I recently wrote a piece for ‘OnLine Opinion’ criticising various aspects of our parliamentary practice, among other things. One of the points I made is that there are too many lawyers in parliament and parliament operates too much like a courtroom.
The fundamentally legalistic nature of parliament hit me one day when I was watching business in the senate while working in Parliament House some years ago. They still wore wigs in those days, so the comparison was more obvious. But as I stared at the president in his high chair, the bewigged Senate officers and all the polished wood and red leather furniture, it suddenly hit me that the model for all this was a courtroom. And no tatty local court, either – this was a high court, the sort distinguished QC’s hung out in. Then I looked at the main parliamentary leaders, and sure enough they were almost all lawyers, strutting and talking just as they might in a courtroom.
Anyway, not long after I was having dinner with my boss and a few other Labor senators in the Parliament House members dining room (renowned for its service, but not the food – and never eat the crustaceans!). At our table was a senator from Tasmania, whose name I forget. He was very distraught, almost at the point of tears. He was unhappy, he informed us, because he found it almost impossible to speak in the senate chamber. His voice would just dry up and he could hardly croak out a few words.
He told us he was used to public speaking, and had spoken before hostile mobs as a trade unionist. So why, he lamented, was he so dumbstruck in the senate?
The answer, as I pointed out to him, was that it was all about class and privilege. As a working class boy, manual worker and trade unionist he was familiar with, and comfortable with, the rough and tumble of that life where people spoke openly and things were plain and simple. As a senator he was suddenly thrust into a world of intricate rules and detail, of privilege and subtle power relations reflected in the very physical surroundings. Coming from the background he did – albeit the working class roots of the ALP – he was a fish out of water.
Most new parliamentarians come to terms with this situation sooner or later, but some never do. Those who have been trained as lawyers have the least trouble, because they immediately recognise the trappings, physical and behavioural, of a law court, their natural home.
Now just why our peoples’ house should be so orientated towards the experiences and tastes of the privileged few is a good question. This is not just ‘good taste’ we are talking about, but a whole set of cues – physical and behavioural – that assert one form of experience as being superior to others.

Even the pro-Bush US media, such as Fox News, is having difficulty disguising the reality that the Bush Presidency is in desperate political trouble.
The recent signs of economic improvement, including the hitherto depressing jobs outlook, have not lifted President Bush’s re-election prospects.
Perhaps even more significantly, nor has the “flip flop” policy stances of the uncrowned Democrat challenger, Senator John Kerry.
Bush is facing a Democrat challenger about whom there are many doubts and concerns, even in his own Party.
But the latest opinion polls indicate that Kerry has taken a significant lead over Bush. At least one poll was taken immediately after there was a raft of good economic news, including on the jobs front.
Clearly the US electorate is desperately concerned about Iraq, and why shouldn’t it be.
The military casualties are greater than at any time during the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The American promise of “democracy and freedom” is not only further away than ever, it looks increasingly impossible to achieve.
The rhetoric coming out of the Administration, notably from the ardent pro-war Vice President and Defence Secretary, is clearly not resonating with the US electorate.
Bush did not help himself by spending the Easter period at his Texas ranch, again giving the impression he is not the hands-on Chief Executive the American people want their President to be.
Perhaps the only recent development favourable to Bush is Senator Kerry’s recent comment that a Kerry Administration would remain in Iraq for as long as necessary – whatever that means.
I watched the Bush press conference yesterday. He holds these media gatherings very rarely, and it was not hard to see why. It was a faltering, inadequate performance, one that will hardly re-assure a doubting electorate and very troubled families of US servicemen and women.
It is not too late for Bush to turn around the political mood. He has a substantial campaign war chest, and incumbency is an advantage in presidential elections.
But there is one problem – the Iraq position is crucial to his re-election, and, like it or not, his capacity to manage, or correct, the situation in Iraq appears to be diminishing almost daily.
Sending in more troops might be necessary, but it also might be very unpopular.
Comparisons between the Vietnam War and Iraq are questionable.
But George W Bush is looking, and sounding, very much like the main political “victim” of Vietnam, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Bush won’t withdraw from the race like Johnson did, but, like Johnson he may well find himself an onlooker, rather than the central participant, come Inauguration Day next January.

It was another bizarre performance by George W Bush when he gave one of his rare live speeches to explain what the hell was going on in Iraq and maybe even something about the 911 commission. Or that seemed to be the idea, anyway. What he actually did was read the lines off prepared notes like some primary school kid having trouble with the big words. His read, stop and stare technique is peculiar in the extreme. Some time ago I read a claim by some media type that he was getting his words through an earpiece – that would at least explain his strange stop-start delivery style.
As for the questions, he just didn’t answer some and ranted on with others. When I recall the great speeches of JFK, the competent dissembling of Nixon, or even the folksy chat of Reagan, I fear for the office of the US Presidency. Surely no one dumber than Bush Jr could ever become president?
After four years of crisis and Bush & Co’s rampant incompetence, the US will welcome John Kerry’s dullness as a soothing balm. Even if the economy goes OK, I think Bush is cactus, and he will go down in history with Millard Filmore and a few other presidential oddities, eliciting the question: ‘What was that all about?’.
And this growing mess in Iraq and upheaval in US-British-Australian intelligence/military circles is all bad news for Howard too. The Howard government has politicised the intelligence services and even the military to an unprecedented degree, and now some pigeons are coming home to roost. It was Howard who ended the supposed separation of activities between public servants and politicians, so he has to wear the problem bubbling up now. These aren’t lefty malcontents coming out of the woodwork but career soldiers and intelligence analysts. Its Howard’s own hyper-patriotism that’s biting him on the butt now.
And surely Howard wishes he’d replaced his totally inept foreign minister some time ago. Alexander Downer stumbles on like the idiot nephew that must be found a sinecure in the family business for appearances’ sake. He’s living proof that these political dynasties are a bad idea – the original talent just leaks away sooner or later, leaving the name alone to suffer more and more ignominy. I’m not a huge fan of Rudd, but it will be nice to have an adult representing Oz to the rest of the world again.
The Iraq/intelligence thing will only get worse for Howard, and all Latham has to do is mumble platitudes and watch the action. The much-vaunted Government advantage in security issues is diminishing daily, and judging from the body language (watch the eyebrows), Howard knows it.

I’ve been thinking about time for one of my coming books. Like so many genuinely important things, we pay very little attention to it in our modern society. There just isn’t enough time…
Before we invented the idea of continuous, linear time, human societies tended to think in terms of time cycles. Interestingly, one of the more famous such circular ‘calendars’, the Mayan, is due to be completed, and presumably start again, in about eight years. Ultimately, of course, even the ‘big bang’ theory of creation suggests time cycles, a kind of fundamental universal pulse.
One of the good things about circular time is that it matches our personal experience of life. Each of us who lives long enough goes through the same basic stages, or life cycle: birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, death. Each of these stages brings with it challenges, triumphs and failures. They make us what we are as individuals, and ultimately our society what it is.
In so-called primitive societies they recognised the fact that we all go through similar stages, and that some go through certain extreme experiences. They constructed a whole series of rituals to mark these stages, and give them personal, social and spiritual meaning. Birth and death, in particular, were marked with a seriousness that is rarely matched in modern society. They understood that a birth was significant to the whole community, not just the immediate family as is the case now. And they knew that death was similarly important, and that the dead had to be properly mourned. Our society is hopelessly inadequate in its treatment of the inevitable fact of death. The best we can come up with – not entirely useless – is ‘counselling’ by professionals or a few hackneyed words from some book or by some worthy as the dead are laid to rest.
As we all find out sooner or later, death and grieving are BIG issues for us as individuals, and should be for society as a whole. Losing someone close is a very big deal, personally and socially. We not only lose a person, we lose a central relationship as well. This loss brings about structural changes to our lives, psychological if nothing else. For instance, consider the loss of a parent: as someone put it to me recently, ‘When you lose a parent, it matters because suddenly you realise that you are now on the front line.’ However you felt personally relating to that parent, their death has great and unavoidable symbolic relevance. Such a death must entail a process of appropriate grieving.
Grieving is a long process, taking months or years to be fully worked through. In a society that demands instant results, we simply don’t have time for such stuff. Someone who can’t ‘move on’ and get back to work and life as usual faces medication or other more or less subtle punishment for their failure. Losing a close one is one of the most important things that will happen to us as individuals, but we give it scant attention and minimal time.
Some of the ancient rituals involve transition from one life stage to another. One important transition was from adolescence to adulthood. With girls this often took a form that related specifically to the onset of puberty, or potential motherhood, which could be physically specific. In boys it related more to the acceptance of a social role, usually adult responsibility. Sometimes this took the form of a painful or frightening ordeal, the point being that the boy had to show his capacity to face these things and through such fortitude gain recognition as a man.
Considering the obvious problem we have with young males now, our failure to recognise the need to mark the transition – and thus identify the need to change behaviour – is clear. Take our footballers, so much in the news lately. Physically powerful men, they all too often lack any real sense of personal responsibility and have consciences more like ten year olds than adults.
Our lives are completely out of balance these days. We enjoy a very few years before we are saturated with information on how we should behave, look and buy. Contemporary capitalism recognises even toddlers as growing consumers, and the adolescent is now king in terms of mass marketing. Then we become productive workers for few decades (although this working stage is getting longer), and then we join the parasitic elderly, no good to anyone in a society that decreasingly values life experience.
The reconstruction of time into linear form has generated a society that is remarkably productive, albeit at great and ultimately unsustainable cost to the natural world. But with all this wealth, this social experience creates an ever-narrower space for us to live out our lives. There is little time for meaningful things, and more and more time for trivial experiences like shopping, eating out and being ‘entertained’. A return to a structure of time that suits us as biological, psychological, social and spiritual beings, not just workers and consumers, seems only rational.
Time as we know it now – defined as a continuous, linear process – is essentially a social construction. Earlier human societies, which centred on the natural cycles of sun and moon, understood time differently. Linear time as a concept and experience is mostly the result of millenarian religion and is sustained by accelerating technological change, but it has a minimal place for the individual human life, which is our existential essence. Most of us know this, we endure the mismatch, and we do not find great personal contentment however much wealth we acquire. The basic construction of time itself is not suited to the fact of the usual human life span and its various changes. We need to reassert the basic need for a conception of time that meets the changing needs of biological organisms with complex psychological, social and spiritual aspects, which is what we happen to be.

(on behalf of Darlene)
Rugby league has long revelled in the ultra-masculinity celebrated by the communities that most support it. Like another example of working-class commitment, the trade union movement, the game has also valued mateship and group solidarity.
While comradeship and team spirit are valuable tools when in competition or conflict, they can become pathological and retardative, as evidenced by rape allegations against the Canterbury Bulldogs and revelations about the misuse of women as a perverse quasi-bonding exercise (can’t these blokes sit by a campfire singing folk songs or form book clubs or something).
After years of this behaviour being glorified or tolerated by a misogynistic culture, footballers are finally being brought to book for their actions, but questions remain about the level of dedication clubs have to challenging the beliefs that lead to sexual violence.
That clubs “still don’t get it” (i.e. the link between sexist beliefs and sexual violence) partly drove protestors, both female and male, to picket City Rowers, where the second heat of the Miss Jim Beam Bronco 2004 competition was held recently.
According to Gillian Brannigan, University of Queensland Women’s Rights Organiser, “(the Broncos) had the chance to pick up the ball and run with it”. Unfortunately, in promoting an event that objectifies women and, as Brannigan points out, mixes football culture with young men and alcohol, they fumbled rather than scored.
The defensive attitude of CEO, Bruno Cullen, to the protest and the assertion by Jim Beam’s Marketing Manager that “there is no association between (the competition) and the current issues surrounding the football codes” shows these companies will continue to use archaic activities to sell their products and think, perhaps genuinely, that sexual violence happens in isolation from the attitudes of all teams and the general community.
They might like to consider that if contestants had sought to connect with players in another context they might have been dismissed as “scrags”, as one woman who has accused members of the Bulldogs of attacking her has been.
Unsurprisingly, The Sunday Mail chose to ignore the broader issues raised by the protest, preferring to reduce it to an expression of female “jealousy”. The inference was that feminism is merely about women fulminating, “if only I was pretty and popular with the chaps, I wouldn’t be concerned about issues such as wage disparities or the dearth of women in management”. Such a suggestion is offensive to every woman, and is only the latest in a long line of attempts to deride a coherent set of ideas by attacking its adherents.
There has been a lot of talk lately about a “crisis of masculinity” and young boys needing male role models so they will learn how to be men. The inherent conservatism and essentialism of much of this discussion makes it difficult to engage with. Nevertheless, as some boys look up to rugby league players, it behooves teams like the Broncos to make a greater effort towards encouraging real equality than chucking a few prizes at one woman. This sort of equality acknowledges women’s full humanity and does not divide them into “scrags”, potential models and the rest.

THE unprecedented publicity Passion of the Christ has given to the Easter story provides a unique opportunity for the Christian churches to use this Easter to begin the reversal of the worrying decline in attendances, and, with few exceptions, church membership.
But how many of our churches, and our church leaders, will take up this opportunity? Or perhaps even more importantly, how many know how to skilfully use the multi-media resources available today?
I was brought up in an era in which the Easter, and Christmas, messages from the Anglican and Catholic Archbishops of Brisbane were almost compulsory viewing or listening. In recent times, the coverage of these messages has been minimal at best.
One Anglican Diocese where attendances are on the rise is Sydney. There is no doubt the high profile, and controversial, Archbishop, Dr Peter Jensen, has contributed to this, even though I for one am troubled by his intolerance on some key issues.
Equally, the outspoken, and equally controversial, leadership of George Cardinal Pell has given the Catholic Church in Sydney a higher public profile.
Passion of the Christ ought to be a marketing dream for churches struggling for relevance in an increasingly secular society. It also ought help balance the appalling image some churches have gained as a result of the mishandling of child sex abuse issues over a long period.
Our churches do much good in the community. Nowhere is this good more evident than it is in the care and support clergy, and laity, offer to the sick and suffering, those facing death, and their families. But all the good that is being done never receives anywhere near the coverage the evil acts of abusers do.
The challenge for the churches this Easter is to add the triumph of the resurrection, and its message of hope for Christians, to the passion and death of Christ that today is probably thought about more than it has ever been, even among non-believers and those with tenuous links with Christianity and the Church.
The doubts about the Churches fuelled by sex abuse and other issues remain. But the chance to rebuild the standing of the Churches in the community, and the life of the nation, has certainly been enhanced by Passion of the Christ.
In the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Centre outrage, I noticed a rise in church attendances, especially by young people. But the highly unfavourable coverage given to the mishandling of sex abuse by the churches undoubtedly turned some of those searching for answers, and even some regular worshippers, away.
It will be interesting to see whether this Easter attendances rise, and, perhaps, just as importantly, whether the secular media give the Easter story wider coverage than normal – and that would not be hard to do!
It will be even more interested in how church leaders articulate the Easter message – whether they make the most of a unique opportunity, or fail the test once again.

It wasn’t good reportage but it was probably accurate commentary, when the AM reporter said this morning that the latest Newspoll (reported in The Australian) shows that the Mark Latham’s satisfaction rating as Opposition Leader has “peaked”.
There’s been a 14 point fall in Latham’s satisfaction rating as well as a 5 point fall in those who prefer him as Prime Minister. John Howard now leads Latham on the second question by 11 percent.
Latham’s satisfaction rating was always unrealistically high and unlikely to stay where it was. There is nothing remarkable in the fall. For an Opposition Leader he is still doing extraordinarily well in terms of personal popularity. Despite the media’s tendency to interpret political events as a struggle between personalities, the party vote is much more indicative of the real state of the parties. This shows Labor in a landslide winning position with 53% and the Coalition on 47%.
We are conducting a focus group on Latham this evening so I will have a better idea tomorrow morning why his approval has slumped. (We’ll be conducting other groups on his leadership and if you want to be considered for participation, fill in the questionnaire at www.ozelections.com).
However, one should not accept the simplistic assumption that the fall is a result of Latham’s decision to bring our troops home from Iraq by Christmas – polls do not generally reflect reactions to those sorts of issues this quickly. It may just be a result of gravity on an abnormally high honeymoon score. Much of Latham’s “approval” rating was actually driven by a low “disapproval” rating coupled with a very low “neutral” rating. There is no way anyone announcing policies can maintain a sub 20% disapproval rating and negligible neutrals, so something has to give.
It is also likely to be a result of the “drag” that is created when voters start thinking about what a party will do in government. Voters will react to Latham as Opposition Leader in a totally different way than they will to him as Prime-Minister-in-waiting, and a high approval rating will actually speed this change in perception. Their perceptions become less emotional (and susceptible to “warm fuzzies” like reading to your kids) and more analytical (what’s in it for me?).
Another factor is likely to be the fact that for the last two weeks Latham has been “off message”. Most people may believe that they were misled about the war in Iraq, but they still believe that Howard is the best person to handle this issue. By getting caught up in the Iraq issue Latham actually ended up playing Howard’s game. No matter how well he plays, his end of the field is tilted, and he cannot win. By engaging in a debate about troop withdrawals Latham denied himself the opportunity to argue about health and education, the issues where the field tilts his way.
I’ll let you know what our participants say tonight. They might have another view, and afterall, they are the only ones who are experts in this field.

The ABC carried a news report today that Bill Gates is no longer the richest man in the world. He has been overtaken by Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea. Kamprad is worth $70 Billion Australian and Gates only $62.
Remember when Abba was the biggest export earner for Sweden? Volvo was always rated up there too. Well, times change, and so do fortunes. Now it is the turn of Mr Kamprad to impress the world with the Swedish ability to make world-beating products.
At 77 he has waited long enough, (which makes you wonder what Gates will be worth in 18 years time when he turns 77). Perhaps there is need for a new metric here. It hardly seems fair to Gens X, Y and Z not to mention us baby boomers that these old guys can just sit back on compound interest and fry the rest of the competition. Perhaps a tiered approach to competition – those under 50 and those over? Or an index that combines internal rate of return with size of fortune?
I always thought that Ikea products were basically cheap, but I’ve had to think again. Mr Kamprad has made his fortune from just 180 stores worldwide. I’d also always thought that the Swedish system, pin-up of the social democrats, was much more egalitarian than our own, but maybe not. Sweden has average GDP per head of $26,000 US while Australians have $26,900, so we’re very comparable on average. Our richest Australian is Kerry Packer with an estimated $5.5 Billion, which is enough to get the left frothing at the mouth about vertical equity, but there’s a hell of a lot more verticality in Mr Kamprad’s $70 Bill. Kerry has wealth equal to the annual per capita GDP of 156,208 of us, while Kamprad’s wealth is equal to the annual average per capita GDP of 2,038,462 Swedes, or about one-quarter the population.
The Swedish television station SVT2 puts the increase in Kamprad’s wealth down to a mere currency effect – the US dollar goes down, the Swedish Kroner goes up, and hey presto a fortune is made. Very modest of them, and illustrative of the inferiority complex that many in the world have to the US. It’s more likely that the US dollar has been over valued for quite some time and that Kamprad should have overtaken Gates some years ago.
Where does all this lead? I’m not sure. Perhaps to computers that you buy at the store in pieces and take home along with an allen key and assemble with the help of your family and an A4 page of instructions?

Direct elect republicans and others ought to be watching Lord Mayor Campbell Newman very closely. He is likely to provide a model for what a popularly elected President could do at his most powerful, and he’s just met his worst nightmare.
Tall, blond, urbane, and a talented artist, Councillor David Hinchliffe, is Labor’s new leader in Brisbane City Hall and in a position to frustrate some of Newman’s ambitions.
The Liberal Party has not handled the Brisbane City Council result well, possibly because they seem to think they won. They didn’t. They have 10 councillors out of 27 with Labor holding the balance of power. Because they won the Lord Mayoral vote they have ensured that their successful candidate will be there at the scene of the crime to chair the committees and cut the ribbons, but no more.
If they want to win the next BCC election they need to have some genuine, or manufactured, arguments with the Labor majority which will bring voters on side with them. If Maureen Hayes had continued as Labor leader this was probably only a matter of time. Hinchliffe is a different proposition.
The new Deputy Mayor’s approach can be easily shown using the following quotes from the CM (not available on line).

“Labor, he said, would agree to Mr Newman’s plan to change the transfer fee, ‘but of course he has to fill the $4.5 million pothole that that will leave in the budget’.
‘He promised to halt the rollout of new bus lanes and review existing bus lanes – done!’ Cr Hinchliffe said.
‘We will support new pedestrian bridges. They are Liberal policy and they were part of our Riverwalk plan – agreed!'”

The paper also said:

“The Labor Party said yesterday it would support the plan [Newman’s plan to build five tunnels] ‘if it stacked up’ and urged Mr Newman to seek financial input from the Federal Government.”

So, if it’s Labor policy – he’s all in favour – if not, he will put strict hurdles into place and try to involve Liberal Governments at other levels in it so that if it doesn’t get up Newman won’t be able to blame him, or a state Labor government.
Newman is up against it with Hinchliffe, which begs a question – why wasn’t he the ALP Lord Mayor rather than Tim Quinn?

This week’s brawling in national politics over Iraq has firmly focussed attention on the leadership issue. Labor has placed all its eggs in the Latham basket; the Coalition is increasingly edgy over whether Howard still has the goods, or whether they should switch to Costello.
I have been giving Latham the benefit of the doubt in my writing. He has real ability, but mostly he is the alternative to another term of conservative government.
In my view the Liberals under Howard have become completely subservient to the global corporate agenda on economic issues, the Bush administration on foreign policy, and local reactionism on socio-cultural matters. As such, they are rapidly undermining national sovereignty, stifling traditional social progressivism, and promoting mono-cultural chauvinism. They are strangling all that is best about Australia, and foreclosing on socio-political alternatives as the global context more and more demands the opposite.
In a number of essays in OLO and elsewhere, I argued that the ALP is in crisis and needs basic reform. I wrote that any leader must take on this task as a priority, or the undemocratic and corrupt operations of the ALP along with the dearth of genuine talent will bring it undone.
However, it is clear that is reform will not happen soon. It is just not on the radar. Instead, more stories of factional infighting, branch stacking and the usual personality conflicts float about.
It is because I increasingly lack confidence about the capacity of the ALP to reform itself into a 21st century institution that I have backed Latham and his strong – some would say reckless – leadership style. But if he blows it, Labor faces the real threat of political irrelevance. Since the Greens are finally learning some political savvy, Labor faces actual competition for the non-right/conservative vote in the ‘third force’ in Australian politics – the Greens, the Democrats, independents, and possibly a remnant One Nation.
Latham’s leadership style is risky, as we have seen this week. But it is a model that has been tried with some success in the corporate world. The argument is that as the core activity (or organisational role) becomes more uncertain, the leader creates a corporate culture around his or her own personality. Beneath this institutional identity, relatively autonomous units get on with the actual work.
Now whether Latham can pull of the leadership role, and whether Labor then has enough talent to back him up in government, are both unknowns. At least politics is back on the front pages, but it would be better if it was a more positive debate going on. The problem is, I just can’t see this happening under John Howard’s leadership.