politics

Breakfast reading 4.21

Posted by hil

KAREN WILLIS: The NRL has said, “We don’t accept violence against women, and we think this is wrong,” and they are a large male dominated organisation who’s stepped up to the mark and said quite clearly, “We will be doing something about this, we will be changing our culture. We will be educating our players. We will be setting protocols in place, and we will do everything we can to stop violence against women within our game.”

  • Bush’s Shadow Army: a scary look at the privatization of the military by the US in Iraq. Private contractors are also becoming active domestically.

“Private contractors like Blackwater work outside the scope of the military’s chain of command and can literally do whatever they please without any liability or accountability from the US government,” Katy Helvenston, whose son Scott was one of the Blackwater contractors killed, told the committee. “Therefore, Blackwater can continue accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money from the government without having to answer a single question about its security operators.”

  • Australia’s Own Mount Olympus: the discovery of ‘the most amazing rock engraving site in the whole of south-eastern Australia’ in the Wollemi wilderness region of NSW.

Once upon a Coffee Cup

Posted by hil

You might think I’m on a real anti-Howard bender today, especially since I’ve also just decided its time to stop posting to my Vigil blog, but I swear this video was found quite accidentally while I was trying out the new Alpha search engine (very cool). It’s such a good caricature, both in looks and voice, too funny to pass by (the ‘Go Aussie’ cracks me up!):

Once Upon a Coffee Cup is described as a A Greek-Australian fairy tale!, presented by The So-Called Elite, a group of ‘latte-drinking, chardonnay sipping, over-educated, under-achieving artists who have come together for the first time to perform in this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival’ under the direction of Matt Scholten and if theatre. It’s written and performed by Andrea Mina, Vaya Pashos & Shan Jayaweera. Show dates are April 17-28 2007, 6:30pm Evatt Room @ Trades Hall.Can anyone tell me who made the puppet?

Shan also has a nice earlier Howard/Bush cowboy spoof.

Update:
Thanks to Shan Jayaweera, the puppeteer behind the John Howard puppet, who contacted me to let me know a few more details! Shan hadn’t picked up a puppet until he did the one year puppetry course at the Victorian College of the Arts last year, but since then he has worked with Philippe Genty (visiting artist at the VCA), and with Spike Jonze (on the Where the Wild Things Are film adaptation).

The puppet in the Howard/Bush Brokeback parody was made by Shan, but he then got a classmate, Jemila McEwan, to re-do the head for Once upon a Coffee Cup. Jemila was a production student at VCA at the time, and did the puppet build
for the show they did with Genty.

Thanks again, Shan.

If the boots don’t fit redux

Posted by hil

(photo via the Canberra Times)

Speaking of sculptures, one of my first blog posts was about Greg Taylor’s satirical bronze, If the boots don’t fit, which depicted the prime minister as dwarf ANZAC. I got a bee in my bonnet, and tracked it all over town. I was pleased to see that its still doing the rounds, and has most recently been placed on the high water mark on Horseshoe Bay at Bermagui, as part of the Bermagui Seaside Fair ‘Sculpture on the Edge’.

Taylor is quoted as saying Bermagui now has “arguably the safest beach in the world.” “What terrorist is going to come ashore there? And there will be no global warming – the sea will not dare rise.”

The best photos (and commentary!) I can find of the sculpture at Bermagui are by JohnG here: 1, 2, 3.

Now don’t you worry about that

Posted by hil

Now don't you worry about that

An action shot of Joh Bjelke-Peterson welcoming guests to the launch of the Campaign – Federal Elections exhibition at Old Parliament House yesterday! Here is a slightly clearer one of him with Malcolm Fraser. Old Parliament House had a collection of the photographic masks of politicians, but I was asked to make the cartoon Joh last week.

The exhibition itself consists of photos by Andrew Chapman; you can see some of them here. They are wonderful ‘fly on the wall’ glimpses of electioneering politicians and political events from the Fraser years onwards. I was most amused by the ones of Beazley, because he so often looked like a jovial dag, but others were arresting.

Vigil for the fair treatment of David Hicks

Posted by hil

one

Vigil for the fair treatment of David Hicks.

Quote of the week

Posted by hil

“It seems the Cole inquiry has to separate the wheat from the chaff because AWB couldn’t see the wood for the trucking fees.”

–Peter Wall of Ascot, Queensland in the Sydney Morning Herald’s letters on Thursday.

Wishlist for government

Posted by hil

Stitchbutton Stitchbutton3 Stitchbutton2 Stitchbutton4

As an antidote to the newspapers today, I’ve been drawing up a government wishlist. These are not in any particular order. I would like a government that:

  • recognizes that the generous and unwavering support of public education is the best investment it can make in the future of our society, and likewise recognizes the value of tertiary education and those that become experts in their fields
  • recognizes that the privatization of public utilities and facilities is like selling the family silver
  • doesn’t think and act as if the economy is the be-all and end-all
  • supports reconciliation, empowerment and the health of our indigenous people wholeheartedly
  • supports multiculturalism wholeheartedly
  • supports gender equality and gay rights wholeheartedly
  • supports universal medicare and dental care wholeheartedly
  • provides welfare that doesn’t require jumping through too many hoops
  • generously treats all immigrants and asylum seekers with the compassion, humanity and dignity we would like if we were in their shoes
  • doesn’t lie, duck, weave, or evade ministerial responsibility
  • actively discourages jingoism, xenophobia and racism
  • actively discourages fear as a tactic
  • recognizes the seriousness of global warming and begins immediate planning and financial backing for the implementation of renewable energies without being swayed by the coal/oil lobby
  • appreciates the humanities, the arts and the sciences as integral to the spirit, wellbeing and richness of our society and generously supports them
  • supports unionism, and recognizes the skill base of negotiation skills that resides there
  • is a republic
  • that lobbies for global commons, justice, human rights and civil liberties, and against preventative detention, torture and the death penalty
  • that won’t engage in warmongering
  • that doesn’t have the media in its pocket

That will do for now, though I’m sure there is more. If you feel the same and would like to use one of the stitch-in-time buttons, please do.

Grab the code for the badge here and paste the code into your sidebar –
<a href=”http://spiritsdancing.typepad.com/spirits_dancing/2006/03/government_wish.html”>
<img src=”http://www.spiritsdancing.com/blog/stitchbutton.jpg” alt=”stitch-in-time” /></a>

Or you can download the badge image you want, upload it into your template
sidebar on your blog or into a post, and link the image back to this post.