Category Archives: Values
Sexism and false equivalences
So I guess it’s my turn to pen a reply to Kath. Earlier today she wrote a piece here on AusVotes whose central thesis was that ‘I don’t believe that women are more the victim than men, or that the sexism is better or worse than other varieties of insults.’ Sorry Kath, but this is […]
Lets talk about sexism against men
One of the more disappointing parts of this gender war the PM seems to love stoking is the many voices that say things like ‘they wouldn’t treat her like that if she were a man’. Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick and her predecessor and now NSW Minister for Women Pru Goward were among the more prominent […]
That Vision Thing
Can we imagine, for a moment, two possible eventualities that could confront us on September 15, both apparently quite unlikely; a re-elected Gillard government and a re-elected Rudd government. What would they do? We have had a three-year period wherein, despite how you may feel about the government, there has been some fairly serious legislation […]
You really wanna put abortion on the table?
There has been much discussion since the – I think we can all agree disastrous – launch of the ‘Women for Labor’ campaign about whether abortion should be back on the table again or not. This flowed from Gillard’s quote “Finally but very importantly, we don’t want to live in an Australia where abortion again […]
Assertions, the Greens and the Black Knight
One of the chief weaknesses of political reporting and blogging in the leadup to the 2013 election is assertions. Assertions that x will happen because of y – and the y is usually based on evidence that is part gutfeel and part reading media reports through an already constructed prism. It would be good to […]
A Line in the Sand
I used to think the argument that Prime Minister Gillard has been excessively targeted for abuse was a pretty dubious proposition. I used to think that although there was clearly some elements of sexism amongst some of the criticism and abuse, you could easily find equivalents in, say, the casually anti-catholic nature of some of […]
Revival of 75 year old Aboriginal rights petition shows we haven’t done much
Aboriginal activist William Cooper’s petition to King George V, rejected by the Australian Government in 1938, is being revived 75 years later by his grandson who hopes that this time they will make it the monarch. The petition of Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia asked that the King intervene to ‘prevent the extinction of the Aboriginal […]
A bribe by any other name
Why do we allow corporate donations to political parties? At all? This is a question that occurs to me every year, surprisingly enough when the AEC release the (by now already dated) data on political donations. This is not an in-depth look at the numbers. I imagine one of our more details-oriented writers is presently […]
ALP: $6.00, Coalition: $1.10
Head out and about to homeless shelters and gambling support groups. Chat to the victims of problem gambling. Ask them what it was that they lost their fortunes, their houses, their families, and even their health to. There’s one response you’re damn near certain not to hear: “I couldn’t stop betting on games as they […]
Are we left with the right centre?
The other day, on the AusVotes2013 Facebook page, we received a concisely-worded piece of feedback. Apparently, AusVotes has become, in its brief lifetime, a hive of Coalition Groupthink™. Never mind the piece I wrote the other day suggesting that I couldn’t conceive of a rational argument for voting for the coalition, or lambasting Joe Hockey […]
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