Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

In this sort of fevered environment, where "morals" are defined in terms of sexual behaviour, the Mirandas become rails runners for opinion dominance. And faux outrage over dubious artworks is just another obvious mode for distraction from real world issues.

"The fight against terror and extremism is the defining challenge of our time. It is more than a clash of arms. It is a clash of visions, a great ideological struggle. On the one side are those who defend the ideals of justice and dignity with the power of reason and truth. On the other side are those who pursue a narrow vision of cruelty and control by committing murder, inciting fear, and spreading lies." -US President George W Bush

As computers become more powerful and more and more information is gathered about individuals it will be very easy to track people simply by their buying habits. We will not need to know their names, just a profile will be enough to identify them. Human being are extremely predictable.

Football is, apparently, un-Australian. It leads inevitably to violence among the spectators (partly, we are told, because it’s mind-numbingly boring and so many games finish scoreless). It will never threaten the predominant winter code of the region in question, be it Aussie Rules or Rugby League.

Even in Port Augusta, the cinema was almost full for the opera Carmen, broadcast live from the Sydney Opera House; and not too many walked out during it. I didn't see anybody I knew from the SES or the local pub; but I did feel some emotional stirrings at being part of a nationwide audience of 10,000 people simultaneously sharing this experience.

It is a mistake to overrate the intellectual capacity of the media as being capable of bias. Bias demands the rigour of imposed values. The sobering lesson when we look at much of today’s news coverage is the lack of intellect and values. In the place of bias, we find only the banal.

Sound from a man speaking from a small open boat would be accompanied by background noise like wind and the engine, but the dialogue on the video is unhampered, as spoken from a closed room. The Pentagon, according to the Guardian, has countered  this problem by saying that it recorded the film and the sound separately and then edited them together to give a "better idea of what is happening"...

"A few weeks ago my wife, frustrated at the amount of time I spend onWebdiary, said ‘They’re really your community, aren’t they?’  I hadn’treally thought about it in those terms before, but it’s true. Webdiarists are part of my community – my virtual community, anyway(although cyberspace and meatspace have become increasingly blurred asI meet various diarists face-to-face or over the phone)." David Curry

UPDATE NOVEMBER 30: When Brendan got elected, I thought the Hornet/F1-11 scandal could bring him down. I wonder if Labor will pursue this? See New Defence Minister questions jet fighter purchase and Labor promises air combat review. As I said in this piece, there should be a judicial inquiry into this scandal. But would Labor be game? I don't think so.

"if you look at the specifics of say the Haneef case, the truth is I don't think any us on our side of politics know precisely what's gone on there. Other than something smells. And that's why I'm dead serious, whether we win the election or whether we don’t, that there should be a full judicial inquiry into that matter so we can get to the bottom of what went wrong. It's quite important because that then informs the future debate about the nature of our laws, the implementation of our laws by the relevant agencies, and let's have all those facts on the table. They are not currently on the table. And that's the problem." Kevin Rudd

The Australian Press Council, which regulates media in Australia, condemned the original article as 'irresponsible journalism'. But the Murdoch journalist who wrote the article showed it went much further than that when he admitted to the Council that the source of the propaganda had been the Liberal Party itself! His newspaper had enabled the Liberals to 'launder' their own libellous concoctions and to disguise their source. As dirty tricks go, this has got to be one of the most cunning.

What can be more condescending than the demand that someone reveal his or her judgment in thirty seconds or less? To appear before TV viewers as 'typical' (and therefore average and not too exceptional!). What greater insult than to imply that reporters can reduce the public psyche to a set of questions and answers in which the assumption is already made that the TV presenter is the clever one!

Kingston has an excellent nose for a story and a profound sense of the historical context and importance of each. Future historians of this period may disagree with her, but they won’t be able to ignore her. As William Randolph Hearst said of the craft of journalism, it is by definition about exposing what someone somewhere doesn’t want to see in print, and “the rest is advertising”.

Hello. Here is the Australian Law Council's statement yesterday on the death penalty debate. The recent history of this issue is very interesting, as is its prominence now. I'll try to write something later. 

"I don’t feel like fluff anymore, I’ve become an activist again.  Joined a group.  Organise public events to really debate the issues.  I speak about the government's lies at every opportunity I get.  I even went to the APEC protests with a group of very respectable women.  I still throw my slippers and I speak out and I vote! We’ll vote the liar out." Christa Schwoebel

The APEC thuggery results from a Labor and Liberal conspiracy to destroy our civil liberties and give police untrammelled power to serve political ends. I've been warning of this on Webdiary for many years. We saw with Haneef that now, police and/or government lawyers are prepared to lie under oath to the Courts to get their way. And the NSW Labor Government's disgrace started long before Iemma.Have a look at the start of the rot, under Bob Carr, in 2002, when Howard was revving up his 'terror' laws.

On August 3, Penguin's publisher Bob Sessions rang me with a shock request - could I update Not Happy, John! in three weeks? Huh? I said I could if my old Webdiary friend and collaborator Jack Robertson  agreed to come on board. He did, and the book goes to the printer this week. So, it's hardly in my personal interest for Howard to resign before the election. The book is a critique of his government, sure, but John Howard is the symbol of that government. And then there's the title! My guess is that he'll stay on. What's yours?

Then it got really ugly. The police moved into the centre of the intersection and formed an outward moving circle, forcing the protesters to the curb.  I ended up trapped amidst protesters and media, shepherded into a corner with armed and mostly unidentifiable police (many police on the day had no ID badges, and I have footage).  Nowhere to move to, and cops in riot gear moving in behind them, and the chopper overhead, I was beginning to get scared.

7 August 2005 Margo update:  Janet Albrechtsen has joined Bolt -  see 'Pass baton to Costello'. Last weekend's Newspoll was a shocker for the government, and speculation is rife that next week Howard will either call an election or stand down. The Chaser proved that the emperor has no clothes - eerily reminiscent of the Bush visit to Canberra in 2003, when security waved what looked like a camera in without a security check and the AFP dressed civilians up to look like cops. Howard is about appearances, not reality.

It seems incongruous that constant warnings about the terrorist threat should lead to APEC staging itself in the very place most likely to be a magnet for such acts. However, APEC has good reason for not meeting on some tropical island. Far from seeking to avoid the week long APEC chaos diary, the event seems to have a fetish with securing these set pieces. As I shall argue here, APEC serves the cause of military urbanism.

Hello, and welcome to Spring! I'm finishing off my project this weekend before getting back to Webdiary, but just couldn't resist posting this transcript - an interview between Charles Wooley and the PM on the pulp mill. How tricky is this for our tricky PM?

It is tempting to lay the blame on Howard and his government for what has been done in our name but, at the end of the day, it is the Australian public with whom much of the fault lies. We have been gullible and self-absorbed. As a nation, we do not really take the threat of global warming seriously. The disengagement by the public at large has allowed our politicians of both major political persuasions to give our big polluters a free ride.

The trouble is that if there is no "Australian connection" the "terror scares" in Glasgow and London then the story being used to provide public support for the incredible amount of security that Sydney is about to endure will have much less credibility with the public.  The intense APEC security is more likely to be regarded with suspicion.

Since joining with Christians Against ALL Terrorism I've gotten a picture of how deeply Christians are discriminated against and put down by people I'll describe here as secular lefties. In the past twelve years I've found, in purely practical terms, that communities of faith are much more likely to provide people who'll act against injustice than are communities of secular lefties.  Certainly our support from some Christian communities has been such as to nurture, sustain and develop our project, while secular political groups including the Labor, Green and Democrats parties have been at best hesitant and partial.  

Imagine a Media Watch which didn't criticise the ABC. It would be meaningless, yes? Well so is Tim Blair when it comes to media and political commentary.

The Law Council of Australia today issued its considered position on the new terror laws in the light of their effect in practice. Here is its press release. Webdiary has campaigned for many years on the necessity of stopping the government, any government, from having the sole right to breach our democratic rights. The citizens in a democracy are supposed to live under the Rule of Law, not of men, and that offers the fundamental protection of citizens against arbitrary action by a government is the only real protection any of us have against governments taking away our freedoms to suit their political agenda.

Hello.  I've been off line for five days traveling with a friend from the South visiting her friends and mine and chilling out. Thank you, thank you to Fiona, Richard and David for keeping comments ticking along. I hope everyone is content at how Webdiary is traveling but if not, let me know in the comments box.

So which was the real coup? Hamas's bloody attack on the violent gangsters allied to Fatah who have terrorised Gaza for a year? Or Abbas's eventual unconstitutional moves with the US’s backing? Either way, once again it is Palestinians who will suffer.

"I am going to say something that few people in public life will say, but most know is absolutely true: a vast aspect of our jobs today - outside of the really major decisions, as big as anything else - is coping with the media, its sheer scale, weight and constant hyperactivity. At points, it literally overwhelms." Tony Blair