUp and the radical Left, the better.

In the meantime, keep pursuing the CCP’s ugly tentacles reaching into our nation, Senator."

As a layperson, I am not across the intricacies of these matters, but on the face of it, GetUp's campaign looks like cheap political point scoring. While the Bill may have unforseen economic and political implications, as recent analysis by legal firm Minter Ellison reveals, GetUp conflates criticising the Chinese government's engagement with other countries with attacking the Chinese people. Their contribution to this debate is not very constructive. 

https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Foreign_Affairs_Defence_and_Trade/AustForeignRelations2020

https://www.minterellison.com/articles/impacts-of-australias-proposed-foreign-relations-bill

Sunday, October 11, 2020

Maintaining the rage

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (2007-2010, 2013) has started a petition to call the Australian government to hold a royal commission into News Corporation's dominance of the Australian news media. Rupert Murdoch's company owns 70 per cent of Australia's newspapers, and in Rudd's view, this is "a cancer on Australian democracy." Rudd also claims that Murdoch uses his newspapers to exert political power in Australia to influence election outcomes, campaigning against the Australian Labor Party, especially in Queensland. 

Having walked the corridors of power, Rudd has dealt with a hostile media first hand. He also courted Murdoch's support in his successful 2007 election campaign. However, I hope that he doesn't blame Murdoch's newspapers for the failure of his prime ministership, or allegedly turning voters against him, when he was deposed in June 2010. According to Rowan Callick, Rudd has only himself to blame for this. His own caucus could not work with him. As Rowan Callick wrote at the time, his downfall was: 

"a result of his arrogant style, of a series of poor policy choices, and of the failure of his government to implement policies effectively."

Allow me to offer some personal responses to this petition. Back in 1996, I wrote an Honours thesis, looking at Australian newspaper coverage of former US Presidents Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) and Ronald Reagan (1981-1989). Looking at Murdoch and Fairfax newspapers of the time, on microfilm, mind you, I wanted to see if the Democrat Carter received more hostile newspaper coverage from Murdoch owned papers in Australia than Reagan, his Republican successor, because of Murdoch's supposed right wing leanings. 

As part of my research, I interviewed two respected former newspaper editors. One of these editors, who worked for a rival masthead, cautioned me against reading too much into things. My thesis examiners also marked me down because they were not sufficiently convinced by the premise of my work. Now that I am older and wiser, and have more of an understanding of how politics works, and how numerous non state actors, be they individuals or groups, attempt to influence politicians to make decisions favourable to them, I no longer stand by the viewpoints I expressed at the time. I actually disowned my thesis a few years after writing it. 

While it is true that in my lifetime, the Liberal Party has held government federally for longer than Labor, Labor has won more state elections than the Liberal Party, especially in my home state of Victoria. Over the past forty years, the Liberal Party has only been in power for 13 years (1992-1999, 2010-2014). Australia's most popular newspaper, the Herald-Sun, is published in Victoria. As recently as 2018, the Labor state government was reelected in a landslide, with an increased majority. The same voters that voted for a Labor state government in the November 2018 election in Victoria chose a Liberal federal government in the May 2019 federal election. Western Australia, Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory also have Labor governments. This would suggest that the situation is not as clear cut as Rudd argues. 

Finally, Rudd's analysis also strikes me as condescending. It implies that readers of Murdoch owned newspapers, who generally speaking, as market research data shows, are from a less affluent and educated background than readers of rival newspapers, such as The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, or the Guardian Australia, which are marketed towards tertiary educated readers, are unsophisticated, easily manipulated, and lack critical thinking skills. They just accept whatever they read in the newspaper without question. This is another way of saying that they are "low information voters," identified by some media commentators and political scientists, of the type who voted for Brexit and Trump in 2016, or Scott Morrison in 2019. 

He also fails to account for the changing media landscape. Newspaper readership and advertising revenues are declining year and year, as well as competition from online news platforms, radio, free to air, and cable television news. 

Rudd is also vague on what the outcome of this proposed royal commission should be. Would the federal government use its power to break up News Corporation's alleged monopoly, take legal action against it, or impose new regulations to ensure that private media companies are non partisan? Are we also expected to believe that aside from News Corporation, all other news media outlets in Australia are completely unbiased and non partisan? Why should they not be included in an enquiry as well? Overlooking Rudd's long standing grudge against Murdoch, perhaps there is room for a mature, sensible debate about these issues. 

https://asiasociety.org/australia/downfall-australias-kevin-rudd

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/oct/11/kevin-rudd-petition-royal-commission-news-corp-media-domination-australia

https://www.statista.com/statistics/894218/australia-news-literacy-by-education-level/