The Generator news service publishes articles on sustainable development, agriculture and energy as well as observations on current affairs. The news service is used on the weekly radio show, The Generator, as well as by a number of monthly and quarterly magazines. A podcast of the Generator news is also available.
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The EDO handbook is an invaluable resource for activists
The Queensland Environmental Defender’s Office has been a West End land mark for decades. Nestled next to Sol Breads across the road from Mick’s Nuts the EDO has taken on governments of all flavours for years – most recently supporting local residents taking on the might of Hangcock Coal in the Gallilee Basin. See related story.
Yesterday, the Abbot Government announced it was cutting off funding to all the EDOs around the country, effective immediately. While we have come to expect a horror story a day from both State and Federal government, this one is particularly nasty.
What it is doing is taking out all the organisations that have the capacity to hold it to account, to make it behave within the law, to make it honour its international and constitutional obligations,
“Yesterday afternoon we were notified without warning by the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s department that the Commonwealth Attorney-General had decided to immediately terminate direct funding for Environment Defenders Offices across Australia,” said Jo Bragg, Principal Solicitor of the Environment Defenders Office (Qld).
“This decision by the Federal government demonstrates the lack of respect that this government has for the many Australian communities using the law to stand up for the places they love and keep decision-makers accountable.” said Michelle Maloney, the Chairperson of the EDO. “They are terminating a four-year funding agreement only six months into the term.”
“It is outrageous that the Federal government seeks to silence the voice of communities,” said Jo Bragg. “Our clients are local communities trying to stand up for their local environment. EDO Qld has helped many of Queensland’s communities stand up against powerful vested interests from rural communities concerned about massive coal expansion to groups trying to protect the Great Barrier Reef. This is a crucial access to justice issue.
“This news comes a week before Christmas, leaving staff and communities unsure of the path ahead. It’s a major blow and puts a big hole in our funding but we would like to reassure our supporters that we remain committed- the earth still needs a good lawyer. The generous assistance of our supporters will help us be a strong voice for Queensland’s communities.
“EDO Queensland will continue to be determined advocates for the many people in our community who share our concern for effective environment protections. We will continue to provide legal expertise and support to the many Australians concerned about the current attack on hard-won environmental protections.”
As kids we are brought up being told that we can trust the police. They are the good guys. Those that will save us if we are in trouble. Maybe not so strange then, when a police officer is caught on camera doing something questionable and it is possibly taken out of context, that the public goes absolutely ballistic.
In a video published on Saturday you can see a man being first allegedly punched by a police officer and then arrested by the three officers in Fortitude Valley Friday night last week.
The video created an instant public outcry on social media and in comment sections of news articles about the incident. The public wanted answers to what really happened and even demanded the police officers to be suspended. Some mentioned that this reminded them of how the police acted when Joh Bjelke-Petersen was Premier of Queensland.
The most interesting, and creative, demand was when a few claimed the police officers should be charged under the new VLAD bill due to its vagueness.
QPS Media Unit published a media release informing the public that the incident was being investigated, but it is here where they failed miserably and allowed concerned members of the public to act as judge, jury and executioners.
With certain investigations it is vital to withhold information. This is to ensure that if a case is taken to court the trial will be fair and not tainted by speculations in the media and social media.
With that said, keeping the lid on too tight, as happened here, encouraged rampant speculation on social media.
The next media release was not really any better than the first. It did state they had spoken to the arrestee, Beau Hall, who had allegedly been punched, and no formal complaint had been lodged.
Shortly afterwards a Brisbane Times article said the three officers had been “vindicated” by CCTV footage that showed the whole confrontation unedited. Unfortunately this footage has not yet been released.
In the Brisbane Times article it was alleged that the officer did not punch Beau Hall, but shoved him with an open hand. The reason for this was, “[He] clenched his fist, pumped his chest out, started to lick his lips and come towards police.”
If this is all it takes to receive such treatment from the police it is understandable why some in the public are concerned and wary around the police.
Joe Ritson who filmed the incident has told 9 News he was threatened with arrest if he continued filming.
Here we have an incident where the police allegedly punch a person, who does not look threatening on film and is outnumbered. To threaten the person filming this incident with arrest as alleged, only makes matters worse.
It would have helped public perceptions of the police if it had been known that the police were responding to a call that Beau Hall allegedly had urinated in the alleyway. It would also help if the public knew that what looked like a punch on the video was instead a shove to defuse a possibly dangerous situation. It is hard to see how letting the public know these two facts would negatively affect a possible trial or fuel the rumour mill on social media.
Instead the QPS Media Unit decided to be very frugal with information. Yet they pride themselves on being good at providing information when receiving requests.
Westender has tried to reach out to QPS Media Unit twice, asking if the CCTV footage will be released, but the requests has not been answered. QPS Media Unit has informed me they do not own the footage and can therefore not release the it, and the incident is still under investigation.
Considering the outcry by the public, releasing the CCTV footage might actually have a true, vindicating effect if the public is allowed to see it with their own eyes.
As it is correct that the footage that is available on YouTube only shows partially what happened and the angel is often a bit awkward.
Many seem to focus on the alleged punch, which later has been stated to be an open-hand shove, but I do not think I am alone being concerned with what seems to be a person that is acting in a non-threatening manner being heavy-handedly arrested. This raises the question, what if a member of the public is mistaken for someone else and is arrested, receiving the same treatment as Beau Hall?
It also raises another concern, will this be common to the lead-up and during the G20 meeting in Brisbane? The possiblity of repeating Friday night’s scenario is increasingly likely now that everyone can easily make recordings with their phones and instantly publish them online at the same time as the police have been given extra powers to handle threats against G20 participants.
Given that such allegations can spread like wildfire on social media it will be very prudent for the QPS Media Unit to be honest and upfront with the public to defuse possible trials-by-social-media. They will also need to work as closely as possible with journalists so the right information can be made available to the public in an attempt to defuse the spread of disinformation on social media: a lack of information can often encourage erroneous speculation.
Below is the video QPS Media Unit claims to have been taken down from YouTube. If the CCTV footage is also made available this article will be updated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WgztzKCB7g
What is your opinion regarding this incident? Could the QPS Media Unit handled it better and do the public need to see the CCTV footage? Post your comment below.
Terri Butler is the ALP’s new candidate for Griffith
Left -wing candidate for Griffith, Terri Butler, has been preselected as the ALP candidate for Griffith.
The rank-and-file membership of the party fielded over 300 members at the preselection and the vote was more than two thirds in favour of Butler.
With the Greens preselection to take place tomorrow Sunday 18th and Palmer stating publicly that he will not be running a candidate in this by-election the field is ready but the race has not been called.
A February date is widely tipped but depends on the former Prime-Minister Kevin Rudd finalising his correspondence (ie writing a resignation letter to the Governor General) and the Prime Minister calling a date.
The Australian Prime minister is not just out of step with the Australian public, he is adrift from the forces of history. His recent behaviour towards Indonesia is reminiscent of a medieval envoy rather than a post-modern leader. This is consistent with a global drive toward corporate feudalism.
Rewind to the Reformation
Most students of the English language have two reference works on their bookshelves: the Collected Works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. These two works date from almost exactly 400 years ago and are the source of a large portion of the idiom of the English language.
Phrases like ‘it’s all Greek to me’, ‘smooth water runs deep’, ‘a pound of flesh’, ‘murder most foul’, ‘method in the madness’, ‘protest too much’, ‘cruel to be kind’, ‘towering passion’, ‘slings and arrows’ and ‘lend me your ears’ all come directly from the pages of Shakespeare.
The King James Bible gives us ‘the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing’, ‘can the leopard change his spots?’, ‘a man after his own heart’, ‘go forth and multiply’, ‘the fat of the land’, ‘the people rose as one man’ and ‘a stranger in a strange land’.
The more you study modern English, the more remarkable it seems that so much of what we say every day, was first coined between 1560 and 1610.
Serious English linguists also own a copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which predates the other texts by two centuries, but has much less in common with our spoken language.
It does yield ‘as brown as a berry’, ‘as lean as a rake’, ‘the knife under the cloak’ and ‘in one ear and out the other’. But the form of the language is not familiar. ‘Modre wol out, that see we day by day.’
What is it about those years, the turn of the seventeenth century that binds us four hundred years later but separates us from two centuries before? Why is it that Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is one of the few existing works that predates the classic texts of four hundred years ago?
The simple answer is that Henry VIII stuck his middle finger up at Rome and made English the official language of England. That took place in 1530 and began a revolution in language, commerce and world politics.
The resounding impact of Henry’s decision to cast aside the yoke of classical imperialism included the creation of the British Navy, and the global empire that it spawned and the spread of English as the world language that it is today. That classical imperialism had evolved greatly through the preceding millennium but it remained through medieval times and English was a parochial language that had no place in the royal court or the church.
In fact King James’ Bible was the fourth version of a work written in secret in Belgium eight decades earlier when it was still illegal to translate the Bible into English. By 1535 Henry VIII had authorized a translation known as the Great Bible which was replaced mid-century by the Geneva Bible used by Shakespeare, Cromwell and the emigrants headed for America. James’ scholars toned down the stridently revolutionary tone of the Geneva Bible and created the institution that remains today.
The overarching reason then, that the best writings of the late sixteenth century remain some of the best literature in English is that they were the first. In the dramatic fifty years of innovation the language shifted from the status of illegal street-speak to an instrument of empire. In that period the idioms and forms of a thousand different dialects where recorded, collated and rearranged. In that creative furnace the best of those forms were elevated to poetry and crafted for posterity into the works that now decorate millions of bookshelves.
It was that combination of capturing a previously un-recorded and dynamic pot-pourri of culture with the creative dynamic of creating a new language for an emerging power setting out to settle a new world that brought so much to bear.
The relevance to our argument here is that the Catholic Church denied the right of the English to exist. England was not recognized as a sovereign state, was officially countered as an imperial force and until the second half of last century has not been officially recognized as a global language by many European institutions.
Fast forward through the Asian Century
The mature language that is English does not produce the intensity of new forms that were available when it was young. A great deal of our more exciting literature comes from people relatively new to the language, writers co-opting the language of the ruling elite and injecting new energy and sensibility into it.
Where will the next great cultural revolution come from?
It will probably be a blend of old and new. The ancient traditions of China perhaps, the remarkably diverse sounds and forms of African language, the blending of native and European languages that characterizes South America.
It will be in a culture that has new-found economic and political power; that forms a language from the remnants of many cultural influences; that brings a rich range of traditions into one emerging culture that claims deep historical antecedents and combines them with new forms. The excitement and rapid growth of its emergence from relative obscurity into economic and military prominence will yield the enthusiasm and freshness that makes it ring with joy and freshness.
One candidate for that unique combination of factors could be Indonesia. The fourth most populous nation on the planet, undergoing rapid economic growth, Indonesia spans a rich range of cultures and religions and has active ethnic minorities from the ancient cultural traditions of China and India with the relatively recent overlay of Islam, Christianity and neo-liberal economics.
Its cultural explosions in music, art and film show how rich the creative atmosphere is in that crowded increasingly confident country and the combination of European and Asian sensibilities is more pronounced than anywhere outside the Philippines, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and small enclaves like Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo.
The fact that it has not previously had its turn at the centre of world politics almost inevitably means that as it evolves it will bring something remarkable and new.
Just as inevitably that means that the emergent culture will codify a rich and hitherto unrecorded slab of human history in a language of the streets that will echo down the centuries as the height of cultural achievement.
Whether it reaches the cultural highs we attribute to Shakespeare or not, depends almost more on the economic and military success of the state than it does on the quality of the as yet un-known writer who rises to the top of that milieu.
Where is Australia in all this?
Humanity stands poised at a major shift of power as significant as the settlement of the New World by the Seventeenth century Europeans. The globe is full, the great colonial era has come to an end and Asia is loosing the shackles of nineteenth century European rule.
The twentieth century was the period when the battle lines were drawn and the imperial experiment rejected, but it has taken most of that century for the momentum to reverse direction. The Pacific War, as the Japanese call it (when they grudgingly acknowledge it), was more about the containment of Asian ambition than it was about political philosophy.
Over the last few decades Australia has toyed with the notion that it has an Asian future but fled consistently back to the bosom of American imperialism. We have boosting the presence of US forces and spy bases on our soil. By offering ourselves as a global nuclear waste dump, shooting range and quarry we have established our role as the lap-dog of US-based global capitalism and the enemy of Chinese expansionism or Asian self determination.
We can bleat all we like about our economic ties and robust friendships but unless we stand on our own feet and vary our alliances we remain firmly in the camp of English speaking dominance.
When we go out of our way to paint our view of the Indonesians as a third world nation that needs our military training, our naval support to control their borders and our economic advisers to develop their economy we further deepen our identification with the past and, by implication, distance ourselves from the future.
It is not inevitable that Indonesia will reach world power status, but it is more likely than not, and the trigger point that will force it to take its place on the world stage will be when it raises its middle finger to the existing global superpower that is trying to push it around.
As a third tier power on the periphery of world trade routes, Australia will be a pawn in that geo-political chess game.
Our attitude to our northern neighbor between now and then will no doubt have some influence on how it treats us when that time comes.
When the Indonesian Shakespeare of the next century pens the equivalent of Julius Caesar, Macbeth or Hamlet it will determine the historical image of Australia for a millennia to come. Shakespeare defined the public view of the Roman Senate, Venetian commerce, Danish royalty, Scottish treachery and Moorish naivety until Hollywood adopted it and took over.
We may not care how history views us but we should certainly care about our cultural, economic and military relationship with the emerging powerhouse that is our nearest neighbor.
Why single out Abbot?
Most Australians in Bali whether they are in the flesh pots of Kuta, the writer’s festival of Ubud or building a quiet retreat on a rarely visited beach in the North reflect the neo-colonial attitudes that poison our relationships with Asia. We assume our right to be rich and the privileges that gives us over the locals and are extremely unsettled when those rights are challenged.
We complain loudly and publicly when the airports are shut after a tsunami has killed thousands of locals, when draconian local laws put our errant teenagers on death row and when strident nationalism threatens our economic interests. The truth, of course, is that we are only rich at someone else’s expense and it is either stupid or disingenuous to claim otherwise.
Tony Abbot and his foreign minister, Julie Bishop, have adopted an attitude toward Indonesia in government that is based on all these bad habits and can only end in tears.
Worse though, it is informed not just by our current and pragmatic alliance with the USA, or our recent and romantic attachment to the British empire, it is directly related to the interests of the Church of Rome. Worse still, this is not the future Church of Rome that stands for the interests of humans against those of global capitalism, that preaches the Fransiscan virtues of poverty and humility. Abbot espouses, represents and champions the Catholicism of Jesuit George Pell himself a disciple of Bob Santamaria.
Abbot represents a movement that fundamentally believes in the righteousness of its mission to claim political power and unwind the liberal humanism that characterized the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Bob Santamaria’s movement was focused on Communism and Socialism and the gradualism and tolerance they embodied. If it seems that Abbot is dragging us back to the past as fast as he can go that is because that is the stated mission of his mentors and heroes.
To expect this man to understand the emergence of a cultural, economic and military power on our northern doorstep that could well redefine the image of humanity for the next five centuries is ludicrous. He is still actively and openly revisiting the battles fought in England four and a half centuries ago.
Aaron Pedersen and Tiga Bayles on Let’s Talk on 98.9FM.
Hot-property Australian movie star Aaron Pedersen was interviewed this week by Tiga Bayles on West End’s 98.9 FM.
Aaron was in town for the Asia Pacific Screen Awards in which he was nominated in the Best Performance by an Actor Category for his role in Mystery Road.
The ceremony was at City Hall on Thursday night. The Best Actor award went to Korean superstar Lee Byung-Hun for Masquerade.
Aaron was very popular on the red carpet and did a number of interview while in Brisbane. Aaron also stars in Warwick Thornton’s new film The Darkside and is set to appear again in the third Jack Irish telemovie on ABC TV next year, co-starring with Guy Pearce.
Local author Sherryl Caulfield last night launched the first book in her Iceberg trilogy, Seldom Come By. For a Brisbane born and bred writer, the Icebergs of the North Atlantic seem like an unlikely setting.
She describes them as evocative of the strangeness and magnificence of the Arctic.
“It started when I was travelling in Canada, and the first draft was written travelling in the mountains of New Zealand,” she told Westender at the launch. The book was polished in Hong Kong and finally published here, with the support of friends and family.
The decision to self-publish was quite a journey, for Ms Caulfield, whose friends have been encouraging her to self publish for years.
“I wanted to work with professionals, and just wasn’t ready to do everything myself.
“It was after the book was finished and I was well into my walk of rejection, I just decided, this is it, it is time to get the thing out an about.”
The long time publicist and marketing expert has pulled no punches in promoting the book. It has the full social media profile, promoting the full trilogy, and is widely available online.
The first book is essentially a romance – a coming of age for the twentieth century as we follow the development of a poor rural girl from Newfoundland and her peers through the first world war and into the events that ended the age of hope and bred the cynicism and self awareness that characterized that century.
Written by a woman, primarily for a female audience, the emotional landscape is rich, the action relatively langorous and the settings evocative. It is rugged and raw though, with the harshness of Newfoundland, the hell of the trenches and the other worldiness of the Arctic all vivid, visceral and compelling.
While only one third into the first novel of the trilogy, the fact that I am arranging social engagements around reading time tells volumes about Caulfield’s powerful writing and clever structuring of plot and character.
I am in love with half the characters in the book and curious rather than disengaged with the minor ones. I reckon it is going to be a ripper.
