by cameron | Aug 8, 2008 | activism, Australian media, Australian politics
I did a show yesterday on China’s censorship and human rights record. A few people have told me that in Australia, we can say what we like and do what we like. Really?
Why is KRUDD spending $60 million on Internet censorship?
Why did a Gold Coast teenager get arrested and charged for wearing a “blasphemous†t-shirt?
Why was Haneef held without charge for 12 days?
Why was Dr Phillip Nitschke’s book on assisted suicide banned?
Why were two Islamic books banned?
China has censorship. Australia has censorship. Ours may be less strict and more sophisticated, but if you want to argue against the principle of censorship, let’s fight it at home first. I’ll be there with you. Let’s just avoid the mass hysteria and hypocrisy of criticizing easy targets when we have similar laws at home. That’s just the way the mass media and governments deflect attention from what is happening in our own backyards.
Australia has laws about what and can’t be said. So does China. And China isn’t going to change until the people of China was it to and do something about it en masse.
If Australia REALLY wants to protest China’s human rights record, let’s boycott the Olympics. We could also stop selling them coal but I suspect economic sanctions hurt innocent civilians more than the people in power. However let’s stop censorship at home first, then perhaps we’ll be in a position to critique other countries.
by cameron | Jun 30, 2008 | Australian politics, Podcast
Tonight’s guests – Katherine Szuminska & Matthew Landauer – are the founders of OpenAustralia.org, a recently-launched site which makes politics more transparent.
Based on the British site TheyWorkForYou, OpenAustralia.org scrapes Hansard and makes it much more accessible. You can find out who your local MP is and then subscribe to email alerts whenever they say something in Parliament. And that’s just the beginning. Kat & Matt have a number of exciting features they intend to bring to the site in the next year or two.
This is their first interview.
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The G’Day World theme music:
Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)
More On This Album
Other music in today’s episode:
Curro , Curro
“El Bueno, El Feo Y El Malo” (mp3)
from “Silba A Ennio Morricone”
(DiscMedi)
More On This Album
Michael Brook
“Earth Alone” (mp3)
from “An Inconvenient Truth – Soundtrack”
(bigHelium/Canadian Rational)
More On This Album
by cameron | Jun 26, 2008 | Australian politics, Iraq
America – your tax dollars have been well spent. What can you buy with one trillion dollars? No-bid contracts:
Nearly Four Decades Later, U.S. Oil Companies Return to Iraq
Four oil companies are in the final stage of contract negotiations to regain drilling rights in Iraq — thirty-six years after they lost them. Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — founding partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — are currently in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry “for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields.” Joining them are Chevron and several smaller oil companies. The deal is expected to be approved by the end of the month and “will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.” The no-bid process has frozen out 40 other oil companies, including Indian, Russian and Chinese competitors. A spokesperson for the Oil Ministry said that “the no-bid contracts were a stop-gap measure to bring modern skills into the fields while the oil law was pending in Parliament.” He added that the companies chosen already had a relationship with the government, “advising the ministry without charge for two years before being awarded the contracts.” While the current contracts are relatively small, they represent a foot in the door for much more lucrative future deals.
Source: New York Times, June 19, 2008 via Center for Media and Democracy
by cameron | Jun 21, 2008 | Australian politics
I’m very excited to see that OpenAustralia, the local version of TheyWorkForYou is online and in beta testing. Congrats to everyone involved. It’s something I’ve been wanting to see happen in Australia for years.
Reading through the site and its’ associated blog tonight, I discovered a couple of interesting points about transparency in Australian politics, good and bad.
The good was Kevin Rudd’s explanation of the nationwide FuelWatch system he’s implementing, to the chagrin of the opposition. From his explanation in Parliament this week and this release on his website (which is a couple of months old but, hey, I’ve been busy), it sounds like a good system to me. I think providing transparency on the issue of petrol prices is exactly what the government should be doing. It prevents them from interfering in the market by either placing a ceiling on petrol prices or getting more directly involved in competition regulation. They provide information and let the people decide which retailers they will buy their petrol from. It’s pretty hard to argue with. Interesting to see the Liberals *still* siding with the oil companies even after losing the last election so badly. All of the post-election rhetoric about having to change and listening to the people has obviously been put aside.
The bad thing I read was on the OpenAustralia blog where they have been trying to get access to the Register of Members’ Interests. What’s that? According to OA:
As you may know, the Register of Members’ Interests says who or what organisations are paying what to members of the House of Representatives. This is a really important document that explains who is financially influencing your Representatives.
So basically you get to see who is bribing your local MP to send them a favourable vote. You would think that this information would be pretty important in a representative democracy, right? So, where is it? Here’s what OA was told:
Not only, as mentioned before, is the register only kept in one office in Canberra, and not available online for everyone to see, it is not even available in electronic form.
Rather, the Register of Members’ Interests is a set of 7 binders with around 1500 A4 sheets in them, which are continually updated (by hand) throughout the course of the parliamentary term. Supposedly, many of the sheets are handwritten.
In other words, it is being deliberately made difficult for members of the general public to get access to. This has to be changed. We need to start a campaign to build awareness around this issue and get the Rudd government to address it. We all should have the ability to see who is lining our politicians’ pockets. This information should be readily available to everybody.
by cameron | Jun 20, 2008 | Australian media, Australian politics, Podcast
Today I got to chat with another person I admire – Stephen Mayne. As I’m sure most of you will know, Stephen is the founder of Crikey.com.au. These days he is also running a video podcast “The Mayne Report” where he takes his video crew into Annual General Meetings for some of Australia’s largest companies and asks the questions other finance journalists are too scared to ask. He is also a co-founder of Kwoff.com, an Aussie news aggregation service.
Stephen has been using his media properties for the last decade to fight corruption and incompetence in Australian politics and corporations. He has fought the good fight AND became a millionaire when he sold Crikey a few years ago. So he’s living proof that you can focus on making a positive difference and also make some money along the way.
Today I capture some of that background, dig into the roots of his activism, discover how big business uses fake defamation lawsuits to pay kickbacks to friendly politicians, and learn about Stephen’s plans for his shareholder activism network.
And if you’re wondering who Patricia Piccinini is, check out these examples of her work!
And is it just me, or does Stephen carry a very striking similarity to the famous portrait of Joshua Smith by William Dobell?
The G’Day World theme music:
Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)
More On This Album
by cameron | Jun 4, 2008 | Australian politics
On Twitter this afternoon I made a crack about how the two-party system we have in Australia is, I believe, fundamentally broken. Someone asked me how I would improve it. This is what I came up with on the fly. This isn’t something I’ve given any thought to previously, so it’s probably full of holes as big as Barnesy’s mouth, but you know me, I’m a shoot-first, think-later kinda guy. I’m certain it isn’t even slightly original. It’s probably discussed in Politics 101 at university but as I didn’t go to university, I missed out.
Let’s scrap all of the political parties.
In fact, let’s scrap elections completely.
Why couldn’t it work like the jury system.
We set up an online Bill submission system. Citizens, businesses, lobby groups, etc, could all enter in their submissions for new laws they want enacted.
Public servants would then arrange for 50 or 100 citizens to be selected at random from the community, jury style, to hear the arguments for and against each submission. After they have heard the evidence and debated it in private, the jury will vote to see which submission deserve further investigation. Two small committees will then be established from the public service to examine the merits of each submission – one for and one against.
Once the committees have their presentations ready, another “jury” will be called to hear the respective arguments. They will hear the “for” argument and the “against” argument, just like hearing the prosecution and the defense in a legal case. Again, this “jury” will deliberate in private and then vote either for or agains the bill.
And so on and so forth.
And we treat being a member of one of these juries with the same seriousness and legal ramifications as we do being a member of a jury today. Tampering with a jury carries maximum penalties.
The benefits? Here are some off the top of my head.
- even if we fly everyone to Canberra for the deliberations, it’s going to save the country millions of dollars a year. The 2004 Federal Election cost $120 million. I have no idea what it costs us every year to run the MPs, but it can’t be pretty. In my system, it would be legislated that the jurors would get leave from their employers at full pay while they were on jury duty. Small businesses (under $10 million in annual revenue) would be compensated for this expense.
- we would get rid of professional politicians for good and all of the problems that this system entails. Lobby groups wouldn’t be able to buy off anyone, because juries would rotate constantly. Nobody gets to retire from politics and become a director of a mining company as a reward for Bills passed or get paid $US500,000 per speaking engagement.
- we’d get rid of party politics. Hooray.
- it won’t just be the wealthy members of society making the decisions. Federal backbenchers now get paid $127,000 pa plus benefits whereas half the households in Australia have a pre-tax income of less than $80,826. And that’s leaving out the politicians who are already insanely wealthy such as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull.
So – as always feel free to tell me where I’m wrong. You know I love a good debate.
(photo by tassie303)
