No Cure For Stupid

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for me, and to be honest, for most of the women in Australia, for most of our LGBTI community, for all public servants across the three eastern states, for intelligent people everywhere, and for anyone who prefers winter to summer. With the exception of the last one – the end of winter – the rest of our group ennui is the result of the stupid things high profile people say, and the probability that they actually mean it, and the all-too-real likelihood that things will continue to get stupider.


Who are these sayers of stupid things? Both men and women are represented, private business owners and elected officials, conservative and leftie, although in fairness, the vast majority of the stupid has come from middle aged white male conservative politicians and lobbyists.

I’ve talked about some of these instances before, but they deserve to be revisited in the context of even more stupidity, so let’s take a stroll back to…

August 22

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott was eviscerated by Leigh Sales on the ABC’s 7:30 programme. This interview stirred up more media reaction than we’ve seen since the last time Tony Abbott was made to look foolish by a ranga at 7:30 on a weeknight on ABC. It beggars belief that the alternative Prime Minister of Australia would be allowed to go on tellie to be interviewed about the details of a report he hadn’t read.

LEIGH SALES: I'm going on the facts that Marius Kloppers said today when he was directly asked if the decision on Olympic Dam was affected by Australia's tax situation and I'm going on the facts that are outlined in their results statement that they've issued. Have you actually read BHP's statements?

TONY ABBOTT: No, but I've also got again the statement of Jacques Nasser, who says, "While we're still evaluating the impact of the carbon tax, but it just makes it more difficult."

LEIGH SALES: But hang on, no, no, you haven't read their statements today, but you're commenting about what they've announced today and how the Federal Government's to blame for that.

August 23
Characteristically, Andrew Bolt had a unique perspective on that interview. Mr Bolt saw what the rest of us could not: Leigh Sales’ disgraceful disrespect, her shrill tones, sighs, eye rolls, accusations… The list of emotionally loaded descriptors rolls on as he refers to ABC journalists who are actually asking questions and expecting answers from the Leader of the Opposition as:

ANDREW BOLT: “…a recent in-house obsession of a small coterie of ABC Leftists.”

August 28
Meanwhile, in a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt, the newly announced Republican running mate Paul Ryan had a bit of a moment and fudged his marathon time by over an hour. It’s become a big deal because it was so easy to disprove, but it wasn’t alone in straying from reality. Ryan’s entire Convention speech has been scrutinized by armies of fact checkers and has found to be somewhat inventive. Now, it’s the marathon lie and the fact-checkers’ lists of inaccuracies that are the focus of Ryan’s world. How could he disregard the fact that as Republican VP Candidate, every breath is the subject of international attention?

The 42-year-old congressman has a reputation for telling "hard truths" about the US government's yawning fiscal deficit but his speech to last week's Republican convention was criticised for accuracy by independent fact checkers.

He accused President Barack Obama of failing to honour a campaign pledge to keep a Wisconsin car-making factory open. In fact, Mr Obama had made no such promise and the factory closed in December 2008 - a month before he took office.

August 30
Back to Tony Abbott and Leigh Sales and a new character in this comedy: Enter Grahame Morris, political strategist, commentator, and speech writer. On ABC702 in Sydney, another accomplished ABC journalist Linda Mottram was asking Mr Morris about the Leigh Sales interview, and in his response, amongst other things, he called Ms Sales a cow. Later, he apologised – but why did he say it in the first place? He’s had plenty of experience in front of a camera or open microphone. As for the apology, how’s this?


      “Poor little sensitive souls," he said, having been told of the feedback.

Asked whether he would have made the comment if Sales had been a male interviewer, Mr Morris said: "That's silly. It's a phrase I have used a million times that somebody can be a real cow when they want to be. Look, I apologise.”

August 30
Gina Rinehart has all the social and communication skills of an angry orang-utan. She put them on display yesterday for the world to see – and the world took notice. She may be unimaginably rich, cultured, softly spoken, articulate, but she’s also in the Homer Simpson class of insensitive. In a column she wrote for Australian Resources Magazine, she advised that anyone can become a millionaire if they work hard.

"If you're jealous of those with more money, don't just sit there and complain,” Rinehart wrote. “Do something to make more money yourself -- spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working.”

Good advice from Our Gina, who has clearly worked very hard indeed after taking control of Hancock, and has been incredibly successful. When Mrs Rinehart took control of her father's company, she inherited a $75 million dollar head start. You and I can work as hard as we’re capable of working, but few of us are capable of earning that $75m from a scratch start, but once you've got that, it gets easier. 
 
August 31

Alan Jones’ incendiary comments about the women “destroying the joint” aren’t confined to Australia any more. The Guardian (UK) has reported the story, too. Jones’ remarkably misogynistic comment has become an internet meme and a rallying cry for women (and men) all over Australia. There’s a petition to boycott 2GB’s advertisers, reminiscent of the very successful petition to boycott 2DAY-FM’s advertisers in response to yet another Kyle Sandilands offence. #Destroythejoint trended on twitter on and off for over 24 hours, and now has its own Facebook page and there’s already a range of T-shirts and accessories carrying the phrase.

What’s that old saying? You can have as many opinions as you like, but you can’t have your own facts? Someone needs to tell Alan Jones. Not content with putting the shock in shock jock, he’s still in denial about climate change, and is working with Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate to undermine it. He has even drafted a letter that his listeners can use as the template for a letter of complaint to the Mayor, which includes the following:

“We were talking about the hoax that is the carbon dioxide tax and he was calling on councils to boycott it. Basically he said he's going to do everything he can to make sure his Council won't pay the tax.”

August 31

Meanwhile, back in Republican American, Clint Eastwood took twelve minutes to deliver a five minute speech which was supposed to support Mitt Romney, but was far more effective as a plea for senior citizens with mental health issues. He spent the bulk of the time berating an imaginary President Obama – in other words, talking at an empty chair. In fact, this shouldn’t be here. It’s not stupid; it’s art.

CLINT EASTWOOD (to an empty chair): “So anyway, we're going to have -- we're going to have to have a little chat about that. And then, I just wondered, all these promises -- I wondered about when the -- what do you want me to tell Romney... I can't tell him to do that. I can't tell him to do that to himself. You're crazy, you're absolutely crazy. You're getting as bad as Biden.”

September 5


It’s Gina again, back for another bite of the Attention-Seeker Cherry, and another opportunity to insult the thousands of people who work very hard to keep her in the style to which they would like to become accustomed. Apparently Australia is just too expensive and companies don’t want to invest here…which is why yesterday’s Annual Growth figures were head and shoulders and a few curly chest hairs above every other comparable country.

It seems that Ms Rinehart’s life would be immeasurably better if Australians were paid less – and then she stated that it was cheaper to do business in Africa, where she can exploit the underclasses for $2/day.

"Furthermore, Africans want to work and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day,'' Ms Rinehart says in the video. Such statistics make me worry for this country's future.''

Newsflash for Mrs Rinehart: they worry us, too. It’s a disgrace that she believes that paying workers so little because she can get away with it is at all acceptable. Shouldn't we be working to bring African employment standards up, not push ours down?

Always

There’s no one stupid thing that Queensland Premier Campbell Newman has said. There’s a gazillion. His becoming this year’s George W Bush. My personal favourite was his gleeful statement on Day 100 of his Premiership that he’d had fun. Woohoo! Delighted that he enjoyed threatening the jobs of every public sector worker in Queenslalnd; thrilled that he relished cutting vital programmes for Queensland’s most vulnerable; gratified that he’s prioritised the Gambling Industry and his former best mate Clive’s interests over those of the rest of Queensland.

In an interview with The Courier-Mail, Mr Newman said his first 100 days in office, had been "a lot of fun in most cases, and very, very rewarding to get on with what we'd said we'd do, particularly on the cost-of-living stuff".

But I am trying to limit myself to stupidity that’s occurred within the last fifteen days, so here goes: just today, Premier Newman made a complete arse of himself with this:

"The biggest thing we need to do, ladies and gentlemen, is create jobs," he told the assembled audience.

"Shelter, food, a job are the critical ingredients to advance all people, those are the things that give people dignity and self-respect.

"Those are the things that this Government is committed to."

Go tell it to the Public Servants whose jobs you're about to cut, and the former contractors and staffers who've already been shown the door. This government is committed to nothing except paying down the now infamous debt.  And Forever

Astonishingly, Jim Wallace head of the Australian Christian Lobby, gets the gong for the stupidest of all these absurd proclamations that I’ve heard recently, and that’s saying a lot. Just yesterday, he declared that smoking was healthier than the kind of lifestyle that gay marriage would bring. The statement was made during a debate with Christine Milne on same sex marriage. The number of ways in which this statement is entirely preposterous is higher than I can count.

Mr Wallace, an intelligent man and accomplished leader, tried to compare decrease in life expectancy between smokers and gay men. Gay men, he says, have higher rates of risky behaviour and suicide, and hence life expectancy is reduced by up to 20 years, compared with 10 years for smokers. Well, if your survey data on gay mortality came from San Francisco during the early years of the AIDs crisis, that’d be right. In September 2012, it’s irrelevant.

“We have to accept the unfortunate levels of suicide, the unfortunate levels of excessive drug use (are) because of the nature of the lifestyle.

“I am very sorry for that. My heart goes out to these people. But it is a fact.”

  I’d like to encourage Mr Wallace to consider the role that his organisation’s relentless isolation and condemnation of the LGBTI community has contributed. In a confounding case of wit, he described gay activism as “bullying”. How would he categorise his own behaviour towards the LGBTI public?

Today, Prime Minister Gillard finally got on board, and has cancelled her plans to speak at the ACL’s conference, and described Mr Wallace’s comments as “unacceptable.” Mr Wallace argued that he’d been misquoted. Misunderstood. The ACL has issued a release.

 
The Last Word

Lyle Shelton (@LyleShelton) of the ACL spent time last night energetically tweeting the rousing words of Bishop Anthony Fisher of Parramatta Diocese. Bishop Fisher is the one who announced his arrival in Parramatta by proclaiming that "Godlessness and secularity caused Naziism, Stalinism, mass murders and abortion..." Last night, Mr Shelton tweeted that the Bishop had said:

The sexual revolution has already damaged marriage. We should hold onto what is good and rebuild. – Bishop Fisher

In the midst of all of that, Mr Shelton tweeted this popular quote from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.

When I use a word it means what I choose it to mean – Humpty Dumpty #marriage

Mr Shelton has tagged the tweet #marriage, so with due respect, no. Marriage does not mean what you choose it to mean for anyone except yourself. I get to choose what marriage means to me; Ross gets to choose what it means for him. Mandy gets to choose what it means for her. The rest of it is just ignorance and hatred.

Okay, I'm done for now. If you'd like to add to my list of stupid things, please do! Click the Comments link below, and rant away. 

Census 2011: It's Made of People

For some, it’s that annoying intrusion one night every five years. For others, it’s a boring set of numbers that waste my taxpayer dollars. For a very special group of geeks and weirdos, the release of new Census data is like statistics Christmas. The “are-these-numbers-still-accurate-enough” insecurity of the last couple of years is wiped away in an instant, replaced with the delicious bouquets of fresh numbers, new knowledge, insights and awareness of things only guessed at.

Today the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the data from the 2011 Census, and for the geeks and weirdos like me, the mysterious sets of numbers all fit together to build up multi-dimensional pictures of what Australia looked like on that one night in August, 2011. These beautiful new numbers are already ten months out of date, but this is the best that we can do, at least until the brave new world of micro-chipped humans emerges. Then, the chips will report back to Control every eight seconds, confirming where we are, what we’re doing, and who we’re doing it with. Personally, I look forward to that day; it will ensure the responses are accurate. No more writing “Jedi Knight” in the field where you should’ve written Lapsed Anglican. The Census Chip will know all. 

Mwahahahahaha! Just kidding. Probably.

But until that glorious day, we have shiny new figures that have been released today, and armed with these, we can do all sorts of brilliant things. By counting everyone, all at the same time, we can see how many of what sort of people live where, so that we can ensure governments and councils provide the right facilities in the right places. 

The beauty of the Census is not in raw numbers or processed statistics or colourful graphs for powerpoint presentations; it’s about people.

For example, we might not want to build a retirement home in a new outer suburb that’s full of young families or university students. Equally, we wouldn’t build a new infants school in a small rural town where the population was declining and most of the people were over 45. Councils and Governments love this data; it helps them to plan.

My favourite part of the Census isn’t the who, when and where questions. I love the way a series of numbers can provide such a rich view of our culture and heritage. 

Religion is one of the hot topics in Australia right now. Can the Census shed light on the state of Australia as a religious nation? 

We hear far too regularly from the Stop-The-Boats brigade that we must be alert to ‘Creeping Sharia’, the insidious (and imaginary) infiltration into Australia of the traditional Islamic justice system. Since the release of the Census figures today, I can report that the Muslim population in Australia is indeed on the rise. In fact Islam bounces into 4th place in the religion countdown. Is this Creeping Sharia business a real threat to our way of life?

The Census says its unlikely. Compare the 2.2% that identified as Muslims with the 22.3% of Australians who stated that they have no religion at all, or the 61% of Australians who identified as Christian, and you’ll recognise how truly insignificant Islam is as a religious force in Australia. It’s not even the fastest growing religion in Australia: Islam grew by 69%, but Hinduism grew by 189%, and I'm not hearing rumours about 'Creeping Dharma'.

Meanwhile, the Australian Christian Lobby has already released a statement asserting that Christianity is not on the decline in Australia. According to the Census, the number of Australians who answered as Christians has dropped from 68% ten years ago, to 61% now. That is a decline, yet its not necessarily other religions stealing our Christian souls, no! In the same period of time, the people reporting “No Religion” increased by the same amount: 7%.
Of course, we cannot conclude that 7% of Australians who were Christians in 2001 have lost their faith in the ten years since then, but there's no doubt that the population has less Christians and more atheists.

The ACL's Lyle Shelton puts this 7% increase down to an "aggressive" campaign by an atheist group convincing Christians to tick No Religion. Unsurprisingly, that's not quite what happened. There was a campaign, but it's purpose was to promote honesty - and sanity - by discouraging people from writing "Jedi Knight" on their census form as their religion. It might sound ridiculous, but thousands and thousands of people worldwide have done it, and it reduces the accuracy of the data. In the 2001 Census, around 70,000 Australians reported Jedi as their religion, but only 55,000 in 2006. 

Remember, today's gift basket of statistical bonbons is just the first release in a series of data releases from the 2011 Census. There's so much more...

Go! Have a browse through the Census data. It's all about us. 

One In Fifty

I've been trying for months to not write this rant. Today, on this blog, I concede defeat. 


I am a straight woman in a committed monogamous relationship with my straight male partner, Rob, who is divorced. We wear matching wedding bands on our wedding fingers. We refer to each other as husband and wife. We are as close to being married (or civilly partnershipped) as you can get, without being married. We have all of the legal protection that defacto couples have, but we are not married. We're not even engaged.


One day we'll do the deed. It won't involve a white frock that looks like a cross between a toilet roll cover and a pavlova. It won't be in a church, or involve religion. There will be spectacular finger food, an incredible cake (or two: we can't decide between lemon-coconut and Black Forest...and Mum will want a traditional fruit cake, so we should plan for three cakes) and tears of joy. It will be a very special day. 


It will be a privilege to marry Rob. I know he feels the same way about me. 


But we've agreed that until every single adult in Australia has the right to enjoy that same privilege, we won't either. Estimates suggest that at least 2% of the world's population is gay. That's one in fifty people. 


In this country, not all single adults can marry the person they love. If Irene and Anne want to marry, they can't. If Adrian and Enrique want to marry, they can't. Penny and Sophie can be parents, but they can't be married. And Rob and I can. 


So I ask myself, what is so special about Rob and I that we have this privileged existence where we can partake of an ancient ritual of legal and spiritual coupledom, when the same ritual is denied our friends. What have we done to make us more deserving?


Lyle Shelton,  Chief of Staff of the Australian Christian Lobby, husband of Wendy "Won't Somebody Think Of The Children" Francis and lapsed journalist, has been stirring the pot on Twitter today. He's tweeting the Senate hearings on marriage equality.  According to Mr Shelton, aside from the obvious reason that homosexuality is against his God's law, his argument against redefining marriage to include same sex marriage is that it places one of society's feet on a banana peel. 


The ACL believes that from gay marriage, it'd be just another short lurch to the left and we'd be legalising polygamy. What does he think will happen next? Rev-heads marrying their cars? Geeks marrying their iPads? Foot Fetishists marrying their Jimmy Choos? 

Twitter identity Can_Do_Campbell was quick to point out that where polygamy exists, it tends to be within a religious structure like the FLDS.  Mr Shelton responded that it wasn't part of Christianity; it's only mentioned in the Old Testament. Does that mean we can toss out Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah's Ark, the talking snake, the burning bush? 


Okay - just checking.


Despite some determined questioning - and just a little provocation, and isolated abuse - Mr Shelton failed to respond to questions about why legalising same sex marriage would have any impact on his life. In other words, what does it have to do with him? 


This basic disconnect accounts for much of the tension between religion and secularism. The religious lobby - any religious lobby - sees it as their responsibility, their divine purpose, to spread the word of their Gospel and thereby save the world. In order for religious zealots to fulfil their purpose, they must ensure that everyone follows the rules set down by their God.


Those who believe in a different God, or in no God at all, are therefore required to reject their own beliefs and follow the teachings of a God they don't believe in. How is that fair? In the case against marriage equality, it's literally using one inequality (their perception of their superior beliefs, and their right to impose those beliefs on others) to enforce another inequality.


It's not for me. Lyle Shelton and his colleagues will never convince me that I am more entitled, more deserving, more special than my friend Irene, a gay teacher, counsellor, mentor and generous friend for over thirty years. Or my cousin Adrian, one of the sweetest, most sensitive and smartest people I know. Or Senator Penny Wong, a brilliant young Australian and role model for all of us.


When Rob and I marry, I hope Irene and Anne and Adrian and Enrique will be there to celebrate with us...and I hope we'll be on their guest lists too. Until then, we have one more battle to win, and many more cake-related decisions to make.


Twitter: @Can_Do_Campbell @LyleShelton