This is all conjecture but I’m confident based on what I’ve read.

I don’t think Senator Lundy will replace Senator Conroy as head of the DBCDE, no matter how much we wish, pray, hope or cross our fingers. Conroy, as I’ve commented twice today, is neck-deep in NBN and Digital TV implementation and swapping him out mid-coitus makes no sense. He’s not doing badly enough in either of those policies for our bitching to have any effect. His Victorian Unity faction (Labor Right) also backed Gillard’s preselection to the safe Labor seat of Lalor in 1998.

This last bit of factional war-history is odd to me. Conroy’s been lumped in with what Beazley called the ‘Roosters’ (Conroy, Kim Carr, Wayne Swan and Stephen Smith), placing the senator in close alliance with Kimm Carr, a man that has tried everything to keep Gillard out of politics altogether. Well, so did Lindsay Tanner, and now he’s buggering off, Wayne Swan is deputy and Stephen Smith is apparently okay with stepping out of cabinet to make way for Rudd. Things must be pretty chummy at the moment for all this to work but if Gillard doesn’t keep the polls happy (or loses the election) it’ll be Conroy and Carr et al that move on Gillard; Swan would make a dissapointing amount of sense to be the next leader of the party.

Nicola Roxon is also (last time I checked) engaged to Michael Kerrisk, one of Conroy’s mates. I say this only to highlight to complexity of factional movements. I’m predicting an internal-only reshuffle with no new faces.

If all that made no sense, good. It makes little sense to me too, but I’m keeping an eye on it.

As far as I’m concerned the Prime Minister woke up this morning with more political understanding and a vagina. Very little else has changed.

I’ve learned my lesson. My shit stayed skeptical at all stages this time. Julia #Spillard’s shotgun ascent to the primary office of our land will not draw the same misplaced optimism I offered Chairman Rudd in his guise as Kevin07.

At roughly Nine last night Jacque Prior messaged me; The Labor party looked close to a spill. I leapt online like Jim Wallace leaps on the emotionally vulnerable. Within two hours a challenge was called and the next few pages of Australia’s political novel written. The moment Gillard walked into the boss’s office there was no way Rudd could lead Labor to an election victory. Today, less than 24 hours since someone pressed the button, our first female Governor General swore in our first female Prime Minister.

That makes me happy, not because I think it’s a victory for feminists, but because it’s a victory for a woman. Those can be hard to come by in politics, business or war.

The sheer speed of Rudd’s removal from office over the last 24 hours puts it in the same chapter, with all the same vicious narrative, as Gough Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975. Rudd’s been compared with Whitlam before, and validly so, but the biggest comparison to be made is the nature of the tragedy. Both came into office with massive popular support, a catchy slogan and big ideals. Both kept key business to a core group of trusted MPs. Both infuriated the opposition. Both had to leave the main office with less than a day’s notice.

I still think Rudd was slightly less effective as a PM, but his accomplishments won’t be ignored by history. His outgoing speech in the Prime Minister’s courtyard listed an incredible number of things that most of us, myself included, had forgotten he’d done. I don’t mourn his passing; a one-man show in government is anathema to me in every way.

Many today have made the comment: “If only he’d cried like that while he was in office.”

What about Gillard? There’s a certain circularity to her story, but I’m saving that for a paid article. What I will say is that she knows what she’s doing, even if it is just occupying the centrist sweet-spot the Liberals have been pining after since Howard the stagnant left stage.

Her politics are less a breath of fresh air than her ability to menstruate. Sure the Labor party might approach the election with less pants-wetting fear than they would have under Rudd, but gratitude for that only assumes the Labor party has anyone’s best interests at heart but their own. They don’t. The Labor machine protests the sour reality of the working class like a paedophile protests the demolition of  a childcare centre; mobility in the working class hurts their ability to feed.

Gillard is, as my fiery colleague Kat Henderson puts it:

anti-union (see ABCC & NAPLAN); anti-refugees (see attacks on Labor for Refugees in 2004); pro-war (see praise of Rudd for increasing troops in Afghanistan); against same sex marriage (see 2009 TV interview); pro-Israel (see comments made after 2008 attack on Gaza in support of Israel).

Even just one of those would count me out as a Gillard fan. Unfortunately for me, it’s more or less what the electorate wants, and in our ham-fisted mockery of democracy, that’s really all that counts.

Grilling Gillard at this stage is scary, the conservatives are expecting it. On first glance my internal ‘Bush the younger’ makes his fiat against criticising the extant powerful for fear that ‘the enemy’ might gain traction. Abott scares me more than Gillard, undermining her feels like supporting the raging regressives in the Liberal party. I will, however, rely on hitting both parties with my usual vitriol to ensure the balance isn’t tipped in his favor.

More to come.

For the teal deers:

I’m trying to explain (via blogpost) that I will tolerate (and in some cases support) personal faith despite loathing organised religion. Apparently I’ve been alienating people on Facebook (not that I mind really). A bit angry that people can’t see the difference between me alienating Christians on Facebook and Christians Alienating homosexuals IN PARLIAMENT!

By now it should be obvious to all involved that I’m strongly, deeply atheist.

During the last month or two I’ve been stretching my rhetorical legs in this field. My attention to media and policy makes it hard for me to escape the ham-fisted souring  that the religiouso bring to public discourse. I don’t hold back when ontological proclamations appear in my Facebook stream, unless said proclamations have a very specific aspect to them.

That aspect is that they have nothing to do with the life of anyone but the proclaimer.

Unfortunately for the Abrahamics in my life there is so much outward pressuring built into the fabric of their religions that they seldom say something that isn’t bothering someone else. Not just bothering, but inciting a world-view that alienates others in practical ways. Here is where I differ from them.

For starters, the Abrahamic religions are not silent on political leanings, especially not in the US or here in Australia. To say that I am Christian has implications for my political viewpoint, whereas to say that I am atheist does not. Atheism simply means that you do not believe a personal God exists. If a religious person said they were a Deist, then they too would be refraining from political comment in their statement.

Even in situations where a person’s identification as a Christian is followed by a denunciation of the alienating ideologies of that church, the identification is still harmful because they have added themselves to the number of people that supposedly support the ideology. The government will use the argument that, say, 60% of Australians are Christians, Christians don’t like homosexuals, therefore 60% of Australians don’t like homosexuals and will vote for me if I don’t like them either. This is a blunt case, but the mechanism runs deep.

This is not a case of the government getting sloppy with statistics, it’s an acknowledgment that the power doesn’t lie with individual Christians, it lies with the opinion makers in the church. Deny your complicity all you like, you’re not doing anything to stop the resurgence of fundamentalism in this country via the brigades over at Hillsong, AOG and the like.

Before I get on to distinguishing between a personal faith and a communal faith, I’d like to mention secularism.

Atheism isn’t intrinsically political, but secularism is. Secularism is an approach to government that separates the State from the Church so that many churches may exist to cater for as many different faiths as exist. The fashionable way to prove your ignorance these days appears to be claiming that secularism is anti-church. Secularism is about as pro-church as you can get before establishing a theocracy. I want all Christians to hear this: You need a secular state so that another denomination doesn’t gain power and oppress you. You know as well as I do that Christianity is fragmented and inconsistent. Don’t forget your history:

• The English civil war was pretty much Protestants killing Catholics killing Protestants.
• Serbs versus Croats is essentially orthodox Christians versus Catholics.
• Freedom of Religion in the US came out of a law preventing the congregationalists (a Christian sect) harassing Baptists and Presbyterians.
• Calvinists killed a hell of a lot of Catholics after the reformation.
• The puritans fled England because other Christians oppressed them for being daft.

Leaving secularism aside, claiming that Australia is based on Christian values means essentially nothing. If you’re talking about the don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t cheat kind of values then, well, thanks for the input, where the fuck were you when we were sent here for stealing bread (first fleet), murdering aborigines, and disrespecting women by disallowing them the vote? If Australia is based on Christian values in that sense then we can probably add ‘only if it suits us’ as a Christian tenet. Apart from those core values, which honestly, aren’t real hard to figure out, it would appear most of the values still left to implement are homophobia, ignorance and authoritarianism.

Please stay the hell out of politics, you keep ruining everything.

So if we take the public face out of religion, what does a personal faith look like? My temptation here is to say it would look pretty silly because the whole basis of faith is delightfully unhelpful to any meaningful progress in society and does nothing but remove people from the collective intelligence of a nation. I’m going to resist that temptation because as a liberal I think it’s more important to let each individual improve themselves in whatever way they see fit (assuming they don’t do something that stops others from improving themselves likewise). So how can you have faith without having it rammed down people’s throats?

For starters, simple things like not trying to convert people helps, but really doesn’t mean much if you then go and vote for someone that wants to maintain the alienation of queers in society. Having a personal faith is about one central and all important self-injunction:

I will live my life by the rules of my faith but make no action that structurally, legally or socially inhibits somebody else’s ability to completely ignore my beliefs.

That’s why I would never vote for the abolition of Religion, no matter how tempting it may become in the future. Examples of applying the above might include:

• Not supporting a man-woman only definition of marriage
• Not having an abortion but not supporting anti-abortion laws
• Not looking at porn but also not supporting Internet censorship
• Telling an atheist he’s wrong but agreeing that he’s allowed to be
• Fighting for the down-trodden and poor WITHOUT telling them you did it because of your faith

The idea here is not to force religion out of the public sphere, that will never happen and never should happen. The aim of secularism and of maintaining personal faith is to reduce the strain and angst in this country. The strain between the religious and the otherwise, the angst of not measuring up to the standards of some celestial dictator, both of these cause far more trouble than I can pinpoint in my research.

The difference between the straw-man Kieran and the straw-man Christian is that when I mouth off on Facebook, I’m trying to ease the burden on the human spirit, not add more rules, not add more obligations, not add more oversight. Abrahamic religions are at their core authoritarian and I am at my core not. I believe in positive reinforcement not a fear of eternal damnation. I believe in atoning for my sins instead of praying them away.

There are so many differences that conflating my outbursts with those of my religious opposition is mentally lazy and shallow. Beneath my remonstrations is my tacit permissiveness and the acknowledgment that my distaste for religion is less powerful – the current political climate won’t allow for me to activate it in any oppressive sense even if I wanted to.

In an attempt to “increase efficiency, save time and fast-track more important matters in the courts”, Anna Bligh wants $100 on the spot fines for swearing. Excuse me while I tattoo expletives to my forehead.

I’ll leave my tirade till later. It is already an offence to swear in public, you can read it in the Summary Offences Act 2005. I read that it was previously part of the Vagrants Gaming and Other Offences Act 1931 as well. It’s come in handy for police officers who can’t find any other reason to imprison those pesky indigenous types that, apparently, aren’t grateful that we white fellas like to bash them to death.

This legislation and its global brethren have been criticised repeatedly, especially because most of them don’t define what constitutes swearing. We can be fairly sure ‘prick’ isn’t on the list though. Not yet anyway.

Bligh’s rationale that this will unclog the courts from the (apparently) numerous obscenity cases that hold up ‘real’ cases is ridiculous. I swear enough in public to warrant the full time attention of three magistrates, a district court judge and Michael Kirby. If this law were already being enforced with any regularity we wouldn’t have a legal system at all, it would have crumbled decades ago. To do away with this obscene clotting of the courts would, in any reasonable person’s mind, require dropping the law altogether or amending it to cover situations where it would actually matter.

The accusation that this is a money spinner is entirely valid. The changes simply mean that more people will be hit by the law as officers won’t be bugged so much by red tape. Due process is such a pain in the ass isn’t it?

I have nothing but contempt for the anti-swearing brigade. Tired axioms like ’swearing is a sign of a poor vocabulary’ or that it somehow points to a lack of education are utter rubbish. I take Stephen Fry’s approach to the topic. Our Prime Minister swears more than I do and, like him or loathe him, the man is supremely well educated and has such width of vocabulary that he’s successfully obfuscated his complete lack of imagination when it comes to nuanced policy.

I’m reassured to hear that our PM swears; it’s a gorgeous link to his humanity and a credible sign that he feels genuine emotion. If his policies were even halfway sophisticated I’d be voting for him this year and his swearing would be a major reason why.

The universe confirmed my views on swearing about half an hour ago when a young mate bumbled something about swearing being bad and showing that one was uneducated. Given that I’m in nearly all respects better educated than my doe-eyed young friend and yet swear enough to make a Nazarene infant cry, I’ll take it as an indicator that he’s wrong.  Swearing shouldn’t just be excusable, it should be regarded as a vital method of expressing emotions. Swearing is far healthier than violence.

I’m disinclined to play this down as a revenue raiser. Living in a state where a slipped tongue constitutes a criminal offence is bad enough. A society that wants to criminalise words, no matter how politically loaded they are, should be anathema to any educated citizen. Reject words, shun their users, but don’t make your judgments absolute for everyone around you, it’s more boorish and crude than the language you despise.

In the first minute of Gordon Brown’s TED talk on using the Internet to make the world a better place, he makes the greatest argument against censorship I’ve ever seen.

I say ’seen’ quite deliberately, because he was talking about something completely different at the time. In his introduction he shows several images that have at one point or another kicked the world into action against a dire situation. He showed the image of Kim, the naked Vietnamese girl running, terrified, away from the napalm that scorched her back and explained how the image punctuated the civilian populations of the world to the horrors of war. He showed the image of Birhan from Etheopia, a girl so neglected, abused and deteriorated that LiveAid followed in her image’s wake. He showed the Chinese student standing in front of tanks. He showed a Sudanese infant naked and moments from death. All these images slammed home the message that ‘things need to change’ with an urgency no other messenger could match.

Yet all of these images either have been, or would qualify to be, censored.

I made the point last week that open information is a prerequisite to a just and safe world. I had no idea at that point that it would be Gordon Brown who would so clearly link social justice to seeing, in full candor, the horrors of the world. It’s amazing how the Christian lobby is so keen to insulate us all (not just their followers) from ‘the worst of the worst’ and at the same time claiming a monopoly on good works around the world. The Christian claim that today’s free world is founded on a Christian set of morals is a painful and damaging lie. The progression in social justice over the last fifty years has occurred in spite of the broader Christian moral structure.

Enough of the Christian bashing, back to censorship.

We cannot realistically judge who we are as a society if we continually try to blind ourselves from the gaping sores. We will not choose the right path if we don’t see the whole picture. We could very well end up patting ourselves on the back for our safe world ‘mission accomplished’ while all the evidence of our disease and decay is batted away by representatives who’ve been conned into helping these horrors stay hidden.

With the recent turmoil in the Catholic church, it makes sense to me that the Australian Christian Lobby would want to keep people from finding out about those kinds of activities. If the evidence is out in the open, people tend to get caught.

Senator Conroy may find himself on a blacklist as the international organisation Reporters sans frontières puts Australia on watch as a potential enemy of the internet.

The RSF report, released on the 12th of March, lists Australia along with South Korea as candidates for its exclusive list of nations that threaten both the proper operation of the internet and the integrity of journalistic expression. The current list includes countries such as Burma, China, Iran, Syria and Egypt.

Opposition Senator Suzanne Boyce raised the report in question time, asking Conroy whether or not he was concerned to put alongside South Korea and Turkey as a potential enemy of the Internet. Conroy’s response was surprisingly uncivilized. His usual reliance on pre-written responses dove into outright lies, claiming that the RSF report was informed by misleading information published by Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA).

Par for the course for Conroy, he was then lampooned for being the only person in Australia who, apparently, wasn’t mistaken about the filter, and for jealously guarding the distinction by hiding as much of the relevant information as possible.

The EFA responded today outlining Conroy’s misleading statements about the EFA misleading citizens. Their response also stated that the RSF report was not officially or even secretly informed by the EFA, and that their conclusions were arrived at by their own reckoning of the situation. Given that the RSF isn’t the first organisation to come to the conclusion that the filter is dangerous, I find it easy to believe.

Of course, in the end, neither Conroy nor Rudd are apologising for slapping citizens with a filter that, after they leave office, they will cease to control.

I wet myself a little when reading Hillary Clinton’s opinions on internet freedom and allowed myself a little gloat in the direction of our very own Minister for Botching Everything he Touches, Senator Conroy.

Her speech contains some of the most rational and future-proofed analysis of the internet in its global political context ever published. Conroy’s response, however, is hackneyed, uninformative and fails, in every sense, to engage Clinton’s arguments. I’ll attempt to illustrate this disjunction without flooding the page with quotes, but Hillary’s words are too erudite and well constructed for me to paraphrase too often.

Clinton launches the thrust of her speech by quoting Obama’s warning to China,

the more freely information flows, the stronger societies become.

Even Conroy can’t disagree, saying that

The Rudd Government agrees with Secretary Clinton that the internet can transform societies and enable and empower individuals to engage, connect and have a greater impact than they ever have

So while Conroy nods his head and mumbles along in fluent pollie-speak, Clinton begins pushing the concept further, condemning Governments’ use of censorship.

technologies with the potential to open up access to government and promote transparency can also be hijacked by governments to crush dissent and deny human rights… [As] history itself has already condemned these tactics.

Conroy by now is slowing his vigorous head-nodding as he realises he’s on the wrong side of the fence. Just in time, however, Clinton throws him a line:

Now, all societies recognize that free expression has its limits. We do not tolerate those who incite others to violence, such as the agents of al-Qaida who are, at this moment, using the internet to promote the mass murder of innocent people across the world. And hate speech that targets individuals on the basis of their race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation is reprehensible. It is an unfortunate fact that these issues are both growing challenges that the international community must confront together. And we must also grapple with the issue of anonymous speech. Those who use the internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities.

Our Minister for Broadband Hindrance and the Digital Expolitation of Children sighs in relief, he’s said the exact same thing!

Australians have always recognised that there is some content which is not acceptable in any civilised society. [So we're going to censor the internet]

Unfortunately for Senator Steve, the line Clinton threw him came complete with bait and hook:

But these challenges must not become an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the internet for peaceful political purposes.

But Conroy’s not trying to violate our rights, right? Right? Hillary?

Some countries have erected electronic barriers that prevent their people from accessing portions of the world’s networks. They’ve expunged words, names, and phrases from search engine results. They have violated the privacy of citizens who engage in non-violent political speech. These actions contravene the Universal Declaration on Human Rights,

At this point our friend in the Senate should be rethinking his policy’s impact on diplomatic ties with the US. Hell, even Google thinks the plan is a disaster. Unfortunately, even the most powerful woman in the world can’t persuade the least receptive man in the world. In the very same press release as his insubstantial agreement with Clinton, he goes on to plug his censorship plans as a good thing. So Australians are in the hole now right? Wrong.

We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship.

Thank you Hillary, thank you. Now if you could just leave the installation materials for TOR on my doorstep I’ll be able to circumvent Con-job Conroy’s censorship machine.

Tune in next time for how the anti-censorship campaign needs to move forward to beat this once and for all.

*Edit: Fixed the first link to Clinton’s speech.

Sixteen years ago I opened a blank schoolbook and began planning a magazine. Today, I start work on that magazine in an official capacity, such is the nature of wishes.

QUTE magazine is the Student Magazine for Queensland University of Technology, run by the student guild, printed by printers, edited by me.

Last year’s QUTE magazine flourished under the magical touch of Michelle Knowles; her fortitude and skills in all things aesthetic took the magazine from startup to number one student mag in the country in under a year. Her ability to attract student contributions and work with Jason (graphic designer) to bring it all together has set a high standard that has been chasing me around my head for about a month now.

That’s right, I’m shitting my pants hoping I can at least keep the magazine going at that level.

I don’t expect to match or replicate the Knowles era of QUTE, it would be disrespectful to try and her style should remain her style. QUTE magazine has established quite the following over the last 12 months, and it’s considered an accomplishment to be published in its deftly designed pages. My job now is to maintain, streamline and expand those standards of publication.

Therefore QUTE magazine will be spread over the following channels:

1. The magazine proper: 5-6 hard copy editions over the academic calendar. Opinion, interviews and high quality works that deserve paper immortality.
2. The magazine website: Updated weekly with more time-sensitive contributions, news updates and media that wouldn’t fit in the print publication.
3. The PodCast: Weekly -fortnightly podcast featuring interviews, student audio plays, humor and analysis.

I’m more excited about the magazine this year than a conservative watching an execution (Fryy ‘im bubba’, fryy ‘im!). I’ll introduce the team as it stands next week when I see them all in the same room at the same time.

Important: If you’re a QUT student of any description and would like to contribute (either periodically or regularly) to QUTE, don’t hesitate to contact me on websinthe at gmail dot com. The team is never finalised and all work will be published (crap work will be published after I’ve reamed it with the proofing-bat).

Two nights ago the Coalition and Senator Fielding blocked proposed legislation that would have increased income for tertiary students while making it harder for students to qualify for any payments at all.

Julia Gillard’s office put together a press release lamenting the loss of income support increases at the hands of the greedy and politically motivated Coalition and Family First parties. Barely 18 hours later the National Union of Students President David Barrows released a response stating that the NUS was “absolutely shocked that Senator Fielding did not pass this measure”, before going on to decry the failure of so many positive changes in the legislation.

Given that the last time I saw David Barrows he was screaming orders at student campaigners and apparently hosing people down with his temper, it doesn’t surprise me that he’s ignoring some very good reasons against this legislation.

While the Coalition is yet to make an official announcement, Senator Fielding’s reasons for blocking the bill come down to the implications these changes would have for Rural and Regional students. The proposed legislation would change the requirements for a person to be considered independent (and therefore eligible for Youth Allowance) to be increased from earning $19k in eighteen months to working unbroken 30 hour weeks for eighteen months in a two year period.

If this legislation was designed to counter people abusing the Youth Allowance system, it’s one of the harshest and least humane attempts I’ve heard of. The going rhetoric is that rich students are using Youth Allowance payments to pay for Gap Year trips around the world. I can’t think of a bigger load of bullshit; if this is happening it’s because Centrelink, as usual, is incompetent, not because the entry requirements are too low.

I’m irked by Dave Barrow’s comment that “a system that gets the poorest students to university [has been] blocked.” Seriously David? You’re calling a system that either keeps people out of education for two years or forces them to rely on their parents during their tertiary education “a system that gets the poorest students” into University? If this had been the system when I was coming into university the first time I couldn’t have afforded it. The poorest families can’t afford to support their children’s tertiary educations, and now the NUS advocating a system that will keep them uneducated for at least 18 months while they work their arses off just to qualify for support that is still only going to be half the poverty line? Why didn’t they even mention the increased restrictions on eligibility?

I’m all for any changes to the Youth Allowance System that increase the level of income support for students. Unfortunately this isn’t one of them. The larger numbers going into students’ pockets are coming at the expensive of how many students are being supported.

I knew there was somethign fishy about Gillard’s press release. Please comment, I’d like to get a better look at this situation.