QANTAS Baggage Handlers' Football Club: Favourites for the World Cup

It is arguably unfair to put the boot into airline baggage handlers, since they are only a symptom of deeper problems with our national airline. Nevertheless, it's a bit like the mugger who comes from a broken home; the ultimate cause behind their behaviour might lie elsewhere and they might be worthy of some sympathy - but that sympathy reaches its limits when it's your kidney they're poking a knife into. Or in this case trying to drop-kick your luggage into the back row of the grandstand.

Some years ago, after having numerous suitcases damaged, I purchased a Pelican case. This came with a lifetime warranty against everything except "shark bite, bear attack and children under five"*. On their web site they had photos of Pelican cases which had survived being blown up in Iraq.

[* = Yes, they are one of those over-hyped American products, but they are still very tough for all that.]

I don't suppose they employ bears or sharks at QANTAS, so they must be using children under five, because the first time I took the case on a flight, it arrived damaged so badly that I had to borrow a screwdriver to open it.

Here is what they managed to do:

Exhibit A

It doesn't look so spectacular, but consider that the metal reinforcing for the locking point was torn loose and rammed so deeply into the side of the latching mechanism as to jam it solid. It wasn't possible to open the case by hand. It's a mystery how they managed to achieve this; it must have required considerable force. Did they place it against a sharp edge and jump on it? Did someone repeatedly hit it with a hammer?

In subsequent trips, the case acquired scratches all over, deep gouges in the top, and was sent to the wrong place on one occasion.

The check-in staff used to have a nasty trick they'd play on people.

"Is it fragile?" they would ask.

"Yes," you would reply, hoping to have your case spared the worst of the kicking.

"OK," they would say, "sign this."

And you'd be given a label to sign waiving your rights to claim damages, because your property was "fragile and improperly packed". Checkmate, sucker!

The abuse of baggage, however, is actually one of the least bad aspects of airline travel these days.

I use to be strongly loyal to QANTAS, but now I alternate between airlines. I try QANTAS and they piss me off so much that I vow never to fly with them again. So I travel Virgin. Virgin then manage to piss me off even worse and I think QANTAS weren't so bad after all. So I go QANTAS next time, whereupon they find some new different way to annoy me.

At this stage the reader is probably thinking "First World Problems", and for sure I'm appreciative of the fact that I have (at least currently) safe and (moderately) convenient air travel available at a reasonable price. Nevertheless, the point I want to make is that things are unnecessarily and artificially bad and this is symptomatic of a worse underlying problem. Things could be (and were in the past) so much better.

It seems that both major airlines are engaged in a classic race to the bottom. Dishonest and deceptive practices are the norm. Staff are mistreated. Customers are a fungible commodity - eleven dollars made by annoying and ripping off a (previously) loyal customer is better than ten made by treating them decently.

A couple of examples:

1) Low cost air fares cannot be changed on line, but instead you have to ring them up to do this. Since they already have to set up the software to allow the more expensive fares to be changed, they could do this for cheaper fares at zero cost. Instead they have to spend extra money to employ people to handle the calls.

This is bean-counter logic. You actively spend money to give people on cheap fares a worse experience, in order to make those on the more expensive fares feel like they're getting something extra. It's the sort of thing that no one with a conscience would even think of, but it's more cost-effective than providing value for money, and that's all that matters.

2) Then there are tricks with extra baggage. If you want to take a second piece of luggage, it has to be booked separately, and rather than an endorsement on your ticket, you get sent a separate receipt by email which you have to print out (and it's not even a PDF, just to make printing harder). Sometimes - and this has happened to me - they "forget" to send the receipt and you have to ring them up and hassle them about it. It's all about tricking the careless (and we're all careless sometimes) into not bringing the receipt with them to the airport, so they have to pay again, at an even higher rate, for their baggage.

Naturally people complain and I'm sure they get their money back eventually, but meanwhile QANTAS essentially have an interest-free loan of your money. Again, appealing to the bean-counters. Of course the check-in staff have to bear the wrath of angry customers, but that doesn't appear on the balance sheet.

I could go on here and bore you with a list of further petty grievances: crowded seating, check-in Nazis with idiosyncratic ideas of what may be allowed in baggage, meals which exemplify the term "all sizzle and no steak", frequent-flier programs now rendered a joke, the high incidence of cancelled flights, peculiar pricing policies which often make it cheaper to forfeit a flight rather than rebook, and of course the ever-present Security Theatre, which is just as much a farce as ever. [And to be clear, these complaints apply equally to QANTAS, Virgin and Jetstar.]

What really concerns me, however, is that aircraft maintenance has not been exempted from this mania for sacrificing everything in the pursuit of the short-term Dollar. We are seeing yet another round of job cuts to engineering staff in QANTAS.

My understanding is that modern aircraft are like modern cars: they are safer and require less maintenance than previously. Paradoxically, this can be dangerous because it gives an excuse to cut back on maintenance and you can get away with more for longer before a real disaster happens. I have zero confidence that the heavy-handed industrial relations attitude of QANTAS is in proportion to any reduced demand for maintenance.

In defence of 419 scammers

I'm sure you've all had those emails from the widow of a Nigerian general who wants your help to get US$120,000,000 out of the country, and is willing to let you keep 10% for your trouble. Don't they just suck, and it isn't it terrible when people get taken in and lose all their money?

Some time ago, I stumbled upon a scam-baiting site; a place where people work together to get their own back on Internet scammers of this type. At first I was pleased that some effort was being made to stamp out this menace, but the more I read, the more I felt that something wasn't quite right. I first became worried, then horrified at what was going on. It certainly changed my perspective on the matter.

Before I write further on this, let me digress with a little imaginary scenario.

Imagine a place where there are two rival groups, let us for sake of neutrality call them the Silvers and the Golds. These groups are frequently in conflict and fatalities often result on both sides. The Silvers are distinguished by their use of blunt weapons; clubs, baseball bats, tyre irons and so on. By contrast the Golds always use edged weapons; cut-throat razors, knives, etc.

So far so bad: It isn't obvious whether being clubbed or being stabbed is worse. Both can hurt or kill you. They are by no means identical in their effects and it might be that under certain specific conditions one method of attack might be considered significantly worse, or more immoral, than the other. Nevertheless a sensible person would say that there's essentially nothing in it; being stabbed and clubbed are both are really bad things.

Now let us say that we are constantly regaled by sensational stories of people (invariably Silvers) being shivved and bleeding to death. Every time someone (invariably a Gold) sticks someone, it is reported in gory detail. Much is made of the pitiful suffering of the victim.

Societies band together for the banning of knives and the compulsory use of safety razors. Vigilante groups form to lynch anyone caught with a blade.

Meanwhile, clubbings go unreported and are ignored. Silvers take pride strolling around with clubs stuck in their belts, those who wield the biggest clubs are honored. Skill in the art of clubbing (but only for legitimate defensive purposes, of course) is considered to be the foremost determinant of a person's worth.

Now if you to complain to an anti-knife society about this situation, they would quite reasonably reply that it isn't their job to fix all of society's ills. After all, a cat shelter could not be considered hypocritical for ignoring abandoned dogs.

They would go on to say, also quite reasonably, about how knifings and slashings are a very terrible thing. They would truthfully say that it's not a good thing to have knife merchants skulking around looking for someone to stab. They would ask (probably sarcastically) whether you were wanting anti-knife societies to disband and thus allow stabbings to continue unchecked.

They would most vigorously claim not to be biased against Golds. They would never mention the word Gold when talking about stabbings (and would strongly censure one of their own for doing so) and they would certainly never claim that a Silver caught stabbing someone would be any less liable for retribution than a Gold. And this would not simply be window-dressing to obscure their real motivations, but would be something they genuinely believe.

"Yes, we agree it's also a terrible thing when someone who doesn't deserve it gets clubbed, and we also agree that clubbing can be every bit as bad as stabbing, but," they would conclude, "it's a free country; you can go form your own anti-clubbing society if it's a concern to you."

They would be saying nothing that's false or even unreasonable. Yet, when the clubbings outnumber the stabbings a hundred to one, and are punished by a limp slap on the wrist (if at all) - and when it's considered taboo and border-line subversive to mention this fact - the presence of a well-resourced anti-knife society exacting unusually harsh justice against knifers can't really be something to feel happy about.

Now let us return to the real world.

Consider the history of Africa: Slavery, massacres, the Belgian Congo, Apartheid, and God knows what else, going back centuries. Much of the wealth in Europe was plundered from its African colonies. Much of the wealth of America was derived from slaves kidnapped from this continent.

This sort of stuff hasn't just stopped. There are still massacres and genocides. Slavery still occurs; both literally (in terms of illegal human trafficking) and in terms of widespread exploitation of people; which is slavery in all but name. Who is it who sews your clothes or puts together your iPhone or digs your diamonds out of the earth for a pittance? Are they really any better off than slave labourers on a 19^th century cotton farm?

Rich multinational companies have more power than poor African countries. By threats and bribery, a multinational can steal billions from an African country with impunity.

In my imaginary tale above, we can quite legitimately make the following substitutions:

    "Gold" = Poor Black
    "Silver = Rich White
    "knifings" = Taking money by 419 scams
    "clubbings" = Taking money by other dishonest means

But in actual fact, the real situation is even more unfair. Those billionaires exploiting third-world countries are amongst the richest in the world (apparently, the richest 84 people in the world have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion). They are not in any sense of the word in need, yet they destroy the lives of tens or hundreds of millions of people simply to increase their wealth still further.

Now imagine, if you can, living in Nigeria. Although not the poorest country in the world, it is hardly a wealthy place and nearly all of this wealth is held by a small elite. For the majority, there are few opportunities. Even if you're smart and work hard you'll have a miserable life. You are surrounded by corruption, and the examples given by your government and by the rich white corporations who control your resources, is that it's quite normal to grab whatever you can by whatever means are available.

Would you consider it legitimate to use your skills to lift a bit of money off (comparatively) rich whites - and especially whites hoping to obtain unearned wealth by dishonest means - or would you take the more "moral" course of working around the clock sewing brand-name running shoes, in an unsafe factory for starvation wages?

I know what I'd do in those circumstances.

Now let use look at an exchange from the 419eater scam-baiter forum, a place which deserves to be named and shamed:

"I'm going to throw this out here, but, and no offence to the great baiters who have done this, Abeche is so... last year. I hear the new Abeche this season is Liberia. Liberia, where our lad has a pretty good chance of being executed by a 9 yo child soldier, is a great travel destination... though things have calmed down recently. "
...

"Yeah, Abeche has been done. It's greatest selling point was how far from anything it is. However, the thought of our lad being shot by a child soldier is delightful to me. Liberia is more accessible than Goma, Congo at the moment."

[That was in the context of a romance scammer who was being tricked into following his supposed victim around the continent.]

Read it again and consider it for a moment. Here are a bunch of well-off whites quite openly trying to get a black man killed, and they are gloating over the prospect. [And in passing, I note that that they don't consider the existence of 9-year-old child soldiers to be an abomination, but merely a useful tool in their sadistic games.]

By comparison, consider this; sometimes salesmen knowingly try to trick people into buying stuff they can't afford just in order to get a commission. Bankers can knowingly give people loans that they can't repay. People lose all of their money and get hopelessly into debt as a result. Both in terms of the morality of the perpetrator and the effect on the victim, this is in many ways worse than a 419 scam.

Should we therefore form societies to arrange for the murder of used car salesmen, bankers and so forth? It would only be fair.

So, as usual, I've laboured my point excessively, so let me just conclude by saying:

Scam-baiters are cowardly lynch-mobs of well-off people who are unconsciously motivated by racism. By comparison, 419 scammers are simply doing what they can to survive and (in comparison) deserve your sympathy.

The Qantas apple

WTF is this? A "ready to eat" sliced apple in a plastic bag.

Aren't apples already "ready to eat"?

Taking the Fuhrer's name in vain

I have a suspicion that the real reason people invoke Godwin's Law is that they are closet Fascists who consider any mention of their beloved leader's name to be blasphemy.

Apparently, if you call someone a Communist*, that's a perfectly legitimate criticism, whereas if you call them a Fascist you automatically lose because "Godwin's Law". That is to say, it's firstly a descent to a school-yard level of logic, and secondly it unfairly targets one side of politics.

[* = Recently however, the term "Socialist", or even in some circles "Liberal", seems to be taking over as a term of abuse, which is a very worrying trend.]

What I find interesting about the business is that whenever I have seen this law invoked (and it must run to the hundreds by now), it has almost without exception been incorrectly applied. There must be some selective blindness at work, because I have seen people cut-and-paste the wording of this law into a post without realising that it completely contradicts their use of this law.

Godwin's Law in no way prohibits the use of any words. It is not a law in the legal sense ("you must do this"), but instead a law in the scientific sense ("this is true"). In its original form it goes as follows:

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."

In other words, it states that over time, discussions tend to degenerate into name-calling and hyperbole. Which is a perfectly valid observation.

You can see how the law was intended to be applied: If, for instance, a discussion on the relative merits of different game consoles reached the point where people were calling each other Nazis (a thing likely to happen relatively quickly), it would be fair enough for someone to cry out "Godwin's Law", as a short-hand way of saying "this discussion has now descended to the point where rational debate is no longer possible and therefore it should be abandoned".

The difficulty I have is that this law is also used to stifle legitimate political discussion. Nazism and Fascism are not isolated phenomena belonging entirely to the past. People don't actually call themselves Nazis or Fascists any more, but the fact is that the same sorts of people, with the same sorts of motivations, are saying and doing the same sort of things today - to the extent that things are getting actually frightening.

You can point out, giving specific examples, where the behaviour of some political figure mirrors that of Hitler or Goebbels, and then some arsehole can arrogantly dismiss your whole argument (without having to counter any of the points you've raised) with the line: "Bzzzzzzzzzt. Godwin's Law. You Lose."

For sure, the vast majority of the time someone gets compared to a Nazi, the comparison is not valid. E.g.:

"I think euthanasia should be legalised"
   
"Isn't that what the Nazis did?"

or

"I believe in stricter firearms laws"
   
"Hitler brought in stricter firearms laws"

But that's only because debate on the Internet is usually at such a low level that the vast majority of the time any one line rebuttal is logically flawed. It's the same principle as Sturgeon's Law**.

[** Supposedly someone said to science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon "90% of science fiction is crap" and Sturgeon replied to the effect of "True, but that's because 90% of everything is crap".]

Now consider this exchange:

"Taking aspirin to reduce a fever is counterproductive, because a fever is the body's way of fighting off invading microbes. In this case it's better to leave your body alone to look after itself."

"Isn't that what a Christian Scientist would say?"

You wouldn't argue that a comparison to a Christian Scientist violated some particular law and that this in itself invalidated their statement. You'd probably reply something along the lines that in this case the Christian Scientist would be right despite themselves and that this was irrelevant to the argument you were making (or more succinctly: "a stopped clock is right twice a day").

If a comparison is invalid or irrelevant, you can simply say that it is invalid or irrelevant. Similarly, if a debate has degenerated to name-calling, you can say that it has degenerated to name-calling and therefore should be abandoned. Godwin's Law is neither necessary nor sufficient to address these issues.

So I suppose all of this is a long-winded way of saying that I think Godwin's Law has outlived its usefulness and should be retired.


[Update 17th August 2017 - it seems that Mike Godwin himself has come to the same conclusion and writes: "By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis."]

It is un-Australian to worship the Australian flag

I saw this obnoxious thing on someone's car at the local shopping centre recently. [Edit: I should add  that despite the date of this post, this is not an April Fools joke; sadly it is real.]

Flag-worship is un-Australian, as is ordering people around like a freaking Dalek.

 
I can understand why certain people have an attachment to the flag of their country.

Imagine you are a soldier fighting a battle. Suddenly a large number of armed men start coming towards you. They may be the enemy and you may be about to die. If the flag of your country suddenly appears over these soldiers, it will become the most beautiful thing in the world at the moment. If you have a flag of your own, you'll be waving it over your head frantically, since your life may literally depend on doing this.

By the end of the war, it is easy to imagine that this behaviour has embedded itself at a deep emotional level in a soldier's subconscious - even without the help of the ceremonies and other rituals they take part in. The attachment could be so deep that a person might get misty-eyed at the sight of their flag, or homicidal at the thought of someone "disrespecting" it.

In other words, flag-worship could be thought of as a pathological condition caused by a traumatic experience.

Edgar Rice Burroughs - the author of Tarzan - wrote a novel called The Red Hawk. Like most of his work, this was a simplistic, action-packed tale of goodies versus baddies and (apparently) not intended to be a social commentary. However it featured the interesting concept of "The Flag" (the Stars and Stripes; naturally enough) actually being worshipped as a deity in itself. Thus characters would say things to the effect of "When The Flag created the world..." and "The Flag will be angry if you do that". I found this much more amusing than it was probably intended to be.

The worshippers of The Flag were, naturally enough, a fierce warrior tribe engaged in a generations-long war. Although fictional, the scenario made sense; if a people have endured an invasion or a civil war, they may be traumatised in the same way as an individual soldier, and their resulting psychoses (including flag-worship) may become part of their national character.

So it would fair enough to say that a flag may have great importance to those on both the giving and receiving ends of militarism.

Australia, however, fits neither of these categories.

Consider ANZAC day; the primary military-related event on the Aussie calendar. It was originally to commemorate the Gallipoli landings. There is much (perfectly legitimate) talk about bravery and sacrifice and so forth, but no one can say that Gallipoli was being celebrated. It wasn't glorious and it wasn't a victory. It was basically a disaster. We lost and had to run away.

ANZAC day is also unusual (and possibly unique) as far as such events go in that it's about both Australians and New Zealanders. It's not a nationalistic thing.

Australia's military heritage consists pretty much entirely of getting dragged into other people's wars (and generally losing*). The only exception was defending against Japanese invasion in WW2, and that was forced on us.

[* = Not necessary because we're incompetent but generally because we get thrown into unwinnable conflicts. I'm not sure whether this makes it more or less humiliating.]

While there's a general belief that Australians punch above their weight in warfare (but don't all countries think that about themselves?), we don't glory in fighting. It isn't part of the national character to think that it's wonderful to go around invading other countries. We don't parade our missile carriers (do we even have any?) through the streets, followed by ranks of goose-stepping soldiers. We aren't militarists, and we haven't suffered invasion, civil war or revolution either. We don't need a flag to cling to, and we should be glad about this.

Now let us look at the flag itself: It is ugly, both visually, and symbolically.

First of all, the Union Jack in the corner is an irrelevant relic of a fairly unpleasant colonial past. Australia was a prison colony. It was taken from its original inhabitants by the British without even the pretence of a treaty. Nothing to be proud of. Moreover, the United Kingdom has very little relevance to modern day Australia (we play cricket, and that's about it).

The Southern Cross is hardly uniquely Australian either; it's visible in all parts of the Southern Hemisphere, and a little way into the Northern. It could equally well be used by perhaps half of the countries in the world.

Symbolically, the Union Jack consists of the crosses of St George, St Andrew, and St Patrick. The Australian flag adds the constellation of the Southern Cross. That is to say, four crucifixes on the one flag. According to a recent WIN-Gallup poll, Australia is one of the top 10 atheist countries in the world. Isn't a flag consisting almost entirely of crucifixes just a little bit inappropriate?

The construction of the flag is also awkward. Aesthetically, the Union Jack looks fine by itself, and the Southern Cross doesn't look bad either (although having stars on a blue background is arguably illogical; at least PNG chose a black background for their Southern Cross), but the two don't go together. By contrast, the Aboriginal Flag is simple, distinctive, and with a choice of colours that not only look good in themselves but also are symbolic of the country**.

[** = I'm not saying that we need to appropriate the Aboriginal Flag; I think that would be unacceptable to both black and white unless a lot more reconciliation takes place. I'm just saying we don't have to look very far afield to find a better flag.]

Don't get me wrong here: I'm not campaigning for a new flag. Our flag is ugly and stupid and in an ideal world we'd have something better, but this is so unimportant compared to all of the other problems we're currently facing that we might as well not bother. And if it's going to upset a few service-people, why create unnecessary pain for very little gain?

Nor am I saying someone shouldn't be allowed to bow down before their flag if they want to. Put a sticker on your car that says "I love this flag" and I won't complain.

But what does concern me is that this person - and there are more like him appearing all the time - feels he has to right to aggressively order me to join him in his psychotic beliefs, and apparently I must either obey him or get out. That is un-Australian.

Ditch the Drongo!

I went to the March in March last Sunday. This is the first protest march I have attended in quite possibly as long as 20 years. I was what you could probably describe as riled up, and not just about the "ultimate conservationists" comment I posted about last time - although that rendered me almost speechless, in the scheme of things it was simply another layer of diarrhea icing on a very large shit cake.

My apologies to any other drongos out there

 
A problem I had on the march - and I am facing a similar problem writing this blog entry - is that I didn't make a sign, because any sign that listed all of the things that were wrong with the Abbott government, would either have to use an unreadably small font or been too large to carry.

I'll try to briefly summarise how much the current government has achieved in just 6 months. To simplify things, I'll break it down into different categories of bastardry.

War on Science

• No science minister. Seriously? This is the 21^st century, and perhaps I should emphasise that this is the 21^st century AD.
• Mass sackings at the CSIRO.
• Deliberate trashing of the NBN. 
• Multiple statements to the effect that climate change isn't happening. On par with announcing the earth is flat. 

War on the Environment

• No minister for Climate Change, but has a Minister for Sport.
• Abolishing the Climate Commission [this also counts as part of the War on Science].
• Seeking to repeal the carbon price. Abbott seems to have some crazed obsession with this scheme - a relatively simple and logical measure which has been adopted by many other countries without drama - to extent of blaming every possible economic problem on it. Multiple times he had blamed the shutdown of one business or other on the dreaded Carbon Tax, only to be contradicted by the actual company involved.
• Sending a bunch of yahoos to the Warsaw Climate Change Conference to disrupt it and block progress in general.
• Appointing Dick Warburton, a climate "sceptic" to head a review into the renewable energy target.
• De-funding the Environmental Defenders Office.
• Scrapping the Home Energy Saver Scheme.
• Cutting all aid programs for environmental purposes.
• Supporting the insane shark "cull" in WA. [This one is so stupid it also counts as part of the War on Science.]
• Bullying the Great Barrier Reef authority to reverse their stand on the Abbott Point coal terminal. Just what we need; export more coal even faster, and dump 3 M tonnes of sediment on the Great Barrier Reef in order to do so.
• Green-lighting the Galilee Basin mine. An extraordinarily large coal mine in the middle of a nature reserve.
• Seeking to de-list world heritage forests in Tasmania.
• Allowing grazing in alpine national parks. This had been banned for decades for good reason.
• Removing the Standing Council on Environment and Water.
• Scrapping the Critically Endangered listing of the Murray Darling basin to allow irrigators free reign. A serious ongoing environmental problem about to get worse.

War on the Refugees

I wouldn't have thought it would have been possible to actually make the situation here any worse than it already was (putting children in concentration camps is not the action of a civilised country), however the Abbott government has somehow managed it.

• Navy personnel "allegedly" torturing people by forcing their hands onto the exhaust pipe of a boat, and then turning the boat around to Indonesia without giving medical treatment.
• Sticking people indefinitely in a hell-hole in PNG where they get bashed and even murdered.
• Separating new-born babies from their mothers.
• Plus masses of other bastardry that makes me sick to even think about.

When things get to a stage where you have to have a media blackout to prevent the bogans (many of who are quite open about wanting the refugees shot on sight) from finding out what's going on, and when even China complains about your human rights abuses, you have achieved something really remarkable.

War on the Economy

For some reason, the coalition have a reputation as good economic mangers (not, in my opinion, borne out by the facts), so you'd think they'd at least do a little better in this area, but apparently not.

• Start off by ham-stringing the economy by crippling the NBN.
• Create uncertainty about what will happen with the carbon price.
• Repeal the (already watered down) resources rental tax so that excess profits from mining go overseas rather than benefiting the economy.
• Piss off our trading partners, especially Indonesia, but also India and China.
• Then say goodbye to Holden
• and goodbye to Toyota
• and goodbye to SPC
• Hello highest unemployment in 10 years. Quite an achievement considering that Labor did better during the entire Global Financial Crisis.
• Then there's the sinister TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) deal. I'm not sure what to say about this one since it's a completely secret process. In so far as any information is available it appears to be the sort of agreement that a corrupt third-world dictator would sign to sell out their country for a wad of money under the table, before making a run for it. It's likely to be devastating for the economy, unless by "economy", you mean "foreign-owned multinationals".
• And that's not even counting the economic effects of trashing the environment (e.g. tourism in Tasmania accounts for 5x as many jobs as forestry, so let's assist the latter at the expense of the former).

War on Women

• Abbott taking on the job of Minister for Women. I mean, seriously, that's just insulting. If it hadn't actually happened, you'd think it was a heavy-handed satire. Even his supporters call him a Man's Man. It is so obvious that he doesn't know or care anything about women, that this has to be a calculated attack.
• His explanation for appointing only one woman in his cabinet was that the appointments were made "on merit". Given that he gave cabinet posts to the likes Peter Dutton - someone who has roughly the intelligence (and general usefulness) of a termite-riddled fence post - this would also have to be a calculated insult.

War on the Indigenous

Howard's "intervention" (which Labor, to their shame, did nothing to wind back) was already such a blow to Aboriginal Australians that it would be difficult to make things worse. Pretty much every bad thing that could have been done, already had been done. Nevertheless, Abbott managed to find a way.

• Savagely cutting the budget of the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, such that they had to sack a third of their staff.
• Cutting Indigenous legal services by $13.4 million, while at the same time providing $2.2 million in legal aid for farmers and miners to fight native title claims.

Miscellaneous Bastardry

• Overriding ACT law on gay marriages - and not just doing this to appease some dinosaur like Fielding (which would be evil but at least understandable in political terms), but because he is actually against the idea himself. Moreover, Abbott condones the incredibly reactionary statements of Cory Bernardi, whose views on "non-traditional" families are remarkably close to those of Vladimir Putin (except that most likely Putin is doing it for cynical political motives, whereas Bernadi actually believes what he is saying).
• Abolishing AusAID. Huge cut backs in international aid generally.
• Cutting compensation for bushfire victims. Just after a big bushfire.
• Attempting to block funding to organisations who refuse corporate sponsorship on ethical grounds. Even from tobacco companies.
• An absolute extravaganza of royal commissions into even the most trivial actions of the previous government.
• An orgy of union-bashing and attempts to reduce working conditions, even going as far as introducing legislation to allow people to work for half of the minimum wage, and be exempt from health and safety laws.
• Multiple acts of bastardry against the unemployed, students, the disabled, and the less well off in general. This even goes so far as cutting the welfare payments to the orphans of soldiers.

You can see that at this point I've started to lose patience (it's like cataloguing individual turds in a giant sewage pit) and been lumping things together that deserve to be spelled out individually. But hopefully you can see why I consider this to be by far the worst Australian government ever. Even Bjelke-Petersen didn't manage to do as much damage as quickly, and his damage was limited to only one state.

Anonymous are taking up the fight, but, like in V for Vendetta, we will all need to help. 

However, the real problem we have here is not Tony Abbott.

Abbott is not a hereditary monarch, nor did he seize power by a coup d'etat. He was democratically elected by the voters of this country.

Democracy is often treated like a gift bestowed upon a people, like having a good climate or fertile soil, but with the additional advantage that it somehow makes you morally superior as well. In fact, democracy is a responsibility, or even a burden, imposed on a people. You get the right to choose, but it doesn't work unless you put in the effort to choose well.

It seems that people put more effort into decorating their living rooms, or even preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse, than choosing their government. People do sudoku or cryptic crosswords for fun, but aren't willing to fill in the senate ballot paper below the line. We are now reaping the results. And don't give me that "whoever you vote for, a bastard gets in" bullshit. Some politicians are demonstrably less bad than others; try voting for them for a change and see what happens.

Maybe I should expand on this last point. The process whereby politicians are elected is exactly like the process of natural selection. The environment dictates the nature of the animals within it. Those individuals who most suit the environment prosper, whereas those who are unsuited die out.

But the important point here is that natural selection works slowly. A giraffe does not spring fully-formed into the world, instead an environment which favours long-necked grazing animals gradually pushes evolution in that direction.

And so it is with politics. You can't expect a politician who is perfect in every way to stand up for election; instead you have a number of people to choose from, all of whom have various flaws. What you need to do is rank the available candidates in order of desirability and cast your vote accordingly (fortunately we have a preferential voting system which allows us to do this). If you create an environment that favours the better politician, you will get better and better politicians each time. Even if every candidate is unacceptably bad, you can still choose the least bad one. Casting a vote in this situation is not futile; in fact it is critically important. If you continuously maintain the selective pressure in the right direction you will eventually get your giraffe. If you stop applying pressure, it will be even worse next time.

If you punish a better candidate out of spite for not being perfect, you are applying selective pressure in favour of a worse candidate.

If you let your vote be dictated by biased mainstream media, you are applying selective pressure in favour of Rupert Murdoch's interests - and almost certainly against your own.

So everyone; next time you vote; take this important task seriously, invest a little bit of time and energy and don't be a fucking idiot.

He who lives by the chainsaw...

Recently, in a breathtaking piece of doublespeak, Tony Abbott has praised loggers as being the "ultimate conservationists".

Let me tell you about some of these "ultimate conservationists".

In the Victorian Central Highlands lives the Leadbeater's Possum, an incredibly cute native animal related to the Sugar Glider. It is currently listed as Endangered, a classification under consideration of being upgraded to Critically Endangered.

A Leadbeater's Possum [Photo from Healesville Sanctuary site] 
What kind of monster would want to hurt this animal?

Unfortunately, this possum requires trees of a certain age to provide nesting hollows. This puts it in conflict with loggers (VicForests in this case) who wish to cut these trees down. The usual story.

However, where things become really nasty is that VicForests are not merely damaging Leadbeater's Possum habitat incidentally, but deliberately and systematically going out of their way to destroy it, in a calculated effort to wipe out the Leadbeater's Possum. The logic being that when the possum is extinct, there will no longer be any impediment to widespread logging.

One trick was bulldozing wide and unnecessary fire breaks directly through prime Leadbeater's Possum habitat (and in fact even bulldozing monitoring stations constructed for the possums in the process). This happened in 2007 and extensively in 2009. Another good trick is "accidentally" logging the wrong area; usually the damage is done before anyone notices and the remarkably compliant DPI merely shrugs their shoulders. According to an insider, regulations are regularly flouted with impunity.

MyEnvironment has specific details on much of this, but even they don't have the full story.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign...

This sign is from the easy-going tropical paradise of Mackay.

It's not clear what, if anything, you are actually "Welcome" to do.