Funny thing about Nicolle Flint and I
This is, to me, REALLY weird!
In November last year I analysed an article by Nicolle Flint. My article was read, but nothing out of the ordinary for this website.
Earlier this month I was intrigued about public reaction to live exports versus asylum seekers and wrote about it. Again, the article was read in the normal range of numbers for this website.
Out of the blue I started seeing a number of hits on the old November 2012 article. I discovered Nicolle Flint had written an article about live exports and the ABC’s (alleged) lack of balance, publish on May 9, 2013.
SO MANY people were interested in this article of Nicolle’s I have been getting totally unrelated hits ever since!
Nicolle Flint related hits
I am a woman of calibre
Well, well, well: I’m a woman of calibre. How nice for me! I don’t earn that much, but the rest of it fits!
I never got a cent of paid parental leave. I didn’t get a baby bonus either, or a first home owners’ grant. I did earn a degree and damn hard work it was too. Readers of my memoir already know my parents both committed suicide when I was 15. I left school. I earned my degree working full-time, studying part-time and raising two kids. It was bloody hard work. I did Year 12 part-time over two years before I started the degree and missed medicine by 3 marks. I never did Year 11 at all.
Melanie
Personally I have never believed in paid parental leave, but I’ll come to that. The baby bonus was just stupid. Here we are with a massively over-populated planet and we started paying people a bonus to have a baby while China has a one baby policy. W. T. F.? Billions of us on this planet and we started encouraging people to produce MORE of us? Not only encouraging, but PAYING! The mind boggles.
Paid parental leave? No. I believe in parental leave, most definitely. I think it is a wonderful thing if companies incorporate child care in their employment policies, as a number of companies do. I support flexible hours for parents and working from home.
If human rights is not something you think about, I invite to read Dr George Venturini
Dr Venturni has an impressive legal bio. He has started a new series of articles on Independent Australia looking at “the history and reasons for Australia’s current unfair and illegal refugee policy”. I invite you to click on the picture below and read Dr Venturini’s excellent article.
Dr Venturini on Independent Australia
Asylum seeker roundup
Nauru Island from the Air (Photo credit: ARM Climate Research Facility)
Roundup of articles on the topic, that is.
There have, thankfully, been a few great articles about asylum seekers this week which has been wonderful to see. Not so wonderful was Tony Abbott’s politically motivated billboard. Using people as a political football is not the sort of action I expect from a leader. Malcolm Fraser was a leader. Abbott is not. Not my leader.
It isn’t just Abbott who uses the word “illegals”, I know this. Today I saw mention of journalists not challenging Abbott’s use because that would be a free kick given they’d then have to challenge the Labor politicians who had done the same thing. And there it is – the political football. Why are we using innocent, vulnerable people to get free kicks?
The first article I read was Daniel Flitton’s Escape to a fair deal? Not in this country! published in The Age.
Incarceration without hope of facing an accuser, prisoners forbidden to know the evidence arrayed against them, a deployment of endless bureaucratic process to act as a disguise for fairness. No day in court. No trial. No appeal. This is not North Korea, but a brutal reality for 55 people in Australia right now.
Andrew Zammit then alerted me to another article, Guantanamo lawyer to defend Nauru 10 by Bianca Hall. Bianca is fast becoming a journalist I follow regularly.
“They’re almost incommunicado,” Mr Mori said. “They’ve charged 10 people, but there’s not 10 lawyers on Nauru. There’s no defence lawyers to handle the cases, so how are people supposed to get access to lawyers to advise them?”
The asylum seekers are detained under Nauru law. Under Nauru’s Constitution, people who are detained are entitled to consult their lawyer wherever they are being held.
How does history get so twisted?
Fraser in June 1977. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Last night I watched Immigration Nation on SBS One and filled in some gaps in my knowledge. For months I’ve been hearing it said on social media that Malcolm Fraser has become more humanitarian with age, he wasn’t like that when he was Prime Minister. Oh, yes he was! Whitlam allowed 1,000 and no more Indo-Chinese refugees in case, coming from a communist country, they wouldn’t vote Labor later on. Fraser was the Prime Minister that opened Australia’s heart and we accepted 70,000 refugees. I have no idea of their voting patterns and nor does it worry me.
I am no longer a member of the Liberal party because I can’t accept the party line on several issues but I have taken some flak for my ongoing support of Fraser. I don’t understand how or why people think he has changed when history tells me he hasn’t. He may have more freedom now to speak in ways he couldn’t before, or in ways that were not necessary before the current crop of Liberals, but I see Fraser acted humanely then as he does now.
The program put in perspective for me why Fraser is so disapproving of the current approach to the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees.
It makes me wonder how history gets so twisted. Every historian has a personal perspective, I suppose, and in some cases that will impact later perceptions of historical times and events. Most historians research diligently and write with the earnest intention of presenting the recounting of a time and events as closely as they possibly can to the reality. I believe Matthew Wright is one of those historians.
Of course, we don’t go around reading history books all the time. We read newspaper articles, we talk to friends, family and co-workers and our perspective becomes removed from the reality of the time. Given the state of the mainstream media at the moment, more opinion than actual reporting, the media doesn’t necessarily present an accurate picture to the reader. If we live in a country we weren’t born in, we have less knowledge of the history than we might otherwise have had. In that situation we have, I think, a tendency to think the “locals” have it right when in fact they may not.
ASIO and DIAC and indefinite detention
Andrew Zammit
Andrew Zammit is a Research Fellow at the Global Terrorism Research Centre (Monash University). Today he published an article, What do ASIO’s adverse security assessments of refugees actually mean? about the adverse ASIO security assessments that currently lead to indefinite detention of asylum seekers/refugees. I have written about one such refugee, Ranjini, on this site previously. Earlier this year she gave birth: an Australian citizen born in detention. Oh, yes, they took Ranjini to a hospital to actually give birth, but to all intents and purposes, this is a child of this nation being raised in detention.
In another earlier article I highlighted detention centres are dysfunctional. Since then the situation has worsened, as the numbers of displaced people globally have continued to grow. I was shocked, as were many others, when off-shore processing was re-implemented.
I am simply the wife of someone who experienced mandatory detention. I live with the aftermath but I don’t have the academic background Andrew has to debate these issues.
You are reading this, you must have an interest in these difficult issues. On that basis, I implore you to read Andrew’s article.
Andrew quotes Director-General of ASIO David Irvine as saying:
“ASIO does not have a view, and certainly not a public view, on whether people who receive adverse assessments generically should be held in detention or not. There are other ways, and other solutions, to that problem, and is up to the government to examine all the possibilities and make its decision.”
A couple of days ago it was reported on the ABC that the ASIO findings being released are too short. It is definitely worth reading the words of The University of Sydney’s Professor Ben Saul in the same report.
Refugee advocate Ian Rintoul says the results are less than illuminating.
IAN RINTOUL: They are very, very general statements. There is no specific allegations or evidence given for those allegations. I mean they are literally, you know, six or seven lines long.
Your strange questions answered
English: Motherboard of Toshiba HD-A1 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Questions being the search terms used to find this site. Many of the search terms are questions relating to Form 888: as that form has its very own page, I am not answering any of those here!
There are other questions that regularly pop up.
what is motherhood in the computer
No, no, no. Look I know I wrote about motherhood and a computer in an article, but really what you are looking for is MOTHERBOARD, not motherhood.
While it would be great to delegate motherhood duties to the motherboard, it doesn’t quite work that way.
To the right is a motherboard.
Motherhood is more like being knee-deep in dirty laundry and deciding what to cook for dinner. Completely unrelated.
