From the Sydney Morning Herald on Tuesday -
“Nine rejected asylum seekers forcibly repatriated by Australia to Afghanistan are believed to have been killed upon their return, and others were arrested or had family members killed, researchers who investigated the fate of the deportees say.
The Sydney Morning Herald has an article today by Paul Sheehan about the Australian WorkChoices legislation. I haven’t really followed the arguments over this legislation too closely, but I was interested in one comment that Sheehan made -
“The union ambush has been deceptive, emotive and expensive. It has been delivered via a national TV campaign. But there is a problem: the claims made on camera do not stand up to scrutiny. When the new federal agency set up to protect workers’ rights, the Office of Workplace Services (OWS), investigated most of these cases, it found the bulk of the claims were a load of crap. The new industrial relations laws were not to blame for the dismissals.”
Why is this interesting? Because there is currently a private members bill before the NZ Parliament on the subect of probationary employment, and the New Zealand Educational Institute – the union that covers primary school teachers in NZ – is conducting a campaign against it. Furthermore, on their website they say –
“The Bill must be seen in the context of National’s recent election policies and the punitive employment laws just introduced in Australia…
Across the Tasman, within hours of new employment laws coming into effect earlier this year, people were being dismissed for no reason.” [Emphasis added]
Now I realise that Sheehan may be mistaken or even misrepresenting the situation for some political reason. Nonetheless, this does seem to me to present a challenge to the NZEI. It shows that someone genuinely interested in evaluating the NZ Bill cannot just blindly accept what the NZEI is saying. It requires a much more in depth analysis than the superficial sound bite they have served up.
From the Sydney Morning Herald today on the censoring of Karaoke singing in China -
“The Ministry of Culture has issued new rules to prevent ‘unhealthy’ songs from ringing forth in the sing-along bars, and to safeguard intellectual property rights.
The Government has picked three cities, Wuhan, Zhengzhou and Qingdao, to test the program, under which member businesses will choose songs from a central database. If successful, the program may go nationwide.
‘All the songs in the database for use by karaoke parlours and consumers need to be censored’ to ensure content meets government standards, Liang Gang, from the Ministry of Culture, told state media.
Media analysts said Beijing’s karaoke initiative was aimed at wiping out songs with sexual or vaguely political lyrics or those that seeped across the border from Taiwan and Hong Kong bearing foreign slang.”
It’s one thing to control indecency, and we do that in various ways in the west as well. However trying to control political expression is a reminder that despite all of the economic transformation in the past few years, China remains a communist country opposed to freedom of thought as we know it in the west.
Seen recently on a website promoting a Christian conference -
“It’s a formula-busting, cliché-erasing multimedia extravaganza featuring key leaders of our time, music for a new generation, and practical training relevant to our day. “
Hmmm – a multimedia extravaganza without cliches. Riiiight.
I get a little annoyed by governments that try to bully people for no good reason. Three examples came to my attention this week, two related to Apple Computer and one related to Australian television…
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An article in the NZ Herald on Monday quoted Stephen Hawking as dismissing arguments against embryonic stem cell research (labelling George Bush and others as reactionary, whatever he means by that). Hawking’s argument is that embryos used in research “are going to die anyway.” He claims, therefore, that this kind of research is no different from taking organs from dead people.
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Always gives me a kick to see some connection with NZ here in the US. I’m currently sitting in the lobby of the Loews Coronado Bay Resort in San Diego and I’ve just been listening to Crowded House playing over the hotel sound system.
I’m here for a meeting, but have been staying in the much less salubrious South Bay Best Western, Chula Vista. Heading to San Jose tonight.
Here’s something to thrill the heart of any political geek – a site that provides access to all NZ legislation and parliamentary bills. Heaven!
Acts and Regulations
http://rangi.knowledge-basket.co.nz/tkbgp/welcome.html
Bills and Supplementary Order papers
http://www.knowledge-basket.co.nz/gpprint/docs/welcome.html
From the NZ Herald, a story that a two year drought in the Amazon basin could turn it into a desert and accelarating global warming.
The prediction is based on a study that involved covering a patch of rainforest the size of a football pitch with plastic panels that prevented rain falling on the forest. After three years, the trees started dying, releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere and exposing the forest floor to sunlight.
The fear is that if the current drought continues, the whole forest could die, drying out the ground and releasing vast amounts of stored carbon that could double the rate of global warming.
With all of these kinds of reports, my inclination is to treat them with a certain amount of skepticsm, knowing the difficulty journalists have in interpreting the real significance of what they are told and recognizing the “bandwagon effect” of global warming in the scientific community.
Nonetheless, the warning needs to be treated with some respect. We should watch closely how the Amazonian climate and ecosystem fare over the coming year and try to learn from the outcomes. In some circles there is an almost religous confidence that the natural state of the earth simply cannot be so easily disrupted as so-called fear-mongers suggest. Regardless of the truth about this, I see no evidence that such confidence is based on any more rigorous scientific analysis than predictions of global doom. We need to proceed with caution.
The TV One web site has video of the NZ Parliamentary Question Time (centre column about half way down the page – I don’t imagine that the content will be there indefinitely).
I took a look at the Tuesday session. A bunch of pathetic infants. The whole lot of them should be thrown out.