The May 28 edition of the Sunday Telegraph moaned about the families of terror suspects receiving increased payments from Centrelink and also receiving assistance from the Legal Aid Commission.
The story, authored by Lincoln Wright, carries a headline of “Terror suspects’ $1M welfare gift”. Wright claims his paper carried out an “investigation”, going onto provide details of increasing payments made to families of the accused.
Investigation? What investigation? Did they obtain records under FOI? Did Mr Wright attend his local Centrelink office and ask a few questions? Did Centrelink staff breach Commonwealth privacy legislation and provide otherwise confidential details to the Tele?
What actually seems to have happened is that the paper used publicly-available formulae to calculate how much the terror suspects earned. There was no investigation. Mr Wright and the paper have in fact carried out no investigation.
Even more laughable is the paper’s claim that “Legal Aid services have boosted the total bill for taxpayers to more than $1 million”. Really? Is that an increase specific to these trials? Or is that a general increase in Legal Aid funding arising from the recent Commonwealth Budget? Or is that an estimate from the upcoming NSW and Victorian State Budgets?
Apparently, the paper wants us to believe that anyone guilty of the crime of being married to or parented by a terror suspect should be sentenced to mandatory destitution. But then, if concerned friends of the family decided to fundraise, the same newspaper would make an issue about “Pro-terror Muslim extremists raising money for their own”.
Apparently, the Telegraph also wants us to believe that there is already a fair amount of indignation in the grassroots. Hence quotes from representatives of such prominent organisations as “People Against Lenient Sentencing”.
I thought I would check the Yellow and White Pages to see if I could find this prominent and influential organisation. Just as I expected, there was no listing. I then did a search on the national names index of the Australian Securities & Investments Commisssion (ASIC). Again, no listing.
So who is this organisation? Who is Steve Medcraft? I wonder if Lincoln Wright would be prepared to tell me? I might just ring him on Monday and find out …
**********
Allegedly conservative columnist Piers Ackerman also finds time to moan. His targets are those nasty boongs who are victims of an inner-city Marxist ALP conspiracy called “self determination”.
And we all know how nasty and left-wing that conspiracy is. After all, it is supported by such radical leftists as Malcolm Fraser, Paul Keating and Aiden Ridgeway. Reds under Piers’ bed!
Or perhaps Ackerman wants to return the blasted Abbos back to the good old days when they received less money for doing the same job. After all, he finds time to lament “the 1965 equal wage case which saw Aboriginal stockmen granted the same wages as Europeans on stations across Australia's northern pastoral districts.”
Perhaps he reckons the black bastards should be happy getting less, so long as their families were allowed to sleep outside and have a few scraps of last night’s dinner and a couple of aspirin tablets thrown their way. After all, treating the boongs as equals is something only those bloody Afghan Muslim cameleer buggers would do.
Perhaps the best way to treat the blasted Abbos is to make them just like us. Get rid of their customs and cultures by throwing their customary law out the door. Let’s be honest. Which die-hard conservative, which believer in the maintenance of the status quo would allow the 20,000 year cultural landscape of the blasted boongs to compete with the 200 year Pommy/Irish cultural new kids on the block?
With friends like Piers to embarrass them, serious conservatives don’t need too many more journalistic enemies.
**********
Everyone’s favourite Dutchman, Andrew Bolt, spends his 26 May column in the Herald-Sun complaining about how the status quo of multiculturalism is once again destroying our nation. How so?
Always a purist on (mono-)cultural issues, Bolt laments that lots of Aussies attending the soccer game were barracking for Greece.
Yep, the choice of which team the crowd supports in soccer represents a dangerous threat to our nation and its culture. According Bolt, this shows a “clash of loyalties” and is part of the great conspiracy known as the “shame-Australia-shame movement”.
But hang on. Weren't the Greeks one of those wonderful European waves of migrants that John Howard claims always put Australia first? That have adjusted well and become part of mainstream Australia? That don't share the nasty extremist traits of those blasted Muslim arrivals?
Andrew, of course, doesn't find space to address this chink in the neo-Conservative cultural armour. Instead, he engages in some good old-fashioned wog-bashing. Maybe someone put too much chilli in his yeeros. Or was that a kebab? Who gives a toss. They're all the bloody same, those bloody wogs!
© Irfan Yusuf 2006
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Why sexual hypocrisy is preferable to shock jock xenophobia
Rex Hunt is a respected AFL commentator and fishing guru. His most recent exploits involved a somewhat amusing spat with residents of the NSW alternative lifestyle hub of Byron Bay following an alleged assault by local youths.
In rather colourful fashion, Hunt described Byron (popularly regarded as an idyllic haunt for backpackers, yoga instructors, schoolies and cashed-up gurus) as worse than Baghdad. Locals were furious. The rest of Australia were most amused.
Yet Mr Hunt’s recent public exposure has had far more serious consequences than verbal exchanges with Byron Bay locals. A frequent commentator on moral as well as sporting issues, Mr Hunt has been forced to admit sexual indiscretions on public radio.
Hunt has condemned himself as a “sleaze” and a “hypocrite” for paying women to provide sexual favours (or at least to keep silent about them) whilst lecturing others on sexual morality. His wife has also appeared on radio to comment on his activities.
Yes, we can condemn Mr Hunt in the same terms as he has condemned himself. But it is also an opportunity to give credit where credit is due. In media terms, for a man constantly in the public eye, Rex Hunt is a uniquely brave man.
In the world of talkback radio, it is rare to find a man prepared to admit his own humanity to his listeners. Mr Hunt’s behaviour may have been disgraceful. But compare Mr Hunt’s conduct and his response to the scandal to the responses of other media personalities.
Shock jocks are known for their flagrant disregard of the reputations of others. How often do we hear talkback hosts insult, malign and defame not just individuals but entire communities.
In the lead-up to the Cronulla riots, a number of Sydney talkback hosts openly encouraged frustrated rioters to take the law into their own hands. They used the worst racial and religious stereotypes to generate hatred toward persons presumed by their appearance to belong to a supposedly offending group.
Rex Hunt may be an unfaithful husband, but his words certainly were not an essential ingredient of one of the nastiest race riots this country has seen since the end of the Second World War. Mr Hunt’s indiscretions did not lead to a breakdown of law and order of such proportions that entire beaches had to be closed up and down the New South Wales coast over summer.
One can only imagine how some notoriously racist Sydney shock jocks would react if their own sexuality was made the subject of public scrutiny. One wonders whether their claims to being protectors and defenders of decent conservative values would survive examination should their known past indiscretions be aired.
I wonder if they would even allow scrutiny of their sexual activities to be even mentioned without their reaching for their lawyers and threatening the alleged offenders with expensive legal proceedings.
Some of these same shock jocks have even gone to the extent of claiming that certain cultures and religions encourage their young men to sexually abuse white-skinned women as some kind of right of passage.
But it isn’t just the ayatollahs of talk back radio that show scant regard to the feelings of others. Some years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the first Bali bombing, a former client of mine was charged with possessing possible explosives. One journalist reported that this fellow had Arabic books in his house and had recently started attending religious classes at the local mosque.
The police involved in the investigation had already ruled out the possibility of terrorism. Yet the journalist involved wanted to use the pages of his Sydney newspaper to spread hysteria about the possibility of terrorism by making reference to a recent religious conversion on the road to Damascus (or in my former client’s case, Mecca).
Ironically, the journalist involved had a distinctly Arabic-sounding surname. His own background suggested that a visit to his own home might reveal Arabic books and possible visits to the institutions of religious denominations at the heart of Middle Eastern conflict. I raised these points on an e-mail group, with a view to levelling the playing field and exposing what I felt was the journalist’s hypocrisy.
Some 4 months later, I received a letter from an in-house lawyer of the media organisation for which that journalist worked. That letter corrected some erroneous assumptions I had made concerning the journalist’s ethno-religious background (I got his Middle Eastern denomination wrong in my e-mail).
More importantly, the letter threatened me with defamation proceedings for daring to question the journalist’s integrity on a private subscriber-only e-mail list. Perhaps the journalist should have realised that sometimes threatening a litigation lawyer with legal proceedings is as effective as threatening a surgeon with a penicillin injection.
To make matters worse, the journalist did not even bother to spend his own money to brief their own lawyers, preferring to use the resources of the company’s legal department to fight a personal legal battle.
Those who lecture others about sexual morality while failing to practise it themselves deserve to be derided. But what is worse? Using the microphone to preach morality while failing to practice? Or using it to behave like fanatical mullahs by preaching hatred toward others?
I’ll take an honest sleaze over a bigotted shock jock or racist scribe anyday.
© Irfan Yusuf 2006
In rather colourful fashion, Hunt described Byron (popularly regarded as an idyllic haunt for backpackers, yoga instructors, schoolies and cashed-up gurus) as worse than Baghdad. Locals were furious. The rest of Australia were most amused.
Yet Mr Hunt’s recent public exposure has had far more serious consequences than verbal exchanges with Byron Bay locals. A frequent commentator on moral as well as sporting issues, Mr Hunt has been forced to admit sexual indiscretions on public radio.
Hunt has condemned himself as a “sleaze” and a “hypocrite” for paying women to provide sexual favours (or at least to keep silent about them) whilst lecturing others on sexual morality. His wife has also appeared on radio to comment on his activities.
Yes, we can condemn Mr Hunt in the same terms as he has condemned himself. But it is also an opportunity to give credit where credit is due. In media terms, for a man constantly in the public eye, Rex Hunt is a uniquely brave man.
In the world of talkback radio, it is rare to find a man prepared to admit his own humanity to his listeners. Mr Hunt’s behaviour may have been disgraceful. But compare Mr Hunt’s conduct and his response to the scandal to the responses of other media personalities.
Shock jocks are known for their flagrant disregard of the reputations of others. How often do we hear talkback hosts insult, malign and defame not just individuals but entire communities.
In the lead-up to the Cronulla riots, a number of Sydney talkback hosts openly encouraged frustrated rioters to take the law into their own hands. They used the worst racial and religious stereotypes to generate hatred toward persons presumed by their appearance to belong to a supposedly offending group.
Rex Hunt may be an unfaithful husband, but his words certainly were not an essential ingredient of one of the nastiest race riots this country has seen since the end of the Second World War. Mr Hunt’s indiscretions did not lead to a breakdown of law and order of such proportions that entire beaches had to be closed up and down the New South Wales coast over summer.
One can only imagine how some notoriously racist Sydney shock jocks would react if their own sexuality was made the subject of public scrutiny. One wonders whether their claims to being protectors and defenders of decent conservative values would survive examination should their known past indiscretions be aired.
I wonder if they would even allow scrutiny of their sexual activities to be even mentioned without their reaching for their lawyers and threatening the alleged offenders with expensive legal proceedings.
Some of these same shock jocks have even gone to the extent of claiming that certain cultures and religions encourage their young men to sexually abuse white-skinned women as some kind of right of passage.
But it isn’t just the ayatollahs of talk back radio that show scant regard to the feelings of others. Some years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the first Bali bombing, a former client of mine was charged with possessing possible explosives. One journalist reported that this fellow had Arabic books in his house and had recently started attending religious classes at the local mosque.
The police involved in the investigation had already ruled out the possibility of terrorism. Yet the journalist involved wanted to use the pages of his Sydney newspaper to spread hysteria about the possibility of terrorism by making reference to a recent religious conversion on the road to Damascus (or in my former client’s case, Mecca).
Ironically, the journalist involved had a distinctly Arabic-sounding surname. His own background suggested that a visit to his own home might reveal Arabic books and possible visits to the institutions of religious denominations at the heart of Middle Eastern conflict. I raised these points on an e-mail group, with a view to levelling the playing field and exposing what I felt was the journalist’s hypocrisy.
Some 4 months later, I received a letter from an in-house lawyer of the media organisation for which that journalist worked. That letter corrected some erroneous assumptions I had made concerning the journalist’s ethno-religious background (I got his Middle Eastern denomination wrong in my e-mail).
More importantly, the letter threatened me with defamation proceedings for daring to question the journalist’s integrity on a private subscriber-only e-mail list. Perhaps the journalist should have realised that sometimes threatening a litigation lawyer with legal proceedings is as effective as threatening a surgeon with a penicillin injection.
To make matters worse, the journalist did not even bother to spend his own money to brief their own lawyers, preferring to use the resources of the company’s legal department to fight a personal legal battle.
Those who lecture others about sexual morality while failing to practise it themselves deserve to be derided. But what is worse? Using the microphone to preach morality while failing to practice? Or using it to behave like fanatical mullahs by preaching hatred toward others?
I’ll take an honest sleaze over a bigotted shock jock or racist scribe anyday.
© Irfan Yusuf 2006
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