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No, it’s not the ‘Before’ pic from an ad for a baldness treatment. It’s The Mad Monk trying to convince Facebook users a far right environmental dinosaur is the right choice to lead a progressive, environmentally sensitive country.

“We’ll end the waste, pay back the debt, stop new taxes, stop the boats and help families”, claims the ad. Oh yes? I wonder if any of these claims stand up to scrutiny.

We’ll end the waste  The same Liberals who spent $420m advertising the GST?

We’ll pay back the debt  This implies both that the current government wouldn’t and that the debt was a bad idea, neither of which is correct. As a percentage of GDP, the debt is nominal; it is dwarfed by the debts of other major economies, yet was sufficient to prevent us from sliding into recession and high unemployment. The coalition shows itself up as out of touch with modern economics every time it rails against the stimulus package.

We’ll stop new taxes  The same Liberals that brought in the GST? The same Mr Abbott who wants to place a ‘levy’ on big business to fund his maternity leave scheme? Taxation is a complex business that must, necessarily, evolve over time. Tax overhauls can require taxes to be scrapped and others introduced. Tax burdens also require scrutiny: of the 1100 companies with an annual turnover above $250m almost half* are currently paying no tax whatsoever!

We’ll stop the boats  Ah, of course – the dreaded boats! The most desperate 4% of asylum seekers must naturally be turned away, while the 96% who can manage the airfare avoid the headlines and can be forgotten about. But just how will they be stopped, and why is it morally right to spend billions on overseas detention centres while avoiding our international obligations? (The current government is also interested in offshore detention, but is not attempting to avoid these responsibilities.)

We’ll help families  By reducing spending on schools and school IT, scrapping the National Broadband Network, cutting funding for hospitals and allowing big business to get bigger, competition to get smaller and prices to get higher? Well thanks but no thanks!

Of course the claims in the above ad are fairly standard for a federal election campaign. It’s not a Liberal Party ad I’m so incensed to have in my Facebook – it’s a Tony Abbott one. A would-be PM who thinks women should be at home ironing, gays are threatening and human-made climate change is “complete crap”? If there was truth in advertising, the ad would say ‘Moving backwards’.

* Source: Business Day, The Age, 13/3/10

Many people are calling Sunday’s Great Debate boring. (Perhaps they would have preferred Jules and the Mad Monk to have been cooking up tiramisu for a cravatted twat.) If you were watching the debate on Seven, though, you were seeing unfurled before you live a fascinating story of gender difference in Australian politics.

Seven’s ‘PollieGraph’ gauged the responses of 96 voters to the battle being played out between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott for your vote. And they split the result down gender lines: red for women, blue for men and white for the average.

And the results from this bold social experiment couldn’t have been clearer: men liked Abbott and disliked Gillard, while women liked Gillard and disliked Abbott. But men disliked Gillard a little less than women disliked Abbott, so on average the PollieGraph favoured Gillard, 53% to 47%. The above image sums up the trend – the left part of the graph represents Abbott trying to explain how increasing the company tax rate wouldn’t increase grocery prices and the right section represents Gillard’s rebuttal. The white line remains in the middle for Abbott, but gets into winning territory for Gillard, despite the men not being impressed.

But I don’t think what we’re seeing here is as simple as a gender bias towards the audience member’s own sex. It’s blindingly obvious that increasing the tax rate for big business will increase costs and that those businesses will pass on the costs to the consumer. Abbott’s argument wasn’t impressive and Gillard’s political capital was easily gained. Yet not from the point of view of the average man.

My interpretation is this: Australian men are less politically astute and more likely to be taken in by bombastic sound bites. Further, I think Australian women are frustrated by the knuckle-dragging blokes they’re expected to choose from, and are crying out for more progressive men.

Abbott is not just another Liberal; he really does want to take us back to fifties values. If the men of Australia give him that opportunity, the women will not forgive them in a hurry.

Last Friday’s return of Collectors on ABC1 made for uncomfortable viewing. Three uncomfortable-looking co-presenters sat round a large table trying to pretend they weren’t feeling uncomfortable. There was no announcement of the Rove-post-Emmett variety – no mention of the show’s 6-season-long host whatsoever. When Adrian Franklin, Claudia Chan-Shaw and Gordon Brown had done trying to guess the Mystery Object (sans hints), they turned to a monitor and were put out of their misery by a punter.

So what happened to presumption of innocence? With Andy Muirhead reported to be due in court in less than a month on ‘one count of using a carriage service to access child pornography’, why not just leave the show (and the ident) on hiatus for the time being? A few months ago, ABC management was desperate to give us Sleuth 101 in that timeslot. Now they’re desperate to give us a bastardised Collectors. Under the circumstances, the fair and reasonable thing to do would have been to rest the show – if necessary, long-term. (They should rest shows more often – a Spicks and Specks break could breathe new life into it.)

Media treatment has been restrained to date, as you would expect pre-trial. Most articles have been short and factual. The public interest argument for publishing is still questionable, though. ‘In the public interest’ does not mean the public will be interested; it means it is in the overall interest of society to make information public. And this ‘mud’ is the type that sticks worst – for someone in the public eye it’s likely to be devastating, no matter the trial outcome.

Given the sub judice minefield, it’s also not surprising that most news reports online are closed for comments. A notable exception is the Defamer post, which has over 125 comments. Jess McGuire’s post uses the word ‘busted’, which means ‘caught out doing something wrong’. Sounds like defamation to me. (I know the site’s called defamer.com.au, but defamation is actually illegal, and something the site normally tries to avoid.) She apologised for using it in the comments, but the word remains in the post.

The comments represent a robust discussion of the charge, some nasty net realities, such as pages that open others faster than you can close them, shortcomings of a law that charges ‘sexting’ 17-year-olds with child pornography, as well as accounts of serious sexual abuse. This is certainly a debate we ought to be having, and you have to hope we’ll finally start doing something about the obscene sexualisation of children.

The ident thing has been an accident waiting to happen. When corporate sponsors back a celebrity, you can bet they have a contingency plan, should, say, clean-cut family man Tiger Woods turn out to be a womanising sex addict. You suspect Aunty was a bit too naive for that. And jeez – has this lot of idents ever passed it’s sell-by date! If I hear Geraldine Doogue say “sparkle-arkly” one more time...

Can’t wait to see this – hope it’s in 3D!

So here we are, one year on from ‘Black Saturday’. Many of those most directly affected still feel unable to take part in the many events set up to mark the day – it’s all too raw still. Even the sound of media choppers overhead has an unwelcome association with that day.

For others, attempts to use memorial services, music, art and media to process the horrific events of that day began early. A televised memorial service was held 15 days after the disaster. This seemed a very short amount of time to allow – the body count was still being established, and communities were being threatened with new bushfires. However, it was sensitively done and hosted with sober empathy by ABC News Victoria anchor Ian Henderson.

An art exhibition was put together from melted remnants just 7 weeks after the fires. Way too soon. And the image, below-left, of the artist curled up atop a burned-out Holden must have been deeply upsetting to many. Ali Griffin had lost her home in the fires. But the subject matter she was dealing with was loss of life, and that’s something else again.

A wander round Borders turns up no shortage of coffee table books on Black Saturday. Commerce. It can immediately sully things. Original intent can be lost in the translation to a retail commodity, the sale of which nets several parties a profit. The print, above-right, is available right now from tradingpost.com.au. 20% of proceeds go to charity, so I guess that’s one up on most of the books. But I find it hard to get my head around the concept of choosing to be reminded of Black Saturday every time you walked past it.

Aftermath is a song penned by StellaQ just three days after the fires. An acoustic guitar backs Stella’s poignant lyrics, as she sings of her brother’s fight to save his home from the flames. I found it on the Contribute section of abc.net.au, which is full of posts, images and video relating to the February Bushfires. You can hear the track in full on Stella’s MySpace page. Continuing a tradition spanning human history, folk music transitions events into folklore.

Images: ABC, Channel 7, and as linked

Women have long sought equal pay for equal work. Which is fair. But actually the work can fall well short of equal.

My experience with female executives has been a consistent trend of working shorter hours than their male counterparts and rushing off home to be mum while their subordinates are left to do the hard graft, meet the tight deadline and make them look good. During the day, too, plenty of family crises involving leaving early, taking an extra hour at lunchtime or every other call being a personal one of an afternoon. And the impact of the boss not giving 110% (or maybe even 80) can be profound. Because it’s just ‘the way things are’ you might not notice that much. But consider the male executive who, say, has an affair. And everyone in the office knows his mind isn’t properly on his work, and is directly impacted by that. Well that level of performance degradation can be the norm for a female exec struggling to balance work and home life.

For men, it’s the elephant in the room, but for women, such observations are often seen as sexist. Well positive discrimination is still discrimination – in this case against men. While seldom stated so categorically, this reality isn’t lost on the business world, which tends not to pay the eighty percenters as much.

On the tennis court, women now get equal prize money to the men. But they play a maximum of 3 sets instead of 5! Do women run half marathons instead of full ones? No. There’s no earthly reason I can see that a professional female player couldn’t manage a 5-setter if they needed to. In fact, to assume they can’t seems insulting – a relic attitude of the Victorian era.

The conclusion of the Australian Open last weekend nicely illustrates the disparity for the spectator. The results were greatly affected by the amount of court time each player had had. In the men’s draw, Roger Federer got to the final by beating Tsonga, who’d just got through two 5-setters back-to-back, while Andy Murray had fended off Cilic in a 4-setter. (Federer had narrowly averted a 5-setter in the quarter finals against Davydenko.) These epic battles colour the men’s game and lend significance to the final victory. Be honest – how many unforgettable women’s finals have there been?

In the women’s draw, both Serena Williams and Justine Henin picked up places in the final from 2-set matches. Williams had played one 3-setter in the 6 previous rounds and Henin 2. Their other matches were all just two sets. Williams struggles in long matches. Under men’s singles scoring, as she and Henin had one set apiece, the third set wouldn’t have been enough to get her the silverware and things would have started getting interesting.

In total, Williams played 15 sets during the tournament and Henin 16. Federer and Murray each played 22. So the girls played just 70% as many sets as the boys. Yet Williams and Federer each walk away with $2.1m. Doesn’t sound very fair to me.

*ducks for cover*

Image, right: AP

The vacuum left by Big Brother has been filled by Twitter this year, which, just like the reality TV show, contains the good, the bad and the beautiful...

“Why get married? Two words: white goods. We have dubbed the washing machine ‘Jesus’ – it performs miracles.” – Angie Hart (@angiehartmusic)

“As small as a frog my parents said!” – Delta Goodrem (@delta_goodrem) on being born 12 weeks premature

“A minute’s Twitter silence is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. While you pansies are quietly remembering, I’m going to skullfuck an arsonist.” – Kevin Fuckin' Rudd (@KevinFuckinRudd)

“For those who keep asking: I am 173cm tall. Or as I like to call it, ‘Fun Size’.” – Rove McManus (@Rove1974)

“Humans are amazing...will elaborate later.” – Charlie Pickering (@charliepick)

“Is it ok to let my dog eat his vomit? His heartworm tablet’s in there. He needs it back inside.” – Claire Hooper (@hoopthereitis)

“Saw my first red back spider for real. She was quite pretty (even for a deadly eight legged nightmare).” – scream-queen Efisia (@01000101)

“Has anyone lost a pretty black elephant with broken-off feet and half a trunk? I found her in the petrol station.” – Lisa Mitchell (@lisahmitchell), just before leaving for her international tour

“The kids introduced me to the wonders of worm farming, what to do with worm poo...” – Kevin Rudd (@kevinruddpm)

“So just to be clear... does @kevinruddpm want to stop me from posting pictures of ballbags? Because I will motherfucking protest that shit.” – Jess McGuire (@jessmcguire)

“19 year old Syd kid. EXCUSE MY BEAUTY.” – Twitter bio of Dawson fan Jacqui Gaut (@jackgotjacked)

“I love Twitter, but every once in awhile, I’m like ‘Why waste time here when I can be spanking my dick?’ 2 minutes later I’m Tweeting again.” – Kevin Smith (@thatkevinsmith)

Silent Bob evidently not so silent when talking about his mate, Dick. And talking of dicks, time to sojourn from Twitter to Barnaby Joyce (though I’m sure Twitter isn’t safe from him)...

“Labor is so typical - every time they come in, marvellous ideas; it’s all, you know, fluffy clouds and funny spots on cows’ bottoms. But they never really are able to handle money.” – Barnaby Joyce, deluding himself that the country would ever allow him to hold the purse strings!

“Government is the entertainment arm of the corporate sector.” – RocKwiz, 17/10/09

“One regrets ever meeting Mr Grech!” – Malcolm Turnbull, post Utegate

“D’you know what they call a place that breaks the law every time there’s an emergency? Dictatorship.” – Dr Cal Lightman, terrorist attacks ep, Lie To Me

“My advice to Tony Abbott: don’t wear the budgie-smugglers – I think the budgie’s escaped.” – Barry Crocker

“At times all three of them, in their own ways, have been polarising.” – Tony Abbott on Kevin Andrews, Bronwyn Bishop and Philip Ruddock, his new front-benchers

No shit! And from a rare moment of truth in politics to a rare moment of truth in advertising:

“I mean, even at $3.90, I wouldn’t be seen dead in them.” – Rivers ad for plastic clogs

“This is where I get my sense of humour from – here in Adelaide, Ladies and Gentlemen.” – David Koch

“I have three cats. I am one cat away from a story on A Current Affair.” – Wil Anderson, Weekend, The Age, 24/1/09

“When they’re about 9 or 10 buy them some stock.” – money advice for parents on NBC’s Today

“Sounds too good to be true? That’s what we're about to discover!” – Mr T, introducing FlavorWave Oven infomercial

“...My grandfather was a plumber ... If you'd let me on stage he would put a toilet in your club.” – Michael Bublé

Worked out well for Bublé – now he’s flushed with success. Back in Australia, Network 7’s substitute for trustworthy media was peddling deadly poisons:

“Botox - why it really is good for you!” – promo for Today Tonight

“What is really sad is that her pert, perfectly in-proportion B-cup breasts become monstrous $10,800 C-cup half cantaloupes perched ludicrously on her svelte chest.” – Mark Ellis, The Age, 10/9/09, on an 18-yo getting a boob-job on doco About Women

“Two eyes?” – Kochie to Fifi Box, as she holds a large boa constrictor

“I change boyfriends like I change my underwear.” – Jessica, Aussie Ladette To Lady, 2009 (second season)

Clean-undied Jessica, who, after a final week Ladette party was still wasted the next morning, came third – Victoria can be proud!

And finally to another Victorian – one with very different sensibilities. Our favourite ex-blogger writes about danger addict Bear Grylls, who offers ‘useful’ survival tips on SBS’s Man Vs Wild...

“I don’t care how parched or stuck in the middle of the Kenyan desert I may be one day, I absolutely refuse to pick up a giant elephant dropping and squeeze it into my mouth until juice comes out.” – Marieke Hardy, The Age, 19/11/09

Dear Brain-dead Network Ten executives,

When a valued [hah!] viewer decides to watch episode one of a new series, lets say Stargate: Universe, they generally look it up in the latest TV guide. This means it’s a really bad idea to change the schedule at the last minute. If you do, they’ll probably miss the first hour and are likely to give up on the series altogether.

If, thanks to a helpful website, they’ve established that you don’t understand that basic concept and have indeed changed the screening times, they’re probably going to want to persevere to the second ep. So obviously you’re not going to screw around with your viewing public two weeks in a row, right?! Without – again – giving the printed guides enough notice to publish the correct times?

I mean, even the most diligent viewer would then face the possibility that the helpful website’s RSS feed would go squiffy and they wouldn’t find out about the last minute change until it was too late. So they’d miss the second ep and be really pissed off.

What would be the point of that? What could be the mega-urgent reason for changing round SGU and Supernatural? Something you didn’t know about five days before, and couldn’t wait another week? Oh, but of course: it just makes you feel like a proper TV executive! “Right, look, we need to change these round right away? Got it?!”

Well, when the ratings for your expensive new fresh-from-pay-TV series come back as ‘disappointing’ it will have nothing to do with the quality of the show. And virtually nothing to do with whether it was on at 8.30 or 9.30 pm. It will be because you fuckwits have made it unwatchable!

So make your next executive decision the only good one possible: sack yourselves.

Yours sincerely,

Irate Ex-viewer

Update: SGU pulled after just 3 eps! That’s even worse than Channel 9’s treatment of Fringe fans, who were furious when it was pulled after just a few weeks. (They eventually brought it back, messed around with the episode order, then pulled it again!)

Surprise, surprise, SGU rated poorly on Monday with just 487,000 viewers. Yeah, Ten execs, you succeeded in driving away your audience!

This shows just how crap a concept the Australian ‘non-ratings season’ is. Officially, the networks don’t poll ratings over the summer. But in reality they obviously watch them like a hawk – they just don’t let the advertisers in on the results! On Boxing Day 2003, Ten got a shock from viewing figures of 2.4m for World Idol – as the SMH succinctly put it “viewers don't disappear in summer; they wait for a program they can give a damn about.”

So advertisers get treated as badly by the commercial networks as the viewers. Free market not really working out for us in TV Land, I think it’s safe to say!

What’s the difference between Santa Claus and Tiger Woods? Santa stopped at three hoes!

Season’s greetings and all the best for 2010 from the ausculture team.

On the days of extreme fire danger around Black Saturday 10 months ago the CFA website was frustrating people across Victoria by listing fires from across the State, from the most serious wildfires to small domestic fires, on the same Incident Summary page. It’s true that you could click the Region heading so all incidents in your region (still a vast area) would appear together, but as soon as you refreshed the page you’d be back to the view below.

After the revelations over CFA senior management incompetence and lack of information reaching people in high-risk areas, you’d think that on the top of the list of things to overhaul for this fire season would be the CFA website. Yet, on the first day of extreme fire danger, the Incident Summary and Warnings & Advice pages are down!!!

Which may leave some people resorting to Twitter for news on the wildfire on the Great Ocean Road.

If the CFA resource has gone down due to the volume of hits from concerned residents across Victoria that shows a truly shocking level of incompetence. That, after all, is the site’s purpose!

If all those vows that the likes of Black Saturday must never be allowed to occur again are to be anything other than empty rhetoric, the authorities are going to have to get with the program. Step No. 1: sack operational Chief Officer Russell Rees – the man who, on February 7th, didn’t even know there was a fire ecologist on-site making accurate maps projecting the movement of the fire heading for Marysville; the maps were never utilised. Co-ordinated Headquarters? Yeah, right!

Update: Well, after several hours, the Incident Summary page came back up late-pm and it’s the same mess of irrelevant, unsorted information: Region 14 structure, Region 24 false alarm, Region 8 ‘Other’, Region 22 structure. Do the CFA really think people are going to go to their website to see whether the house they’re in has a chip pan fire?!

The Great Ocean Road fire and many others were brought under control by the excellent work of the CFA volunteers, who do their best in the face of normally unseen frustration with the senior management.

Well last night’s Race Relations ep was pretty full-on. I have a tough skin, but seeing 4 inch nails get driven into John Safran’s hands was confronting even for me. But hey, nothing wrong with that. If TV was all Smurf collectors and peony pruning it’d be a very lacklustre medium. (There are whole channels like that, so I guess lacklustre floats some people’s boats.)

The episode’s rating, though, was questionable: M – adult themes and course language. M is generally considered to mean that it may be unsuitable for people under the age of 13. There’s a higher AV 15+ rating, and that’s the highest rating on Australian free-to-air TV. There’s no rating for content suitable only for those 18 and over, and in practice this means a lot of non-violent content that should be rated 18 gets an M rating and violent content gets M or AV 15+. Every show gets rated, which would lead you to think that we care about what content developing minds are exposed to. Yet the lack of an 18 rating demonstrates that we clearly don’t!

Anyway, practising Jew, Safran, flies off to Bulacan in the Philippines to take part in a Christian crucifixion ceremony as the ultimate way to burn his Jewish bridges so as to be free to date a Eurasian! (It might also have something to do with getting good TV ratings.  )

As a religion that sets itself apart by having had its prophet uniquely nailed to a cross, it seems odd that this festival should do this to around three men every year. But then odd and religion go together like hammer and nail...

Safran is certainly pushing the boundaries. Let’s hope he doesn’t get crucified by the critics...

► John Safran’s Race Relations encore, tonight at 9pm on ABC2

Image: ABC

LOL! Abbott and Bishop leading the Libs – Christmas has come early for ausculture!

First came the stocking fillers: Barnaby Joyce, Nationals Senate leader, belligerently traipsing Bob Carter, the one climate change denying scientist he could muster, across drought-ravaged country Australia telling farmers there was zero warming between 1958 and 2005! And then Steve Fielding calling for a Royal Commission into the climate change science* after a Senate deal to wrap up the ETS debate – “The temptation to weep with laughter is great” said Chris Uhlmann on Monday’s 7.30 Report.

And now the Liberal Party joins the Nationals to form a hilarious double-act of out-of-touch polices** and bombastic sound bites.

What the majority of the Australian public wants is a set of effective policies to address climate change, the effects of which are starting to look scarily catastrophic. That’s what we gave Labor a mandate to do. Unfortunately, Rudd’s been bowing to pressure from the worst polluters and promising them absurdly generous ‘permits to pollute’, something famously denounced by his own lead climate change advisor, Ross Garnaut, as well as The Greens and many others. Rudd has been trying to conjure up a scheme which no one really feels the effects of. Which, of course, defeats the whole point: if the tax on a packet of cigarettes was 20 cents just how many people would give up smoking?

Elsewhere in the developed world, conservatives have been supportive of emissions trading schemes. The EU, an alliance of 27 countries ranging from left- to extreme right-wing, already has one. Even the US has one, albeit watered down. Leaving Australia very much on the outer.

So as funny as it is to have a Leader of the Opposition who only a month ago said “I think the climate change argument is crap!”, at the end of the day the joke’s on us.

* Funny enough in itself – “Right, we need to summon Dr. David Suzuki to testify in Canberra – I mean, how are we supposed to accept him as a serious environmentalist when he keeps manufacturing petrol motorbikes?”

** Well, not so much policies as opposition to policies – all the more ironic as the Coalition would have brought in their own ETS had they retained power.

Image: ABC

Strange things happen back ’o Bourke...

Well, in the words of John Safran, I’ve been thinkin’!

There was certainly racism in the already controversial second ep of John Safran’s Race Relations, but it didn’t emanate from white-turned-black Safran.

Discrimination engenders discrimination by those discriminated against. (You might need a moment to get your head round that sentence – I know I did! ) The Jews in Israel, for instance, were badly discriminated against, and now go out of their way to persecute the Palestinians. So it is with racism. An era of whites-only cliques in the US has given way to blacks-only cliques. The word ‘nigger’ was once used by whites in order to offend blacks, but is now used extensively by blacks but considered offensive if spoken by a white. That is racism! It’s just reverse racism.

We are one race – the human race – and we should all be able to speak the same words.

The term ‘black brother’ is another divisive term. As ‘mate’ traditionally refers to a white Australian male the white speaker could imagine being close to, ‘black brother’ of course is the same dodgy tribalism with a different skin colour. Shortened to ‘brother’ or ‘bro’, it can sometimes mean someone non-black, but the predominant (non-sibling) usage is coloured by racism.

‘Mate’ carries some historical baggage – which generations of Australians have never even considered – but is used by many young Australians without bias. Hungry Beast did an interesting piece last week about us now being ‘post race’. (Look out for the clever ending.) Although playing for laughs, they were making a serious point about subtleties of context. In short they were saying that something is offensive if it offends! They played around with the idea of white people using words like ‘nigger’ and ‘wog’ and it being fine sometimes. Trouble is (and this wasn’t mentioned in the clip) it’s only fine if it offends nobody at all. Not the black guy, not the white guy, and not the other guy who happens to be getting a refill at the water cooler.

I was chatting with a (drunk) bar owner in Wangaratta recently, and he called himself ‘wog’ over and over with relish. I didn’t like it. It offended me. It said to me “I don’t feel I’m like you” and that doesn’t fit with my view of a single human race. So the best thing is to just let all the pejorative words fall out of use. That’s true post race.

Image: ABC