1. Antediluvian senator Abetz against gay marriage
- Conservative cabinet minister Eric Abetz says Australia should not legalise gay marriage because no Asian country has adopted marriage equality.
And Senator Abetz says legalising gay marriage would lead to polyamory and argues issue should be rejected out of hand because Opposition Leader Bill Shorten supports change.
He also suggested that cabinet ministers supporting gay marriage should resign, because it’s a breach of existing policy.
Liberal MP Warren Entsch and Labor MP Terri Butler are preparing a bill backed by a multi-party grouping.
Abbott looks as though he’ll kick the ball into the grass saying that “it is rare for a private members’ bill to be voted on” and that his government’s main priority is security.
Maybe he’s saving us from embarrassing ourselves. Head counters say that only 15 LNP pollies support gay marriage, 18 are undecided and 82 oppose. For Labor the numbers are 60 in favour, 13 against and 7 undecided.
2. Hockey wins a mozza
Joe Hockey has won a defamation case against Fairfax over a newsstand poster and tweets which he argued implied he was corrupt and “for sale” to political donors.
However, the Federal Court found that the article itself was not defamatory.
Hockey was awarded damages of $200,000, enough to put a deposit on another house. Those who know suggest he’ll have only small change left after expenses.
3. Phone line to help prevent Aboriginal deaths in custody
It looks as though the:
- life-saving Indigenous custody hotline has received a last-minute funding commitment from Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion, who also called for the service to be rolled out nationally.
The phone line, the Custody Notification Service, was previously fully funded by the Commonwealth, so it’s continuance will depend on NSW and the ACT stumping up half the cost. Or so it seems.
You can find the previous (I think) unedifying discussion thread on the topic at Saturday salon 6/6.
4. Q&A did investigate Zaky Mallah
Q&A did investigate Zaky Mallah before the program but didn’t know about his tweets threatening sexual violence.
That’s what the Department of Communications report has found.
The program said if it had known of the tweets in question earlier, Mallah would not have been allowed on the show.
Mallah was well-known to program staff (I think it was his fourth time) but did try to make checks.
- “After attempts to contact two people familiar with Mr Mallah were unsuccessful, the Q&A team relied on its previous experience with Mr Mallah, the advice of another ABC journalist [and] a review of a recent television appearance,” the report said.
Also:
- The report said the decision to re-broadcast the controversial program was made by ABC managers, including managing director Mark Scott.
They decided that because the program had already “been seen by many viewers and widely reported” not showing it again would have had “no effect”.
Q&A executive producer Peter McEvoy has been given a formal warning by the ABC Board. The Board’s own review will be carried out by former SBS managing director Shaun Brown and television journalist Ray Martin.
My previous post is here.
5. Will Labor turn back the boats?
There is a push from the NSW right for Labor to adopt the LNP policy on turning back asylum seeker boats.
Joel Fitzgibbon is arguing that the policy should be part of Labor’s “tool kit”.
Labor for Refugees is not impressed:
- what this thinking misses is that turnbacks breach international law and conventions, they continue to upset the Indonesians who are getting very angry with Australia over turnbacks and they deny refugees their rights.
Bill Shorten seems to be sitting on the fence, at least in public. There should be a lively debate at the forthcoming Labor national conference.
There’s more at New Matilda.
Introduction to Saturday salon
Because of the way the blog currently presents posts on the home page I think it’s better to remove the introductory material to a different place. For new readers, here’s the rationale for this space.
An open thread where, at your leisure, you can discuss anything you like, well, within reason and the Comments Policy. Include here news and views, plus any notable personal experiences from the week and the weekend.
For climate topics please use the most recent Climate clippings.
The gentleman in the image is Voltaire, who for a time graced the court of Frederick II of Prussia, known as Frederick the Great. King Fred loved to talk about the universe and everything at the end of a day’s work. He also used the salons of Berlin to get feedback in the development of public policy.
Fred would only talk in French; he regarded German as barbaric. Here we’ll use English.
The thread will be a stoush-free zone. The Comments Policy says:
The aim [of this site] is to provide a venue for people to contribute and to engage in a civil and respectful manner.
I see they have Ed Husic as pro-SSM, interesting.
Jumpy, apparently Husic had a change of heart.
zoot, more a message from directly above rather than the most high I suspect.
At any rate, if equity is the goal, removing marriage privileges in law over the unmarried is the only answer as I see it.
In terms of refugees what I am really want to see is a big increase refugees being allowed to come to Australia along with more aid being given to help countries like Jordan and Turkey who have been lumbered with a crushing influx of refugees.
I would also like to see more aid/trade with countries that people are leaving for economic reasons.
Labor would be smarter to always link stopping the boats with a substantial increase in the number of of refugees accepted.
Gillard tried that with the ” billet a reffo ” bribe, next to noone took it up.
Did you ?
JD:
Australia and other like countries already accept large numbers of refugees and have paid a terrible price for doing so, with regards to terrorism and the draconian laws and billions of dollars spent to deal with terror. Seriously, whose bright idea was it to approve Man Haron Monis’ claim for asylum? They should be taken outside and shot.
I’ve come to the view that the West would be better off pursuing an isolationist foreign policy with the exception of mutually beneficial trade. Our European ancestors had to endure many centuries of horrendous butchery before it reached its current state of comparative peace (yeah I know the former Yugoslavia, Ukraine etc ..) Let the savages elsewhere slaughter each other until they too discover civility. Let’s not invite strangers into our peaceful country in such numbers that we can longer sleep without a loaded pistol under the bed.
Come to think of it, when you consider the human propensity to annihilate others for ethno-religious reasons, I don’t see how someone can fret over a one in one thousand risk concerning global warming but be totally blasé about putting their own tribe at risk through bringing in huge numbers of people from other tribes, especially when they are tribes primed by arguably incommensurate culture and soaked in warfare. My inner Machiavelli tells me this is real dumb.
This whole Zaky Mallah farce stinks of yet another right-wing extremist attempt to discredit and to wreck the ABC “because the ABC is a leftist organization”.
It goes to show how out of touch these right-wing ideologues are with reality. Apart from being a platform for such well-known lefties as Philip Adams and a few others, ever since John Howard became Prime Minister, the ABC has been back in its traditional role of “Menzies’ Mouth-Piece”, the right-leaning voice of obedience to the LNP. Having ultra-Right nong-nongs attack and undermine the ABC like this is really kicking an own-goal and I’ll bet lots of lefties are snickering at the folly of it all.
Karen: The AGW no action case risk that AGW will destroy our civilization is over 99%. The only question is how soon will our civilization be destroyed.
Your mate Machiavelli would have understood the importance of alliances. Your strategy
means that the savages elsewhere will, just like we did, learn how to fight very very well before they invade us. In case you have missed it we are a long way from other people like us and other people like us may not want to come to our rescue every time our colonial arrogance gets us into trouble. Even when they try they may find that, just as Britain did in WWII, the savages are rather good at fighting.
Let’s see if my maths is right here.
LNP currently stands on 48% in the polls.
The gay population of Australia currently stands at somewhere between 2 and 10% depending who you talk to.
If the LNP blocks same sex marriage they will, repeat will, lose the next election because gays won’t vote for them.
Is my logic sound, or not?
Paul, gays could be rusted on LNP or Labor voters, eg Abbott’s sister. But some in the LNP are worrying about this as a factor influencing votes at the margins.
I’ve got a post I’ll put up tomorrow.
True, Brian. But Abbott’s sister is … well, Abbott’s sister.
Look forward to reading your post.
JD:
Sounds like a good argument for Australia having a nuclear deterrent.
The ABS has some good data on marriage and divorce trends in general, 2013 looks to be the latest.
The 50 US States renamed for countries with similar gun ownership..