Rudd hit by car scandal: SMH

With PM Kevin Rudd now in more than a little bit of trouble, the question comes down to will heads roll over the matter?

What I still find amusing is Rudd’s insistence that he doesn’t do favors for donors, when there would hardly been an MP or Senator past or present that hasn’t. Large donors to candidates rarely give out of the goodness of their hearts alone, but as a way to gain access, and on occasion for the odd favor or two. It’s the way the system has always worked and having worked in various capacities with Federal and State members, I’ve seen it first hand.

Of course there’s a big difference between making a representation on behalf of a donor who is also a constituent, and having the Prime Ministers Office, and Treasury Department intervene….that takes it to a whole new level.

However I’d argue that the issue isn’t so much that it happened, but Rudd denied it in Parliament and in the public arena. The validity of the email aside, it’s known fact that Treasury helped Rudd’s mate, how they got to that point may only be a matter of semantics.

But what next, because there’s no precedent that I can recall like this given it is more than just a case of misleading Parliament.

If it is just a case of misleading Parliament, Rudd gets a slap on the hand, but he all but loses the public’s trust.

If it’s more, could he be forced to resign?

I’m betting unlikely, but that’s without knowing if any laws were breached in terms of the lobbying to begin with. Maybe an abuse of office…. hard to say.

On the other side, Turnbull is playing high stakes poker and he may not win yet. But if Rudd is proven to have lied, the next election becomes a whole lot more interesting .

Update: of course Rudd has the numbers in the Rep, but this is isntereting (via Oz Politics)

Parliamentary Privileges Act 1987 which has limited and clarified the privilege and contempt powers of the Federal Parliament. Each House may impose penalties for contempt limited to imprisonment not exceeding six months for a person, or a fine not exceeding $5,000, or not exceeding $25,000 in the case of a corporation. It has also made the imposition of penalties subject to judicial review. This Act also prevents members of parliament from being expelled.

How Gen-Xers became has-beens

Let me start by saying I’m not having a go at News.com.au here, but the “job seeker” Michael Gowers who wrote the article.

Lets look beyond the intellectual snobbery this guy offers first, because there’s two really weird quotes in the article (well, there’s more, but these one stands out.)

Along with many of my friends, I never paid much mind to the idea that one day I might be unemployed. For my generation, who are used to a permanently strong economy, it was just never going to happen.

For myself and the rest of the Generation Xers who grew up in a time where work was plentiful, this experience is one that crushes one’s sense of self-worth and leads to an every day battle to maintain hope and keep up the momentum of searching for work.

Now I’m a member of Gen X, and I fit the definition of a young Gen Xer as well because I was born towards the end of the accepted time frame for Gen X (depending on the source, Gen X is anywhere from 1965 through to 1980, although some put the end date earlier at 1975, the year I was born).

Here’s the thing: I didn’t grow up in a time where work was always plentiful. Indeed, when I finished high school in 1993, it was so hard to get a job that entry marks into Universities hit record highs. But maybe my memory is faulty, so lets get some figures.

According to the ABS, unemployment in Australia in August 1993 was 10.7%, but significantly higher again in states like Victoria and Tasmania. It peaked that year at 10.9% after several years above 10%. Although things did turn, by 1997 the figure was only down to 8.7%. Notable is that “youth unemployment” has always been significantly higher than the general rate.

The quotes from Michael Gowers are bullshit. We’ve had a good run from maybe the turn of the century, but the 90’s weren’t a cake walk. What I can’t work out is why use the lines: they aren’t lines that make him a sympathetic character, but an entitled one. As some of the comments note, boo-ho.

Here’s another line that made me laugh:

That is my reality in 2009 now that I am a fulltime unemployed professional jobseeker.

note the “professional jobseeker” part. That’s not meant to imply that he’s a professional at seeking jobs, but he’s looking for a professional job. And here in lies the problem, he’s a job snob.

Don’t get me wrong. Australia has a fantastic system that provides benefits and assistance to those in need. It is not, however, designed to cope with highly qualified individuals who have found themselves out of work

So what he means is that he’s somehow better than others who are unemployed but don’t have three degrees? give me a break.

Everyday I continue with my full-time job of looking for a job, a process that just keeps reminding me of our economic conditions. I am unable to get some jobs because I am now over-qualified and employers feel that I’d simply be taking a job just to have one and would leave as soon as the market picks up.

So how is it that given 5-10 minutes I could find this guy work in a supermarket stacking shelves or at a shop delivering pizzas then, because the local Woolworths still has a sign out saying they are looking for people…oh, and the unemployment rate today is 5.7%.

It does suck to have to go back to doing base work when you’ve had high ranking positions, but society doesn’t owe you a living. As recently as 3 years ago I worked part time in a bottle shop to help pay the bills despite my whoopdy-do degree, and previous roles in marketing and management, some somewhat senior, because that’s what I had to do (that, and b5media wasn’t making money at the time.)

Michael Gowers: get off your fat, lazy, entitled arse and go and take any job you can get.

The absurdity surrounding Indian students being attacked in Australia…well Melbourne specifically (despite what the Indian press claims) continues on.

As I’ve said before, and I’ll say again: any assault is bad. That some of the assaults included racial abuse is a given, and are beyond apology. But likewise the context is primarily one of crimes of opportunity, not race.

Despite the Victorian Government, and the Australian Government bending over backwards to appease India, there are now boycotts and more….

Now here’s your raw stats

Now I know Australia vs India per head of pop doesn’t work, but it’s important to note that assaults in India have a bias towards main cities; still maybe not quite close stats wise, but hardly numbers you can ignore.

Did I fail to mention that foreigners have a far higher stat rate for assault in India?

Must be racism, surely, after all ,that’s what’ happening here…not.

My son goes to a school where maybe half the kids can count heritage from the subcontinent. I don’t make the difference because they don’t, and let’s be clear: if there really was a race problem in Melbourne, the people allegedly making the attacks wouldn’t be able tell the difference from an Indian, a Sri Lankan, or a Pakastani.

BTW: my son has as his second language Sanskrit. I wonder how many kids in India learn the language of their ancestors.

I hate to say this, and I certainly don’t say this to the first, second and third generations here in Melbourne who don’t have an issue, and who….for lack of a better term, have blended with us all (and in that I mean it both ways). But seriously: if you’re an Indian student who seriously believes you’re not welcomed here: fuck off. Everyone is welcome in Australia, far more I should add than everyone is in India, particularly when it comes to caste. I wrote a post about American hypocrisy today; it applies to India as well: link.

The growing controversy over the bashing of Indian students in Melbourne has taken on nearly farcical levels of stupidity.

The allegations, particularly from the Indian press is that Indian students in Melbourne are being targeted on racial grounds, in what is being referred to as “curry bashing.”

That there has been attacks in which racial slurs were used is factual. That there is a wave of violence against Indian students isn’t.

It’s hard to get solid numbers, and local Indian representatives aren’t helping. On ABC radio last week, the head of the Indian Students Association claimed that there had been 60-70 incidents. Within that number, he included suicides that he blamed on fear of being attacked. Whether than number is accurate or not, I don’t know.

What I do know is that according to Victoria Police, there were 31,284 assaults recorded in Victoria in 2007/2008. Some of these so-called “curry bashing” incidents included robbery, of which there were 3,332 incidents in 2007/2008 for the entire state.

Numbers of the total numbers of Indian students in Melbourne are hard to pin down, but have been suggested to be around 30,000. This might be on top, or including the 50,000 odd people who said they were born in India in the 2006 census and the 30,000 from Sri Lanka (while I know there is a difference, your average racist thug at night couldn’t tell the difference). What we can add to that is the first and second generations of people born in Melbourne that have Indian or Sri Lankan heritage; I don’t have a number, but you’d probably double or triple the not-born here number.

So out of maybe 150,000 to 200,000 people of Indian or Sri Lankan heritage in Melbourne, 60-70 have been subject to assault, robbery, or death.

Remember, the incidents of assault in the general population is 563.9 incidents per 100,000 people. Given the population of people with heritage in India or Sri Lanka, there should have been roughly 1000 assaults….but there’s been maybe 60-70, and possibly less.

I’m don’t want to belittle any crime big or small, because ultimately they are all wrong and they shouldn’t happen. But perspective based on numbers vs what is now being called a trend that is threatening international relations between Australia and India? Give me a break.

The xenophobia in India is so out of control that you read shit like this article. It claims that a student who was found to have committed suicide was murdered by an Australian taxi driver. What this article fails to mention (and the others like it) is that if he was murdered by a taxi driver, and there is NO EVIDENCE to suggest that he was, that there’s a very strong chance the taxi driver WOULD HAVE BEEN INDIAN AS WELL. I don’t have numbers, but a rough guess would be at least 50% of taxi drivers in Melbourne are Indian from experience, if not higher. Those that aren’t Indian are often visitors or from other parts of the world, in particular Eastern Europe. But why let that get in the way of a good beat up.

I was going to be more scathing about the way the Indian press are dealing with story, but then it dawned on me that I’ve seen stories like this before.

In Australia.

Every time some idiot Australian tourist gets pinged for drugs or theft overseas, the media and general population fall into an orgy of xenophobia, one of cultural elitism that borders on outright racism. That the Indian media is now doing the same to us…well, it gives pause for thought, doesn’t it.