Every Cloud Has a Saliva Lining
Every Cloud Has a Saliva Lining
After Pavlov
[Apologies to the source of the original of this image whose provenance we do not know.]
Lolcats With a Vengeance
Lolcats With a Vengeance
Sir Roger is despondent
After all the hard work of so many people Australian politics is looking like Howard Lite, iSuck 2.0 déjà vu all over again. Boat people – “Aaaaarrrggghh! Foreigners! Tough on Queue-jumpers [but not on the causes of queue-jumpers]”.
“Let’s pretend to be doing something about climate change. We have to do something. We have to do something. I know! Let’s play tiddlywinks! That’s “something”. Hey, youse guys, the world is going to burn to a cinder unless we do something about it! So what we’re doing is, we’re playing tiddlywinks. If you don’t play tiddlywinks too, the world is going to burn to a cinder.”
“Okay, well, um … wait on … we don’t believe in tiddlywinks but we’ll play if Johnno and Wayne don’t have to play but you promise they will win.”
“But if Johnno and Wayne don’t play the world will burn to a crisp! No-one will win!”
“Okay, well…well…well get fuckin’ stuffed then! Let the world burn for all we fuckin’ care! … Fuckin’ lower class upstarts! Fuckin’ fairy eggheads!”
Palestine.
Israel.
Obama (what a fucking disappointment).
Russia.
Burma.
Sri Lanka.
China,
Tibet.
Fucking arrogant, corrupt and criminally-incompetent Indonesian politicians, bureaucrats, police and judges.
Walls everywhere.
Hatred.
Religious madmen in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia.
And the United States, which is terminally fucked in the collective head.
Democracy movements being crushed everywhere.
Freedoms, rights and privacy being shredded even – especially – by the good old Brits, eh, what?
Stupid global refusal to listen, based on creaking, long-ago-discredited, Industrial-Revolution-era social-political-religious theories that date back – even in their most recent versions – more than 200 years in the West, and on 4000-year-old, crazy, murderous, hate-filled, tribalist, racist, desert-engendered cruel religious fantasies in the rest of the world.
The hopes of “peace and love” from the last five decades crumbling like the naïve hallucinations they so pitiably were.
Young people who will “look after” things in a few years unable to think or care about anything but how some fake and shallow, talentless celebrity flashed her cunt, and what eyeshadow to wear …
And the people who actually care. the people with answers, who could possibly do something about it all, are sneered at and ridiculed.
It’s enough to make you want to just give up and forget it all and look at some funny cat video.
“Visa Bob”‘s Dept Ruins Yet Another Life
“Visa Bob”‘s Dept Ruins Yet Another Life
Oh Dear … DIC’s ‘Very Bad Event’. Again
Mr Bob Correll,
Deputy Secretary,
Department of Immigration, Citizenship and Wrongful Detention
Shit, Bob,
(You don’t mind me calling you ‘Shit’, do you Bob?)
You and I go way back, Bob, and I know this will seem out of character to you but … I know it’s wrong. I know I shouldn’t. But unlovely as it is, Bob, I can’t help this feeling of smug superiority (you know, that feeling you always have, Bob, when it comes to other people).
Yet another “very bad event, a serious administrative error and a terrible circumstance,” according to Foreign Affairs Minister, Stephen Smith; the wrongful detention of Van Phuc Nguyen, a permanent resident who was detained in 2002 and held in Sydney’s Villawood Detention Centre for more than three years. Immigration officials – your officials, Bob – at Sydney airport did not recognise his visa – your visa, Bob.
How “holier than thou” are you feeling at the moment, Bob?
The longest term of wrongful detention in recent history according to the Ombudsman?
Yet another appalling miscarriage of justice perpetrated by your department and brought to light
- not through the transparency of your department
- not through your department’s decency or its ethical standards
- not through the exemplary corporate behaviour you are expected to display
- or the exemplary legal behaviour you are required to display as a government department
- but only through the persistence of the aggrieved man and the efforts of an overworked Ombudsman.
Indeed, far from pursuing the decent and ethical thing to do – let alone the right and the humane action to take – according to the Ombudsman your department engaged instead in (typical-public-service-arse-covering) legal debate about your options.
And so poorly does your department understand moral standards that still it offers only a pittance in compensation for your department’s incompetence – $70,000 for the theft of three years of an innocent person’s life (less $12,000 for the government’s own legal costs, of course).
How much do you earn get paid, Bob? How much does the DIC head, Andrew Metcalf, earn? [About a quarter of it, as the joke goes?] It’s hard to find out but certainly more than $200,000 and probably in at least the $300,000 vicinity.
Do you recall telling me smugly about “the important business managed by the Department”?
Do you recall telling me in your patronising way about your deep concern for “Australia’s reputation overseas“?
I certainly recall your telling me that you considered my website “offensive”. And how can I ever forget your bullying threats of legal action under Sections 53 (c) (d) and (eb) of the Trade Practices Act 1974, Section 68 of the Crimes Act 1914 and Section 39(2) of the Trade Marks Act 1995.
Well, Bob, so much for the Important Business Managed By Your Department.
It wasn’t managed at all, was it?
So much for Australia’s Reputation Overseas, or your department’s reputation at home.
And Bob? I find your department’s clearly-evidenced inhumane, incompetent, arrogant attitude towards human beings far more offensive than you could ever find my website.
I am not a lawyer Bob, and neither, clearly, are you, but Joe Public – not to mention Van Phuc Nguyen – is entitled to question your department’s capacity to carry out its duties. He is entitled to question the justification of departmental officials to their juicy salaries. He might well ask,
“If the department has so comprehensively, so frequently and so predictably failed to manage its responsibilities, are departmental officials, or the department itself, represented by its senior executives, therefore subject to legal action for misfeasance1? And might mandamus2 be sought against the Department because of the department’s incompetence? If the Ombudsman has determined that Nguyen’s detention was “wrongful” then shouldn’t Nguyen, rather than being offered some insultingly token compensation by the department, be awarded punitive damages by a court?”
You gave a speech in 2007, Bob, in which you said,
… on our website, the department currently lists ‘seven important things you should do as soon as possible after arriving in Australia’:
1. Apply for a Tax File Number (TFN)
2. Register with Medicare
3. Open a bank account
4. Register with Centrelink
5. Register for English Classes
6. Enrol Your Children in School
7. Apply for a Driver’s Licence
You should have added:
8. Apply for release from Villawood.
Hey Bob? Why don’t you resign?
1 When a party fails to perform at all, it is nonfeasance. When a party performs the duty inadequately or poorly, it is misfeasance. …The terms misfeasance and nonfeasance are most often used…with reference to the discharge of…statutory obligations; and it is an established rule that an action lies in favour of persons injured by misfeasance, i.e. by negligence in discharge of the duty…The courts can find evidence of carelessness in the discharge of public duties and on that basis award damages to individuals who have suffered thereby.
2“Mandamus is provided for by Section 75(v) of the Australian Constitution. The duty sought to be enforced must have two qualities: It must be a duty of public nature and the duty must be imperative and should not be discretionary.”
The Whoredom of Philip Ruddock
The Whoredom of Philip Ruddock
An Unfinished Canvas
“ They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them…
Between rim and robe naught was there to see, save only a deadly gleam of eyes…
And they became forever invisible and they entered into the realm of shadows.
The Nazgûl were they, the Ringwraiths, the Ulairi, the Enemy’s most terrible servants; darkness went with them, and they cried with the voices of death…
The Nazgûl came again like vultures that expect their fill of doomed men’s flesh. Out of sight and shot they flew, and yet were ever present, and their deadly voices rent the air. More unbearable they became, not less, at each new cry.
At length even the stout-hearted would fling themselves to the ground as the hidden menace passed over them, or they would stand, letting their weapons fall from nerveless hands while into their minds a blackness came, and they thought no more of war, but only of hiding and of crawling, and of death.
Is there a more obnoxious, more simply awful creature than this Nazgûl, Philip Ruddock, whose entire career has been to suck the life out of all around him? In a recent outing he supported the Rudd government’s changes to terrorism legislation like this:
“ … the man who drafted the existing suite of laws, former Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, indicated in-principle support for the Rudd government’s changes: “I always saw counter-terrorist laws as an unfinished canvas.”
It is one thing to be a cold and heartless bastard in whose presence blood congeals, water freezes, the sun dims and flowers wither and die; to be a wraith who sucks the breath out of the mouths of babies and who, when he speaks, makes the sound of sand being breathed into his lungs, or of your brain being sucked out of your skull through your ears.
It is another thing to be what many might consider a traitor, if a traitor is someone who is advocates selling or giving away his country’s sovereignty to another.
Everyone can recall, with a shudder, his tenure as the “cold, callous and outrageous” Minister for Immigration, and his equally inhumane, life-sucking time as Attorney General. You may not have heard of “Mr T”, a Vietnamese Australian suffering from mental illness, who was detained three times by Immigration and whom the Nagûl blamed for the horrors that Ruddock and the dark forces of his department visited upon him.
“ In order to excuse himself of any accountability, Mr Ruddock referred to ‘contributory negligence’ and said problems of identification lie when people did not properly identify themselves.
“Mr T was well known to the Department of Immigration having been asked to verify his identity on a number of occasions,” said Mr Burke.
“When Mr T was detained for the first time in 1999 despite ‘appearing confused’ and displaying signs of mental health problems, he managed to tell the Department of Immigration his full name – with the first two names transposed -, his correct date of birth, his correct address and his sister’s correct phone number. He was identified and released after five days in detention.
“Mr Ruddock was the Minister responsible when Mr T was wrongfully placed, yet again, in Villawood for 242 consecutive days in 2003. He was also the Minister responsible when on 22 January, five days into this period of detention, Mr T identified himself as an Australian citizen. Mr T also provided his correct date of birth.” ‘
Ruddock has acted consistently against the rights and interests of Australian citizens. It was Ruddock who was Attorney General when the Howard Government agreed to allow Indonesia to determine Australia’s policy on West Papuan refugees.
It was Ruddock who was one of the loudest cheerleaders for allowing the – at that time – corrupt United States Justice Department, and the Pentagon, and the State Department, and the White House, to determine Australia’s policy on the detention of David Hicks.
It was Ruddock who, as the highest legal officer in the nation, through his terrorism legislation willingly buried the essential concept – and one of Australia’s hardcore values – of innocence until guilt is tested and proven, not to mention habeas corpus, for reasons that can only be guessed but probably include vanity, ambition, pride, arrogance, self-righteousness, cringing Uriah Heepish sycophancy, and just basic total bastardry. Ever so ‘umble.
Stripping away these foundational values of our nation was in our view nothing short of treachery, stupidity, ignorance and a dried and shrivelled morality.
Now Ruddock has formed the grisly view that amounts to this: Australia should allow China to determine Australia’s foreign policy.
If we give away who we are and what we stand for, if we give away the very values that make us Australian, the values that make it worth being an Australian and make being Australian so exceptional, for fear that China might take its money and go home, then Australia is a whore, owned by anyone with enough money and pimped by a politician. A politician, of course, knows exactly what this is all about. The heart of a politician’s art is to say what people want to hear, especially what their masters want to hear. Doing whatever China wants would install China as our master and we would no longer be a free people.
We would no longer be a sovereign people and to agitate for such a condition is to be a traitor to the country and its people.
Well, as a whore, why don’t we go the whole way? China’s politburo seems to define anyone – especially downtrodden minorities – who disagrees with its brutal, inhumane, anti-democratic, racist, butchering regime, Orwell’s ‘boot stamping on a human face – forever’, as a “Terrorist”. So why don’t we do as the Nazgûl advises and just tell the Chinese that we agree with them, that we’re not really all that fussed about “democracy” (until they’re ready to let us have it). Why don’t we take their lists of “terrorist organisations” and make them our own, round up Chinese and Chinese-born Australian citizens (same thing to the Chinese) who fit China’s “Terrorist” profile, bulldoze their homes and businesses as the Chinese do and send them back to China for a bullet in the back of the head?
But Ruddock’s not a whore. Whores have feelings.
…and now he was come again, bringing ruin, turning hope to despair, and victory to death.
Keelty
Keelty
Gone at long last
How much time should one spend on this slug?
We don’t even feel like woo-hoo. Just “at last” and “good riddance” and “what took you so long”.
One of the things we really dislike about (not exclusively-) Australian culture is the way we rail against awful people and the moment they die or resign we politely say ever such nice things about them. It’s hypocritical and weak and cowardly. We think. We have no such qualms. Keelty in our view was a bad man, morally weak, a disastrous Commissioner who willingly ran over the basics of human rights and legal traditions like habeas corpus in order to pursue a flawed and misguided agenda.
He was a willing and irretrievably politicised Liberal Party stooge, and concerned more with appearance than with the truth.
His most egregious failures are well-known – the obscene treatment of young Australians in the Bali Nine affair, Haneef, the onanistic display of muscle at APEC, and the Ul-Haque farce.
Speaking of Ul-Haque we once asked,
“ Justice Adams said ASIO officers ‘committed the criminal offences of false imprisonment and kidnapping.’ When do they go to prison? Have they been arrested and charged yet? Where are they being detained? Are they being pursued and prosecuted by the AFP with the same vigour and determination that it showed against…oh, I don’t know…Mohamed Haneef, say?”
Good question still.
Elsewhere we said:
“ It’s time for Mick Keelty to resign. Or be sacked. Keelty has to go because of how he thinks about the law. He has to go because everything points to his being utterly politicised and his making decisions on political, not legal, grounds as directed by his [then] masters, the Howard ministry. Keelty made, cleverly he probably thought, a Faustian pact with the Devil of Realpolitik. Now he’s been caught out yet again and so we say, yet again:
Do the decent thing at long last, Mick.
And we said this:
“ Sack [him] for misfeasance. Malfeasance. Non-feasance. Abuse of power by a public official. Criminal stupidity. Any of those will do.
Federal Police yesterday released a statement saying the former Gold Coast doctor [Haneef] is no longer a person of interest to them, and they have found there are no grounds to proceed against him. [SBS News]Well fuck me dead – I’m Foreskin Fred! Yes, after all this time. After all the waste. After all the harm. After all the stupidity and incompetence. After Scotland Yard laughed at the AFP; months after the Queensland Police Service and ASIO both said there were no grounds. After all the subversion of democracy, the courts and the rule of law.
Sack them.
Everything about the carriage of the Haneef affair by the AFP and the government suggests that it never was about public safety; that it always was a political stunt; that it was in fact a considered and calculated decision by the AFP to use the Haneef matter for political ends. As we know from another case, the AFP sought every possible opportunity to test the envelope of the terrorism laws. Keelty, in particular, clearly operates a political agenda, having capitulated under pressure from John Howard years ago. He learned his lesson well and in the Haneef case hung his hat on the re-election of the Howard government. This means that he has lost sight of his actual role, his constitutional – and certainly his moral – obligation to the people of Australia and the democracy they own.
Nothing has happened to cause us to resile from these opinions. Keelty appalls us because he respects neither democracy nor the rule of law, the law being not a tool for repression and control but a safeguard of a vibrant civil society.
Keelty cheerfully acquiesced in the subversion of such safeguards.
‘I’m Sir Roger and I’m Fucked’
‘I’m Sir Roger and I’m Fucked’
This is not for you
Really. We just want to acknowledge ourselves privately but publicly (it makes sense to us, anyway). It’s not meant to be onanistically self-congratulatory, except in the sense that we have achieved some things and we want to record them.
So this is a stocktake for posterity, if you like, that marks a moment, a milestone.
Yes, ValuesAustralia is two years old. This is our 712th post. Singlehanded, eh, Clubtroppo, Larvatus Prodeo, RoadtoSurfdom etc. etc.? That’s almost one a day. (There used to be a billboard for One A Day vitamin pills at the corner of Victoria Rd and Rowntree Street at Blackwattle Bay in Sydney. There was a picture of a man and a woman. The woman was saying, “I’m Jenny and I give John One A Day.” Soon a graffiti artist had added, “I’m John and I’m fucked!”)
And, yes, we’re just about fucked, ourselves. We’ve got a rotator cuff from all the typing and mouse clicking, especially during October and November last year.
(We went to the radiologist. “What seems to be the problem?” “I’ve got a sore shoulder.” “Hmm…we’ll do an ultrasound and an x-ray…… Hmm…. Hmmmmmm, our expert analysis of the ultrasound and x-ray indicates you have a sore shoulder. You’ll have to stop using it for a while.” “Thanks….What?)
We’ve never paid for any advertising. We’ve never submitted ValuesAustralia to any search engine. Nevertheless, we got ourselves listed on Google within 24 hours of launching the site. We tried to register the site with dmoz.org (The Open Source Directory) – as you do – but it wasn’t taking orders, and by the time it came back on line months later, ValuesAustralia was already magically listed!
We’ve been #1 for “Australian Values” on Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask most of the time for more than a year and a half. We’re #12 for “values” on Google worldwide, out of 314,000,000 results and on google.com.au we’re #2 for “values” out of 307,000,000. We’re #1 on google worldwide and Australia for “Australian political values” out of about 400,000 results.
Our Google Page Rank is 4 (used to be 5 but they changed the algorithm) which is respectable but we’d prefer a 5 or a 6.
We’ve had over 300,000 aggregate visitors and more than 75,000 spam messages (thank you, Akismet).
Earlier this year we were consistently getting more than 1000 visitors a day – over 30,000 a month, which is okay, although nothing like the big guys.
We’ve made friends all over the world and especially in Australia. We are in the top 1% of websites worldwide. We are popular in Saudi Arabia – amongst the top 42,000 favourite sites for Saudis. (That worries us just a bit…Say hullo to Al for us…) We appreciate our readers and those who choose to comment from time to time. We thought a scarcity of comments was a Bad Thing, a Failure, but we noticed that one of the most popular, most entertaining bloggers we know of, Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, doesn’t get heaps, either – a few, but not tens like Possum or hundreds and thousands like William the PollBludger.
In May 2007 ValuesAustralia was picked up by the “Stay In Touch” column at the Sydney Morning Herald, accusing us of “rhetoric”.
One of Sir Roger’s posts was selected by ClubTroppo and On Line Opinion in January 2008 as one of the top 40 posts in Australia for 2007. We’re very proud of that.
But it’s a post we made early in 2007 that we are still most proud of. Ken Parish at ClubTroppo called it
“quite possibly the best piece of passionate, angry polemic I’ve ever read, certainly on a blog. ‘Roger Migently’ is roused to extraordinary heights of eloquence… ”
Yes, Troppo has been good to us and we mourn the passing of Missing Link and Ken’s prolonged work-induced(?) absence. We were also congratulated by Richard Neville (HomePageDaily) and Steven Poole whose Unspeak blog is our benchmark for economy, clarity, style and wit.
We have enjoyed the journey so far and we have no intention at this stage of stopping, although we have slowed down (work, you know).
Bobbo the Clown
Our favourite person in the world, of course, is the clown, Bob Correll (above), Deputy Secretary of DIC, OPM, because he wrote us the letter which inspired our outburst. As we discovered he was (and appears still to be) the person who had taken over departmental responsibility for “Borders, Compliance, Detention and Technology”, or in other words, perhaps, for keeping innocent kiddies locked up in the desert, deporting Australian citizens, supporting the failed state of Nauru, making the lives of genuine refugees a misery, doing it to please the Minister, and all at the touch of a computer key. Previously he had been the driving force behind developing and implementing Job Network, or “how to design exquisite, personalised punishment for people who are already struggling with the stress of being unemployed”. Godluvvya, Bob! How’s the Volvo? How’s the kids? How do you sleep at night?
One of the most satisfying things is how we always beat the Immigration Department on Google.
Our second favourite person is Mick Keelty, just for being such a hopeless buffoon and continually making appalling stuff-ups for us to make fun of. G’bye, Mick.
Anyway, just for the record.
(And a special “hi!” to Lang!)