Patrick McGorry is a youth psychiatrist in Melbourne, who was named Australian of the Year for 2010. He made some criticisms, earlier in the years, of the Government’s policies regarding detention for asylum seekers, pointing out (not unreasonably) that they are likely to exacerbate mental illness.

Enter Menzies warrior James Darby.

Professor Patrick McGorry, newly appointed Australian Of The Year has said asylum seekers had experienced severe torture and trauma in their home countries and that people in detention needed to be processed quicker and while living in the community.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from here.

My view is that these kind and unrealistic views expressed by The Professor are extremely counter productive to the future well being of Australians.

We might well ask why.

The Professor could have served the interests of Australia better by naming the countries from whence these tortured and traumatised Asylum Seekers have come.
What are their occupations, their language and their religions?

Does a particular occupation or language shield one from post-traumatic stress?

How many of these invaders does the Professor expect Australia to release into the community?

Oh, I get it now. Did you see that? Those starving people from PNG or Sri Lanka are invaders, here to plunder your women and salt your earth. See their leaky invader boats, and tremble.

Can The Professor tell us how many would come to Australia if the solution for processing illegal refugees, Asylum Seekers, boat people, queue jumpers, is to “release them into the community for processing”?

The Professor is not a fortune-teller, James, any more than you are. We don’t have any evidence that delays in processing asylum seekers benefit anybody. None whatsoever.

Because the Professor wishes to be so generous at someone else’s expense it is surprising that he has not suggested that these people are flown into Australia as the boats that they intend to arrive on often sink.

Yes, it’s surprising that the Prof isn’t trying to get Rudd to charter Concordes for these Vikings. How droll, James. I bet those Young Liberal conferences are a hoot.

The Professor has not named the Countries from which these people come or the numbers of people who would come. You work it out. Indonesia hosts citizens of many Countries whose populations dream of escaping to Australia. Then you have virtually every Country from Viet Nam to Turkey. Then just about every African Country. There are about 15 million Philippinos who will come to Australia tomorrow.  Let’s not start on the Red Chinese.  The poverty, the religious fanaticism, the torture and the trauma created by the various forms of socialist Governments is not the responsibility of Australia.

You read the above correctly. According to James, every one of those miserable blighters from Asia (’Red’ China), to Russia, the Central Asian states and the Caucasus, not to mention those uniform and homogeneous folk in Africa are all sitting back, refreshing their web browser, looking for news that Australia will process asylum applications more quickly. Should we have a humane, or even half-way efficient process, and lo, those victims of ’socialist governments’ (in Sri Lanka, PNG, Iraq, Afghanistan) will come here, maybe even in the eleventy billions! Naturally, it can be assumed that those filthy Moroccans and Malaysians despise their own ’socialist’ homelands so much that they’d universally jump at any opportunity to enter Australia.

I do agree with the Professor that detainees should not be ‘kept’ on Christmas Island. They should be returned to the last port of departure and their boats seized and scrapped.

So, on the global problem of refugees, one of the wealthiest countries on earth (i.e. Australia) should do nothing, and let a developing nation (like Indonesia) pick up the slack. How noble.

Accepting that Australia has entered into international obligations to accept refugees, let us allocate all those places to Christians who are suffering persecution.

This is James’ bizarre conclusion. We apparently can’t afford to encourage refugees to our shores, but maybe we can afford them, if said refugees are Christian. After all, what else are international obligations for?

People such as James are the ‘leading’ lights of the intellectual right. How embarrassing for you, centre-rightists.

MEDICARE spending on psychological therapy will blow out to $1.5 billion by 2011, twice its budget allocation, according to a new analysis.

Despite the huge investment – three times the original five-year estimates when the scheme began in 2006 – the Federal Government has not released any evidence that the consultations are improving mental health…

Long consultations with psychologists grew fastest – by 32 per cent. But they were used disproportionately by city dwellers, with country people only about 60 per cent as likely to attend them.

The analysis also shows patients are being hit by out-of-pocket expenses likely to be prohibitive for those on lower incomes – an average $35 for 50 minutes with a psychologist.

This result is not surprising, and I’d like to touch on two related points to elucidate the origins of this costly failure:

1. The rebate scheme derived from the Howard government’s fetish for lining private pockets with public funds. (This is a fetish he shares with his ALP State counterparts, and Kevin Rudd, ’social democratic’ rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding). Rather than invest in the necessary infrastructure and staffing to make mental health work in hospitals and the community, the Government has opted for a market solution here – throw money around, and, rather than actually plan anything, let private psychologists (and their ‘clients’) sort it out. This is transparently magical thinking, but it’s standard practice for man economists and bureaucrats today.

Understandably, private psychologists were themselves happy with this scheme. For everybody else, there is little reason for enthusiasm. Firstly, the range of things that private psychologists cannot do makes them totally unsuitable to be the sole clinicians for many of the ‘mentally ill’. A private psychologist cannot prescribe medication, cannot arrange hospital admissions, or crisis assessments. Consequently, all of the shortfalls that existed in the system prior to this rebate have continued. For instance, a hospital in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley failed to meet 80% of its ‘performance targets’. In short, the $1.5 billion in funding didn’t create a single bed for the suicidal and psychotic. This only intensifies the pressure on the poorly-paid, poorly-funded public services. The consequence is that hospital patients wil continue to be churned through the system, CAT (Crisis Assessment Team) services will continue to minimise risk (i.e. “You’re not at immediate risk, you still have one foot standing on the bridge”) etc.

Moreover, as you’d expect from a market-based approach, private psychology services have been skewed to the benefit of wealthy areas. This has been the case for some years, as evidenced by this 2007 report:

IF YOU live around Hawthorn or Kew, finding a psychologist that Medicare will pay for is a breeze. If you live in Reservoir or Footscray, it’s quite a bit harder. And if you’re unlucky enough to live in a country town such as Ararat, you miss out altogether…

Access to Medicare is generally a good thing, but because health practitioners follow the market, Medicare rebates tend to favour those in wealthier, urban areas where health workers congregate, she says.

This is starkly demonstrated by the distribution of Medicare psychologists. Hawthorn and Hawthorn East, with 55 Medicare psychologists, have more than the Northern Territory, with just 22.

Despite the rebate, private consultation still usually has a cost (which varies widely) due to the ‘gap’ between the rebate and a clinician’s fees. Naturally, this has the effect of making the rebate a kind of ‘middle-class welfare’, that favours those with more disposable income. You can test this hypothesis yourself, using Victoria’s Registry of psychologists to search different areas. Affluent Brighton has many more psychologists than Deer Park, for instance, despite each being roughly similar in terms of population size and distance to the CBD. Meanwhile, the Medicare rebate has furthered the proliferation of charlatan McTherapy franchises who see dollar signs where one ought to see suffering (discretion prevents me from naming them). In short, the market behaves here as one would expect. It follows the money, and is completely incapable of solving a complex problem (namely, that of psychiatric care in Australia).

2. The ‘mental health’ industry, independent of funding issues, is rotten to the core. Where it is not geared (privately) for sheer profit, it is driven (publically) for ‘outcomes’ and ‘KPIs’.  This is most evident wherever you find an acronym somewhere in the ‘mental health’ profession, such as the DSM (the dominant basis for psychiatric diagnosis in Australia) or CBT (the dominant form of ‘therapy’). The rise of these acronymic approaches coincides with what one psychiatrist called ‘the dumbing down of mental health expertise’. The ‘client’ of psychology is, in fact, a human, always with a polyvalent history and complex presentation, but in the dominant paradigms of treatment, he or she is reduced to an inert, imbecilic, and readily-quantifiable object, a constant in the equation, if you like, rather than an ‘x’. In practical terms, this means that GPs and psychiatrists prescribe medication as if patients were guinea pigs. Diagnosis by prescription is common practice, with the workings of almost all psychiatric drugs remaining largely a mystery for researchers, despite the grandiose claims of pharmaceutical companies. A whole range of human phenomena, from unhappiness to grief to anxiety are reconstructed as ‘medical disorder’, and therefore rendered, in principle, amenable to drug treatments.

This is compounded by the DSM system, which ought to be an intellectual embarrassment, but which is used as a lingua franca. Then you have the fromagerie of most ‘treatment’ itself – a mix of ’self-help’ techniques, and recipe-book style manuals, all of which provide a one-size-fits-all solution to multiplicitous problems. This is explicitly the case for CBT, whose founder, Aaron Beck, says quite plainly that clinicians ought to ignore a patient’s discourse and manifold array of symptoms in order to effect a ‘problem reduction’. Beck says that this reduction is necessary in order to get the ‘client’ to ‘damp down’  his or her ‘inappropriate emotional reactions’, and reintegrating back into the individualistic production line of alienated, competitive, consumer capitalism.

Needless to say, between markets and their ‘therapeutic’ prescriptions, it’s not surprising that Australia still has a problem with  ’mental health’.

”It would help to bolster public support for immigration and acceptance of social diversity if more minority leaders were as ready to show to mainstream Australians values the respect they demand for their own,” he told an Australia Day function in Melbourne last night.

He said for all the misguided and sometimes cruel treatment of Aborigines, the ethnic typecasting and occasional snobbery that still existed, Australia had rarely seen domestic discrimination based on race or culture.

Is Abbott stupid, or just plain lying?

Or is there, perhaps, something else in operation here, something at a different psychological level? Perhaps this ‘forgetting’ of racism is actually a repression, both personal and cultural, an attempt to sweep an ‘unacceptable idea’ under the carpet in order to preserve a fragile, narcissistic image of ourselves. The idea of racism is still unacceptable, as Australia is yet to have ‘worked through’ the bloody, traumatic aspects of its history (and present). So many on the Right still regard the mere admission of racism in Australia’s past as a kind of ’self-hatred’ or some such.

Bringing such things is all the more urgent when, a few days out from Australia Day, the Herald Sun is attempting to drum up ill-feeling in response to the manufacture of halal Vegemite:

Muslim leaders have congratulated Kraft for introducing the labels, but Family Council of Victoria secretary Bill Muehlenberg questioned the company’s motives.

“This is a private company trying to make money,” Mr Muehlenberg said. “I don’t think they care a rip about offending the tastebuds of Muslims.

“Why do we have to keep bending over backwards to please minority groups? There are only 300,000 Muslims in Australia out of 22 million people, which is a very small percentage.

“Of course, there’s a case for making allowances for different cultures, but aren’t we getting a bit carried away with political correctness here? It’s ridiculous.”

Mr Muehlenberg feared the halal labelling was also a sign of “Islamisation” of western countries.

It’s not very clear why somebody representing a ‘Family Council’ needs to comment on Vegemite’s marketing decisions. What is clear is that Vegemite has already been Kosher for years (apart from a brief period in 2004), and the only objections were from Stormfront and other fringe-dwellers from the conspiracist, wanna-be fascist crowd. This is the company kept by our man from the ‘Family Council’. It is precisely this evidence of racism, as old as it is entrenched within Australia, that Mr Abbott finds so objectionable that he must deny it altogether. But the cost of repression is neurosis, and that is what we see in the Australia of today, and we will have no clearer example than the young people who, on the 26th of this month, will drunkenly brandish flags and slogans, whilst older heads among the commentariat fervently inform us that Australia is not racist, has never been racist.

The focus at the moment, is on Copenhagen, climate change, and Rudd’s proposed ETS. It is by opposing this piece of legislation, and being a climate ‘sceptic’ more generally, that Abbott has come to be leader. Yet behind (and underpinning) the struggle for ‘action’ on climate change is the familiar spectre of another, older struggle, that of antagonism between rich and poor, bosses and workers. When we contemplate what an Abbottian future might look like, we ought not merely to think about climate change, but about the latter’s radical zeal for class struggle, as enthusiastic as that of the most ardent leftist revolutionary.

If we are honest, most of us would accept that a bad boss is a little like a bad father or a bad husband. Notwithstanding all of his faults you find he tends to do more good than harm. He might be a bad boss but at least he’s employing someone.

This was Abbott’s message as ‘Workplace Relations’ minister under Howard, in 2002, where he also quipped that a “bad boss” does “more good than harm”. This ought to tell you everything you need to know about where Abbott stands on ‘workplace relations’ (and, for that matter, marriage and parenthood). Abuse, authoritarianism, exploitation, and so forth – we can suspend our judgement on these things insofar as they are called to service for a ‘greater good’ – employment, parenthood, and so forth.

Naturally, Abbott now, as leader, accompanies his prattling about ‘battlers’ with a pledge to overturn the ALP’s ‘re-regulation’ of IR. This is despite the fact the past two years have seen wages drop proportionally in relation to corporate profits. Abbott is, relatively speaking, a straight-talker among politicians. Unlike Howard, he does not intend to cloak his intentions with simpering talk of workplace ‘flexibility’, or the need to martial ‘wage restraint’ vis-à-vis inflation. Abbott will make himself perfectly clear – profits must be increased, workers’ pay and conditions must be diminished, and the unions (the ALP’s bases) must be crushed. In concrete terms, this means yet another overhaul of IR laws, with the level playing field to be tilted dramatically toward business (particularly in terms of unfair dismissal).

A recent poll suggested that, ALP protestations notwithstanding, many Australians do not regard Abbott as an ‘extremist’. This is entirely correct. There is nothing whatsoever extreme about Abbott – he is the logical culmination of Howard-era Coalition policy, except that what Howard had to dress up with euphemisms, Abbott parades nakedly and without shame. He intends to go back to the future – the future that would have existed had not climate change and a GFC hindered the neoliberal political and economic agenda.

For this reason, leftists who attack Abbott on the grounds of his being a supposed ‘conservative Catholic’ are misguided, to say the least. To be sure, Abbott is happy to bait women (see his actions regarding the ‘abortion pill’), and those in favour of legal abortions. Nonetheless, his politics are decidedly neoliberal rather than truly conservative. Cuts to welfare and attacks against unions are not inherently conservative positions. The same goes for Abbott’s take on Catholicism. He may be pals with Pell, but his version of the faith is at odds with the many Catholic orders and other Christian denominations that stridently criticized Workchoices, Iraq, and other fiascoes of the Howard era. Focusing on Abbott’s religious views risks obscuring his much more dangerous political ones, and also risks alienating the many ‘conservatives’ and Catholics out there who do not subscribe to Abbott’s theology of paternalism and exploitation. The abortion debate is more or less settled in this country, and it suits the Coalition only too well for their detractors to be bogged down in this sort of a sideshow.

Neither should observers be fooled into thinking Abbott is some kind of ‘mad extremist’, a kind of Tory answer to Mark Latham. Mark Latham may well have been mad. He certainly lacked Abbott’s survival skills. But he was never an ‘extremist’, or even, very clearly, a leftist. In contrast to Abbott, who has reaffirmed his support, time and again, for the worst excesses of the Howard era, Latham showed in his speeches and his writings that he was an anti-Labor Labor leader, a kind of Blairite peddler or ‘third-way’ politics. The Coalition are staking everything on a clear Howardist platform, not some attempt at party compromise. Australia is at a stage in its history where, to all appearances, it would be utterly unwilling to re-embarked on a Howard-on-steroids misadventure. As far as Tony Abbott is concerned, history needs a push.

The mythical “doctor’s wives” and “small ‘l’ liberals” who were supposed to rescue Australia from Howard (and never did) do not exist as any kind of serious electoral or political force, and will almost certainly continue to vote Liberal, albeit with pegs on their noses. We saw this recently in Higgins and Bradfield, and we saw it very clearly in the 2007 federal election. The doctor’s wives returned Turnbull with an increased margin; it was salaried workers in relatively low-income areas that tipped out the Howard government, not a fairy-tale army of principled libertarians.

The fight against Abbott and his cronies is therefore very real, and it is also one orientated quite clearly around class struggle (as was the 2007 election, insofar as this was a contest about Workchoices and IR). There are no indications that Abbott shies away from this interpretation of things, suggesting that he and his backers either believe that the Australian public has suddenly warmed to a ‘deregulatory’ industrial and environmental agenda, or he is simply possessed of utter stupidity and hubris.

Of course, the coming political battle is not solely reducible to class. This is evident when one peruses the flotsam on Abbott’s front bench. Ruddock, that hollow man who should serve as a living (or undead) warning to all “small ‘l’ liberals”, was given a position, no doubt for his work against asylum seekers. The race-baiting and serially incompetent Kevin Andrews was given a senior position, and the detestable, walking caricature of the Liberals, Bronwyn Bishop, was recalled to the shadow cabinet for the seniors’ portfolio. Barnaby Joyce, as proficient on economic matters as a bucket of pigshit, was given the finance portfolio, pairing him with ‘avuncular’ Joe Hockey. Clearly, it would seem, Abbott prefers a ‘type’.

Abbott may be a Rhodes scholar, and no doubt, he is, in some respects, an able man, but he’s already managed to deal himself out of the game when it comes to climate change. A carbon tax was the perfect, market-based rejoinder to Rudd’s complex and useless ETS. There were strong arguments in favour of a carbon tax from a Coalition point of view. (The intra-right debate on this topic was quite interesting, from my observations). Instead, Abbott has positioned himself as opposing a ‘great big tax’. Without the government imposing ‘price signals’ with respect to carbon emissions, there is no market-based solution to be had. You are then left with a Federal Coalition government that will either do nothing, more or less, or one that will attempt to tinker about the margins with command and control solutions. Again, none of this is particularly ‘conservative’.

All this may look rather grim to those of us who don’t vote Tory. There is, however, a silver lining or two. The working classes have often been persuaded to vote against their own economic interests in the past, but the Tories couldn’t pull of this trick in 2007, and it’s even harder to see them doing it in 2010, post-GFC. We should thank Abbott and the Liberals for shedding their disguised, and revealing themselves to the public as they really are (and always were!). That is to say, they are neither ‘liberal’ (except in an economic sense) nor a party. Finally, there are few people better than Abbott at unifying the enemies of the Coalition. Under Abbott, the Coalition will wage Republican-style ‘culture’ wars, which themselves mask a rather nasty economic war. In this, Abbott has every chance of inadvertently fomenting a counter-coalition, comprised of workers, immigrants, homosexual couples, and the many other who would be the targets of Coalition policy. It is as if, politically speaking, Mao’s famous blessing has come true in Australia, and we are finally beginning to live in ‘interesting times’.

We know that relations socials and economic have changed greatly over the couple of decades, and nowhere more so than in those states formerly behind the Iron Curtain. The push toward what Australia’s PM calls ‘neoliberalism’ – namely, the alliance between government and capital against workers – has occurred everywhere, but has arguably been most ruthlessly pursued in many of the ex-communist states.

Maggie Thatcher, one of the leading practitioners of neoliberalism, famously quipped that ‘there is no such thing as society’. Perhaps she is being proven correct, in that societies have teetered on the brink of collapse directly in proportion to what geographer David Harvey calls ‘the commodification of everything’. Harvey argues that ‘the destruction of forms of social solidarity … leaves a gaping hole in the social order’, for which the ‘inevitable response is to reconstruct social solidarities’ leads to a revival of nationalism, fascism, and ‘authoritarian populism’. This blowback is the corollary of universal freedom of enterprise.

It is apropos of economic turmoil and social collapse that I bring you this story from Bulgaria, concerning a 23-year old Sydney man named Jock Palfreeman. The media has given Palfreeman’s situation little coverage, but The Daily Telegraph had this story:

The former The King’s School student was arrested on Friday in Sofia after allegedly fatally stabbing Andrei Monov, 20, the the son of a prominent local psychotherapist, in a street brawl.

Palfreeman – who claimed in court to being employed by the British army – is also accused of attempting to murder Antoan Zahariev, 19, during the same attack.

According to a police statement, Palfreeman admitted stabbing the two Bulgarian men but insisted it was in self-defence.

Palfreeman said that while he had been carrying a knife at the time, he only pulled it out to defend himself and two other friends from a group of football hooligans who were attacking another man.

What separates this case from the many involving Australians who run amok overseas is the suggestion that Palfreeman is facing a kangaroo court. Contra the claims of Bulgarian prosecutors, there is another side to the story:

In December 2007, Jock witnessed the gang attacking two men of Roma ethnicity in Sofia. Jock went to the aid of the Roma men, putting himself in the middle of the attack. The Roma men were able to escape, but the gang continued their vicious attack on Jock. Following the fight, one member of the gang was killed and another injured.

Jock was refused bail, and has been in the infamous Sofia Central Prison for nearly two years awaiting a verdict. He will give his final plea on Wednesday, 2nd December 2009, and can expect a verdict on the 3rd December.

Jock’s trial has been repeatedly delayed due to witnesses, court officials and even members of the judging panel failing to attend scheduled court dates without notice. Three consecutive court dates were aborted after 30 minutes due to missing medical and technical experts.

More importantly, crucial evidence proving Jock’s innocence has been either carelessly or deliberately destroyed. For example, CCTV footage showing the gang’s assault on the Roma men and then on Jock was initially deleted due to police recklessness. When Jock’s defense was able to retrieve it using a computer expert, the entire computer mysteriously exploded destroying the footage, again in police “care”.

The stories of the gang members and other witnesses have been changed repeatedly since the initial statements. The gang members initially confirmed Jock’s version of events, but have since changed their statements to deny even the existence of the Roma men. They claim that Jock, a young Australian in a foreign country, simply attacked a gang of 16 men alone without a motive. Their initial statements have been blocked from court by the prosecutor. Initially, ten Bulgarian Police Officers supported Jock’s version of events. To date, eight of these have changed their stories to fit with the statements of the gang. Throughout the entire case, Jock’s statement has remained exactly the same.

It is impossible for me to verify the claims above. What I do know is that they are plausible. Firstly, Bulgaria, like a number of other ex-communist countries, currently has a major problem with racism, and has seen a rise in violent, proto-fascist activity. Secondly, Bulgarian authorities are widely believed to be corrupt — the EU has questioned ‘the independence and accountability of the judicial system’.

What this case highlights are the very real problems –- corruption, racism, and violence –- that still plague much of the world, particularly where a sleazy version of free enterprise has replaced a creaky version of communism. So far, the Australian media has not been as interested in Palfreeman as some other Australians incarcerated overseas (with occasional exceptions). He lacks the tabloid fascination of Schapelle Corby and her family -– he’ll never get a gig on the front cover of Ralph. Unlike David Hicks, he is not an international symbol of that recent US paradox -– suspending ‘human rights’ and democracy in the name of human rights and democracy. He may yet, however, turn out to be a victim of corruption, and a casualty of neo-fascism, and his story ought to be told. Rising nationalism and justice systems tilted in favour of the wealthy and connected may be more pronounced in Eastern Europe than elsewhere, but they are problems everywhere, including Australia.

Palfreeman’s fate will be determined on December 2nd, next week. More information on this matter can be found hereand here.

From what I can see of the emails, they prove no such thing. What they do demonstrate, however, is that scientists, and science itself, are fallible, and subject to the vicissitudes of personality and politics (broadly speaking), just like every other aspect of life. To construct an entire conspiracy theory out of this decades-old fact is to therefore be clutching at straws.

None of this ought to be news for the conservatarians, or anybody else, for that matter, except the former have an irrational fear and hatred of all things that smell even vaguely pomo. Because of this, some fairly basic points, such as science being fallible, or occurring within a context that is full of contingencies, are likely to be new and unfamiliar, despite these points having been made, in different ways,  some time ago.

Indeed, Kuhn argued long ago that ‘more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection data’, and that ‘personal and historical accident is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time’.

Note also that, whatever the purported sins of these AGW scientists from East Bumcrack, their scientific failings are utterly trivial when compared to the shenanigans of Big Pharma, for instance, about whom the conservatarians are entirely silent.

We can expect to see plenty more about this on the blogosphere. (Larvatus Prodeo has a thread here — the comments are interesting, though the post itself pulls its punches, IMHO). This is what constitutes a scientific scandal when an entire generation of computer-literate conservatarians have been getting their ’science’ from Andrew Bolt and Ann Coulter.

Australians work more than two billion hours of unpaid overtime a year, a $72 billion gift to their employers, a new study by an independent think tank shows.

The Australian Institute research shows a typical full-time employee is working 70 minutes of unpaid overtime a day, which equates to 33 eight-hour days per year, or six-and-a-half standard working weeks.

Across the workforce, the 2.14 billion hours of unpaid overtime represented six per cent free labour for the economy depends.

“While Australians might have a reputation for taking ’sickies’ and ’smokos’, the evidence suggests otherwise,” the institute’s executive director Richard Denniss said when releasing the research on Wednesday.

During the past decade Australia had simply accepted the “dubious honour” of working the longest hours in the western world, when other developed countries had sought to reduce working hours.

“The amount of unpaid overtime worked in Australia is the equivalent of 1.16 million full-time jobs,” Dr Denniss said.

“In an economy where unemployment is rising, overwork is an obvious area for government to address.”

The survey found 45 per cent of workers, and more than half of all full-time employees, work more hours than they are paid for on a typical workday.

The online survey of 1,000 respondents, commissioned by the institute, found that 44 per cent of people who work unpaid overtime said it is “compulsory” or “expected”.

Slightly fewer (43 per cent) said overtime was “not expected” but also “not discouraged”.

Australians also work three times more hours or unpaid overtime than they volunteer to community organisations.

In response to its findings, the institute has nominated November 25 as national Go Home On Time Day.

This research is merely confirming what plenty of us know already. In short, a majority of Australian workers are doing charity work for their bosses by compulsion, or, at the very least,  without explicitly agreeing. Most workers are subject to theft, in other words.

Dr Denniss, the executive director of the crowd who published this research, suggests that the problem is one for government to address. He neglects to mention that government has been addressing the issue of overwork for years — addressing it by entrenching it in the labour market and economy at large. This is still the case, in spite of the Federal ALP’s new and ‘radical’ IR laws. For all the histrionic talk of union thuggery, the unions of Australia are barely able to cope with serious OHS matters, much less run a campaign against overwork.

Rather than have some Mickey Mouse ‘Go Home on Time Day’, workers should be going home on time every day, unless there’s a damned good reason. Miserliness of one’s employer is not such a reason.  The GFC was always likely to encourage employers to intensify their exploitation of staff. And rather than relying upon the benevolence of employers in order to finish work on time, workers should consider staging a ‘Tell the Boss to Fuck Off’ day.

Does anybody seriously believe that the ETS, a market solution, par excellence, is going to make the slightest bit of difference? That in placing all of our eggs into the capitalist basket, we are trusting in a magic talisman that can, at best, merely tinker on the margins?

Using capitalist structures and processes as a means of combating AGW is like trying to fight a live bushfire by opening up a a farmers’ market, and putting a tax on undergrowth.

And this at a time when support for ‘the market’ has never been lower.

Two of Howard’s claims — the the Rudd government has engaged in “symbolism” and high-spending, are entirely true. The problem for Howard, however, is that there is nothing wrong with symbolism per se. Moreover, if Howard had been in power during the GFC, the recession in Australia would almost certainly have been worse. Workchoices would have exacerbated current problems of unemployment and underemployment. Even the current Federal opposition does not deny that it would have spent money of a stimulus package, but rather, merely quibbles about the amount.

Howard is particularly critical of the stimulus package: “Mr Rudd will say he had the global financial crisis to handle. Well, courtesy of us, he was well endowed with money in the bank.”

Actually, it was courtesy of Howard and Costello that Australia was left with a structural deficit in the budget, in effect making budget surpluses dependent upon record (and unsustainable) revenues from mineral exports. That’s the real Howardian ‘legacy’ – casualisation of Australia’s labour force, and ‘fiscal prudence’ predicated on a unique, temporary and entirely contingent set of economic circumstances.

So there you have it. Howard is predictable and completely ineffectual in any debate without a team of News Ltd trollumnists behind him. And the Herald Sun can’t even do Sunday sensationalism like it used to. Until the Sunday Hun can let us know which strip joints Howard attends, the man should be wheeled back out to pasture.

It is precisely this honour that is lacking in so many in Australia today. It is lacking in the wretched Rightists, who fill their media columns and blogs with casuistry on the need to repel and brutalise asylum seekers. It is also lacking in our politicians. Wilson Tuckey, for instance, best known for assaulting an Aboriginal with an ironbar, thinks that Australia’s military might should be brought to bear on these seeking asylum by boat on our shores. Prime Minister Rudd thinks that it is not murderers, rapists, war-mongerers, or arsonists, but ‘people smugglers’ who are the ’scum of the earth’, who ‘trade on the tragedy of others’, and who, in good Conservative Christian fashion, ought to ‘rot in hell’. This lack of honour, this cowardice, this pusillanimity, to use a more precise term (literally, Latin for ’small of soul’) is plainly evident in those ‘real’, ‘patriotic’ Australians who, with their Southern Cross tattoos, and their bumper stickers reading ‘Fuck off we’re full’, decry a nation which they believe is being swamped by aliens. As Bob Ellis wrote, these people are not a majority, but they are certainly vocal, and well-represented in both the media, and among the political classes. Twisted with ressentiment, and in need of an outlet for their grievances, Asians on leaky boats present an easy target.

The facts on asylum seekers who come to Australia by sea tell a different story, of course. Most asylum seekers do not risk a sea voyage to come here. Most who do are then granted asylum as legitimate refugees. Evidence is thin on the ground that any such asylum seeker has posed any major problem for Australia in any way hitherto. Whilst the dishonourable profess that they are not racist, there are clear undertones of bigotry in the furore over asylum seekers. A few Sri Lankans are a cause for Australian outpourings of panic, despite the fact that, since 2001, Australia has allowed entry to over 10,000 white Zimbabweans fleeing the Mugabe regime. Clearly, some victims of circumstance are more worthy than others.

To revisit a bit of history, in the late 1930s, German Jews were persecuted non-citizens within their own land. Despite this, the world’s powers, particularly the US and the UK, failed to accept German (and other European) Jews as refugees or immigrants. The disastrous consequences of this recalcitrance and xenophobia are well-known. In response, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees was established in 1951, in an attempt to provide some basic rights and assistance to displaced persons around the world. Australia is among many other developed nations that have agreed to international conventions that commit nations to the protection of asylum seekers and refugees.

This background of xenophobia and catastrophe is the context in which Australia’s commitment to refugee rights was affirmed, but it seems that this background has been forgotten. One can well imagine what some of our concerned friends on the Wretched Right would say to the asylum seekers of the late 1930s. It is harder to understand the seething hatred for so-called people smugglers. With the exception of those  who do not provide safe passage to their charges, but rather, expose them to harm through negligence, ‘people smugglers’ are regarded as heroes in many other contexts. The history of WWII and its build up is full of daring escapes across borders, aided by ingenious locals. For a contemporary Australian ‘patriot’,  Sigmund Freud, for instance, was a mere ‘queue-jumper’, who used money and contacts so that his family may avoid a fate that he and the other you-know-whos had to endure. The East Germans made numerous attempts to flee communist rule and defect to the West. For Prime Minister Rudd, those that assisted these people are mere ’scum of the earth’, despite the fact that it’s difficult to imagine life in the DDR being any better than that in Afghanistan, or for a Tamil in Sri Lanka.

And for these Australian vultures circling the boats of asylum seekers – what are their objections to the ‘boat people’? One of the first is that these people are not genuine refugees, but merely ‘economic refugees’. We already know that this is false – 4 of 5 asylum seekers are in fact legitimate refugees. In any case, dismissing the status of ‘economic refugees’ is ignorant and hypocritical. In a globalised economy, it makes no sense to reap the benefits of cheap labour overseas (i.e. cheap imports to Australia) and then complain about the chaos and displacement that is a corollary to such a system. The second main object is that asylum seekers are ‘queue-jumpers’. Again, this is pusillanimity writ large, as if the only criteria for admission to Australia ought to be a willingness to adhere to inept bureaucratic processes. At bottom, these objections do not express anything of substance so much as they disguise the fact that asylum seekers fulfill a very precise, and necessary role in the Australian ‘patriot’s’ demonology, and will continue to play this role for as long as ressentiment exists, reasons be damned.

In Aristotle’s Ethics, we encounter an argument where happiness is held to approximate a ‘mean’ of sorts. To put it differently, the aim of life, according to Aristotle, is to have neither an excess, nor a deficiency of a ‘virtue’. That is to say, some anger, or some lust, or some pride may very well be a good thing in certain situations, as long as you don’t take it too far, or are found anemic in these qualities. The one possible exception to this rule, in the Ethics, concerns pusillanimity and its opposite, magnanimity (translating the English word from its Latin origins, this means  ‘greatness of soul’, itself a translation of the Greek megalopsuchia). Magnanimity is achieved by placing honour at the fore; the honourable are, for Aristotle, ‘disposed to confer benefits’, and, do not ‘nurse resentment’. The Homeric heroes invoked at the start of this post exemplify this magnanimity. The Wretched Right, the ‘patriots’, and the spineless politicians represent its opposite. With this in mind, it is evident that the very ‘debate’ about asylum seekers is beneath us. To debate on the terms of the pusillanimous, to enter into the logic of racism, cowardice and ressentiment ought to be shameful for men and women in a relatively free land in one of the richest countries on the planet. It is in the name of honour that I call on Australians to make their assessment of the asylum seeker ‘problem’ by observing the facts with the gaze of magnanimity, and by rejecting a popular worldview that is fit neither for us, nor the wanders who seek our assistance.