That is the question that came home with my girls from Sunday School the other day branded across a couple of book marks. The Oxford Diocese of the Anglican Church seems to have asked themselves the same question and come up with the answer “Get on the net!”
As a result, and after three years of planning (I know it sounds like a long time, but they are Anglicans) they are launching an “i-church” (just a slight marketing suggestions guys, but are you sure this doesn’t sound just a little egotistical, e-church might be better) and have advertised for a “web pastor”. I will be following their efforts with interest. Building communities of interest on the Internet is what On Line Opinion and National Forum is about and a church community is little different from any other sort of community so we will have lessons to learn from them. For example, how do you successfully pass the plate around in cyber space?
They say that there are more people alive today than there have been in the whole of previous human history. If you regard the occurrence of a Christ or Buddha or Mohammed as governed by the laws of statistical probability, then there is every chance that their reincarnations, or equivalent, are out in cyber space tossing ideas around via email. Imagine the synergy they would create and the size of the audiences they could reach.
I’ve been surprised that Jesus, or someone like him, hasn’t turned up on a blog roll somewhere. When it comes to political communications Christ has been one of my more unlikely role models. Not only did he have a gift for the great phrase and image, as well as the political non-answer, but he was innovative in the techniques he used to get his message out. If the best natural amphitheatre was on a lake he would use a boat as a podium, and he virtually seems to have invented door-to-door sales, sending his disciples out to proselytize two by two.
But Christ’s biggest advantage was natural – he was born in Palestine, a country on the social, cultural and political tectonic plates between East and West. This amplified his message into most corners of the Roman, Greek and Eastern worlds. The beauty of the Internet is that every spot on the globe now has those natural advantages. Writing this in Brisbane Australia, it can potentially be read by, and influence, people in any country in the world. If Christ was around today, it wouldn’t have taken him three years to get his church onto the net, he’d be there now. Heck, three years is enough for a life time’s ministry.
Not that I would be super critical of the Church. One of the keenest sponsors of On Line Opinion has been the Catholic Church through Fr Michael Kelly and Church Resources, the publisher of a number of eJournals, such as Cathnews. I owe a lot to Mick for his support, and we all owe him because as the founder of Jesuit publications he is responsible for Eureka Street magazine. And I did notice the other day that you can receive weekly guidance via the ’net from that “A” list member of the media friendly liberal high priesthood – Bishop John Shelby Spong.

In my last blog entry I mentioned a Pentagon report on global warming. This was taken from the Guardian website and some have claimed the story misrepresented the actuality. Thanks to a lead from a reader I’ve got more info on the story. I don’t intend going into this in depth, but I will make a couple of points.
The actual report seems like a typical scenario exercise on the implications of global warming. Scenarios are used in futures exercises to get people thinking about possibilities, and are not predictive as such at all. In fact all consideration of the future is inherently speculative, because even speculating can affect the future.
However, organisations like the Pentagon do not do such things for fun and the exercise does indicate that some of the Pentagon’s denizens are thinking about this problem. As reasonably rational people concerned about the crucial issue of national defence in a fast changing world, they should be.
And so should the President of the US, instead of claiming that more science is needed before he’ll even start to do anything. Much of the most obvious responses to the prospect of global warming – like conserving fossil fuels, especially oil, developing energy conservation measures generally and establishing global crisis management structures – make sense anyway. As opposed to what the current Bush administration is doing.
So whatever the facts about this report (and the original Observer story may have skewed them somewhat), the significance of the Pentagon’s interest remains.
As for the actuality of global warming, there is strong argument that it may well be beyond ready predicability in that complex natural systems can quickly shift from one stable state to another with little apparent extra input. Thus we may not have the time most economists assume to get evidence on long term trends.
There is no doubt we are conducting a major experiment on the earth’s atmosphere in pumping all the pollutants into it and the oceans. The argument that we should ease off until we know better what it will do seems obviously valid to me.

On the basis of its last two election results, the most competent political administration in the country is the Beattie government. So why is it in so much trouble over a ten dollar bottle of wine?
The story so far, for those not in Queensland, is that Teresa Mullan press advisor to the new Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and former Playschool presenter Liddy Clark has been sacked because she took a bottle of vin very ordinaire into a Leichardt River Aboriginal community. This community is “dry” and there is a maximum $75,000 dollar fine for bringing alcohol into the community. The offending vehicle can also be confiscated.
Clark, Mullan, Dr Warren Hoey the Head of the Department and the new member for Cook, Jason O’Brien all flew into the community. The bottle never left the plane, but was left in pretty full view on a seat. Nothing may have happened except that a plane full of licensing inspectors landed just after the Minister’s plane and a baggage handler apparently felt it was his duty to tell them that there was a bottle of wine in their vicinity.
After that things took on a life of their own. Ms Mullan took the entire blame and was sacked. Interestingly, according to today’s Sunday Mail she was paid slightly more than twice the termination payment that she would have collected had she resigned. The Premier flew up to the community and apologized.
Yesterday Mullan changed her story after talking to her parents and finding that there could be a criminal trial. She says she feels “crucified” by the Premier, and is not prepared to commit perjury if the matter does go to trial. The revised story is that everyone on the plane knew the bottle was there and that she had told Rob Whiddon, Chief of Staff to the Premier, this. She says her Minister had also told the Premier that she knew the bottle was there. This is denied by the others and the Premier has referred the matter to the Crime and Misconduct Commission.
It’s possible the Minister and the Premier’s Chief of Staff could both go over this, yet I can’t get past the threshold question as to why anyone should be punished.
So, a law was broken. They are broken every day with no consequences to anyone. In trivial matters no one will report the matter or if they do the police will often not press charges. In many matters that do go to trial the judge does not record a conviction. One intention of this particular law is that inhabitants of the community should not be able to drink while living in the community. That was not thwarted by this action. Another intention is to discourage and punish boot-leggers. The Minister’s press advisor was not intending to sell the wine, so again, no substantive issue.
The only issue really seems to be whether the Minister was undermining her own legislation if she knew. I guess she was, but it seems to me that the legislation is overly punitive, so in a political sense it is something that could have been shrugged off. Anyway, it is little different from the Police Commissioner receiving a ticket for jay walking, or the Treasurer not filing a tax return on time – both events that have happened at different levels of Government in Australia with no real consequences for the transgressors.
It is certainly strange that in Queensland foster children can be sent back by the Families Department to carers who have abused them and infected them with STDs and no-one at any level is sacked, yet a minor infraction of an absurdly punitive and restrictive law risks the careers of three senior members of the government. If the Opposition has any political ability, when parliament resumes they should be shooting for the former Minister for Families Judy Spence, and her former Head of Department, Frank Peach as this issue brings them back in reach on much more serious matters.
Stay-tuned. This issue has a few more episodes to run.

President Bush must be getting sick of the Pentagon criticising him. Recently a Pentagon report argued that the War on Iraq would only expand global terrorism and create a quagmire the Americans might be stuck in for years. And now a Pentagon report has said Bush is dead wrong on global warming and must take it seriously.
The report was commissioned by Pentagon adviser Andrew Marshall, who was behind Rumsfeld’s new military policy and BMD (son of Star wars). It says Europe is heading for a snap freeze (this is presumably the cooling Gulf Stream argument) and that the world will go haywire as climactic disaster occurs. Nuclear conflict, mega-drought, famine and widespread rioting will occur. And all up, the threat of rising global instability outweighs the threat of global terrorism.
So there, Dubya, your own boys are telling you. Are you still going for the old ‘the science is not proven’ ploy?
Will President Kerry do something about global warming? If so, what exactly? Or will Bush pull some rabbit out of the hat (there are rumours that the Pakistanis captured Bin Laden, so maybe the Whitehouse is just waiting for the time of maximum impact to tell us) and win a second term? Could be a lot of Americans heading down our way to immigrate if that happens!
Look, this is ridiculous. The threat of global warming makes all the other problems of the world pale into insignificance. The de facto world leader and his all too eager subordinates around the world had better wake up, smell the coffee and get on with doing something about it. I know it is a new kind of problem, and very tricky, but they get paid enough. If they can’t take the heat, let them leave the global warming kitchen to some other cooks who might just have a few new recipes to try.
(Sorry about all the cliches – I just got carried away.)

Hmmm, this blogging thing is tricky. It was originally put forward (not so long ago at all – this is very much an infant sub-genre) as being sort of like a cross between a diary and an essay – more personal and provocative than an essay, but obviously not as honest or unstructured as a diary. The Online Opinion Blog is complicated again because it is part of a website that features short essays as the main contributions. Sometimes the difference between such a piece of writing and a blog entry is minimal.
I have to say that I have been having second thoughts about the value of blogging, at least for the blogger. It inevitably takes up takes time, which could be used in other ways. And it has to be kept reasonably up to date to keep readers interested. So it is fairly demanding. Furthermore, getting the style and approach right is not easy. For instance, earlier I tried a few more personalised blog entries, but the sense of personal exposure was unsettling, especially as you cannot assume the readers will respond with similar openness. To be personal is to set yourself up for a special sort of scrutiny and criticism, and the web is a very public space to do that.
The other problem is the need to write in a more informal, less rigorous way. This means the blogger will sometimes make assertions without providing supporting evidence (like my recent comment about conservatives – or at least conservatives like John Howard – still preferring women pregnant in the kitchen).
As a trained academic and author writing without a whole lot of qualifiers and supporting evidence makes me uncomfortable, but it would be simply impossible to write anything as a blogger if I didn’t take these short cuts. The other, more formal style protects the author, but as much academic text attests, it also tends to make for boring reading.
I will say that attempting to say things and make various points within these restrictions, knowing that critical responses – sometimes contributed in less than good faith – will likely occur, has been an interesting experience. It has reminded me that the price of comment is often misunderstanding or worse, but that that should not stop the endeavour to comment. After all, it is probably true to say that negative comments are more likely that positive ones, because the readers who agree or are neutral about what has been written will just say nod and move on. It takes some kind of emotion –like anger – to mobilise most of us to act, so disagreement is much more likely to generate a response. I suppose any journalist learns this reality early in their career.
One thing I do know is that the comments in my blog will differ markedly from the material constantly and uniformly put forward in the mass media, and I see no reason why we should just hand over new technology like the Internet to the same people who have so debased the fourth estate.

I have not been pulling my weight on this blog. Over the last month since the Queensland State election, Peter McMahon has blogged (cyber for “spawned”) twenty times and I have only blogged three. I have a number of excuses, but one is a beauty, in fact, not really an excuse at all. On the 25th of February I became a father again, and I think that counts for much more than 20 bloggings.
Harley Thomas Huesch (I’ll be adding the name “Young” when he is with me) was born in the Manning Base Hospital at Taree Wednesday last week. I wasn’t there at the time, but I was the next day. Taree is around seven hours drive from Brisbane, so timing arrivals at births is difficult.
This is not a position that I expected to find myself in at age 45. Harley was not a “planned event”, but he is now an important part of my life. I have never been married, de jure or de facto, to his mother, and never will be. He is an unlikely career occurrence for a church organist. But he has caused none of these things. Instead, they have happened to him.
Harley arrives at a time when we have become very aware of the problems that boys face in this society that we have constructed for ourselves. His mother is single. We know that this is statistically portentous for his future quality of life. Some years ago, I came across Christina Hoff Sommers “The War against Boys”, and published a link to it from On Line Opinion. I am troubled at the decline of the pre-and-adolescent male, and want both of my sons to achieve as well as any other person. This is more difficult for a child whose parents do not live together. For Harley it will be a challenge as his parents have never lived together. The challenge for me is to deal with the situation in a way that makes his life as good, if not better, than it could otherwise have been.
Harley and I can draw some comfort from my own family history. While baby boomers have been weaned on the myth of the nuclear family, my father was raised before the Great Depression at a time when marital relations were less straight-laced and certain than they became in the middle of last century. Not only was he the child of a broken marriage, but neither his mother nor his grandmother ever knew their fathers. Children will survive with proper nurturing, and as long as they know that the parents they have really care for them.
My own mother was a “grass widow” because Dad was always away at sea in his profession as a marine engineer. Growing up, this did not worry me, and it still doesn’t. There was the romance of hanging around the docks when the ship was in town, and the certainty that Dad cared for us. From childhood I remember nothing more precious than curling up with my sisters in Dad’s faintly acrid arms and listening while he extemporized stories about the children who lived in the mango tree in the backyard.
I trusted my father, and it was a trust that grew out of knowing that there was nothing that he wouldn’t have done for any of his children. At the same time I grew up in a house full most of the time with women – two sisters and a mother – where gender had few privileges. That’s why I’ll be spending a lot of time between here and Forster, where young Harley will be living for the while. Boys need their own Dad. So too do girls. Looks like Sophia and Libby will be spending some time on the road as well. Welcome to Australia Harley, you’ve got a bright future, and lots of love from Brisbane. Perhaps not the ideal world either of us would have wanted, but I’m sure we can extemporize a tune that a more perfect world would have muted.

There are some strange things going on right now that suggest that we may be entering a new phase of post-rational politics. If this is true, then celebrity will replace intellectual competence as the main political asset.
First, let us consider the most controversial movie in years, and its impact on popular culture. It is emerging more and more that the movie “The Passion of Christ” is a conscious intervention in western popular thought by Mel Gibson. Gibson, who is an ultra-conservative Catholic, stimulated and maintained an international publicity campaign to promote his film, which has been a surprise hit (given its lack of stars and the fact that it has subtitles, traditionally the kiss of death). The fact that it initially alarmed Jews may be accidental, but its intention to promote the most reactionary interpretation of the whole story of Christ and his death is increasingly clear. Some people are trying to pass this movie off as the ‘true’ story, an impression heightened by the ‘realism’ of the violence.
Second, there is the growing role of various actors and other celebrities active in US politics. In regard to the Democrats in particular, the important role of people like Martin Sheen (the TV US President), Ted Danson, Madonna and Michael Moore in supporting their particular presidential candidates is striking. Certain other actors – notably recent Oscar winners Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, Robbins’ partner Susan Sarandon, and the New York show-biz liberals led by Barbara Streisand – have also been consistent political activists.
Although these people are lefties, the combination of Hollywood and politics was a trend originally pushed hardest by the right. It should be noted that right-wing actors like John Wayne were constant supporters of reactionary courses. One of them, Ronald Reagan, even became US president. And of course more recently Arnold Swarzenegger became Governor of California, following his colleague Jesse Ventura’s example, and is talking about trying to run for US President one day if the constitution is amended.
Next to actors in the popularity and recognition stakes are pop stars. And indeed, musicians are also becoming more active, usually on the left and generally mobilised against President Bush (who has undoubtedly reenergised US politics with his ultra-right wing policies). The Dixie Chicks, who were blacklisted from radio networks for bad-mouthing Bush, are perhaps the most notorious example. Some musicians are taking part in getting out the vote campaigns. The fact that many people, and especially the poor, do not vote in US elections is a Republican mainstay.
But Hollywood and the movies are most important because image is the most powerful sensual stimulus. The timing of Gibson’s film is of course interesting. Certainly some Christian interests have hailed this film as initiating a new period of Christian evangelicalism, the film itself being a kind of audio-visual battering ram. In an increasingly post-literate world, will this movie become the standard text on Christ’s life and death? Given the focus on Islam of late, it suggests that Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisation’ thesis – in which religious conflict is central – looks ever more credible.
I suspect there is something even more profound at work. National politics is still one of the most important expressions of public culture, and ultimately of the nature of basic social relations. Increasingly it is devoid of genuine content, focusing instead on dramatic imagery and sound bites. These things are intended to appeal to the irrational, or subconscious, and not to the logical, rational mind.
This growing irrelevance of formal politics is possible because the most important processes of modern life are run increasingly by systems managers – economists, corporate managers, political spin-doctors, PR people of all kinds, etc. Indeed, there is a growing perception that politics is basically a show, and increasingly irrelevant to the nitty gritty of modern life. The attack on lobbyists and Washington insiders by Democrat presidential candidates reflects the problem, but few actually think anything can or will be done about it. The lobbyists most basically represent the triumph of money over democracy, and a fundamental weakening of what politics is supposed to be about.
(Oz politics suffers from similar problems, but not nearly as badly as the US. Lobbyists abound in Canberra, constantly cosying up to pollies with fake smiles and freebies. Pollies, who are often lonely and insecure people, are oddly susceptible to this sort of thing.)
While celebrities more and more enter onto the political stage, they are greatly assisted by the fact that politics is becoming both more boring and more like show biz. Very few pollies will concern themselves with the really important issues, exactly because they are so politically tricky. Much safer to stay behind the lines and let the mass media and if necessary the courts sort things out.
At the top politics is certainly more and more like show biz. Leaders and aspiring leaders have to sell a carefully thought out persona. In actuality, they are more and more like actors playing a part. Even Mark Latham, who seemed as much like and old-fashioned polly as anyone, has remade himself to suit media expectations. In the US this selling of the candidate as being ‘presidential’ has become the most salient aspect of the whole exercise.
It is as if the rational process of politics – finding the best compromise between competing claims on social resources – is being replaced by a contest between archetypes, which is what actors and pop stars are. In such a situation, people will vote on how much the candidates appeal to their sub-conscious, irrational selves, not according to policy or political principle.
Perhaps the sort of grass roots – or at least optic fibre – mass politics developed by Howard Dean will show the way to a new form of popular, participatory and genuinely representative politics, otherwise it really will become more and more like Oscar night in Hollywood.

Recently we here in the west have been treated to some exciting TV footage of rioting kids battling the thin blue line (as the talkback jocks like to call it) on hot summer nights. First there was the bloody running battle involving the cops and some hundreds of kids on Australia Day, then a few weeks ago there was a riot down at the Scarborough beach, and this long weekend there were two incidents in consecutive nights, one in the hills and one at the beach (nice dispersal, that). Cops have been going down like ninepins under barrages of flying objects.
The TV showed cops, male and female, some in riot gear, taking on kids, male and female, some as young as 12, who were throwing anything at hand and jeering at the sometimes helpless cops.
Although the police eventually got the upper hand, these events indicate some very disturbing realities about contemporary life in Oz. And although it is kids involved in the WA riots, the parallels with the Redfern riots should be clear.
The fact is that we just do not have enough police to contain serious outbreaks of mob violence, and we will never have unless spending priorities of governments were to greatly change – with say, two or three times as much being spent on police. In modern society we rely on a general acceptance of ideas like public order, and not actual police force, to curtail mass violence. But increasingly, it seems, the kids just won’t go along with this.
The riots in Perth were not caused by any one thing (unlike the riot in Redfern), they just occurred when enough kids were gathered together with nothing much to do. In the latest cases it was party gatecrashing that led to the incidents. An appearance by the police is not necessary to start the violence. There is always the simmering hostility of young males to kick it off, often directed at each other. And of even more concern, it seems that when enough kids congregate, they tend to directly confront community authority, and in particular the police, with aggressive behaviour.
There are a number of worrying trends behind this development. First, the moral authority of the police is rock bottom as far as the kids are concerned. Maybe it is because they have seen too much obvious corruption (how many Royal Commissions have we had into police forces lately?) or the apparently arbitrary way youth in particular are dealt with by the legal system. Or maybe it is because they increasingly question the social values behind police authority. After all, the main message they get from business, the media, sports, religion and politics is ‘get in and get your share, no matter what’. Lie, cheat, do whatever it takes, but get yours. Public morality definitely comes a poor second to personal opportunism these days, and when you are part of a crowd you can get away with whole lot more.
Another factor is drugs, and especially alcohol. There is a culture of binge drinking and drug taking in our kids that no one wants to seriously consider – the implications of this self-destructive behaviour are just too confronting. It is bad enough when we consider the long-term effects of these various potent psychotropic substances on young brains. Of more immediate concern is the behavoural effect when these kids drink or use drugs to get wiped out, and then lack enough personal control to modify extreme behaviour. Some of the drugs, like speed, positively generate hyper-activity and some imbue the user with near super-human strength, for a short while at least. All these things are conducive to reckless and violent behaviour.
This tendency to mob violence should be addressed at the roots. Sure, reforming the police forces to make them less corrupt and more genuinely authoritative is a good idea. But most importantly these kids, like the Aborigines in Redfern, need hope that life can be meaningful, and they need to be shown that you can have fun without getting off your face. They need to be brought in from their isolation and made a valuable part of the community.
An acceptance of community values depends on a belief that one can share in the benefits of community life. It is a worrying fact that more and more kids, like the inhabitants of Redfern, do not feel this engagement with the community and community values. The police cannot keep order by themselves when crowds gather – the individuals in those crowds must each embody the ideals of the community and discipline themselves. So we’d better come up with some genuine and inclusive values before we have real trouble on our hands.

How amusing to see the government getting so concerned about the future of Oz’s population all of a sudden. Apparently, they have found out about this thing called ‘demography’ and are now all excited about it. “Demography is destiny” is the latest catch phrase, as if it was all some simple linear process of population growth equals economic growth equals prosperity for all.
The fact is that the tendency of population growth in affluent countries to flatten out is just about the only hope we have on this planet, due to the inaction of governments on a whole raft of vital environmental issues. And just as well since affluent countries use up disproportionate amounts of diminishing global resources. Last time I looked, an average Aussie used about 30 times as much of the material resources as a person in a poor country.
This population trend, when the hitherto exponential growth curve begins to flatten, is largely due to the decision by parents to have fewer children so they can spend more on the children they have, education etc being so important to success these days. It is also due to the decision by more and more people to not marry and/or not have children at all. In both cases this trend represents the growing independence of women in society, thanks largely to birth control technology.
Conservatives, of course, hate all this. They might not like to admit it, but really they want good old patriarchy, with women pregnant in the kitchen. Our current PM and his main offsiders like Tony Abbot try to pretend otherwise, but their discomfit with the greatly improved condition of women over the last few decades is obvious.
Anyway, whatever the current government comes up with as a solution to this supposed problem, no doubt it will have little to do with redistribution of the existing wealth and power. Globally, the sane thing would be to use the divergence in population growth in rich and poor countries to spread the wealth, through both immigration and aid to support population control in poor countries. This would be the best way to optimise economic growth, social satisfaction and political stability.
And finally, am I the only one who sees the irony of a government all excited about the growing proportion of elderly so negative about allowing immigration by people with large, young families from certain poor countries. Some of these hopeful immigrants are so desperate to come to Oz and work that they risk their lives in flimsy boats. But they are of course mostly non-white and have strange customs…
But what really gets me about this sudden discovery of the future is that this same government has steadfastly refused to see the much more imminent problems caused by environmental trends like salinity and climate change. Given the present situation, I make one prediction about the future: in twenty years Oz will not be obsessed with the demographic problem, it will be focussed on how to survive in a world struggling with serious climatic variation and rapidly declining fossil fuels, surrounded by nations grown tired of our selfish, introspective ways.