Horse 2949 - Could A Falcon Have Won The Daytona 500?

I sit here in 2021 after the Australian Motor Manufacturing industry has been burnt to the ground and with it, most of the brain power and talent that used to be used to create it. I want to wind the clock back 40 years and ponder what might have been because I suspect that no amount of support from the Australian Government would have stopped the eventual closure of the industry. 

The car makers deigned to build cars here because of taxation penalties and it was the removal of those penalties rather than subsidy payments which convinced the car makers that we are a market worth selling to but not one worth employing in. That view appears to be shared by the practically the entire rightist side of politics in this country. We are also swayed by what the United States tells us to do, based upon a crippling existential fear that generic 'Asians' will take over; which is ironic given that Japan, Korea, China, India, Vietnam, Thailand... all appear to be better at having things built in their own country. Australians over the past 40 years have deliberately been made more stupid and less capable by design.

This is why I ponder the broad question of why the United States' car makers continued to be perfectly happy to build bad cars from the so-called Malaise Era and beyond. At no point during the life of the Commodore or Falcon, did the United States produce a better car as an equivalent.

The Ford Falcon which was introduced in 1960 as Ford's "Compact" car in the United States, when built in Australia became Australia's "big" family car. Apart from minor modifications to the platform, most noticeably in 1986 in preparation for EA which debuted in 1988 and for the development of AU in 1999, it remained pretty well much the same for the entire run. Ford's Thriftpower Six engine which started out at 144cid, would eventually grow to 250cid before eventually settling around the 243cid mark. At no point of the existence of either the Ford Taurus or the Ford Fusion, were either of those cars either better built or more capable than the Australian Ford Falcon.

Likewise, the Impala 7 onwards, which was an almost 1:1 equivalent to the VT Commodore,  was also always worse built and less capable than the Commodore. From 1988, Commodore took on the Buick V6 and then the LFX V6; which were American engines. Commodore drove the rear wheels and not the front.

Even today, a 2016 Falcon is still better built and will probably be more reliable prospect than an out of the box 2021 Mustang. The 1964 Mustang was built on the 1960 Falcon platform and the fact that it hung around in Australia for 56 years says that it was pretty good the first time. I have driven the current generation Mustang and I am struck at just how poorly it is built and how unfun it is to drive. 

In 1981, NASCAR reduced the capacity of their cars from an official 450cid to 360cid. They also chose to run 'compact' cars with a wheelbase of 110 inches. Since from 1992 NASCAR switched to bespoke bits of kit which shared exactly zero components with the road car, this means that the 5.7L Commodore arrived way too late for my hypothetical. Falcon only had it's 351 Cleveland V8 until 1983 because worldwide production of that engine ended in late 1982 and Ford Australia managed to wrangle a smallish batch of stock before the end ot the run. This leads me to a pointed question. For an exceptionally small window, the XD and XE Ford Falcon, with its 111 inch wheelbase, would have been technically eligible to race in NASCAR. What I want to know, is could a Falcon have won the Daytona 500?

Standard production Cleveland V8s won the Bathurst 500/1000 in 1970, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1977 and 1981. Dick Johnson's win in 1981 was a shortened race but the same car would front up for the 1982 event and finish that. 1000km is a shade over 621 miles; which means that distance hasn't really been a problem for quite some time.

Also what I think is interesting, is that during the 1981 Daytona 500 broadcast, CBS Commentator Ken Squires made the comment that the cars were generating about 550 horsepower. In the 1982 Bathurst 1000 broadcast, Dick Johnson tells Mike Raymond that his XE Falcon was generating 590 and maybe 600 horsepower; which says to me that a Cleveland V8 in the United States and a Cleveland V8 in Australia are practically interchangeable. 

Obviously a NASCAR Grand National Car would have been geared differently to an Australia Touring Car but gearboxes and differentials and the ratios of gears inside those components would have been changeable. I imagine that a car built for Bathurst, with its 20 corners and surprisingly slow sections, would have far shorter gearing for better acceleration, than a NASCAR Grand National Car which has to cruise on or about 200 mph for 500 miles. Even now they talk about short run and long run speed; taking into account gearing, tyre pressures and other minutiae which has to do with answering a different set of questions. 

NASCAR Grand National Cars of the early 1980s are rectilinear boxes, with massive notches behind the C-pillar and with what is basically a flat facing wall at the from of the car. The Falcon which was a four door, had a much gentler rear rake of the back window; which I suspect should mean that it produced less rear end drag. I also suspect that the XD Falcon and then improved XE Falcon with that lip that bends over the front of the bonnet, should also produce less frontal drag than almost every American car which ran in NASCAR in the period; with the exception of the Oldsmobile Cutlass which had a very pointy front section.

On the face of it, Falcon might look like a bad choice to attack the Daytona 500 with, as it was smacked 8:2 by the Torana and Commodore from 1975 to the end of Group C. Mostly that has to do with Ford Australia losing interest and Holden being the de facto factory team with the most horsepower. Mazda had a tilt and Nissan's Turbo Bluebird was still about 5 years away from doing serious damage. 

This say to me that if privateer Falcon competitors could on occasion compete against and beat the factory Holdens, then the underlying product must have been pretty solid. With a proper racing Cleveland under the bonnet, I think that it potentially had the ability to beat the Americans in their own backyard.

Horse 2948 - Oh No English, O English, O Thief

"O Holy Night, The stars are brightly shining.

It is the night, of our dear Saviour's birth."

Christmas is one of the strangest times of the year. As we live in an increasingly secular society, the instance of most people singing Christmas Carols has probably passed and now we're more likely to hear increasingly banal music that has rushed in to fill the void.

What once was a Christian co-opt and invasion of a Roman festival, is now a secular co-opt and invasion of that Christian festival. The banal has almost succeded in toppling the sacred when it comes to the kinds of songs that people sing; and with it, one of the last remnants where you are likely to find that curious word in the vocative register: O.

Yes, 'O'. One letter. That is not a misspelling. O is an acceptable word to play in Scrabble for instance, albeit one that is almost impossible to put on the board. When playing Scrabble because you have to build off of words that are already on the board, it means that it is impossible to make one letter words most of the time. The only time that you could in theory make a one letter word, is right at the beginning of the game, and those words are very limited.

A - which is the indefinite article in the singular. 

This is a blog post. It could be a waste of time. I have just seen a horse.

E - which is a regional interjection from Yorkshire.

E by gum. E up fluffy whiskers. 

I - which is the perpendicular pronoun.

I think that this is obvious.

O - which is what is known as a poetic vocative.

O English, what trouble hast thou wrought?

'O' is different to oh. Oh is used as an interjection. 'Oh' can be used to sharply express a whole cast of emotion; including disappointment, sorrow, joy, pain, pleasure, hesitation, regret, and can even be used as recognition of what someone else has said, or with a questioning intonation to further press someone for more information about what they have just said.

In text, 'oh' doesn't have to be capitalised and might occur in the middle of a sentence. As a hanging interjection, it will be entrapped by surrounding commas because it isn't of itself a clause. 

'O' on the other hand is always capitalized. As a poetic vocative, it always immediately precedes the person or thing  being addressed. This is the odd thing though, even though it is a poetic vocative (which means that it is employed in addressing or invoking a person or thing, it isn't actually a proper noun. 

Pronouns may be played on the Scrabble board. It is perfectly acceptable to play His, Hers, Theirs, Ours, You etc. on the Scrabble board. It is even acceptable to play 'I' on the Scrabble board because while I may be a pronoun, it is not a proper noun; for nobody has the proper name of 'I'. Cycling back around to 'O'. There isn't anyone or anything called 'O' unless that letter is used as the initial for something else. Roy Orbison was know as 'The Big O' but now we've moved well away from the word 'O'.

'O' as a vocative can be found in places like:

'O Yahweh, my God, in you I have taken refuge' (Psalm 7:1),

'O holy night, the stars are brightly shining' (Christmas carol),

'O Love divine, what hast thou done!' (Charles Wesley),

'O Canada! Our home and native land!' (Canadian national anthem),

'O Fortuna, Velut luna, Statu variabilis.' (Carmina Burana, Carl Orff)

'O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,' (Walt Whitman)

In all of those places, the poetic vocative is invoked when the person or thing is bigger than the one making the invocation. The vocative case in English is used in very formal settings and the most common places that you will hear it are in statutory bodies like courts and parliament. 'Mister Speaker', 'Madam President', 'M'lud', are all in this form.

The reason why a scabby language like English, that nasty little thief of the Anglo-Frisian language family even has a vocative case is likely because had it imposed upon it when the Normans invaded England in 1066. English's cousins in Norwegian, German and Icelandic generally do not have a vocative case and when they do, it is because English passed it back to them once the English edition of the Bible started to make its way around the world.

O in English is first recorded the middle of the twelfth century; and it is apparent that Middle English got it from Old French who in turn got it from Latin ō, who by that time had already abandoned it for academic uses. English's vocative 'O' is a late addition to the language; but was already seen as archaic by the time that the Authorised Bible was published, under the direction of King James I (James VI of Scotland). Probably because of the ubiquity of the King James Bible from 1611 onwards, 'O' was given a second chance to escape; hence the reason why it exists in Christmas carols and poetry.

"Oh Holy Night!" which is wrong, looks more like a creative interjection in place of a swear word; in the same way that Bandit Heeler's favourite injection in "Biscuits!". "Oh, Holy Night!" looks like either a declaration of surprise or disappointment. However "O Holy Night!" which is actually how the thing is spelled, uses the vocative case and declares that the "Holy Night" is the thing which is sacred or worthy. Likewise "O Canada" places Canada as the thing which is being declared as worthy; which is fitting as a national anthem is usually the national song which declares some kind of worthiness to the nation, flag, or monarch which represents it. "Oh Canada!" sounds like a swear word and "Oh, Canada!" sounds like the sort of thing that someone might say if they have been merrily sailing along for months and have accidentally bumped into Canada (to be fair, Canada is pretty big; so it's not like you could have missed it).

Vocative 'O' almost but not quite falls into the category of being a skeuomorph within the English language. Just like the little handle on the side of maple syrup bottles which is totally useless, or pictures of steam trains on level crossing signs despite the fact that steam trains haven't really been in main line use for more than 60 years, or even that picture of a dogbone handset on the icon for 'Phone' when it's totally obvious that the mobile phone that you are using looks nothing like that, vocative 'O' is almost totally useless but hangs around as a decoration to mark the worthy and sacred.

In a world where the most common songs that you are likely to hear at Christmas are now "All I Want For Christmas Is You" by Mariah Carey, "Simply Having A Wonderful Christmas Time" by Paul McCartney, or "Jingle Bells" by whoever it is, then vocative 'O' can not exist because once the sacred and the worthy has been scraped away, there is simply no place for it at all.

O English, what trouble hast thou wrought?

Aside:

Compare this curious line from 'O Holy Night':

"Led by the light of Faith serenely beaming

With glowing hearts by His cradle we stand."

- O Holy Night

with:

"With glowing hearts we see thee rise,

The True North strong and free,"

- O Canada

If you do have a glowing heart, then there is a chance that you are either radioactive and should seek urgent medical care, or that you are E.T. and should run away from urgent medical care. In both cases, it sounds incredibly uncomfortable.

Horse 2947 - I Couldn't Organise A Piss-Up In A Brewery

SENATOR WATT: I do, and it relates to infrastructure. The report, and there are copies here, says: "Backbenchers were frustrated with her (Senator Bridget McKenzie) leadership style and have not ruled out a challenge to her position."

One MP said it was a "waste of time" contacting Senator McKenzie because she "never gets back to you", while another said she "couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery".

- Senator Murray Watt, in Hansard

There's just something uniquely... Australian about Australian English. Maybe it's because the colony of New South Wales which kicked off the English language's adventures on this wide brown land, wasn't a colony of pilgrims and dreamers in search of a better life but a penal colony, made up of the refuse that Mother England didn't want any more and dumped sufficiently far away enough that they could ignore them.

We weren't good enough to send actual real money out to and so the colony of criminals and ne'er-do-wells used what they had, and since the government of the colony was martial law with what was an outpost of the Royal Navy in charge, the totally official unofficial currency of the colony of New South Wales for the first three decades was rum. I think that that says a lot.

We're a less than noble nation with a far from noble language and the fact that this kind of turn of phrase is to be found in Hansard (the official record of what is said in parliament) is inevitable. Is there a more Australian phrase than saying such-and-such and or so-and-so "couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery"? Not only does this play on the stereotype that Australians are boorish drunkards but it also makes use of that very Australian trope of language which turns simile and metaphor into hyperbole. 

The premise that someone "couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery" assumes that a brewery, being a place with lots of beer, should be an easy place to organise a mass drinking event. However, as with quite a lot of turns of phrase and idioms, if you even scratch the surface just a tiny little bit, you find that the thing asserted is actually quite difficult. 

1.

The easy part is getting hold of the alcohol. By virtue of you already being in a brewery, beer is plentiful. However, merely bringing lots of alcohol to a venue is by far and a way the easiest single item on a whole slew of items that you need to mark off a checklist, in order to properly organise this event. This is just the first of many.

2.

The second thing, which is already done for you, is the licensing of the event. Presumably unless the brewery is extremely generous, which I very much doubt that they are as they are a commercial operation, then the selling of alcohol needs to be covered by a licence to do so under the Liquor Act 2007.

https://legislation.nsw.gov.au/view/html/inforce/current/act-2007-090#sec.32

32   Wholesale suppliers of liquor

A producer/wholesaler licence authorises the licensee, if the licensee carries on business as a wholesale supplier of liquor—

(a)  to sell liquor by wholesale, at any time on the licensed premises, to persons authorised to sell liquor (whether by wholesale or by retail), and

(b)  to sell or supply liquor, at any time on the licensed premises—

(i)  to the employees of the licensee or of a related corporation of the licensee, and

(ii)  to customers and intending customers for consumption while on the licensed premises, but only for the purposes of tasting.

- Section 32, Liquor Act 2007

A brewery will by virtue of if being a production facility of alcoholic produce, already have a production licence under the Liquor Act 2007; which they will have had to organise before they even produced a single drop of their product. A production licence already entitles the producer to sell product to either wholesalers, retail sellers such as pubs, clubs, and other licenced venues, as well as the general public. That makes sense and should be obvious as it would simply not do if you have a licence to produce a product but be unable to sell it.

3.

Immediately we run into the problem that if you intend to sell alcohol to the general public, then the Liquor Act 2007 directs the licensee to define the areas in which alcohol is to be sold. 

In order to sell alcohol to the general public, the licencee needs to have supplied a floor plan that clearly shows the boundaries proposed for the licensed area. Again, this is almost always covered when setting up the conditions for the licence in the first place but as a production facility which sells to wholesalers and retailers, then that might not have been the case. Similar provisions apply to bottle shops and big liquor merchants, who have what is known as an "off-licence" where the consumption of alcohol is done privately and off the premises of the business.

My assumption is that a brewery will more than likely have defined the terms of the production licence as an off-licence because they wouldn't normally expect to sell to the general public on the premises. You can of course apply for a temporary on-licence and this requires not only a floor plan but extra details of the proposed licensee, premises and business owner and the usual contact details for an authorised person.

Normally a venue will have to defind its requested liquor trading hours as part of the licence process but as we are talking about a brewery, the production licence already entitles them to 24-Hour trading, with the proviso that there be a 6 hour break somewhere in the day. Most big venues have multiple liquor licences which define different areas; which they will open and close throughout the day, which not only allows them to be compliant under the act but also allows the venue to employer cleaners to make the place presentable.

On the detail of defining the size of the venue, in this case it will be the entire brewery. Again, this will have already been defined when applying for the production licence in the first place. On that note though, for a very very big venue such as the Sydney Cricket Ground, the Sydney Football Stadium, or perhaps Olympic Park, the whole facility; perhaps including spillways, throughfares, gardens, etc. will have been defined as the venue, including if the venue holds more than a hundred thousand people. If you are watching a football match and nip off to the bar at half time and bring back some beer, then you haven't actually left the premises which is covered by the stadium's liquor licence.

4.

It should be obvious that you are inside a brewery. I have no idea exactly how big said brewery is but it might range from a micro-brewery which exists in a single room to a massive industrial facility. Immediately there will be Occupational Health & Safety issues which need to be addressed. 

Apart from the usual OH&S plan that needs to be in place in every workplace, the admittance of the general public presents and extra series of complications. Presumably there will need to be areas which are roped off or demarcated, where your soon to be intoxicated patrons will not be allowed to go. Ropes may not be enough. You may need to hire more substantial barriers and/or even security staff to enforce the restriction of movement. 

My suggesting at this point would be to hold the event in an area which would normally be used for transporting finished product; which will usually be where trucks and/or forklifts would normally be operating. Those areas in very big facilities should already be marked off anyway.

5.

It is probably sensible, though not compulsory, to consider setting up an incident register. An incident register is a record of certain types of incidents that occur at a licensed venue and they are mandatory if venue is authorised to sell or supply liquor after midnight at least once a week on a regular basis.

Given that a production licence already entitles the brewery to 24-Hour trading, then although the Liquor Act 2007 is unclear if it needs to keep an incident register, it surely can not hurt to do so.

6.

I am going to assume that the brewery will have some kind of toilet facilities. What I am unsure of is how many people that will be at this event. That second thing will determine whether or not the existing toilet facilities are adequate or not. 

In general, the minimum required number of sanitary facilities is:

- 1 toilet pan per up to 100 male users,

- 1 toilet pan per no more than 25 female users,

- 1 urinal and 1 washbasin per 50 men, and

- 1 washbasin per 50 women.

As an aside, this is the reason why in general that male toilets are on the whole, stinkier that female toilets. It isn't necessarily because males are more or less disgusting but rather, there are less facilities for them to use because the law assumes a higher throughput. A client of ours who operates a nightclub, has a venue with 2 toilet pans and 1 urinal and 2 washbasins in the male toilets, and 8 toilet pans and 2 washbasins in the female toilets. 

If this event is really small however, then the Occupational Health & Safety Act stipulates that there’s no need to provide extra sanitary facilities if the total number of people is not more than 20. You may in fact be able to get away with using the existing toilets in the brewery. 

7. 

Assuming that you have ticked off every single item above and before you have begun to set up your temporary bar, then you will need find or hire some people who can serve your attendees. Pulling a pint is a skill that can be learnt relatively quickly but there are legal obstacles which your bar staff and in fact the licensee will need to have climbed over.

Each of the bar staff will need evidence of having completed Responsible Service of Alcohol (RSA) qualifications, a current National Police Certificate issued within the last 3 months, and evidence that each of the three identity documents used when applying for the National Police Certificate have been sighted by the licencee.

End.

Having said all of this, depending on the brewery in question it might be possible that they already have everything in place. A brewery might see this as an extra avenue for revenue. For instance, the Bunderberg Rum factory in Bundaberg, runs tours of the factory; which after you have been through the facility, lets you taste their wares. I expect that the factory actually holds both a production and retail licence under the relevant liquor act of Queensland. The Carlton & United Brewery which used to be on Broadway in Sydney, owned and operated the pub which was on the corner of Broadway and Harris Streets but I have no idea if they ever conducted tours and or events in the brewery.

What I am certain of is that if the checklist needed to organise a piss-up in a brewery is longer than your arm, then saying someone "couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery" isn't as scathing as initially thought. It turns out that the request involves setting up something which I assume isn't normally done and that unless you have had previous experience, or are just really good at organsing something and navigating the legal minefield then organising a piss-up in a brewery is probably beyond most people and certainly beyond my inclination and want to do so.

Horse 2946 - Train Drivers Have To Keep Track Of Every Detail - STRIKE!

As I write this, the Rail, Train, and Bus Union (RTBU) has taken industrial action has decided only run Australian built trains on the Sydney Trains network. Services right across the network are in all kinds of disarray and while the general public has been directly affected by this industrial action, they appear to be fine with it. I am personally inconvenienced but I am very much fine with this.

The RTBU's motives are actually pretty reasonable. Train staff kept have trains working during the pandemic, in spite of the danger that the virus could have presented them with a chance of death, and the NSW State Government under the then Treasurer and now Premier Dominic Perrottet and Transport Minister Andrew Constance have decided to reward train staff by announcing a works program which will replace the K-Sets and Tangaras with the next generation of trains that will not have guards on board. That is like saying: "Thank you for your hard word; by the way, you're fired."

Sydney's trains are unique in the fact that we are one of the few cities in the world to run full-size overland stock on heavy rail lines. I know of very few suburban rail networks in the world where you could run a mainline diesel train through an underground commuter station. Not only can you do this in Sydney but we have done in the past.

That presents an operational challenge which is different to say the Paris Metro, New York Subway or London Underground. Those three networks have all run driverless trains, quite apart from running trains without guards, but those networks also run relatively short trains compared with Sydney. We have already seen platform length barriers and doors on the Northwest Metro line in Sydney but to retrofit that kind of infrastructure to a lot of Sydney's suburban railway stations is an exercise in stupidity.

A train heading toward the city in Sydney, can be 50km away, running in the rain and will be outside for the vast majority of the journey. You could remove the duty of the guards and place it upon the responsibility of the driver and maybe that is what the NSW State Government intends to do but that says to me in principle that whoever is making the decision, doesn't fundamentally understand what the real world is like. 

Suppose that you are at Doonside Station on a Wednesday night and that it is raining. Do we really expect the driver of the train to pull the train up, monitor all of the eight cars, open and close the doors, and then pull away without either leaving people behind or getting out and helping less mobile passengers out of or onto the train? The NSW State Government does.

Suppose that it is 07:39pm on a Thursday evening and some hoodlums have got on the train. They are terrorising a woman on the train and threaten to steal her handbag. Let's remove the guard from this scenario. My advice would be for her to never get on the train in the first place because the trains are now decidedly unsafe. 

The RTBU who is not only looking out for their members and their working conditions, as front line workers who provide an essential service which maintains the proper functioning of our fair city, is also looking out for the general public; to whom they provide that service. Say what you like about whether or not you think that unions have too much power, the truth is that nobody else with any power whatsoever is in the corner of the general public and fighting for us.

I am pretty sure that the Premier Dom Perrottet who is the member for Epping, doesn't really use the train network even though his electorate is one of the most connected. I am pretty sure that the Treasurer Andrew Constance who is the member for Bega, also doesn't really use the train network because trains only go as far south as Nowra. I am also sure that neither of these people either care or have to live with the consequences of their actions. Power without responsibility almost always leads to knavery; which invariably it must do because people without exception are selfish.

If the pandemic taught us anything, it is that government can if it wants to, literally pay us money to stay home. I personally think that that's a horridly inefficient use of that money and so it would be more sensible if government employed more people to provide services for us. The point is that the government isn't a business and doesn't really have to return dividends and profits to its shareholders. As it is, the provision of public transport is generally a loss making enterprise; where the difference in revenues and expenses can be recouped through taxation. Paying people to do jobs for us, such as drive trains, keep us all safe on those trains, and provide the necessary ancillary staff for the railway network, is I think a sensible use of government funds.

The reason why governments in principle do not want to provide services, is that there are forces who do not want to pay tax. The people who have much, would rather that the people who have little have even less. This is further evidenced by the fact that wage theft is pretty much rampant all over the world and slavery doesn't exist any more, only because people had to fight for the right not to be held as chattel goods; sometimes through the payment of their blood on battlefields. The people who would prefer that government is run like business, act as if they have no responsibility to society whatsoever. Those people are currently in charge of the NSW State Government.

I also agree with the notion from the RTBU that their industrial action means that they are not driving foreign built trains today. Again, it is good that they government pays people to provide goods and services; and in this case the goods in question are club goods that we all share. I find it criminally stupid that we buy trains from overseas. 

Firstly that the NSW State Government thinks so very little of the people of NSW that it would prefer to spend money overseas and employ people in other countries, than it would to pay people within its own borders. A parent doesn't kick their child in the face and give that child's dinner to the next door neighbour's children; but the NSW State Government certainly does.

Secondly it says that the NSW State Government in its pursuit of reducing its costs, would rather refuse to train the people living in its own borders and prefer to buy things on the cheap. This says that it doesn't even think that the people of NSW are worth investing in, for the future either. 

The trains which are being operated on the network today are the remaining K-Sets which were being built until 1985 and the Tangara sets which were built from 1987 until 1995. That means that for 26 years, or a generation of people, governments on both side the aisle have thought so very little of the people of NSW that they chose to employ nobody in the state to build our trains. 

I really really really like the idea of today's industrial action, it manages to strike a bell in the morning and afternoon peak periods but because we are still in a pandemic, it's not incredibly disruptive. It has been chosen deliberately to say something about where we choose to buy our trains from. Perhaps elegantly (insofar as much as industrial action can be elegant) this is the people whose jobs are directly affected, making use of the voice that they have and speaking. If there is no voice willing to speak for you, then you'd best learn how to yell.

Horse 2945 - Villain Defeats Villain For The 2021 F1 World Championship

Max Verstappen is the 2021 Formula One World Champion. Although this is not my ideal outcome for this year (I would have preferred Lewis Hamilton to win the title, claim his 8th World Championship and then retuire), I think that I am fine with this result. In some Formula One seasons you have drivers who are heroes and villains but in 2021 both Lewis and Max played the role of villains and did so in a spirit of maximum spite.

2021 saw Lewis Hamilton, the consummate professional and practically complete grand prix driver, get knocked off the top by Max Verstappen who effectively employed bluster and bravado to good effect. Both drivers are incredibly skilled, both drivers are in very good equipment, and the dog fight back and forth throughout the whole season showed that both drivers refused to lose if they could help it. This season had shades of 2007 about it, where Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso traded blows, with both of those two ultimately failing as Kimi Raikkonnen snatched the championship away for Ferrari. Fittingly, Kimi Raikkonen's last Grand Prix was also at the Abu Dhabi GP where this championship title was decided. 

Some say that it is wrong to compare drivers across eras who ran in vastly different equipment and circumstances but there is no doubt about it, Lewis Hamilton is the greatest Formula One driver of all time. In retrospect, Michael Schumacher who is the other 7-time world champion, scored one of those titles by deliberately taking out his opponent. Hamilton is not without his share of controversy but I do not think that he has actually crossed the line into culpability. Knavery? Yes but not culpability. For Max Verstappen to win this championship on the last lap of the last grand prix of the season, smacks of result engineering to me but it still comes in the context of a very very long season.

The 2021 season can be highlighted by 4 key Grands Prix.

The Belgian GP which lasted all of two laps, was quite frankly a farcical affair which had the two title contenders  taken each other out at the Yas Marina Circuit, would have actually given the championship to Verstappen. That race, started under the safety car and finished under it, had half points awarded because it hadn't gone the full race distance but was given full status as a Grand Prix win; which would have been the thing to split the difference if the point scores had been level.

The Italian GP in which the two title contenders actually did take each other out, proved that Verstappen was prepared to do literally anything if he saw some advantage in doing so and that Hamilton was also prepared to allow no quarter given.

The Saudi Arabian GP was an administrative nonsense; with a series of idiotic steward's decisions; after the race went under safety car conditions several times and both Lewis and Max forced each other off the track and both repeatedly exceeded the track limits. Max's attempted redress which was basically a brake check on Lewis, saw Lewis plough into the back of Max's car and break the front end plate on the wing of his Mercedes. Max's five second time penalty for exceeding track limits, proved to be a worthless penalty in the end.

The Abu Dhabi GP which had that late race safety car, created a one lap shootout after the steward's decided to allow lapped cars to go through. This is not how procedure is done under any other circumstance and it brought Max to the rear of Lewis' car. This was a made for TV moment which is more akin to the purely artificial finish of a NASCAR race; whose organisation openly has little regard for normality.

Those four highlights by magnesium burning brighter than the rest of the season, have outshone the fact that we had Lewis Hamilton in a Mercedes-Benz which has fallen off the very top of the mountain and Max Verstappen who was probably in a better car but who isn't as good a driver. Those two things combined probably left us with two driver/car combinations which were separated by less than the width of a cigarette paper.

I do not think that motor racing fans can complain that much about this season. We had two drivers both going at it; with a result that went down to the wire. We had other winners this year who made their contribution. We even had comedy numpty (and decidedly racist fool) Nikita Maze🅱️pin who repeatedly proved that he didn't deserve to be in Formula One but had sufficient funds to buy a ride.

I think that I am fine with Max Verstappen being the 2021 World Champion, despite and maybe in spite of the fact that I do not like him. In the grand narrative of Formula One, that now sets him up to be knocked off the top pedestal, either by Lewis Hamilton who will probably want revenge, or by someone else who will be a dark horse and come in from the outside. That can either be Sergio Perez in the other Red Bull, George Russell who will be joining Mercedes and replacing Valtteri Bottas, or maybe one of the Ferraris or McLarens. I do not think that Alpine, Alfa Romeo or Aston Martin are good enough to challenge for the World Championship but they may pop up for the odd GP win in 2022.

Horse 2944 - DOOMED! - England 147 All Out, And The Ship Is Already Tanking

 0, 11, 11, 29, 60, 112, 118, 122, 144, 147 ao.

This strange series of numbers to the untrained eye looks like it might be a number sequence of significance. To the student of sport and of Test Cricket in particular, this string of 10 numbers is the fall of wickets of the England team on Day One of the First Test at the Gabba. To an England fan, this string of numbers is the first tolling of the bells of doom.

When Mitchell Starc took the wicket of Rory Burns, with the very first delivery of the series and by bowling him out, the pendulum could have begun to swing in one of two ways: either this was an anomaly and England would gloriously cruise to a massive target, or this would be the predicate for a horrible day's play. What we saw was the latter.

You would think that as an England fan that I would be devastated at this horrid turn of events but then I remember that I am an England fan and that watching England continuously innovate by finding new and different ways to disappoint and infuriate its fans, is par for the course. I have seen England sides get driven around dust bowls in India, get bashed silly by West Indies sides whose players have more flair in their little finger than the entire England squad, and watched English teams drag themselves around the wide brown land of Australia as though they'd been sent to suffer punishment just as the nation had sent prisoners of Mother England to Australia 233 years ago. This is not a new experience.

Not even Joe Root, the one on whom so much of the pressure and burden of expectation sits, could muster anything more than a duck egg. It was the fall of the 6th wicket and the 52 run stand which offered the slightest amount of resistance. The parochial Australian crowd almost cheered cheers of consolation when Buttler and Pope managed to find the boundary occasionally but really, that was about the only highlight in this otherwise morbid innings.

England surprisingly looked to have no answers to the bowling attack of Starc, Hazelwood, and Pat Cummins who spent most of the afternoon on autopilot en route to 5/38, sending the ball from centre to a width and a half outside the off-stump in a fairly unimaginative bowling display. Why would they need to invent anything? It was obvious that on this green-top there was less out there for the batters than for vegetarians at a pig spitroast. Abject tosh took wickets; so why try harder? This is the point that I would normally say that I expect England to know how to play cricket on a green-top but given that they also no how to play badly on a green-top, this is nothing remarkable. Australia is nothing special, England can lose to anyone in the world.

About the only saving grace for the day was that God (who by the way is English, otherwise why did he give the words of the Bible in pre-Commonwealth English to Shakespeare, amen) cracked the irrits and decided to chuck down a few thunderbolts. England all out for 147 was more exciting than watching paint dry but not quite as exciting as waiting for it to peel and I suspect that He had to go watch a paint peeling festival somewhere. Had the Aussies taken willow to leather, the score at the end of the day could have very well been Eng 147 and Australia 220 without loss.

As I sit on a train which crawls through Western Sydney in a rain storm where visibility is less than a hundred yards, I can see with perfect clarity that what we witnessed on Day One might very well be as good as it gets. Jimmy Anderson was seen on Instragramgramtwitbook (I'm down wit da kids, yo) merrily jaunting about Queen Street and Stuart Broad did start the match either. About the best that we can hope for is that in four years' time, England might be good enough to trouble the Australians but this has all the makings of being something like the Mike Atherton side of 1994. 

I wager at this point, it scarcely matters where the 5th Test after being cancelled from being held at Perth ends up at. By that stage Australia will be 4-0 up in the series unless rain saves England from a fate worse than... well... sorry, but as an England fan, there is not fate worse than being an England fan. What else can you throw at us? We know the score. We've seen it all before.

Horse 2943 - No, Actually. Penny Wong Could Be Prime Minster From The Senate (Section 64)

The completely unsupported legend of how Issac Newton got the insipiration to formulate the theory and laws of gravity is that he was sitting under an apple tree and while he was musing about something else, an apple fell off the tree and them struck him in the head. I have no idea how much of the legend that I have gotten wrong and nor do I particularly care all that much because the whole event almost certainly never happened. It is a useful story though.

When you are faced with a conundrum of thought, sometimes it is helpful to shake the tree of knowledge and see what kind of leaves and maybe apples fall out. Of course sometimes you might also be liable to get squirrel poop and or other unpleasant liquids fall upon you, so maybe you should think about getting an umbrella for your analogy. 

I have made the comment on a number of occasions now that I think that the best possible Prime Minister that Australia could have at the moment is Penny Wong. Ms Wong has a surfeit of competence as well as a calmness which we need from the head of executive government. On top of this, I would like to see Penny Wong as Prime Minister from the Senate because that chamber as the house of review, tends to carry itself with a little bit more decorum.

If you make such a comment though, invariably people will tell you that that's impossible because you can not be Prime Minister from the Senate and then go on a tangent and the entire train of thought is an express train to nonsense land. I know what I meant. I know what I said. I already knew that it's fine and because I have bothered to read the rules, I can prove it.

Every Constitution for a corporate entity, be it a sporting club, book group, church, corporation, nation state et cetera, is the set of rules which lay out how you make rules and policy. The various powers which that entity is enabled to do and the various offices which are empowered to be able to carry out policy are usually defined within the bounds of the constitution and the Constitution Of The Commonwealth Of Australia is no different. There are entire chapters defining the roles of the Governor-General, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Powers that all of these have, how you change the Constitution, where the Constitution applies, how it interacts with the existing body of law and other relevant jurisdictions and so on.

What the Constitution does not do (and in my opinion should not do) is define what, how, or even if there needs to be a Prime Minister. 

Literally nowhere in the document of the Constitution will you find any mention of the Prime Minister and because you will find no mention of the office, there isn't really anything to limit where the person to fill that office can come from. Immediately we move into that ethereal place called convention and truth be told, convention lasts exactly as long as it does until it doesn't. I would have thought that it should be convention for the Prime Minister not to go on holiday to a tropical island not in the country when half the country is on fire; I would have though that it should be convention for cabinet minister not to question a body with reasonable powers to investigate corruption; I would have though that it should be convention for a Prime Minister to at least make some attempt to care about the entire general population during a global pandemic and take reasonable action to secure a vaccine supply in a timely manner but clearly none of those things are subject to convention; so I fail to see what I should care an iota about a convention for a thing which isn't even contained within the Constitution.

There is a directive contained within the Constitution about the rules for appointing Ministers of State; so if we want to accept that the Prime Minister as the head of executive government is Minister Without Portfolio, then it behooves us to actually bother to read the relevant section of law:

https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Powers_practice_n_procedures/Constitution/chapter2#chapter-02_64

64. Ministers of State

The Governor-General may appoint officers to administer such departments of State of the Commonwealth as the Governor-General in Council may establish.

Such officers shall hold office during the pleasure of the Governor-General. They shall be members of the Federal Executive Council, and shall be the Queen's Ministers of State for the Commonwealth.

Ministers to sit in Parliament

After the first general election no Minister of State shall hold office for a longer period than three months unless he is or becomes a senator or a member of the House of Representatives.

- Section 64, Constitution of Australia Act (1900).

Take note. A Minister of State is expressly appointed by the Governor-General and at "the pleasure of the Governor-General". If you think that sounds like a lot of power to place in the hands of the Governor-General, then you would be right, it is. The Governor-General in the Australian Constitution is according to law a kind of hemi-semi-demigod who has massive powers to pretty much do whatever the heck they like and hire and fire people at will. It's not even entirely sure if the Governor-General, although named as the Queen's (King's) Representative, is answerable to the monarch or not and Section 64 leaves us with some very very strange implications.

Inside Section 64 you will find virtually no limits or direction on who the Governor-General can appoint to the role of Minister of State. The only limit is that such a person shall attain a seat in the Senate or the House of Representatives within three months. With no limit as to whom the Governor-General can appoint, this is where we can start shaking the tree of knowledge violently and see what falls out.

The Governor-General can appoint Vladimir Putin, Jacinda Ardern, Xi Jingping, Jamie Whincup, Martin Skrtel, Sir Donald Bradman, Chuck Norris, Kim Kardashian, Broken Hill City Council, Aslan, Captain James T Kirk, the entire Andromeda Galaxy... there is nothing within the text of Section 64 which puts any kind of limit; neither citizenship, nor being living or dead, nor being real or imaginary, nor being singular or corporate, nor even being a person or not, on who the Governor-General can appoint to be a Minister of State. If the text of the Constitution doesn't say a thing, then it doesn't say a thing.

The firing of the Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on the 11th of November 1975, is perhaps the only time in Australian political history when anyone even remotely remembers anything at all about the office of the Governor-General. The Whitlam Government had failed to pass a budget and six months after the bill had been introduced to the House of Representatives, the Governor-General Sir John Kerr took away his pleasure and appointed Malcolm Fraser. Was that legal? Absolutely. Actually, the text of Section 64 tells us that the pleasure of the Governor-General is the only requirement that someone be appointed to the position of Minister of State. The Governor-General was entirely within his Section 64 powers to fire the Prime Minister.

Likewise when the former Prime Minister Harold Holt wandered off into the sea at Portsea in 1966 (the United States has Presidents assassinated; Australia merely loses Prime Ministers), the leader of the National Party John McEwen was hurriedly made the next Prime Minister (for 22 days) and then while the Liberal Party sorted out its internal succession plan, John Gorton while in the Senate was made the next Prime Minister. Australia has already had a Prime Minister from the Senate. He then resigned his seat in the Senate to contest the newly vacated seat in the House of Representatives (and won it) but being in the House of Representatives is only a secondary condition as he was already in the Senate. Being in the House as opposed to the Senate was a matter of political theatre and not a constitutional requirement. For 22 days Australia had a Prime Minister in the Senate. For 23 days, Australia had a Prime Minister with no seat in any chamber at all and it was fine. Again we move back into the realm of convention; which I've already established is utterly worthless. 

The truth is that having Ministers of State in the Senate is ridiculously normal and boring. The mechanics of Westminster Parliaments is that they do not care about where Ministers have their seats. The mother of all parliaments at Westminster herself, had quite a few Prime Ministers sitting in the House of Lords. 

The Constitution doesn't specify if there even needs to be a Prime Minister. It could be possible to imagine a duumvirate, triumvirate, or an actual cabinet of equals and have the role, or even not have the role, dispersed. Since we've decided to burn all of the other norms and conventions of the job, why not remove that one last plank and rebuild the stature and worthiness of the job?

Having answered every single constitutional objection that is possible, the only objection that can be made about having Penny Wong as Prime Minister comes down the personal preference. Forgive my naivety but I want to see this country governed well, I want to see this country governed by someone who is competent to do the job, and more importantly I want this country to be governed by someone who paradoxically doesn't want the job. I want the best person for the job to do the best job.

Of course having said all of this, the actual chances of this happening are nil. Politics is the art of the expedient and the art of achieving the possible. I'm just tree shaking.

Horse 2942 - Freedumb For What?

Before I begin this proper, I need to define my terms. We can take it as a truth that there are people with varying degrees of intelligence, just as there are people with varying degrees of spatial awareness or with differing musical or emotional ability, just as there are people of varying degrees of strength. I absolutely do not want to frame this as having anything to do with the innate physical capacities of people; nor do I wish to make any kind of value judgement on this same subject.

The term which I will repeatedly use, is the concept of 'stupidity'. That is, decisions taken by an apparently rational actor with agency, who is capable of selecting something based upon the available information to them and then deliberately arriving at horrible choices. The reason why I make that distinction is that a person of lesser intelligence is still capable of being kind, helpful, rational and noble. The stupid person is also capable of being kind, helpful, rational and noble and then chooses not to be.

I think that there is a distinction in category between someone who is misinformed but well meaning and someone who is ill-informed and ill-meaning. The former can be convinced of what is true and even corrected through sound reasoning. The latter, convinced of their own reasoning, can not be convinced of the truth or corrected through sound reasoning. They have rejected reality and substituted their own and until they've have paid for their personal truth that they have purchased with lies, they are like castaways who are alone under stormy skies. Or rather, not alone, but often in community with others who also have purchased that same unreal reality.

One of the counterfeit pieces of currency which is flashed around by the showmen who want to flog a miracle snake oil, is the word "freedom". Of itself, freedom is a useful concept because it says that an individual is free to do what they wish. Unfortunately, if freedom is possessed by a stupid person who is unencumbered by the thought process, then the results are equally as stupid. One of the base assumptions in economics is that the actors in the economy are held to be rational; I have serious doubts about this most of the time. Most people are about as rational as the inverse distance away from their last meal. Judges for instance, are more likely to hand down guilty verdicts in the half hour before lunch than the half hour after it. Freedom, in my not very well paid opinion, should be tempered with the sensible questions of: freedom to do what? freedom for what? etc.

I would like to say that people in the 21st Century who have access to practically the entire world of knowledge in the palm of their hand, are somehow better at discerning that which is true, proper, just, kind and/or rational but sadly, that is not the case. It very much appears that people in the 21st Century can be just as easily led down stupid highways than in previous centuries. I find it more than a little ironic that the Englightment was fuelled by coffee and came after the gin craze, if we want to call what we are living through now the "Unenlightenment", it is also in part fuelled by caffeine. Monster Energy drink gives people the energy to do dumb things faster and turn them into monsters. Red Bull gives people wings and they can fly right into the side of a building. Freedom? Freedom to do what? Freedom for what?

As usual, because the centre of the universe is 19mm behind the corneas of the individual who makes the observation, that means that the central driver for freedom exercised, is selfishness. Selfishness might result in a self-organising system but all it guarantees is that whoever can apply the most brute force, either of will or of physical violence, ends up winning. If that's the end point, then that in reality is only 'freedom' for a select few and deep unpleasantness for the powerless, the vulnerable, the weak, the kind, the generous, the noble and the quiet. 

One of the central themes of the rolling series of anti-vax protests in Melbourne is the claim of a glib notion of "freedom". Presumably these people want the freedom to do and go as they please with no regard for the welfare of anybody else and the fact that they haven't been allowed to do exactly that, in the middle of a global pandemic where people have been dying, makes them sad. Avoiding sadness isn't exactly the highest and noblest driver of what is good or best for either one's self, or others, or others in Commonwealth. During the last great pandemic, the influenza pandemic of 1918-20, newspapers like The Sydney Morning Herald, The Argus, The Truth, The Sun etc, ram adverts for cocaine and heroin; which were still legal for the general public. I am sure that those things also reduced immediate sadness but would do absolutely nothing to address the influenza problem. Avoiding sadness without addressing underlying problems as a matter of policy, is stupidity in action.

I guess that I understand that sadness of an immediate loss of circumstance is unpleasant but being blown about on the wind and waves of emotion, is hardly a sensible method of determining policy. Especially in Melbourne, there have been political rallies which have on occasion demanded the murder of the Premier of Victoria and this has been promoted, nay even defended by sections of the media, as the people "taking back control" (whatever that's supposed to mean), and people marching for vague notions of freedom and liberty. It must be said that I am probably more well read in political philosophy than your average freedom rally attendee and while I agree with the notion that there are places and appropriate times for speech and action, I absolutely refuse to concede the point that any freedom and/or liberty either is or even should be absolute. 

If anything, the actions of the protesters are pushing me towards the notion that individual liberty and freedom when pursued as a directionless idol, are not only counterproductive to the notion of liberty itself but actively making me feel sad and angry at them. Based upon the logic being employed by the protesters (or the complete lack thereof), then my feelings are sufficiently good enough to decree that all of them should be held under house arrest. 'Ahah' you will say, that's stupid. 'Ahah' I will agree, congratulations for arriving at the same conclusion that I came to. Facts do not care about feelings and policy which is only designed to make people feel good is stupidity in action.

In general the assumption at law is that people are free to do whatever they like as long as it doesn't impinge on the liberty of someone else. This assumption must stem from the position that people are made of crystal spheres and that as long as the crystal spheres never touch each other, then all is right with the world. I think that this is a stupid assumption. The kosmos is made of loads of interconnected systems; most of which are designed to operate as seamlessly and as silently as possible. If you can not tell how something arrived at a position but that thing is sufficiently complex enough, then the underlying systems which have brought it there are sufficiently well enough designed. If you demand 'freedom' but have no intention other than to break complex systems, with no idea or design of what you are going to replace them with, then this is also stupidity in action.

What then is the United Australia Party demanding with its glib yell for 'freedom'? To be honest I have no idea. They haven't told us what they want it for. Freedom to do what? Freedom for what? I too can yell 'freedom freedom freedom' into the void but it is meaningless unless it is directed at some purpose. The United Australia Party with their series of adverts both in the wild and radio, tv and print, makes no claim about what they want freedom for, or what to do with it when they've got it, or what they want freedom from. I can't even work through the chain of events that would happen if they were to get and enact whatever their notion of 'freedom' is. Without articulating anything sensible, this is just one step above duckspeak. woohoo.

Horse 2941 - I Wouldn't Want The Right To Make Rights

Last week I was watching the opening monologue of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, where in discussing Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organisation which has the potential to overturn the precedent set by Roe vs Wade that women in the United States have a right to get an abortion of a pregnancy, Mr Colbert made sport of the following comment:

One of the enduring features of comedy and especially satire, is to take exactly what your opponent has said and place that statement in a new light in order to either make a parody of itself, or to shine a light on the apparent internal logic failure or otherwise stupidity of the speaker. In selecting this particular quote, Mr Colbert painted Justice Clarence Thomas as a dunderhead and went on his merry comedic way. All of that is completely valid in the art of comedy and satire.

However, if you are trying to use a satirical comedy show as a source of news, you had best check yourself before you wreck yourself on the shore of misinformation. Comedy and satire can speak truths but they aren't inherently the best source of truthiness. If you place Justice Clarence Thomas' statement back into the stream of discussion, what you find is that he is in fact asking a very serious question:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2021/19-1392_4425.pdf

JUSTICE THOMAS: General, would you specifically tell me -- specifically state what the right is? Is it specifically abortion? Is it liberty? Is it autonomy? Is it privacy?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: The right is grounded in the liberty component of the Fourteenth Amendment, Justice Thomas, but I think that it promotes interest in autonomy, bodily integrity, liberty, and equality. And I do think that it is specifically the right to abortion here, the right of a woman to be able to control, without the state forcing her to continue a pregnancy, whether to carry that baby to term.

JUSTICE THOMAS: I understand we're talking about abortion here, but what is confusing is that we -- if we were talking about the Second Amendment, I know exactly what we're talking about. If we're talking about the Fourth Amendment, I know what we're talking about because it's written. It's there. What specifically is the right here that we're talking about?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: Well, Justice Thomas, I think that the Court in those other contexts with respect to those other amendments has had to articulate what the text means and the bounds of the constitutional guarantees, and it's done so through a variety of different tests that implement First Amendment rights, Second Amendment rights, Fourth Amendment rights. So I don't think that there is anything unprecedented or anomalous about the right that the Court articulated in Roe and Casey and the way that it implemented that right by defining the scope of the liberty interest by reference to viability and providing that that is the moment when the balance of interests tips and when the state can act to prohibit a woman from -- from getting an abortion based on its interest in protecting the fetal life at that point.

JUSTICE THOMAS: So the right specifically is abortion?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: It's the right of a woman prior to viability to control whether to continue with the pregnancy, yes.

JUSTICE THOMAS: Thank you. 

- Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, SCOTUS, 1st Dec 2021

In context, Justice Clarence Thomas is doing two things: firstly he is asking the claimants in the case to specifically define what it is that they are asking for because the Supreme Court which has the power to emphatically say what the law is, wants to make sure that the judgement will actually fit the terms and scope of the subject that the claimant is asking about and secondly, he is actually asking the claimant to be more precise about the claim, so that the work of the court in this decision is as limited as possible. In a rights case, although the Supreme Court has very large, sweeping, and wide ranging powers, it is also aware that is possesses the power of original jurisdiction and so by creating or denying a right, it wants to limit the terms of its decision as narrowly as possible, lest it start to interfere with other rights issues and even the operation of other law itself.

In other words, by probing and asking and questioning for the claimants to be very specific about what they are asking the court to do, Justice Clarence Thomas is being quite deliberate about dispensing the power that the court has. Rather than being a dunderhead, Justice Thomas is trying to be precise in an area of law which is very very blunt.

Immediately we run into the obvious problem that I think that the whole area of giving the court the ability to determine rights are, is. Suppose that I was on the court. I personally think that in general that there shouldn't be a right to abortion in most except on grounds that it is likely to endanger the life of the mother and in examples of rape et cetera. Immediately you're likely to think that my opinion is either noble or monstrous. 

In general I do not like the right to bear arms, or have an abortion, or the right to die through euthanasia because I see that the right to life of someone is very likely to be impinged and someone's life is destroyed through the actions of someone else. Especially with the right to abortion if it exists, then at some point you have to declare someone as an unperson and to be honest, as I have no idea where that point actually is (due to the paradox of the pile of beans), then I err on the side that I and in fact nobody else is qualified to make such a decision sensibly. I think that abortions should be safe and exceedingly rare but not generally legal. 

Before you declare me to be a monster, remember, that I come from an equally vexing and challenging place where different people's rights are competing with each other (namely the mother and child). That takes you to a very very long thought process which looks at a whole range of issues such as bodily autonomy, vulnerability, responsibility issues and what not and more than likely, we will arrive at different conclusions. I am also informed by faith as well as other documents like the Declaration of the Rights of The Child, which you are free to accept or reject.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx

Bearing in mind that, as indicated in the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, "the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth",

- Preamble, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 20th Nov 1989

Let's assume that you disagree with me and think that my opinion is monstrous (I think that's a fair assumption for a lot of people). Do you want me to be in charge of making such a decision? I would wager, no. Actually, I would wager that quiet vehemently "no" and you will even go so far as to spit in my face to make the point. If "no", then I should really be in charge of making a rights decision like this? If not me, then I will immediately ask, on what basis should a court of 9 be allowed to make such a decision? 

The method of selecting those 9 people is by the nomination of the President (which is a political position) which is then agreed to or not agreed to with the advice and consent of the Senate (which is made up of 50 political positions). Is that sensible? Should the ability to make and decide what rights exist, be given over to an entirely political process?

I will argue that every right, which is the ability to do something at law or the privilege of having something recognised at law or a benefit conferred on someone by the law, is always going to be a political process and second to that, I absolutely hate the idea of a Bill of Rights.

The United States ran into this problem at the outset, and in fact, Thomas Jefferson who famously wrote the Declaration of Independence, expressed his grave concern about including a Bill of Rights in the Constitution to James Madison. It is Madison and Hamilton who are mostly responsible for laying out the three-ring circus that is the United States Constitution and I think that they actually did an awful job. Not only do I think that the instrument of government by which the United States is awful but I think that history has proven me right by virtue of the fact that it has been copied by exactly zero other countries.

Jefferson had this to say:

https://jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/selected-documents/thomas-jefferson-james-madison

Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.—It may be said that the succeeding generation exercising in fact the power of repeal, this leaves them as free as if the constitution or law had been expressly limited to 19 years only.

- Thomas Jefferson, to James Madison, 6th Sep 1789

Again in context, Jefferson argues that rights, whatever they happen to be, should be the domain of the living rather than being a tombstone of the dead, around which the living are tied to via a rope around the neck. Thomas Jefferson couldn't have foreseen the right to health care, the right to education, the right to reasonable terms of employment and working conditions, and given that he lived in an almost pre-industrial and very much agricultural nation, then the right to abortion wouldn't have even been imagined. Also, the country which he was writing in, was in part predicated by rich people agitating the general public for the right to keep and retain slaves. The United States was literally started because of a demand for the right to vote (No Taxation Without Representation) but where the Coercive/Intolerable/Punitive Acts were in part motivated by the colonies' bucking on the subject of slavery (see Somerset's Case (1772), and later Knight v Wedderburn (1777)).

If I shouldn't be allowed to decide what rights exist, and presumably a political process shouldn't be allowed to decide what rights exist, and parliaments shouldn't be allowed to decide what rights exist, then I ask upon what basis does anyone think that a Bill Of Rights is a good idea? 

Like Jefferson (who by the way owned and kept slaves and more than likely had an affair with one whilst in the office of the President), I hate the idea of a Bill Of Rights for the same reason. I very much think that some rights can and will exist through a process of discovery (such as the right to live in a clean and viable environment) and that some rights which used to exist in the past are absolutely not appropriate for today (such as the right to bear arms). I hate the idea that rights should become crystallised and never ever subject to review. 

I agree with Jefferson that rights should belong to the land of the living and to that end, the only sensible and permanent right which anyone will logically agree upon is the right to free speech but even that should come with limits surrounding defamation, racism, sedition, incitement and the harm that it is likely to do to others if exercised. The 1st Amendment to the Constitution gives me the right to tell you that the 2nd Amendment is horrible and that the only amendment that I actually like is the 10th Amendment.

The problem with writing fixed rights into a constitution is that as a constitution is the set of rules by which other laws are made, the safeguards which are invariably written into a constitution makes it difficult to remove or expand rights. If you carve a set of rules into a very big rock, then convincing anyone to carve new rules into the rock is difficult. Convincing anyone to deface the rock is difficult. Getting enough people to use their efforts to move the rock, especially when other people want to push it in the other direction is difficult.

In my country of Australia, the framers of our Constitution, also faced this dilemma and deliberately did not include a Bill Of Rights for this very same reason. Had they done so, then Australia might very well be in a similar predicament to the United States, where no right to health care and/or education exists because there are people who prefer that not to be the case.

Jefferson and Hamilton both came to this conclusion and the only reason why the United States has a Bill Of Rights, is not because of the imagined wisdom of the forefathers but because the people who were arguing in sweaty basements (and who were all men) were arguing on behalf of their own little state who were in very real danger of being swamped in a wave of Federalism. The United States might very well tell itself that it was conceived in liberty but when it came time to write the rules which determine how you write rules, it was carried in a spirit of knavery and wingnuttery. I imagine that there were lots and lots of cuss words thrown about and that hatred and enmity ran hot - remember: the Vice-President shot and killed the former Secretary to the Treasury in a duel; using the very power conferred to him via the 2nd Amendment.

From the outset, Thomas Jefferson, who by the way wrote that he held certain truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal but proved that he thought that this was a lie by owning other people as chattel goods, conceded that the constitution should be a contestable document. Already within his lifetime the right to own other people or not to be owned as chattel goods was being contested and by demonstration, it took a lot of other people to die before his entire generation got out of the way. It took the bloodiest war that the United States has ever fought, to finally settle the matter.

All of this generally goes on to show that rights, where they do exist, belong to the domain of the living and that as society changes and decides for itself what rights to confer upon itself (and what rights are no longer appropriate), that the idea of a fixed Bill of Rights as handed down by forefathers with imagined god-like status, is monumentally stupid. There should be no final victory and no final defeat and no final statement on what rights do and do not exist. 

So now what? In my perfect world (and having successfully infuriated everyone across the authoritarian/progressive political spectrum) rights should always be up for debate. I know that I am so incompetent to be able to decide most of these issues that I should not be given the power to do so. I would submit therefore, that every member in society generally, who has probably thought about issues like this, to a degree less than I have, is also as equally incompetent as I and should also not generally be trusted in making a decision such as this. The problem is that because each of us are selfish individuals who shouldn't be given the power to make and confer rights or destroy and remove, we live inside a paradox where someone at some point is forced to by virtue of their job to do so. Say what you like about Justice Clarence Thomas, I think that in cases like this that people like him have a truly awful job and I certainly wouldn't want to do it.

Horse 2940 - What The Sign Tells Us Without Telling Us

 I love this sign:

I think that it's fair to say that every single sign in the history of the world is designed to convey at least one unit of information. I would go further that that an suggest that every single piece of writing and every single piece of communication is designed to convey at least one unit of information. Even a piece of graffiti, sprayed on the side of a wall or train, conveys the unit of information that 'Soups', 'Wako', 'Huek' and 'Gedup' have been somewhere. 

A sign like this, not only conveys a unit of information about distance but also a unit of information about what is considered to be valuable and useful to know. The former is a matter of fact; the latter is the result of a value judgement, which contains a whole constellation of unsaid assumptions about how the world works.

The modern world as we know, only really began to take shape after the invention of three key pieces of technology. The first piece of tech is potable clean water being piped into people's houses. That is basically the reason why people tend not to die of a host of water borne diseases like cholera before the age of 10. The second piece of tech is electricity. Electricity absolutely transformed the insides of people's houses, the entire of industry, and even how transport systems work. The third piece of tech is the internal combustion engine; which not only pushed the development of the motor car but trucking and logistics and the necessary infrastructure to go along with it.

Roads existed well before the invention of the motor car and motor truck but the advent of modern highway systems has enabled goods and services to flash around countries and the world, at rates never before seen. This is the reason why I can have a lovely piece of steak for dinner which comes from southern Queensland. One hundred years ago, before the invention of refrigeration and trucking, that would have been simply impossible. 

I think that it's fair to say that road networks are driven more from an economic standpoint rather than a desire by governments to provide a public service. Governments want a return on their investment; which is why I suspect that in my state of New South Wales, they're more likely to want to build a toll road because of a desire to extract tolls out of motorists and even more so trucking and freight, than actually provide a service to the good and fair people of New South Wales. 

The laying out of modern road infrastructure also necessitated more exact information systems. Whereas once signs used to be provided by parishes, villages, local towns, and counties, they are now mostly provided by the state. That also warranted a change from where towns' mileage markers are measured from. The City Of Sydney, which used to be the township of Sydney, has an obelisk way way closer to the harbour than you might expect and it is from that point that all roads in New South Wales officially draw their mileage from; and not the General Post Office as is the case in practically every other state in the Commonwealth.

The usual point from which mileage is laid out (I am a Metric Man, every inch of the way) is from the Post Office that defines the locality. Notice how I use the word 'locality'. Postcodes are things drawn by Australia Post and usually coincide with Suburbs but they do not have to. Localities are places within suburbs that are usually defined by Post Office.

I live in Marayong which has the postcode of 2148. This is a notoriously large postcode which also encompasses places like Blacktown, Arndell Park and Prospect. Across the postal boundary in 2147, we have the suburbs of Seven Hills, Kings Langley and Lalor Park. There is also the unoffcial locality of Grantham Heights; which real estate agents want to put in advertisements but which doesn't actually exist. Marayong has a post office. Blacktown has a very big post office. Seven Hills, Kings Langley and Lalor Park all have their own post offices. In all cases as far I as I can tell, the official measurement of where roads are measured from is those post offices.

I work in the suburb of Mosman and even the people who live there have to concede that Mosman Municipal Council is a weird weird thing. Officially it is one suburb and one postcode (2088). When the NSW State Government threatened to merge it with North Sydney Council, Mosman Municipal Council ran a leaflet campaign telling everyone that they would split the suburb into 5, just so the local government area would somehow look more powerful than it is.

Balmoral Beach is not a suburb but a physical place. Taronga is the name of the zoo but isn't even a locality. Spit Junction and Mosman Junction aren't suburbs but the names of the post offices serving the postcode 2088 which only contains the suburb of Mosman. 

The Spit is a landmark like Balmoral Beach is but the businesses and even the addresses on the marina have a Mosman 2088 postal address just like they do at Balmoral Beach. It is one of the oddest landmarks to list on a road sign though because unlike Balmoral Beach, Spit Road continues to head north over Spit Bridge and across Middle Harbour. You can get to The Spit on Spit Road but if you have actually got there, then you can not get out because you will be doing 60km/h. 

The Spit is also different to the other three things listed on the road sign. The Spit is a landmark. The Spit is not a suburb. There are no addresses with The Spit as their location. Spit Junction Post Office is not in the suburb of The Spit. You can not even send mail to an Post Office Box listed as Spit Junction because they are all listed as being in Mosman; which they are. Manly, Brookvale, and Dee Why are all suburbs and because they are suburbs as previously stated, they will have their mileage measured from the Post Office. For The Spit though, if you see this sign, you will have already passed the relevant post office from where the distances are measured from. 

This isn't unique when it comes to Sydney's road signs either. In this part of the world, you will see signs directing you to City; which is also not a suburb but a vague concept which isn't even defined as to where it is. You will also find signs directing you to Harbour Bridge and Harbour Tunnel; which are physical things but due to the nature of them crossing the harbour, I have no idea whether or not they are actually in any suburb at all. 

Of course, these kinds of things are different to cultural destinations such as Taronga Zoo, Sydney Cricket Ground, and Opera House, and they usually appear on brown signs as opposed to the usual green ones.

The existence of The Spit on a road sign is not unexpected because it is an obvious thing to measure distance from but it is unusual. What's more, it is also useful. The Spit Bridge is one of those traffic bottlenecks which twice a day opens; and no motor traffic can pass. If you are a motorist and/or a truck driver, that's a really handy piece of information to have at your disposal as this sign with 2km marked upon it, is almost but not quite the point of no return. You can turn around and head back around via Chatswood and the Roseville Bridge but once you get past a certain point, there are no other roads that you can go, to head north.

That's a lot of work that the number 2 is doing in this sign. Manly, Brookvale and Dee Why are all sensible destinations in their own right. Manly has beaches, Brookvale has a football stadium, Dee Why serves as a fairly important suburban hub. The Spit isn't really any of those things. It isn't really a destination for motorists unless you really want to get out and visit the little park, the little beach and the few seaside restaurants. No, this sign is telling you that this is where the North Shore ends. Beyond 2km, there be sea monsters, bunyips, goblins and hobgoblins. This is your last warning. Turn around, save yourself, or keep going and cross over The Spit Bridge to... well actually to the rest of suburbia.

Horse 2939 - Schrödinger's Liberal Party

Coming up on December 4 are the NSW Local Government Elections. Across the state of NSW, people will be voting for their local councillors and depending on how their local council is constituted, maybe their local mayors as well. Now, although there is a frequently oft cited saying that "all politics is local" in reference to state and national elections, this time around it appears that right across Sydney, no politics is local at all.

I live in the local government area of Blacktown City Council. It is one of 42 local councils across Sydney. I mention this because 2021 has been a year of plague; where the experiences of people across Sydney have been vastly different depending on which local government area that they live in.

Blacktown City Council was one of the 12 "areas of concern" during the Sydney outbreak of the Delta Variant of Covid-19. This particular outbreak which started in a salon in Rose Bay after a traveller returned from overseas, had very very different policies depending on where you lived. For the 12 "areas of concern" this meant that people were technically not allowed to leave their homes except for the purposes of exercise, going grocery shopping, and/or seeking medical treatment which included getting the vaccine. The people within the 12 "areas of concern" were also restricted to movement within a radius of 5km from their house, and it was unclear in the legislation whether or not you were technically allowed to leave that radius for the purpose of getting the vaccine. 

This was a chance for the people of Western Sydney to learn the conjugation of irregular verbs.

We failed in our jobs of quarantine and vaccination rollout.

They caused the outbreak with merry abandon.

You are doing the wrong thing.

...and so it goes.

In order to reinforce the point, the NSW State Government decided to enforce to point. Depending on where you lived in Western Sydney, you were subject to 13 weeks of nightly flyovers by police helicopters and/or RAAF helicopter gunships. In order to further reinforce the point, the NSW State Government put extra police on the ground, sent in Armored Personnel Carriers and military service people and tracked people's number plates to make sure that nobody left the 12 "areas of concern".

During the period of lockdown, I was pulled over by the police three times; wherein they asked to see my driver's licence and wanted to know the purpose for me leaving the house. I also had the car serviced during that insanely short window when mechanics' shops were open, before they too along with literally any shop that wasn't a supermarket or a medical centre/chemist, was ordered to be closed.

Then as it became apparent that they only way out of this was by making sure that people were vaccinated at a faster rate, the NSW State Government set up mass vaccination hubs and helpfully made sure that none of them were actually in the 12 "areas of concern". On top of that, they prioritised where the vaccine was going and I just happened to be one of many people who had their vaccine appointment for Pfizer cancelled by NSW Health, probably as an incentive to make me get the Astra Zeneca vaccine in a hurry (which I duly did).The then Premier  of NSW Gladys Berejiklian, refused to meet with any of the 12 mayors of the "areas of concern" because presumably they were also doing the wrong thing.

Eventually as the outbreak worsened, the 5km radius rules were extended across Sydney; but the rhetoric changed. Suddenly "we are all in this together" as the people of Western Sydney became vaccinated at rates exceeding that of the rest of the state and were the first to get to +90%. 

As there are no stories told in a vacuum, the NSW Local Government Elections happens at the end of 2021; after the people of Western Sydney especially, were demonised in the popular press and then made to feel like second class citizens like the scum class that we supposedly are. Apparently, the wrong thing that we kept on doing was existing. 

So when it comes for even the smallest chance of equity and to signal to the political parties that we're not happy about what was done to us, the political party that was in change at both State and Federal level, is conspicuous by its absence.

All across my local electorate, the branding for the Liberal Party is non-existent. Instead, the people who would have run as Liberal Party candidates are running as the "Blacktown Coalition of Independents". I am led to believe that we are not unique in Blacktown City, as right across the city and especially in the "areas of concern", the Liberal Party is so concerned about the reputational damage which it did to itself, that it isn't technically fielding candidates; even though in lots of cases next year, the same people will be very much running under the Liberal Party banner.

It isn't actually wrong to run as an independent. It must be said that up until about 1890 in Australia, there weren't really proper political parties at all. The list of Australian Prime Ministers (which by the way isn't contained in the constitution as a position) reflects this and it is likely that the political parties were more of a suggestion rather than formal membership. However, running as an independent when normally you are absolutely a party member, looks to me like an intent to deceive.

Of course this is further complicated by the fact that within Blacktown City Council, one particular family has gamed the local branch of the Liberal Party and it is subject to one of the strangest cases of very local factionalism that I've seen in my observations of the political game, anywhere in the world.

When you also add the cultural overlay that News Corp and Nine Ent Co. closed heaps of local newspapers, then what we have in Blacktown City Council isn't even subject to scrutiny in the popular press either. You won't read about a lack of branding in the local newspaper because there isn't a local newspaper anymore to report on it. Blacktown City Council's own pamphlets can not very well report on the goodness, fitness, badness, or sadness of local politics because that would be using the instrument of government for political propaganda.

What we have in this year's local government elections, is a political party that isn't explicity running because they don't want to be punished at the polls, candidates who have chosen not to brand themselves in the political party which they would normally run for because they don't want to be punished at the polls, and a non existent press who can not hold them to account. Somehow, we the general public are expected to make wise choices to determine who will be in charge of the local council, with practically no information whatsoever. 

Did we do the wrong thing again?

Aside:

You can ignore this entire pose when it comes to the City Of Sydney. Town Hall and Macquarie St are in a perpetual battle of preposterous pugilism. The Liberal Party within the confines of the City Of Sydney hates anything and anyone which it sees as daring to enter its domain. The amount of visceral hatred for Clover Moore and indeed any independent by the Liberal Party within the City Of Sydney is extraordinary. The Sydney Morning Herald has been running a quiet disquiet campaign, so that the people of that particular local government area don't elect "the next Clover Moore"; through some kind of fear that I can not understand.

Aside II:

Actually, even if you account for everything that I've just mentioned, being a councillor in local government is arguably even less fun than being in State or Federal politics. In State and Federal Politics there is the stage of political theatre; which helps to explain why so many people who are skilled in the arts of rhetoric, oratory and thesp, are drawn to it. Local government, which isn't even being reported in the local newspaper (because of an existence failure), is now the art of squabbling in rooms over where property developments, parks, toilets, roundabouts, and parking signs go. At its heart, the saying that "all politics is local" is immediately proven as bunk, as I am sure that the Prime Minister of Australia has no idea of why there are arguments over traffic islands in his local constituency.

Horse 2938 - "Boofhead" In Parliament

On the afternoon of the 30th of November 2021; after Greens MP Adam Bandt had asked a question of the Prime Minister (Scott Morrison) and after the Prime Minister (Scott Morrison) had given his non sequitur of a reply, the call then passed to the Leader of the Opposition Anthony Albanese, who was about to speak with the Defence Minister Peter Dutton, interrupted and stood at the despatch box on the government's side of the chamber. Mr Albanese who had clearly had enough of the Defence Minister's shenanigans, then told the in MP in question to "Sit down, boofhead." This created a furor which rippled throughout the rest of Question Time and has been the subject of at least one milliunit of faux outrage on Sky News Australia. 

The Opposition Leader was not asked with withdraw his comment; which now means that not for the first time, the word "boofhead" has appeared in Hansard, which is the official record of what is said in the the parliament of the Commonwealth Of Australia.

How Australian is that?

Parliaments in Australia, which have carried forward the tradition and the legal direction from the Bill Of Rights Act 1688, that what is said in parliament ought not to be impinged and nobody can be made to answer criminally for what they've said on the floor of the chamber. Parliamentary Privilege is in fact the only place at law in Westminster Parliaments where free speech is absolute. Not even the United States with its very Roman view of law can actually say that there exists a place where the right to free speech is absolute. Famously, one can yell "Fire!" in crowded theatre or perhaps "Theatre!" in a crowded fire. Not only are both acceptable on the floor of the two chambers of parliament, I suspect that both have been done just to prove the point.

Of course there was the usual malarkey and political thesp where groans and hoots of disapproval came from the government's side of the chamber and an equal amount of woots and whelps on the opposition's side of the chamber but that principle of unqualified free speech in parliament remains.

There wasn't even a call from the Speaker which mentioned anything about unparliamentary nature of calling the Defence Minister a boofhead. Admittedly this is because the insult of "boofhead" is rather mild and if the Leader Of The Opposition had called the Defence Minister a cussing cuss (insert your favourite cuss word), then we'd have a cussing problem and the cussing Opposition Leader would probably be ejected under the standing rules because of his cussing cussing. Famously, Australia is a nation which was in part started with an empire faced with the prospect of losing its biggest place to dump its criminals and ne'er-do-wells decided to dump them on a land which they then declared was empty even though there was people living here. One could arguably make the point that a nation started with criminal stock, doesn't really change all that much and that the language which its citizens employ which would ordinarily make sailors blush, is likely to be filled with cussing - and it is.

I think that we are probably one of the only nations where the captain of a national sporting team is alleged to have said "Which of you bastards called this bastard a 'bastard' instead of this bastard?" and be proud of the fact.

The Federal Parliament in Canberra is bigger than both the United Kingdom's House Of Commons and the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, where the two sides of the chamber are in fact close enough to physically spit at each other. As such, I think that this may have resulted in slightly more creative shenaniganry and actually less vicious direct insult than the those two other places. Direct yelling is not as much rewarded and so barbs have to be better fashioned, as opposed to just meeting a wall of sound with another wall of sound.

In the course of events though, this government has locked up asylum seekers of tropical gulags with no chance of arriving at Australia, it has placed pensioners onto cashless debit cards so that they can not spend their pension monies at their local shops, it is trying to pass legislation whereby it demands the identities of the users of social media accounts but defends the identities of those funding legal Defences, it has engaged in open corruption and awarded contracts for carparks and sporting facilities within its own electorates, it has demanded that poorer people pay back overpayments via Robobdebt but is perfectly happy with letting multi-billion corporations keep JobKeeper payments including if they were profitable; so perhaps "boofhead" is a mild word which doesn't actually do the amount of rebuke required, justice.

"Boofhead" is the name that I call my cat Micah, if he is particularly naughty and has decided to attack Nana for no reason. I might call my cat Micah "boofhead" if I am about to stick my face into him (how can you not put your face in a fluffy kitty?). I think that's why the Speaker let the Leader Of The Opposition Anthony Albanese get away with called the Defence Minister Peter Dutton a "boofhead". I almost suspect that at about 5pm on a Friday, that there might actually be a bit of camaraderie in the parliamentary bar at the end of the week. Calling the Defence Minister Peter Dutton a "boofhead" lets him know that someone is annoyed with him and let's be honest, the offence is very mild compared with what might have been said in the chamber.

One of our client who phoned us later in the afternoon and who is a lawyer, made the suggestion that "mere abuse" doesn't constitute defamation and therefore Mr Albanese could probably get away with this outside the parliament; he that joked that truth is an adequate defence in a defamation case and that if the Defence Minister Peter Dutton genuinely is a boofhead, then all Mr Albanese has done is stated a fact. I have no idea how you even go about proving the truthiness of such a case.

I find that in all three of the daily newspapers in Sydney and backed up by the chorus Sky News Australia and 2GB, that they were questioning the suitability of Mr Albanese to be Prime Minister; while at the same time overlooking the fact that Mr Dutton had just deliberately interrupted him and was being disruptive in the chamber.

In those same three newspapers, Sky News Australia and 2GB, the fact that Senator Jackie Lambie was being met with growling dog noises, wasn't even remarked upon. Senator Penny Wong, the Leader Of The Opposition in the Senate and who isn't even from the same party of Senator Lambie, had to being this to the attention to the President Of The Senate; who them promptly denied that he had heard anything at all.

On one hand you have the media crying foul because a mild insult like "boofhead" was used in one chamber of parliament. On the other hand, you have institutional misogyny in a workplace which has had an inquiry because rape has occurred on the premises. The former has become the subject of column inches and outrage, while yet again misogyny appears to be tolerated and even ignored.

With the Jenkins Report into the culture and behaviour within Parliament House due to be tabled, I seriously wonder what if anything that that report is likely to achieve. We have more than a few members apparently committed to the prospect of letting the institutional misogyny in the parliament and its building not only continue and flourish. Not only that, we have the backers in the media who benefit from this current government being reelected, not only singing from the same sheet music but actively writing it.

How Australian is that?