I have not seen Mel Gibson’s film about Jesus, and I don’t intend to. An interpretation of one of the great narratives of history by a Hollywood movie star just does not attract me.
I have heard some commentary here and there. People are appalled by the violence, but of course Christ’s suffering is at the centre of the whole story, so it must be violent. The logic of the narrative only works if the sacrificed one (Jesus) goes through just about every imaginable humiliation, torture and finally death, and still chooses to save humanity. The message is that humans are so intrinsically worthwhile that Jesus will suffer anything to save us, and at the same time his extreme strength in doing so indicates some higher spiritual character. This story relates to us all, because overcoming the suffering of life is a core human concern. It is without question a great story full of meaningful commentary on the human predicament, no matter whether one accepts the orthodox Christian interpretation or not.
One comment that has amused me is to hear people claim that the movie is historically accurate. Now, I won’t bother mentioning the various arguments doubting that Jesus was actually a historical person, or if he was, nothing like the man in the story. No, let’s stick with the texts. So, all I’ll ask is, ‘historically accurate according to who’?
As the excellent SBS program ‘Who Wrote the New Testament?’ shows, there is no single source telling about Jesus’s life and death, even if we limit the narratives to the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Furthermore, there are other texts extant that seem to present a different Jesus again, although the Catholic Church seems keen to keep this material quiet.
Mel Gibson clearly has an ideological reason for making this movie, but he is entitled to spend his money in this way if he chooses. After all, there have been plenty of movies about Jesus. But we should not be fooled into thinking there can ever be an historically accurate version. People who claim this are exhibiting their faith, not their knowledge.

John Kerry looks all set to win the Democrat nomination for presidential candidate, but some problems are emerging for him. Indeed, he may have already peaked. Kerry did it so easily, especially in upsetting the early favourite Howard Dean, that some commentators think he is getting it too easy and will flounder when Karl Rove, Bush’s Chief of Staff, main political adviser (and according to some unkind people, Bush’s brain) opens fire on him.
Furthermore, the essential quality that has supposedly got Kerry the front spot, ‘electability’, is now the same concept that some argue is behind the growing support for the only real alternative, John Edwards.
One of Kerry’s problems is that despite being in the Senate for 19 years people still wonder who he really is. One trait he has exhibited is a definite tendency to try to play both sides of an issue. The most famous example of this is his being both a Vietnam war hero and critic. Similarly, he voted for the invasion of Iraq in the senate but now criticises it strongly. He is apparently not, as we would put in here in Oz, a ‘conviction’ politician.
Another problem is that in this mass media dominated world, Kerry is a pretty ordinary communicator. He comes across as distant and his speech is dull – even with the obligatory scripted catch phrases. This criticism sounds funny given Bush’s trouble with articulate speech, but the media will not let Kerry off like they have Bush. Kerry is supposed to be intelligent and competent in his own right, so he has to be able to do it all.
John Edwards is reputed to be a brilliant public speaker who can reach out to many different constituencies. He is not nearly as rich as Kerry (the richest man in the race, largely thanks to his wife’s fortune) and actually has working class roots. Both Bush and Kerry went to Yale and were in the secretive Skill and Bones club, and were generally privileged establishment boys. Edwards’ life experience and commitment to certain definite ideals enables him to attract more varied support than Kerry.
And of course Edwards comes from the South. The Democrats’ abiding dilemma is how to get the innately conservative (some might say innately reactionary) South to vote liberal. Speaking with a southern accent – like Carter’s and Clinton’s – evidently helps.
So, somewhat ironically, the ‘electability’ factor seems to be swinging over to Edwards’ side. Perhaps, in being so early exposed due to his success, Kerry has become too exposed. And rumour has it that the Bush camp wants Kerry to win – which is more good news for Edwards since beating Bush is what this election is all about.
Maybe it will be an interesting Democratic Convention after all.

It was a pretty ordinary 4 Corners this week on bank robberies – too much trying to get the victims crying, too little evidence and analysis (ah, standards are dropping at the ABC) – but it is interesting to see a serious debate on violence emerging in Oz. Violence, especially by males, is of course the ugliest aspect of the myriad social changes brought about by socioeconomic change, and now being discussed, even by politicians.
It would not be too great a statement to say that western masculinity is in crisis. Traditional roles are being undermined – more by socioeconomic change than any feminist ideas – and males increasingly find themselves without the basic skills to prosper in the 21st century. There are lots of reasons for this shift, and if the issue is treated seriously and discussed with empathy, much good could emerge from a basic rethinking of male experience and gender relations generally.
The 4 Corners program pointed out that drugs are behind much of the growth of violent crime. Criminals steal to pay for drugs, the drug industry is violent, and criminals are often on drugs when they commit crime, which makes it less predictable.
In WA the police acknowledge that most property crime and much violent crime is related to drugs. A complicating factor is the state’s population of young Aboriginal males who are all too often poorly educated, unemployed, angry, bored and prone to crime and violence. Drugs, or other forms of mind-altering substances (like solvent sniffing, which just rots the brain), are often a factor here as well.
Everyone knows that current drug policy – criminalisation – does not work. It does not deal with why drugs are so popular, how to deal with addicts or how to minimise resulting crime, and it corrupts and clogs up the law enforcement system. It creates a market that ensures that the drug pushers will remain wealthy and the users poor, and the rest of us nervous. It also ensures lots of people will overdose and die.
The basic alternative – treating drugs as a public health issue – has not been tried. I am not saying it is simple, but I am saying that a basic paradigm shift in how the matter is dealt with is long overdue.
I read a lot of history, and sometimes I read about certain practices (like executing human beings for stealing or making young children work in mines) and I wonder “What were they thinking?!” The point is that strange ideas about right and wrong and power and public order prevailed over a rational, and humane, consideration of the actual matter at hand. One day historians may well look back on the way we mis-handled the great 20th century drugs industry (increasingly mass produced from global sources, like most ‘legal’ drugs), and I suspect that’s what they’ll wonder too.
If we deal explicitly with drugs we will deal with much of the cause of violence. Then we can focus better on the other causes.

There used to be a lot more point breaks for surfing on the Gold Coast than there are now.
When I grew up as a kid listening to storms belt against the unsealed tin roof on the front verandah of our holiday shack at Currumbin we worried that the house could fall into the sea. It had come close in 1956. Dad had a photo of the erosion escarpment two feet in front of our front steps. He was standing at the base of it with a 16’ ply-wood surf-ski standing vertically beside him. It did not reach the top.
In the ’60s I remember the front of the shops on Pacific Parade on the patrolled beach just a little further north from us being sand-bagged to stop the sea which was crashing across the road from breaking their display windows.
When we eventually sold our holiday house and looked for something a little cheaper and a little further south we were turned off some beach front property on the Bilongil Spit at Byron Bay for the reason that back in the ’70s it hadn’t been beachfront at all, but one block back. You could still seem some of the stumps of the houses that the sea had eaten before it left the new high-tide mark.
This last Christmas the beach is back stretching further out than ever. Certainly further than my father can ever remember and that goes back to his first times at the coast in the ’20s. This is partly a result of the new Tweed River sand bypass, but mostly a consequence of South-East Queensland experiencing no cyclones of note since 1974.
Tuvalu in the South Pacific has just recently experienced flooding as a result of high tides. According to the CIA World Factbook it is a string of coral atolls which is 0.1 times the size of Washington DC (for those of you in the habit of measuring things this way). It has a maximum elevation of 5 metres above sea level. The main income of its 11,305 inhabitants appears to be $50 M in royalties which it will recover in the five years to 2005 from leasing its internet extension “.tv” It would have to be because it apparently has no potable water and no arable land. Because there is so little money its one bank closes at 1:00 p.m. every day.
For years scientists and the government of Tuvalu have been warning that greenhouse warming and consequent rises in sea levels would cause Tuvalu to disappear, and so it might. As a result, in a South Pacific variation of the opportunistic alarmism noted in my last post, every time there is flooding, the government of Tuvalu and various scientists all scream out for something to be done globally. Take a look at this article from the ABC NewsOnline as an example.
The problem with this theory is that the atolls on which Tuvalu is situated may well be sinking. As the ABC article says “…scientists and politicians are divided over whether the Polynesian atoll nation that lies some 3,400 kilometres north-east of Australia, is sinking or whether the sea is rising”. It claims “The jury is still out”.
Nonsense. Any scientist who claims that the current problems in Tuvalu (as distinct from possible future ones) are caused by sea level rises isn’t a scientist, they are a propagandist. Any journalist reporting these claims anything but critically has abandoned their professional duty to inquire after the facts. How can I be so sure of this? First, we know that the islands are an unstable formation because one of them – Tepukasavalivili – sank in 1997. According to government meteorologist Hilian Vavae “You can look down into the water and see the outline of the island.”
Second, the tide height readings at the Brisbane pile light are stable. They seem to be pretty stable everywhere else in the world, and may even be in Tuvalu because they have only been measuring the tides there for 10 years! For the same reason that water doesn’t run up hill, global warming can’t discriminately raise sea levels just in one part of the world.
Greenhouse advocates do the cause no good when they lend themselves to such spurious nonsense. In fact they make more of us even more likely than ever to discard the theory. If they keep up like this, it will take a minor miracle, like all the point breaks coming back on the Gold Coast and the sea crashing into the hills behind Flat Rock creek before most Australians will believe that Greenhouse has anything to do with them.

I’ve been reading about Nazi Germany and what can happen if democracy fails. In a few short years the country many would have said was the most civilised in the world became one of the most barbaric.
One argument was that Democracy had not properly taken hold in Germany, and so it was fragile. It was not valued enough in itself for the various contesting social forces to make sure it was not threatened. Of course the Nazis and Communists specifically wanted it to fail, but they were always in the minority.
Oz has a pretty good record in this regard. Despite us originally being a group of British colonies, responsible self-rule was well established by the time of Federation when we led the world in expanding the voting franchise. Furthermore, our preference system is seen as one of the better voting systems, encouraging stability by coming down to the two strongest parties but also allowing voters a ‘protest’ vote.
It has faltered now and then, perhaps most clearly in 1975 when structural power won out over democratic power due to remnant monarchical institutions. Whatever we think about the actual dismissal of the Whitlam government, it was set up by the prior refusal of the conservatives to accept the people’s choice of Labor. The conservative-dominated Senate (that ‘unrepresentative swill’, as, I think, Keating called them) was clearly used to undo the popular vote that elected the Labor majority in the House of Representatives. It is certainly ironic that it is John Howard, who was so personally well rewarded by this anti-democratic manoeuvre, who now wants to reform the senate to make Parliament more accountable.
Anyway, whatever formal arrangements are in place it is clear that two things must obtain to maintain a functioning democracy. The first is a popular belief in the institution of Parliament, and thus of the value of voting. The second necessity is a well-informed populace who can make rational decisions on who to vote for.
Confidence in parliament is eroding, as Mark Latham has pointed out. This is a western world phenomenon, and although there are common problems, they have specific manifestations in each nation. Mostly, this loss of faith is because of the corruption (subtle but real) of politicians on all sides who see personal power and wealth as being more important than some notion of national good. It is also because of the ever-growing power of the executive, which seems now out of the control of Parliament itself. In Oz the demise of question time as a key process has a lot to do with this.
On the second point, an informed populace requires functional mass media, and in particular a free press. Thomas Jefferson, if I remember correctly, said he’d take a free press over a free government it was so important. I suppose a truly well informed populace can always reform its government.
We in Oz suffer from one of the most concentrated, politically conformist mass media in the world. Each new government law makes it worse (like handing over new TV technology to the big players). Even the ABC is being constantly weakened financially and assaulted ideologically. Ex-minister Alston’s absurd barrage at the ABC’s reporting on the war in Iraq is just the latest attempt by certain conservatives to close it down.
There are anti-democratic forces in Australia. They are mostly badly organised and under-funded, but so were the Nazis at the start. The Nazis got their big chance when bad times caused social upheaval and a weak democratic system of national government could not hold. Oz may well face hard times, and sooner than we think. One Nation has already shown how prone to simplistic answers some people are when under pressure.
Like anything else important, democracy has to be worked at to be kept strong. Our current crop of pollies do not do this nearly enough, focused as they are on short-term advantage and personal gain. And neither does our mass media, concentrating as it is on maximising profits. The old saying, ‘use it or you lose it’ applies here, and we had better start to figure out how to use our democracy more and better.

Graham’s blog entry on the extreme weather is clearly right in terms of the facts, but I think there are valuable lessons we should take from it anyway.
We seem to get the weather here in Perth before it heads east, at least in the summer, so we enjoyed the heat and humidity for a few days as well. Here it was compounded by the electricity supply crashing, just when we needed it most. Increasingly houses and other buildings are built to rely on air-conditioning. Things like overhanging rooves, a traditional way to maximise shade, are increasingly done away with, apparently for aesthetic reasons (and to maximise house size). Anyway, there was a big stink about it, and the state government sacked a couple of blokes at Western Power, but not the relevant minister. Whatever happened to ministerial responsibility?
Hot but wetter summers and drier winters is what is predicted for WA under the prevailing Greenhouse model, and this does seem to be happening. In this sense Perth is becoming more like Brisbane. While Graham is correct that we simply cannot tell whether this extreme weather is caused by Greenhouse or just normal variations, we should recall that more extreme weather is itself a predicted indicator of climate change. Actually, what we are looking for is a pattern of more variety!
But there is another lesson in the weather. Whatever is causing it now, if the global warming models are correct, this sort of weather is the least of what we can expect in the not too distant future. And that is serious.
Even with the air-conditioning, most people I spoke to felt oppressed by the wet heat and their productivity suffered as a consequence (not to mention their mood). If nothing else, new weather patterns will generate a few changes in local culture (siesta, anyone?).
So even if this nasty weather is not caused by global warming, we should take the lesson that it is a taste of things to come if global climate change gets properly under way. We will need to get used to oppressive heat, along with the storms, the rising oceans, the new diseases, the loss of fresh water, etc, etc.
The harsh reality is that right now the world’s governments are doing next to nothing about climate change, which more and more scientists claim is already occurring. The WA government, to its credit, has at least considered the problem and just released its policy. For its part the Howard government is following the US line (ho hum) and waiting for more proof, or something…

According to Dad, in 1925 my grandmother sat on the back stairs of the workers cottage in East Brisbane where he still lives and said to my great grandmother – “Maybe they should just leave this land to the blacks.”
Somewhat predictably Saturday morning the Courier Mail devoted around a whole page to suggestions that the unseasonable February weather that Brisbane is experiencing may be a result of the Greenhouse effect. I’ve been a believer in the Greenhouse effect since before most people had heard of it. The term was coined in the ’50s and I remember as a primary school student who avidly devoured popular science reading about the effects for the earth of light diffracting off an increased layer of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
I’ve also been alive long enough to know that at another stage in the last 40 years scientists were worried that we would go through a period of global cooling and that the world has been through a number of cycles going from a periods of ice age to tropical idylls.
I can understand why scientists being interviewed on our current high temperatures (we hit over 41.7° yesterday) and would attribute it to Greenhouse. It means increased publicity, which leads to increased funding, leading to more publications. A greater publication record equals an increased reputation which equals in turn more publicity and increased funding. For the scientist this is a virtuous cycle – it is also a process similar to the one that drives cyclones.
The weekend’s high temperatures have very little to do with Greenhouse gas emissions, if at all. They have been caused by a north-westerly wind blowing across the hot desert interior of the continent and reaching the coast. It is not increased global temperature that is causing this but an unusual weather pattern.
My grandmother was saying something to these scientists. Her comments weren’t the signs of an emerging consciousness of aboriginal land rights, they were an expression of disgust at the high temperatures that Brisbane was experiencing at the time.
Before claiming that the weekends high temperatures are an effect of global warming, scientists ought to ask themselves this question – “How is it that while these temperatures are nudging current records, the records that they are nudging were set in the 1920s, a period well before the major increase in greenhouse gas emissions?”
The fact that these temperatures were possible that long ago indicates that there is most likely something other than global temperatures at play. To ignore this issue, while it may generate headlines, doesn’t generate credibility.

I’ve been enjoying the new doco ‘Wild Australasia” on the ABC. The commentary is pretty banal and Matt Day’s reading is ordinary, and of course it is loaded with the usual stupid terms designed, I assume, to pander to overseas assumptions about Oz. But it does a good job in emphasising the absolute uniqueness of Australia and its wildlife. It is especially relevant in these times when we are so busy trying to become like everyone else through globalisation, FTAs, etc, that we are reminded that in many ways this country is like no other.
Furthermore, our peculiar climate, geography and ecology have been basic in shaping our social history. This in turn has moulded our politics. Our politics, for instance, still reflects the fact that we feel an obligation to support those who have taken on Oz’s harsh environment to generate wealth – even as we increasingly recognise that many of these practices are unsustainable. Most of us huddle on the relatively benign coasts, but we have been reliant on the farmers and miners to make money so we could import our needs and wants. When increasing globalisation forces change, such as the undermining of the sugar industry, we still feel that our tough-minded farmers deserve more than just “thanks for the memories”.
After all, noxious political developments like One Nation can too easily arise if we don’t show a little interest in the situation of people who feel like they are losing out as the world changes.
Mining, which has been taken over by big companies, is somewhat different. They have learned to be more accommodating in terms of indigenous rights and environment al costs, but their actions behind the political scenes are still too often selfish and shortsighted. The problem is compounded by the fact that there is little to make transnational firms care about what they leave behind when they exhaust the ore bodies and go home.
And how much will the American economists who will have an increasing say over quarantine issues under the FTA really care about the unique Oz species that will be threatened by exotic plants and animals?

Once front runner Howard Dean is out of the race for Democrat candidate in the next US presidential elections. He somehow squandered a healthy lead and some $50,000,000 (whew! a lot of money for nothing). Now it looks like a shoot out between Kerry and Edwards, with Kerry the big favourite.
What does it all mean?
Well, it probably most means that you still can’t get far without the big boys behind you, in this case the Democrat party machine. And it means you have to be very careful in front of the cameras, because one tricky ‘moment’ and you are cactus.
Senator Kerry of course is seen as electable exactly because he is an experienced Washington insider – in other words, just the sort of opportunistic polly people are fed up with all around the western world and who are behind the crisis of legitimacy of democracy itself. He is an absolute mainstream polly who always sniffs the wind before acting. In other words, yet another claimant to political leadership who just follows the crowd.
Congressman Edwards is probably the best bet for someone with a genuine agenda, and we should watch this smiley face for the future (as perhaps an alternative to Hilary Clinton).
The Dean e-campaign did impress many people, even if it ran out of steam eventually. There is talk of trying to leverage it to rejuvenate the Democrat Party. If so, and if it works, Dean may wind up having more impact on US (and therefore world) politics than any of the other candidates, even if they become president.
The Democrats are a real chance to shift US politics to the left (and Bush et al have gone so far to the right that will be easy) if they can organise themselves properly. The demographic trends are in their favour, but they must overcome the usual problem of the poor not voting and the superior Republican organisation. Whether the poor will move onto the net soon is doubtful, but clearly the Internet is a new way of organising human effort and gathering money. No doubt all sorts of smart boys and girls will be moving on this. This is Dean’s legacy.
Meanwhile our Mark is doing OK here in Oz. As he said himself, as leader he is too busy to get into much trouble. At least he is something different to the tired old tricksters like Howard, Beazley and Crean (and, if he doesn’t watch out, Costello). Meanwhile, Abbot continues to show how uncomfortable he is if he isn’t being negative. His face just comes alive when he’s in attack mode, but when it does those of us who think politics is a serious matter can just switch off.
I wonder what Costello will do with Abbot when he becomes opposition leader?

Watching the ‘Four Corners’ report on the destruction of Tasmania’s old growth forests gave me a real sense of déjà vu. The slippery government dealing, the dodgy forest management agency, the huge private firm with tentacles everywhere, and the various passionate people appearing on either side all reminded me of the long and strong debate over WA’s old growth forests.
In WA it was also successive Labor and Liberal state governments that failed to resolve the question decisively right until it became such an issue that independents (like Liberals for Forests) stood on the matter and Geoff Gallop’s Labor government read the popular mood and got tough. Labor finally moved to protect remnant old growth forest and restructure the local timber industry in what was, despite their complaints, a pretty good deal for timber workers. The iffy state forests management authority was, in its latest form, the Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM), led in the main by a bunch of ex-logger types who primarily saw the forests in term of material resources. The logging company was Bunnings, which like Gunns also managed to pay minimal royalties to the state while flogging off invaluable public assets for a song, and which also had inordinate influence on state politics. There were the same images of vast, clear-felled tracts of land, of woodchip mountains being loaded onto ships off to Japan, of angry greenies climbing huge trees and of stony-faced bulldozer drivers in hard hats. And of obfuscating talking heads protecting special interests, political and financial.
However, it seems WA politics was not as in-grown as Tassie politics appears to be, and so the matter was eventually resolved at mainly state level. Like the hard-fought dams issue of the early 1980s (which really launched now Senator Bob Brown’s national political career), this may be impossible in Tasmania. Federal ALP leader and very likely next prime minister Mark Latham is apparently visiting the relevant areas soon, in company with Green Senator Brown. I suspect that, mindful of how much the Tasmanian dams issue helped Bob Hawke to government in 1983, he will take a position that is relatively pro-Green. It has become one of those symbolic issues.
Tassie politics has always been messy and overly influenced by big corporate fish in small ponds, like the Tasmanian hydroelectric commission and now Gunns, and the island could certainly do with a freer media (also like WA). But with so many Tasmanians heading to the mainland, and so many mainlanders heading to Tassie, politics could be in for a big change. After all, many of the new immigrants, with real money and new skills, are looking to enjoy the physical beauty and serenity of Tasmania. Plus they know that Tassie could be a tourist bonanza, and so cutting down what are some of its best assets is dumb in economic terms as well.
And so we see how the specific issues of state development can eventually become symbols in the more general contention of national politics.