Election 2013 - is there Life Under Abbott?

Why Labor and the Left Lost the Unlosable Election

Labor and the Left lost.

World heritage areas and national parks are no longer safe, marine reserves may be repealed, environmental protections will be gutted, renewable energy will be targeted in favour of coal, climate science has been junked, the Great Barrier Reef is in jeopardy; chainsaws are revving up for a final assault on Tasmania’s forest strongholds. Environmentalists and other truth speakers will be purged from the civil service.

Election night - Abbott wins the election for the Tories

This should have been the unlosable election for progressives. Under a Labor government Australia weathered the GFC better than any other nation in the OECD. We kept a AAA credit rating. We tackled carbon and the sky didn’t fall in, costs didn’t skyrocket and our industries didn’t close. In fact lots of people got jobs in renewable energy and our superfunds invested in them. True, Labor was taking water over 'boat people' but then Labor Prime Minister Kevin, in a tactically brilliant move, pulled the rug out from under Abbott and sent them all the PNG. So why did Abott win?

 

The talking heads have dissected every tactical error in the Labor campaign but ignored the deeper issues. As someone whose social circle includes political candidates for both the Greens and Family First; my lesbian neighbours, the politically correct, Liberal voting business men, and conservative evangelicals, I would like to offer an explanation.

Basically, Australian’s don’t like Wowsers. In the early days of settlement (OK invasion for those on the Left), we had Wowsers. They were usually religious people who harboured a great personal horror at the thought that someone somewhere might be having a good time. They preached against drinking, whoring and gambling, and exhorted husbands to be faithful. In short, they were regarded as a pain the arse.

No one listens to religious people much in Australia any more but nature abhors a vacuum and the Left has rushed to fill it. Let me put it this way:

What if urban working class blue collar red neck Australia doesn’t want multiculturalism - or at least object to the wholesale taking over of suburbs by defined ethnic groups? What if many Australians don’t want gay marriage? What if people actually want the freedom to speak their mind without being reported on, fined, reprimanded, or sacked? What if people don’t want homosexuality promoted as a life style choice through the school system? What if most people deep down would prefer Caucasions to remain a statistical majority? What if people wanted recidivist sex offenders jailed for life or shot? What if most Australians just don’t want more refugees or other migrants flooding into the poorer parts of crowded cities? What if some migrants' cultural values (wife burning and clitorectomy for example) are not in-fact compatible with our values? What if some people think that being a mother is as valid as being an employee? What if we all did become human at some time prior to passing through the birth canal? Is it OK to encourage mothers to have their babies instead of aborting them? What if closing down an entire industry in the top-end and pissing off a well-armed and hungry nation of more than 200 million people to satisfy some animal rights activists wasn’t very smart?  What if some people are really worried about their teenage kids if drugs are legalised? Are people who hold those views bad people?

According to the Left they are. And that’s why the Left lost.

It’s not so much that the educated middle classes have a different set of values from most Aussies. It is that they are utterly condescending and disparaging in the way they put their values forward. Forget dialogue. Forget respect. Having received an electoral thumping the Greens have just discovered that being ‘right’ doesn’t get you elected, being popular does. Forgot to listen - whoops!

The majority of Australians would relate to most if not all of what I just wrote. To them it’s common sense. For them there is a real sense that we are losing our country, losing our morals, and losing our way. Who is ‘right’ and whether these things are objectively true is beside the point.

To make the divide greater those who implement policy seldom have to live with the consequences of it. Blue collar workers have no choice but to live with, or be pushed out by, migrants with whom they compete for jobs. The latte set don’t have to put up with ethnic gangs, are safe in their suburbs, and would never send their kids to public schools filled with ethnic students. When the Northern Territory cattle industry was decimated no-one in the Australian Public Service lost their job.

This divide climaxed recently with the proposal by human rights lawyer and refugee advocate Julian Burnside that Australia’s entire refugee intake should be housed in the Island State of Tasmania. He reasoned that Tasmania started out as one big penal colony so why not send all of Australia’s refugee boat arrivals there? We are talking anywhere up to fifty thousand traumatised people in a State of half a million centred around two large towns. Having dropped that bomb shell Julian flew home to his wealthy urban life. Hmmm. Didn’t seem to have occurred to him that Tasmanians may not want to become again another vast penal colony, or that the social fabric is already stretched, or that we would need to build a whole new hospital, or that we might have spent a hundred years trying to break free from the past.

Tamania is home to many refugees from many places, as well as economic migrants like my parents who emigrated from the UK. Migrants are a welcome and valuable part of our community. There are practical limits though to any society's capacity to absorb large numbers of people from other cultures. Julian is entitled to his views – it’s just that he doesn’t live here and he didn’t ask anyone.  See here.

Not to be outdone local Greens leader Nick McKim then rushed off to his Party to endorse Julian’s suggestion as party policy. That’s OK, it’s just that he is a member of Cabinet and a leader in a coalition government that is ‘on the nose’ and, um, he didn’t consult with the community first.

So where to from here? If we want to build a civil society, whether from the left or the right we need to stop lecturing and start building bridges. We need to care as much about boorish beer swilling blue collar working people as we do about refugees. It’s going to be tough. The Green movement is going to have to abandon the Greens and their social agenda and campaign again as a-political patriotic Australians for the environment. The Left are going to have to BBQ some sacred cows and the right are going to have to grow up and realise that the 'market' isn't going to solve our problems on its own. The market is after all about maximising private profit which is not a benevolent activity.

The Greens can represent the far far left if they want to, but in so doing they need to accept the reality that eighty per cent of Australians will never vote for them. However eighty per cent of Australians still care about the environment and about climate change. Right now Australia needs a movement for the environment from across the political spectrum, not just a manifestation of the social left which is today's environmental movement.

Tag line: Julian Burnside Tasmanian refugee proposal, asylum seeker policy, Christine Milne election, Tony Abbott climate change, Labor election 2013, secondary boycott laws, SLAPP, Greens human rights, gay marriage, marriage equality,

Back to the Future – Post Modernism and Gay Adoption

If society were based around human wholeness what would it look like?

I write this article in response to the commentary generated by my posts on gay marriage. It would be easy to have a shouting match which reveals nothing more than the fact that there is a collision of world views which, like giant icebergs in the ocean, sometimes bump up against one-another, their curious shapes colliding at the corners. The corners are an odd assortment of wedge issues. Gay adoption is one of these.

Really it’s about post modernism; whether human society is something we can invent, or whether there are some things inherent and innate that we can’t or shouldn’t change. Is there a plumb line for what it means to be human?

We can look from an evolutionary perspective to simians. Homosexuality occurs in simians to varying extents. Indeed I have been corrected on, and surprised by, the extent to which it occurs across numerous species in the wild. I have not done an exhaustive review to find out whether or not gay simian couples habitually raise young but if anyone has observed this they are probably describing an exceedingly rare event. Penguins and black swans often do form gay couples who raise young. What significance is seen in this probably depends on your world view. I suggest that raising a chick to be a swan is very different to raising a human baby to adulthood.

We can look from the perspective of the world’s great religious writings. This is a reasonable thing to do because, whether or not you believe them to be inspired, they do incorporate thousands of years of human experience and understanding. The Abramic religions do not countenance gay adoptions. I know of no religion that does, but someone with greater learning may enlighten us.

Every society makes provision for adoption – usually as a familial or tribal obligation to care for orphans. Other societies have variously tolerated, celebrated, or suppressed homosexuality. I know of none that tolerated homosexual adoption. Maybe there is an anthropologist out there who has found one. Again, they will be describing something very rare.

Perhaps this is because gay adoption challenges the most fundamental philosophical underpinnings of human society. If a mother and a mother are sufficient, there is no need or place for fatherhood. If a father and a father are sufficient there is no need or place for motherhood. If there is no need or place for either motherhood or fatherhood there is no need or place for the traditional family at all. It is a complete ‘free for all’. If two mummies are OK and two daddies are OK then any two heterosexual women and any two heterosexual men should also have the right to create a ‘family’ and adopt. On reflection, why stop at two daddies, why not have several….you get the idea.

This debate is only partly about equality. As the boundaries are pushed (and they will be) the debate will shift from whether a minority group should share in marriage to whether ‘marriage’, ‘motherhood’ and ‘fatherhood’ have any real meaning. There are some who see all three concepts as redundant. As a correspondent to a facebook friend of mine (who is a gay activist) wrote in relation to the gay marriage bills “Lets just get the fucking bills through and then get rid of the whole fucking institution [of marriage].” It is reasonable to ask whether it is wise to de-construct the foundational underpinnings of our civilization because some people within a minority group of less than two per cent of the population want to do something that appears foreign to human society.

 

There are practical issues also. If we have true marriage equality then any two men who register a marriage should have as much right to adoption as a heterosexual couple have to conceive. Let’s be real for a moment. If that ever becomes law the paedophiles will head to the registry office and down to the adoption office in very little time. I am not saying gay people are paedophiles. I am saying paedophiles are intelligent, strategic, and work in team to gain access to children. Allowing male unions to adopt gives them more opportunity.

Since the human question is one of identity, a logical place to start would be the story of traditional/indigenous societies for the last few thousand years. That is where we have come from, and as a species, that is really who we are. I am not an anthropologist but a good place to start is linguist, naturalist, anthropologist and author Jared Diamond. For the record, Diamond regards Christians and Christianity with withering contempt.

You can read Diamond’s books for yourself but in essence traditional indigenous societies tend to have the following key features:

• Babies are breast fed until at least the age of two but often much later
• Babies are in the immediate physical proximity of their mother, and usually in skin contact with their mother, until they can walk
• After they can walk they remain in close proximity with a close relative
• Children grow up in an extended family/tribe/village/clan
• There are rights of initiation into adulthood and they are different for men and women
• Gender roles vary according to need and custom by genders are clearly distinct. The means of distinction are as varied as the number of extant cultures in the world.
• Every child is given a value system and cosmology which forms part of their tribal/clan identity.

Thus by the time ‘normal’ homo sapiens become adults they have a family identity, a gender identity, a tribal/clan identity, and a cosmology. That was also the case in Western countries until the great cultural dismantling got underway in the 1960’s. It doesn’t take an anthropologist to figure out that all these essential aspects of human identity and wholeness are under systematic attack in the West.

In this context further deconstruction of 'marriage, gender, mother, father, and family' is unhelpful from a whole of society perspective. My reading of pro-gay rights blogs suggests that this social deconstruction is the next wave in the long march from "what consenting adults to at home is no one's business" to "We will close down your organisation or put you in prison if your clergy won't formalise gay unions, your school won't teach pro gay marriage propaganda, and your adoption agency won't foster children to gay couples; and we will fine you for speaking out on these issues and take your children off you if you object to them being taught pro gay school curricula." Hating Christians is not a crime and what was once a plea for tolerance and respect is now a no holds barred assault on basic freedom of conscience and practice. This militancy is perhaps understandable given the many injustices suffered by gay people from religiously inspired policies. That said, forcing people to take sides doesn't foster understanding. It leaves people who might support some but not all of the gay agenda with limited options.

I am not a fundamentalist because I am religious. I'm a fundamentalist because I think a line is the shortest distance between two points, 2 + 2 = 4, and people who wander off into the wilderness without knowing how to survive tend to die there. We can be more creative with social mores but I still regard post modernism, and many of the policies that come from there, as exceptionally silly. 

 

Tag line: gay marriage, gay adoption, family values, emily's list, postmodernism, deconstructuralism, Jared Diamond, gay rights, marriage equality

 

 

Gay marriage bill and the fork in the road

Greco Roman sexuality was fluid and celebrated in art.

Now that the dust is settling after the defeat of the gay marriage bill it is time for all parties to reflect.  For the record I did not support the bill, about which, more later.  However, before I am written off as a homophobic anti gay bigot allow me to indulge in a little heterosexual bashing.  Whose sexual conduct does the greatest harm over-all?

It was not long ago that a 12 year old girl in State care was prostituted by her mother and step father.  Perhaps 100 men paid for sex with her.  They got off on a technicality (it was dark apparently).  One prominent politician was prosecuted – the victim came to his home and it was not dark – but he also got off.  Apparently his med’s made him do it.  I like to think that if I took some medication that made me sexually incontinent I would do what every self respecting 15 year old boy in the country does and jerk off with a copy of the Myer lingerie catalogue.  I am fairly confident that no medication would cause me to rape 12 year old girls, but we digress.

The only positive thing about the whole sordid saga is that it is still considered shocking.  It was not always so.  In ancient Rome if you wanted a 12 year old girl or a 9 year old boy you just had to go to the slave market and buy one.  Indulging in prostitution was considered a religious and civic obligation which is why the State provided a temple prostitution service.  Paedophilia was socially acceptable as was bestiality.  Homosexuality was celebrated in art.  Promiscuity was OK and unwanted babies were left out to die.  Cruelty and violence were celebrated at the games – paid for variously by the State or wealthy patrons.  Indeed, so foundational was violence to the Roman identity that arenas were build as far away as Wales.  The entire social hierarchy depended on the crassest forms of class exploitation.

None of the Greco/Roman gods had a problem with any of this, nor on the whole did the classical philosophers so beloved of the new atheists (see Grayling et al).  Only Jehovah, the god of a small oriental cult, had a problem with it for which reason he and his devotees were considered intolerant, uncultured and bigoted.  

Dawkins et al imagine that an enlightened humanism will rise phoenix like from the ashes of Christianity.  Basically he imagines a Christian society without religion and with a more relaxed view of sex and sexuality.  Unfortunately Rome’s social policies were a lot more consistent with Darwin than Dawkins’ are.  Unsurprisingly, as the culture turns its back on Christianity, we are drifting back to the moral and social mores of Rome. 

We are rapidly approaching a fork in the road and it is high time the church stuck a sign in the middle saying ‘wrong way, go back’.  The question is ‘go back to where?’ When people today think of the church and sex they think of paedophile priests, and a social policy that kept women in the kitchen, gays in the closet, denied sex education and contraception to teenagers, then when they got pregnant put a pillow in their face and stole their baby.  Partly informed by these policies rape within marriage did not become a crime in Tasmania until 1986 – because the wife was the property of the husband.  This nonsense didn’t work then, won’t work now, and we can’t go back there.  Somewhere between secular debauchery and 1950’s repression there has to be an answer that results in happy well adjusted people and families.  If we (Christians) are to find it we are going to have to have a frank and (for some) painful conversation, and we are going to have make theology the servant of facts and evidence.  On the other hand, that is the conversation we need to be having with our teenagers anyway.  I intend to begin a conversation - but not on this blog.

Tag line: marriage equality, Greco Roman erotica, Christian responses to LGBT issue