POLITICS: Scattered thoughts on what is likely the end of Scott Morrison's political career

[01] Well I guess it's that time again. Time for Australians to decide which party or coalition will lead the Commonwealth for a few years. And time for the rest of us to become instant experts on the mass debate concerning government policy, economics, politics, health, education and everything else that we expect our bloated governments to run.

[02] The next election, to be held on Saturday 21 May 2022, could be the closest election in Australian history. Certainly that's what I expected when the PM first announced the date and after Albo's first couple of gaffes. But the way the Liberals and Nationals are shooting themselves in the feet and getting desperate even about their safest seats, it looks like the next election will be an Alboslide.

[03] Things had changed since Morrison miraculously won in 2019, defeating Mark Latham. I was living in Waikiki and working in Mandurah (WA) at the time. No one had a clue that we'd be joining the rest of the world in a pandemic that has already claimed the lives of over 1 million people in the United States alone. 

[04] The world has changed since March 2020. We aren't so fussed about suicide bombers anymore. Terrorism is now a term used to describe crazy white guys who don't get enough of it. Guys like the white Australian terrorist who murdered over 50 people in Christchurch.

[05] Now we are staring at the old enemy again - Russia. But we also have a new enemy which is also our most lucrative export market - the People's Republic of China (let's call it the PRC, shall we?). Asymmetrical warfare has been replaced with traditional war between states. It's back to the future.

[06] I'll be sharing my thoughts on this election over the next few days and possibly weeks. There is so much to write about. This election could destroy the Coalition and set the conservative cause back decades. It could lead much of the party into populism, Trumpism or even Vichyism. The Liberals may become the religious right in much the same way as the US Republicans. They could turn into the party of antivaxer libertarians. Who knows?

[07] Anyway, enough for now. I'm off to bed. Khudahafiz.

AUSTRALIAN POLITICS: Tony Abbott isn't going anywhere

The former PM is back on the talking points, painting himself and Dutton as "reluctant challengers" and orating about "the betterment of mankind".

Bad news for all those hoping Tony Abbott will leave Parliament soon: on Monday, Abbott told a packed crowd of adoring fans at the uber-conservative Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney that he isn’t going anywhere. Abbott is already negotiating some kind of “Indigenous envoy” role with his new leader Scott Morrison. It’s as if the Liberals don’t have someone like the Member for Hasluck, who may know a thing or two about Indigenous affairs.

Abbott was scheduled to speak on the vexed subject of immigration, after his calls for a national reduction. But given the events of the past seven days, it was only logical for him to provide his side of the #libspill story. As expected, he also was totally unrepentant.

Politics today is better than it has been in the past few days. Peter Dutton was a most reluctant challenger last week, just as I was back in 2009. Peter Dutton was someone who, above all else, wanted to change policy and not change leader.

Abbott almost seemed to be taking credit for the rise of Scott Morrison who, he claimed, had restored the government to

... that sensible centre-right Liberal conservative mainstream ...

of economically liberal and socially conservative.

Abbott was in no mood to compromise on key areas of policy such as energy, social security and immigration either. Listening to the way he spoke, one could almost think he was auditioning for the role of leader again. He insisted that energy policy under the new administration will be designed

... to cut price, not to cut emissions … the important thing is to get price down and let emissions look after themselves.

Abbott declared himself no believer in

... the green religion.

To applause from the well-heeled crowd, Abbott went on to declare that social security must be more

... like a trampoline than a hammock.

The former PM seemed pleased with Alan Tudge’s appointment as Minister for Cities, Urban Infrastructure and Population. However, it seemed he didn’t quite understand Tudge’s portfolio. He repeated his “Team Australia” mantra, saying:

... immigration will go hand in hand with integration and in particular the stress for all primary applicants will be on having a job and joining our team and making a contribution from day one.

In other words: new migrants will again have higher expectations placed upon them than the rest of us.

Abbott said that under Morrison, the policy contest will be much sharper than under Turnbull. He claimed a key weakness of Liberals in recent times has been “seeking a false consensus rather than prosecuting a real contest”. Abbott said such an approach made little sense in a world where political differences are becoming wider, not narrower.

He closed his presentation, astonishingly, with an observation from Ben Chifley:

Our great objective is not to make someone premier or prime minister. It’s not putting sixpence more or less in someone’s pocket. It is working for the betterment of mankind. Not just here but wherever we can lend a helping hand.

The audience didn’t seem to mind. Apart from the journos, the audience was all nods and smiles. Among them was Maurice Newman, who was a member of PM Abbott’s Business Advisory Council and is highly sceptical of the existence of climate change.

Abbott claimed his objective has always been to work to help others achieve their best selves. We didn’t see much evidence of that last week.

First published in Crikey on 28 August 2018.

BOOKS: A Sunday afternoon trying to make the Liberal Party great again

A new book proposes a plan to fix the Liberal parties leadership woes.

Sunday afternoon at a pub in North Sydney and Sky News presenter Ross Cameron is launching the first book of conservative apparatchik John Ruddick. It’s called Make The Liberal Party Great Again.
I’ve known John since 1994 when I found myself in the conservative faction of the New South Wales Young Liberals known as “The Team”. Ruddick was our officially endorsed presidential candidate at a time when the non-conservative faction (known as “The Group” but also known by other labels such as “The Left” and “The Pink Triangle”) had firm control over the entire NSW Party.

Ruddick is a likeable bloke who sells home loans for a living. He has appeared a fair few times on Sky News’ Outsiders.

The basic message of his book is that the Liberal Party is neither liberal nor democratic enough in relation to its members. Its processes lead to organisational instability and electoral ruin. When the selection of the leader is just left to elected MPs, ego and vested interests alien to the membership get in the way and the door to leadership change revolves ever so quickly.

Ruddick’s solution? Follow trends overseas. Non-Labor parties across the Western world (and in the UK even the Labour Party) have democratised the process of choosing their parliamentary leaders, including grassroots party members. In this way, the parties mimic the democratic process of general elections.

Ruddick argues the Liberal Party should hold a mega-convention every three years (mid-way through the parliamentary term) to choose the leader of the parliamentary party. The convention need not be in one place but can be spread across numerous cities. The media will be welcome to cover the event. The entire nation can thus see how Liberals choose their leaders instead of relying on media “elites” to deliver whispers and leakage.

In theory it sounds fantastic. In practice, Jeremy Corbyn. Imagine trying to keep a party membership united after such a process. And who would get to vote? If attendees at Ruddick’s launch are anything to go by, it would be a bunch of retired and semi-retired wealthy white folk. Even if the Liberal Party adopts Ruddick’s prescription of mass democratisation, the people attending the Liberal mega-convention would still be about as representative of Liberal voters as Mark Latham is of ALP voters. 

I didn’t see any sitting MPs at the launch raising the question of whether anyone who could take this change on is even listening.

The closest was Stephen Mutch, former federal MP for Cook (the seat ScoMo currently holds). And, of course, there was Ross Cameron, a former MP whose Liberal Party membership has been suspended for four and a half years.

If the Liberal Party is to have any future, it should embrace the generation of young people represented by three youngsters present at the pub with their Asian-Aussie mum. In a broad Strayan accent, one of the boys boasted that he spoke fluent Thai and was learning Vietnamese at school.

As long as the Liberal Party is held hostage by a xenophobic far-right, solving for the leadership problem alone won’t work.

First published in Crikey on 24 September 2019

CULTURE WARS: A message to mono-cultural chestbeaters

Abul A'la al-Ma'arri (973-1057BC) was an Arab philosopher and poet who lived to the ripe old age of 84 in the district of Aleppo in Syria. When it came to denigrating religions, al-Ma'arri was an equal opportunity offender. French-Lebanese novelist, Amin Maalouf, quotes one of al-Ma'arri's more famous verses in his The Crusades Through Arab Eyes:

The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: Those with brains, but no religion, And those with religion, but no brains.

His words were almost prophetic. Decades later, European crusaders led by Raymond de Saint Gilles and Bohemond of Taranto stormed Abul A'la al-Ma'arri's home town, murdered 8000 civilian and then cooked and ate their remains. In 2013, the al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front in Syria finally got to punish al-Ma'arri by beheading his statue.

Al-Ma'arri's message is strangely relevant today as we see self-declared Christian politicians and their pundit pals using every opportunity to attack a religious tradition which is oh-so similar to their own. Their crusade/jihad may not involve cannibalism or beheading statues. However, it does involve a strange mix of patriotism, prejudice and political opportunism.

The rhetoric about Islam, a faith whose Australian adherents are from more than 160 countries and who make up barely 2 per cent of the population, has never been terribly sophisticated in Australia. Middle Eastern religion isn't one of our strong points. Many Australians are still offended by depictions of Jesus as black or of Mary wearing a veil. The Aussie Jesus must be whiter than Santa Claus, his mother a Roman-era Lara Bingle.

Surprisingly, Tony Abbott appears to have joined the ranks of the monocultural chest-beaters. There was a time when he doggedly refused to follow the Howard line on multiculturalism, penning articles for Quadrant and The Australian declaring multiculturalism to be an inherently conservative idea worth defending. He refused to buy into the anti-Muslim rhetoric of colleagues like Bronwyn Bishop or pundits like John Stone and Andrew Bolt. Abbott's Catholicism did not even lead him to mimic his close friend Cardinal Pell's speculative diatribes on Muslims.

And then Mr Abbott became prime minister. We soon discovered he wasn't the suppository of wisdom on national security. Our law enforcement agencies cringed as Abbott lectured Muslim spokespersons to convince him they really meant it when they said they followed a religion of peace. It was a patronising performance from a prime minister born overseas to religious communities largely born in Australia.

Still, the numbers of young Muslims heading off to Syria to join Islamic State didn't exactly skyrocket as a result, remaining steady at about 0.0002 per cent of the total Muslim population. The few successful prosecutions of Muslim terrorists have involved tip-offs from Muslim communities, including mosque leaders giving crucial evidence at trials.

ASIO and law enforcement officials are aware of these facts. They are aware of the pressures minorities face when their traditions are constantly maligned and pilloried, when they are treated as security threats and as people whose transnational connections make them a danger in the imagination of others. Yes, many people working for ASIO are middle-aged Catholics who, like Abbott, are not too young to remember a time when Catholics, their faith and institutions were treated as foreign, a security threat and not very Australian.

"But ah, Mr Yusuf", I hear you say, "What percentage of Australian Catholics turned to violent extremism?" I'm not sure. Perhaps 0.0002 per cent of them?

Mr Abbott says not all cultures are equal. Or perhaps he was echoing the words of that great foreign fighter George Orwell by declaring all cultures are equal but some are more equal than others. But can one speak of Muslims whose ancestry is from more than 160 different countries as possessing one single culture? Why are so many mosques and Muslim religious bodies divided along ethnic and linguistic lines? In this respect, how are Australian Muslims any different to Orthodox Christians or Buddhists?

Even some Coalition MP's seeking to "defend" Islam have made a meal of it. Concetta Fierravanti-Wells has argued that we need "a more modern interpretation of the Koran". Seriously? Is the problem one of exegesis? Do people who tick the Muslim box on their census forms stop and consult the Koran before they decide whether to shop at Coles or Aldi?

Why do Coalition MPs imagine that Muslims are any more or less religious than the rest of Australia? Is it all about religion? Are Muslims just characters in some Koran-bashing freak show? 

Such speculative forays do become frustrating for Muslims who are often too busy working to pay mortgages and school fees to worry about what some Coalition MP or obsessive Kippax Street columnist is saying about them. But I strongly doubt the unholy Islam circus will push Muslims over the edge and into the hands of IS.

I appreciate the phone calls made by the ASIO boss to Coalition MPs, but I wonder whether it was as unnecessary as the many rounds of anti-terrorism laws that ASIO has supported over the past decade or so. Still, if our civil liberties can be curtailed for the sake of national security, why can't the verbiage of pollies who love the sounds of their own voices?

Irfan Yusuf is a PhD candidate at Deakin University's Alfred Deakin Research Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. First published in the Canberra Times on 20 December 2015.

POLITICS: Cory Bernardi gets in touch with his inner conservative

Tony Abbott is gone. Malcolm Turnbull is in power. This apparently means conservatives in the Liberal Party have or soon will be vanquished. The "wet" or small 'l' liberals have won the day.

Little wonder the likes of South Australian Senator Cory Bernardi are making noises of leaving the Liberal Party and forming a new conservative party, perhaps similar to Britain's Conservatives.

But things have never been so cut and dried. The "Right" don't see each other as all being Right, let alone right. The Liberal Party founded by Menzies represented a political compromise, a somewhat uncomfortable marriage of liberals and conservatives.

 But what does it mean to be conservative in Australia anyway? Does it mean you worship God on Sunday and the free market every other day? Does it mean you support traditional values but insist they can only be Judeo-Christian?

In my final years of law school, a friend and I were invited to dinner with John Howard. It was 1993, and Mr Howard was the opposition spokesman on industrial relations. John Hewson had just lost the unlosable election, and had stunned many colleagues by "coming out" as a social progressive. I asked Mr Howard whether he thought the Liberal Party was or should be necessarily more conservative than the ALP. In those days I was thinking with my undergraduate binary political brain, typical of many in the highly factionalised NSW Young Liberal conservative faction.

In those days, the 'Group' (as the small 'l' liberals were known) had a winner-takes-all mentality, refusing to share power with any but a handful of conservatives. My education as a conservative young liberal included recognising dangerous 'wets', among them Marise Payne, John Brogden, Robert Hill, Christopher Pyne and George Brandis. That's right, campus left-wing activists. Christopher Pyne and George Brandis were on the Liberal left. No doubt many current Young Liberal lefties would be wondering what on earth happened!

Back to dinner with Mr Howard. From memory, Mr Howard's reply to my question was that the essence of conservatism is respect for tradition and the status quo. Change needs to be done gradually, not hastily or in a radical manner. Evolution always works better than revolution.

In that respect, Howard said the Liberal Party was a "broad church". He admitted that many policies pursued in his own portfolio in those days could hardly be called conservative. Indeed, the idea of seriously curtailing the dominance of the union movement and the award system in Australia was regarded as revolutionary. For decades, centralised wage fixing through an independent umpire was the norm.

Howard had a much clearer understanding of what the role of conservatives in the Liberal Party was. He realised you had to take the electorate with you, and you had to use big events to your advantage. The rule was respecting things as they are and making minor changes here and there (or at least major changes when no one was watching). Events like the Port Arthur 'massacre' (conventional racialised wisdom won't allow us to label this an act of terrorism) gave Howard the catalyst to introduce gun laws against the wishes of many in the National Party.

But there was one lesson Howard and other self-styled conservatives today have not learned. When conservatives are guided by prejudice instead of reason, they risk giving birth to a political monster that could go out of control and come back to bite all of us.

The free market is built upon people acting in rational self-interest. This means looking out for commercial advantage regardless of linguistic, ethnic, religious and other differences one might have with others. There's no point accusing the ALP of anti-Chinese xenophobia for having reservations about the proposed preferential trade agreement with China when there are people on your own side using the existence of violent Muslim extremists in the Middle East as an excuse to punish cattle farmers and put our export markets at risk.

And if refugee policy is built upon ease of integration, do we really think an Arabic-speaking Christian refugee named Nabil Youssef tortured by Islamic State and/or Assaad will find it easier to integrate than an Arabic-speaking Sunni or Alawite refugee named Nabil Youssef traumatised by IS and/or Assaad?

John Howard would have wished his last press conference as prime minister could be devoted to his long record of achievements. Instead, he had to deal with a fake pamphlet of racial and sectarian content distributed by members of the Liberal Party (including a NSW State Executive member) in a Western Sydney marginal seat. He went on to lose not just the election but his own seat.

Conservatives who dabble in irrational prejudice will never succeed in the long term. If Mr Bernardi and his fellow travellers wish to establish a conservative party on narrow foundations, they might consider doing so in North Korea.

Irfan Yusuf is a PhD candidate at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. First published in the Canberra Times on 20 September 2015.
 

OPINION: At least God has the Commonwealth on His side

There was a time when the Liberal Party stood for the "forgotten people", the people who didn't have a union or truckloads of cash and capital to back them up. Vulnerable individuals.

 

The 2014 budget hasn't given young and future voters much to cheer about. A swag of youth-related programs have been slashed, especially in regional areas. Often these are places where businesses are shutting doors, where workers are being laid off and where the only jobs available often involve flipping burgers in return for a few dollars.

And if you are unlucky or too depressed to do this kind of work, you may find yourself with no income source for six months. Apart from your parents, that is. Conservatives are all about family values, you know.

You might choose to study. No upfront fees! What a bargain! And enough debt to make getting married, having babies and putting a roof over their head almost impossible.

There was a time when the Liberal Party stood for the "forgotten people", the people who didn't have a union or truckloads of cash and capital to back them up. Vulnerable individuals.

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But that seems like ancient history today. There are plenty of vulnerable individuals today, especially with union membership falling. But instead of providing opportunity, modern Australian liberalism is all about kicking vulnerable individuals in the guts.

So to whom can young vulnerable individuals turn? What should they do? Jostle a few past and present female MPs? Hold placards upside down on national TV?

Hiding in the detail of Joe Hockey's 2014 budget is a clue. Young people could do with a dose of good old-fashioned religion. An injection of taxpayer funds to empower God is what's called for.

John Howard injected $90 million into a pastoral care scheme. Howard knew public school teachers were spending too much time sorting out the great unwashed kids whose parents were too selfish to invest in decent grammar school education. Too much money for beer and cigarettes, and not enough for chapel, Latin classes and rugby.

Money for wealthy public schools also got shared among the poor struggling private schools. The result was that all schools could claim funding under the National School Chaplaincy Programme.

The scheme was a huge success. By July 2011, a 28 per cent of state schools had taken the dosh. Writing in Inside Story on July 21, 2011, Monica Thielking and David Mackenzie noted:

The initiative had its critics, but generally the education sector welcomed the additional resources.

.

Also happy were the chaplaincy providers, most of whom were faith-based. Here was a chance to spread the word.

One spokeswoman from ACCESS Ministries was quoted saying:

[I]n Australia we have a God-given open door to children and young people with the Gospel. Our federal and state governments allow us to take the Christian faith into our schools and share it. We need to go and make disciples.

This missionary zeal was nothing new. Back in the 1980s my school was making us year 10 boys spend one hour each week for an entire term being indoctrinated by Francis Schaeffer's How Should We Then Live?.

This series of videos presented the European Enlightenment as an atheistic tragedy, the French Revolution as a series of guillotines (OK, he got that one right) and modern "secular humanism" as responsible for everything from the Holocaust to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Schaeffer's solution? Bring God back into public life, into the public square, into government. Spoon-fed theocracy. That's where my parents' school fees went.

Seriously, though, the chaplaincy scheme is a good idea so long as governments recognised that not everyone believes that the Son of God was sent to die for our sins. And that some youth problems are too tough even for prayer.

The very hint of the Commonwealth funding direct preaching in schools (even if this isn't generally the reality) doesn't sit well with voters. Even if Chris Pyne and Tony Abbott scream until the Christ comes home that states and territories are funding less godly counsellors and psychologists.

Which is exactly what is happening. An extra $245 million has been found in the budget for the chaplaincy program. But schools don't have the option of having a not-so-religious social worker to fill the role.

When it comes to our kids' pastoral needs, at least God has the Commonwealth on His side. But not in other areas of school life.

Chris Pyne has already indicated he wants a reviewed curriculum for schools which puts emphasis on Anzac Day and our Western civilisation. God's children mustn't be pacifist and certainly mustn't have a black-armband view of the past, even if His son was a Palestinian Jew.

The culture wars are alive and well in our schools. God help our kids.

Irfan Yusuf is an author and PhD candidate at the Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. First published in the Canberra Times on Saturday 24 May 2014.

BOOK/POLITICS: The Education Of A Young Liberal

The Education Of A Young Liberal
John Hyde Page
Melbourne University Press, 2006.

If a day is a long time in politics, how long would one describe a decade? This was roughly the period of John Howard’s prime ministership, which ended in such a spectacular fashion last November after a bunch of Liberal Party apparatchiks were caught out spreading a bogus pamphlet containing the kinds of messages John Howard’s favourite columnists and shock jocks were famous for.

A decade is also the period spent by both John Hyde Page and yours truly in the NSW Young Liberals. In my case, “double dipping” rules meant one could still be an adult member of the Young Libs (the cut-off age was 30) and the “senior” party simultaneously. It was also a time when Young Libs gatherings were dominated by all kinds of adult activities, including the sort of activities one might see in an adult movie. Not that I’ll admit to watching any such activities (even in the movies).

Young Libs (especially the self-styled moderates) have often seen themselves as the conscience of the Liberal Party, criticising conservative excesses in both the “senior” party and Liberal Parliamentarians. It was a Young Liberal who tipped off ALP campaigners in Lindsay about the “Ala Akba” pamphlet, triggering off a sting operation that led to the prosecution of senior Liberals including a member of the NSW State Executive.

John Hyde Page spent much of his sojourn in the NSW Young Libs fighting my old political allies. Many of the events he describes early on in his The Education Of A Young Liberal are ones I participated in toward the end of my active membership. At the time, we thought we were making Australian political history. Reading Hyde Page’s book confirmed in my mind just how silly we were to entertain such political fantasies.

For a man of his age, Hyde Page has produced a surprisingly mature account of the operation of political structures within the Liberal Party. Certainly any young moderate who saw (and still sees) the stranglehold of the religious right in the NSW Young Libs will succumb to premature ageing.

Yet Hyde Page’s work is not a serious or pompous tome. Indeed, even a former conservative warhorse like myself found many occasions to laugh at factional stoushes which at the time were the source of political bipolar disorder – the elation of a successful branch stack followed by the depression of finding out the Annual General Meeting of the stacked branch had been knocked out for technical reasons.

The book was the subject of at least one defamation action brought by conservative party members. The offending chapter, provocatively entitled “Meeting With Nazis”, didn’t exactly provide glowing references to some of my old factional allies. Hyde Page describes some rightwing cadres he met as “spruiking enthusiastically like a used-car salesman”. He writes of the Machiavellian-ness of one conservative hack in these terms: “I got the impression that you never found out what [he] was really thinking, no matter how much time you spent with him”.

To his credit, Hyde Page doesn’t reserve his often devastating wit on his former opponents. In this respect, his work describes not just inter-factional warfare but also intra-factional intrigue. Much of this was played out in the context of two highly contested preselections in the blue ribbon eastern suburbs seat of Wentworth, now held by Liberal Party leadership aspirant Malcolm Turnbull. 

Wentworth changed hands twice during Howard’s term in office. It was first held by former Tourism Minister Andrew Thomson, a member of the conservative wing. Thomson was the subject of a preselection challenge from former Young Liberal President Jason Falinski, a moderate. Hyde Page actively assisted in branch development (read stacked branches) in the Wentworth electorate against Falinski and in favour of another moderate, former Liberal Party President and barrister Peter King.

Hyde Page and his allies’ brazen tactics included holding a barbecue at the University of New South Wales during which free beer and sausages (financed from a factional slush fund) were handed out to students who agreed to fill out membership forms. He was rewarded for his efforts by Peter King MP in the form of employment in King’s electorate office. To say that Hyde Page’s anti-Falinski role made him persona non grata with many in his own faction would be an understatement. His status was only made worse with many of Hyde Page’s new moderate opponents supporting Malcolm Turnbull’s tilt for the seat.

You don’t need to be an expert on factional politics or the operation of political parties to enjoy this work. Hyde Page colourfully describes such dark political arts as branch-stacking, ballot-rorting and constitutional hair-splitting. Hyde Page’s flippant, humorous and highly engaging writing style would have to make him the closest thing to a more conservative Mungo MacCallum, or perhaps even a less conservative PJ O’Rourke. Not a bad plug from a former factional opponent!

This review was first penned in 2008. It is finally seeing the light of day after accidentally located on an external hard drive at the bottom of a pile of papers in the author's exceptionally messy study.

POLITICS: Refugee rhetoric that makes no sense

I really would hate to be John Nguyen. This young professional is the Liberal candidate for the Victorian seat of Chisholm. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Heck, it's a badge of honour to put your hand up for public office. And Nguyen isn't new to federal elections or to the area, having been candidate in the 2010 election.

But imagine what it is like to be candidate in a party whose major slogan would, if implemented during the late 1970's, would have seen you, your siblings and your grandparents locked up indefinitely in a detention centre and made to feel like "illegals". Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison keep screaming "stop the boats". Well guess what. The Liberal Candidate for Chisholm arrived in Australia in 1979. He fled Vietnam on a boat. He escaped communist persecution on a boat. One wonders whether Mr Abbott would have wanted to stop John Nguyen's boat from arriving. Fairfax Media reports Abbott visiting Nguyen at the Mulgrave Country Club. Abbott is quoted as follows:

''This is what modern Australia is all about,'' a beaming Abbott told the morning tea in Wheelers Hill. 

''This is today's Australia: a country that makes people from the four corners of the earth welcome because they have come here, not to change our way of life, but to join our way of life. They have come here not to detract from our country, but to add to it.''

Putting aside the issue of Abbott's policy on stopping persons fleeing persecution from arriving on boats (even if this is the only feasible method for them to get here), his logic sounds rather warped. On the one hand, he says that migrants do not wish to change our way of life. On the other hand, he says migrants have come to add to our way of life. How on earth does that work? How does adding to our way of life not involve a necessary change? Yet again we see how all this divisive bullsh*t rhetoric makes no sense.

Somehow I get the feeling that the Leader of the Opposition, a Rhodes scholar, doesn't believe alot of this crap.

CRIKEY: NSW election: the ethnic vote battle that is Lakemba

With the NSW election coming up on March 26, there will no doubt be plenty of attention paid to the so-called ethnic vote. And with even safe ALP seats up for grabs as O’Farrell’s barrel of promises rolls across western Sydney, ethnic organisations will use the opportunity to promise votes. For a price, of course.


In Lakemba, things aren’t exactly promising for the Libs. Although the Liberal candidate for Lakembasecured a two-party preferred swing of some 13% in the 2008 byelection, it remains rock-solid Labor. The only problem is that an outsider wouldn’t be sure who the ALP candidate actually was. Sitting MP Robert Furolo for some reason has omitted words such as  ALP and Labor from his posters. Unlike last time ...

Lakemba isn’t a popular place in some circles. Dr Jeremy Sammut, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, sees Lakemba as an example of the "M&M" problem of "disintegration". Sammut claims that "Lakemba and its surrounds ... remain ghettofied ... [with] jarring realities on the disintegration of some parts of Sydney from the mainstream, and the failure to repeat the successful patterns of integration of other ethnic groups".


And presumably ghetto-dwellers presumably vote the same way, obeying the dictates of their leaders. Enter the Lebanese Moslems Association (LMA), which manages the Imam Ali ben Abi Taleb mosque on Haldon Street, the largest of around 10 mosques in the seat and where Sheik Hilaly often leads the service.


In the 1995 state election, which then Premier John Fahey lost of Labor’s Bob Carr, Hilaly openly backed Michael Hawatt, then (and indeed now) the Liberal candidate. Hilaly’s voice could be heard on a loudspeaker stuck to the roof of a station wagon telling voters in chaste Arabic how to vote for Hawatt. A few days before the ballot, a host of Fahey ministers were at the Lakemba library showing their support for Hilaly’s campaign. And all to no avail. Tony Stewart easily defeated Hawatt, and Carr managed to knock off Fahey.

The LMA is also no stranger to politics. It was often involved in branch stacks on behalf of competing ALP factions. Back in the 1990s when Tony Stewart competed with former premier Morris Iemma for the Lakemba preselection, a former LMA president and local solicitor allowed his office to be used as a base for a dummy branch set up to support one of the factions.


In the 2001 Auburn byelection, whose ballot was held on the Saturday before the 9/11 attacks, Liberal leader Kerry Chikarovski sought endorsement for her candidate in Auburn from Hilaly and the LMA. She got it. The Liberal candidate obtained a primary swing of less than 1% in a ballot with no compulsory preferencing. Scott Morrison was campaign manager and state director.


Just how representative is the LMA anyway? Last time I checked, the LMA excluded over 50% of voters by not allowing women to be full members. Then again, "mainstream" Australian organisations such as the Melbourne Club are also happy to only have chicks working in the kitchen.


And like the Melbourne Club, the LMA is becoming a bastion of Liberal Party activism, throwing its support behind a swag of Liberal candidates, among them Michael Hawatt in Lakemba. Personally I think this is a politically inept move for any community organisation, but then again I’m probably one of those ghettofied M&M types.


The Libs shouldn’t fall into the trap of accepting ridiculous claims by community organisations of delivering votes. People don’t vote because of some alleged ethnic or organisational affiliation. People vote because their parents voted a certain way or because they like the candidate or for some other reason usually divorced from race or religion. And they hardly ever vote a certain way because their imam tells them to.


And that makes the LMA’s reported move of endorsing candidates completely futile. Still, at least this time around they’re backing a party and not some Muslim-only ticket as their senior imam did recently.


Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf



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OPINION: Reflect reality, and reject monocultural nonsense

Don’t let politicians and other pundits lecture us on who we are, IRFAN YUSUF writes

Something really tragic took place in the Sydney suburb of Rouse Hill last week. Five Christians of various ages were buried. An entire Christian family - mum, dad, two children and an aunt - died in a tragic boating accident. An Anglican priest presided over the service.

A smaller number of people who died in the same accident were being buried at the Muslim section of Rookwood Cemetery in western Sydney. A huge media contingent was there. Virtually all attention was on the Muslims who died, as if the greater number of Christian dead didn't matter.

Virtually all public discussion about asylum-seekers, immigration and multiculturalism focuses on Muslims. It's as if Muslims were this singular wave of migrants who all recently arrived from the Kingdom of Muslimistan in boats. As if the demographic reality that about half of all our Muslims were born in Australia and aged under 40 are a figment of the collective imagination of employees at the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

One need only visit Mareeba in northern Queensland to understand just how entrenched Muslims are in the Australian heartland. You can find Muslims who have lived and worked and farmed in this area since the 1920s. Women from the local mosque have established a dance group consisting of Albanian, Greek, Italian and Irish-Australian backgrounds.

Even when Muslims originate from a country home to many faiths, we assume they're somehow different. I find it hilarious when I hear people say that Lebanese Muslims are different to Lebanese Christians because of their culture. How so? Do Muslims inject chilli in their baklava? Do Christians slip a bit of pork into their felafels? It's a bit like saying that meat pies made by Catholics are different to those made by Protestants.

Some years ago, I was at a function where the majority of the audience were Lebanese Sunni Muslims. Bob Carr had been invited to speak. He had a special message for the crowd.

I'm pleased to announce that the next Governor of NSW will be Professor Marie Bashir.

The roar from the crowd was instantaneous. People whistled and clapped and cheered. Some readers might wonder why Muslims would be excited about the appointment of a Christian. But they miss the point. She was a Lebanese Australian. These people are Lebanese Australians. She is a symbol of their progress.

The same crowd would cheer on a player from their favourite rugby league team regardless of what his faith was, and even if he was roughly tackling Hazem el-Masri. Cricketing fans among them would cheer a non-Muslim Australian bowler if he managed to bowl champion South African batsman
and devout Muslim Hashim Amla out for a duck.

Forget government policies. Australian multiculturalism is a deeply individual affair for those of us with at least one overseas-born parent. We all have layers of identity. At different times, different layers come to the fore. It's our right as individuals to decide how and when we express any of these layers. It isn't for governments to dictate to us how this is to happen.

What governments can and must dictate is that we act within the law. Different interest groups can shape and influence laws and government policies. In this respect, Muslims as a collective have been rather hopeless. They have little impact in the politics of this country and almost no impact on foreign policy. In political parties, their role has been all but marginal, acting largely as branch stackers than factional heavyweights.

Yet still this notion persists that they are somehow receiving special benefits. I wish I knew what these special benefits are. A local council closing off a pool for a few hours for women to swim? Surely that must beat easy access to members of cabinet and shadow cabinet that groups such as the Australian Christian Lobby enjoy to pursue agendas most Christians are uncomfortable with.

So many people who tick "Muslim" on census forms see themselves as so much more than religious actors. They're rarely seen at the mosque even for the congregational prayers on Fridays. For many, religion isn't a matter of conviction. Writing about the India he grew up in, American author Suketu Mehta remembers a place where

... being Muslim or Hindu or Catholic was merely a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle.

That was my experience growing up in a subcontinental family in John Howard's electorate. That's how it is everywhere in Australia. Australians should be allowed to decide on their personal eccentricities and hairstyles.

When politicians and pundits start lecturing us on what our culture is, we should give them the one-finger salute. It isn't their job to tell us who we are, what layers of identity we should value more. In this respect, we should add an extra finger when this kind of monocultural nonsense is sprouted by those claiming to be Liberal.

Seriously, what kind of Liberal MP tells his or her constituents that we're a Christian country? I mean, which of Jesus' disciples preached the gospel 40,000 years ago in Arnhem Land?

My advice to pollies and commentators who persist in sowing the seeds of monocultural revolution is: save yourselves the effort and move to a country where such revolutions have been won. Say, North Korea.

Irfan Yusuf is a lawyer and author of comic memoir Once Were Radicals: My Years As A Teenage Islamo-fascist. This article was first published in the Canberra Times on Thursday 24 February 2010.

Words © 2011 Irfan Yusuf



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COMMENT: Things I learned about asylum seekers today

Here is a summary of learnings I gained from various smart, important and influential people today on the subject of asylum seekers today:

[01] If you pay for the funeral of a dead asylum seeker, it just encourages more of them to jump on boats.

[02] If an asylum seeker wants to bury their 9 month child at taxpayers' expense, s/he needs to come up with a decent policy proposal.

[03] Funerals cost so much money, and we should all be angry. They explains why Scotty Morrison remarked on Macquarie Radio:

I know probably more than anyone how strongly people feel about this issue, how angry they get about the costs that are involved. I share that anger, and I want to see that changed ...

Funeral directors can look forward to tough times ahead.

[04] Both compassion and sex are not beyond budgetary constraints. As Barnaby Joyce correctly remarked, the price of compassion is ...

... not limitless. You can't do it with a completely open cheque book.

I'd hate to do it with a chequebook fullstop!

[05] We need to have an asylum policy that favours Christians over Muslims. We don't have that at the moment. Hence you have this kind of thing happening:

At Castlebrook Cemetery in Rouse Hill, five more coffins were lowered into the ground; a husband and wife, their young son and daughter and an aunt. A little girl in a purple dress and leggings stood out against eight weeping family members and friends dressed in black.


The victims were Protestants from Iran. "They had dreams of a better life and they came to our country searching for something,'' said the Reverend David Misztal from St Jude's Anglican Church, Dural. ''They desperately wanted a place to call home."

This would never have happened if we had a pro-Christian asylum policy. But we still shouldn't pay for the funerals.

OPINION: Prejudice among our pollies is alive and well

Tony Abbott doesn’t have much talent to choose from, IRFAN YUSUF writes

It's official. Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi doesn't like halal meat. He argues halal slaughter contradicts his values and he doesn't see why he should have to put up with it.

I too am a victim of halal slaughter. My first experience with it left me severely traumatised. It was 1977 and I was a wee lad of seven. It was the festival of Eid al-Adha, a time each year when Muslims celebrate Abraham's preparedness to sacrifice his son. (Seriously, what kind of value system is that? Middle Eastern people prepared to kill their own kids should be locked up and deported!)

Our family were invited to the farm of a Pakistani doctor in Newcastle for what I was told would be a nice barbecue and a chance to play with some animals. After a four-hour drive along the long and winding Pacific Highway, we finally reached the farm. There was no barbecue in sight. One of the Indian uncles asked:

"Where is lunch, Doctor Sahib?"


“Lunch is out there on the paddock. There are enough animals for each family.”

Within minutes, I saw my parents and a host of uncles in their safari suits and aunties in their saris running in the general direction of the lambs and goats. The poor animals recognised the nefarious intentions of these men and women, and ran for their lives. The little lambs looked rather skinny; if anything, there was more meat visibly hanging from between the sari cloth of the aunties!

One or two lambs were finally caught. Their throats were cut in my presence. I cried, not just for the poor lambs but also because, instead of barbecue, the meat was placed into large pots and mixed with chilli and spice to make traditional Indian casseroles. No fair dinkum seven-year-old Aussie kid can stomach that!

By now, I felt like vomiting instead of eating. To make matters worse, the remaining animals were too afraid to play.

The experience wasn't enough to make me a vegetarian, though eating meat from an animal I had seen slaughtered was now out of the question.

Still, someone has to slaughter the animal. Meat doesn't grow on trees.

So when I read Bernardi's recent comments in the Herald Sun, I couldn't help but wonder if he too was at that pseudo-barbecue in Newcastle. He told the Herald Sun that halal slaughtering ...

... is anathema to my own values.

And what values are they?

Cory isn't terribly good at declaring what he is. A look at his website shows he's much better at telling us what he isn't. He is one of numerous Liberals who have followed the Tea Party line, replacing political correctness with political erectness, a kind of macho ideology in which people work themselves into an ideological frenzy.

Most conservative politicians (and ideologues, editors and columnists) think that the only way to prove you are really conservative is to reach positions on all issues that are completely opposite to what anyone they deem "the Left" would come up with.

Bernardi waxes unlyrical about people he describes as “Islamists”. Among their characteristics is their “insistence of consuming Halal food”. Those Bernardi describes as “moderate Muslims” don't share this fixation with cutting throats.

I wonder what Bernardi makes of “Judaists”, who share this fixation with an identical form of slaughter. Indeed, “Judaists” go much further, as anyone who has kept a kosher kitchen would know.

A good friend of mine is a “Judaist”, and everywhere he goes he carries plastic utensils and refuses to eat meat offered to him. Apparently these “Judaists” don't believe in our legal system. They prefer to have their disputes handled by the Beth Din, a special tribunal of “Judaist” jurists who make decisions in accordance with “Judaist” laws that are around two to three thousand years old.

In fact, it would be fair to say that if Bernardi were holding public office in a European parliament during the 1930s, he would almost certainly be writing the same remarks about Jews. But it isn't just Bernardi talking sects.

Kevin Andrews, John Howard's bumbling former immigration minister, told the Herald Sun that there is ...

... a risk [of enclaves] in Australia. What actually concerns me the most is that we can't have a discussion about it.

Now this statement really confused me. Let's face it. Almost every time Kevin Andrews opens his mouth in front of a TV camera, it's to talk about ghettoes and enclaves and immigrants not integrating. It's true that what he says rarely makes much sense. Perhaps what he should have told the Herald Sun reporter was that he is incapable of having a sensible discussion about it.

Andrews has a strange view of ethnic enclaves. Back in 2007, Andrews declared that

... some groups don't seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian way of life.

His comment was triggered by the murder of 18-year-old Sudanese man Liep Gony. Clearly migrants should adopt Australian values by ensuring they are not murdered so readily.

So this is the kind of "talent” Tony Abbott must work with in his parliamentary party. Ah well. Shit happens.

Irfan Yusuf is a lawyer and author of Once Were Radicals: My Years As A Teenage Islamo-fascist. This article was first published in the Canberra Times on Wednesday 16 February 2011.

Words © 2011 Irfan Yusuf

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POLITICS: Liberal plane set to crash if crew bombs left wing

Here's a scenario for politically astute, frequently flying Canberrans. A passenger jet is about to make its descent to its destination. The pilot, Captain Blackadder, orders the cabin crew to prepare for landing.

But some of the crew have a cunning plan. They harbour a strange belief that this plane should fly with only one wing. They have strapped makeshift bombs to the left wing of the plane, attempting to cause irreparable damage, if not destroy it. They then plan to enter the cockpit, knock out Captain Blackadder and take charge of the plane.

It all sounds like a cunning plan. And one likely to lead to a rather bumpy crash landing, one with perhaps more crash than landing.

In certain sections of the Liberal Party, such delusional crash-landing politics has become the norm. Some Liberals seem to think it's not only possible but necessary to fly their party's plane with only a right wing. This kind of Liberal thinking might work well in campus politics, where often only the most doctrinaire ideological creatures congregate.

Indeed, many allegedly conservative Liberals insist that anyone not as conservative as they should find another party. NSW Young Liberal presidents have often subscribed to this school of factional aeronautics. Back in May 2005, one Young Liberal president openly criticised moderate party members. The young man told the Sydney Morning Herald:

Nobody joins the Liberal Party to be left-wing. If you stand for compulsory student unionism, drug-injecting rooms and lowering the [homosexual] age of consent, you can choose the Greens, Labor or the Democrats.

He went further and promised conservative stacking to mould the NSW Liberal Party in his own image.

I'm about a long-term philosophical shift in the Liberal Party to the right ... I do not shrink from signing up people who believe in conservative agendas and the free market. I'll sign as many as I can up every day of the week.

That young man is now a federal member for a safe Sydney seat. He is hopefully now embarrassed by the words of his political youth. If he isn't, Tony Abbott might be in for a crash landing soon.

The arch-rival of this Young Liberal was then NSW Opposition leader John Brogden. Many NSW Liberal right-wingers, both young and old, were of the view that Brogden would be unelectable. They argued that the electorate would only vote for conservative Liberals. Small ''l'', limp-wristed wets would never attract votes.

Brogden's response? '

The Liberal Party is a broad tent, capable of encompassing many views, but someone is auditioning for the role of clown.

Sadly for Brogden, the broad-tent model descended into a circus. Labor won the following NSW election. And it's fair to say that the likely result of the next NSW election would be better described as an ALP loss than a Coalition victory.

The ideological NSW Liberal right also cost Tony Abbott the Lodge. Abbott should have won western Sydney seats such as Lindsay and Banks. He could have defeated Julia Gillard's divided and demoralised ALP.

But the factional one-wingers in his home state, who prefer stacking branches with people with little incentive to hand out how-to- vote cards on election day, missed a golden opportunity to secure government for Mr Abbott, not to mention staffer jobs for themselves.

Liberals in Julia Gillard's home state have managed to pull off what Tony Abbott's Liberals could only dream of doing. They have soundly defeated both the ALP and the Greens. They have achieved the kinds of swings of seats that, if replicated at a federal level, could have avoided the prospect of a hung parliament in Canberra. And they did it with a leader who was probably to the left of his Labor opponent on a host of social issues.

Ted Baillieu is the kind of Liberal leader that Labor voters would feel comfortable voting for. He isn't a raving monoculturalist or a theocratic fruit loop. He isn't the sort of chap who would be invited to submit regular opinion pieces to a certain national newspaper.

Baillieu is the kind of Liberal premier New South Welshmen could have had back in 2006 if a certain group of Young Libs hadn't tried to dynamite the left wing. As the eminently sensible Charles Richardson wrote in Crikey recently:

Ted Baillieu has consciously branded himself as a social liberal, and even those who held no brief for the Liberal Party have wished him well in the hope of preserving that strain in the party's heritage.

The last thing the Coalition needs is to be seen as a political force that will happily "stop the boats" but ignore the electorate. As Richardson notes, Baillieu's election shows that ...

... the party has an alternative to the Howard-Abbott model of hard-right populism.

And that's a good thing not just for the party but for our democracy. If only believers in one-winged crash-land politics would understand this.

Irfan Yusuf is a lawyer and author of the comic memoir Once Were Radicals. This article was first published in the Canberra Times on Wednesday 1 December 2010.

UPDATE I: An anonymous person surnamed Darby and formerly of Fred Nile's Christian Democratic Party sent this interesting response:

I'm sure the Liberals appreciate being lectured to by a revoltingly fat and smelly Pakinigger. How about fixing your sad life and mental illneses before trying to fix the Liberal Party? Alex Hawke and Tony Abbott can at least get out of bed without needing to scoff kebabs and cakes. The best thing you can do for Australia is leave it. There is no need to apologise for being alive. Just get out of Australia and don't come back.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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COMMENT: Watching the election in boganville ...

I have my computer with me at McDonalds in Mackay city, taking advantage of their free internet connection. I'm surrounded by alien and ugly looking creatures with tattoos running up and down their arms. But I needn't worry about them reading what I type. It's likely they cannot read.

OK that's a little slack. 95% of them cannot read. And their English vocabulary is generally limited to words consisting of no more than four letters.

A large number of these people would have voted for the Liberal National Party (LNP). You have to wonder about people who would vote for a party whose name makes it sound more like a New Zealand soft drink than a serious political choice.

I'm told such people don't by any means represent the majority of people in this fine city. I won't be staying here long enough to find out if this is true.

But what of the ALP? Ever since Julia Gillard decided that irrational hatreds and fears of boat people is the way to survive in politics, the wingnuts in the Coalition have had even more reason to scream "STOP THE BOATS". Including those who themselves own at least one boat.

Anyway, as at 10pm, it's almost impossible to tell who is going to win. Or even whether there will be a winner.

If the Greens win both Grayndler (unlikely) and Melbourne (almost a certainty), can the ALP work with them in government? And what is Andrew Wilkie wins Denison in Tasmania (which I think he already has), what kind of minority government would the ALP form?

Then there is the issue of the three independents (Tony Windsor, Bob Katter Rob Oakeshott) who both have histories in conservative politics. Windsor has worked with a Labor government when he was a State MP. Would he work with Gillard and deny Abbott the Prime Ministership?

But let's give credit where credit is due. Tony Abbott has brought back the conservatives from the political wilderness. He worked hard. He showed discipline, far more so than his political opponents. He was always out there. He travelled the length and breadth of the country.

For sheer hard work, if anyone deserves to be PM, it is Tony Abbott. But I hope he doesn't become PM. Why?

Because he is surrounded by wingnuts who want to turn the Coalition into the Australian chapter of the Tea Party. Tony is a good decent man surrounded by an assortment of morons, bigots, racists, homophobes, muslimphobes, commonsensephobes refugeephobes, Sinophobes, Asiaphobes and closet anti-Semites.

For the sake of the country, let's hope Julia remains PM.



Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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POLITICS/CRIKEY: Northern Qld politics no place for wusses, sheilas

Politics in the central Queensland mining town of Mackay isn’t a game for wusses. Or women for that matter. Which might explain why not a single female candidate showed up to the Dawson "Great Debate" last night at the Mackay Entertainment & Convention Centre. It’s not that chick candidates wouldn’t have been interested. It’s just that there were no sheilas running this time around.

Unlike the LNP candidate George Christenson, few conservative women I know would be stupid enough to spend their university days writing stuff that single-handedly offends Jews, women and gays.

When asked about the remarks published in The Student Advocate in 1998, Christensen said sorry to everyone for his "pretty stupid and quite frankly offensive" comments he made "when I was a teenager" and emphasised how he had never believed his mum was stupid. One prominent academic, Heather Nancarrow from nearby Central Queensland University, told Christensen she had asked each party for their policies on reducing violence against women and children. She’d received stuff from all other parties present (Greens, ALP and Family First) but not from the LNP. Christensen replied words to the effect of "I’ll get it to you before the election. It’s been a busy week".

On the other hand, how many left-of-centre women would you know who, like ALP candidate Mike Brunker, would end up in a fight with the president of a local turf club and be facing criminal charges a week out of the election? Brunker denied it all and told us about how he’d "copped it on the nose" from the said Cyril Vains (himself an ALP member) and merely defended himself. The editor of the Daily Mercury, who was chairing the debate, noted that the defence involved Vains receiving cuts to his eye and a bruised face. Brunker responded that he had lots of witnesses including a minister of religion. At this point, one lady screamed out: "Good on ya Mike. We still love ya!".

Apart from this heckler, there were very few sheilas in the audience. Or indeed blokes. The hall must have had a capacity of about 1500. Hardly a fifth of that number showed up. Among the no-shows was a candidate from the Citizens Electoral Councils. I doubt he’d have been missed.

The Greens chap Jonathan Dykuj began his presentation by acknowledging the traditional owners of the area. This caused a tiny ripple of applause up the front and a much larger groan around the rest of the hall. Perhaps Christensen should have just focused on the blacks and left the sheilas and poofters alone.

Speaking of the backwardness of black fellas, some bloke representing the local branch of a forestry lobby group got up and lectured us all on the evils of world heritage listing before reminding us of how "white man had discovered the value of our forests". No one took him seriously except Christensen, who reminded us that people should be able to chop down trees on their property.

Christensen also kept going on and on about the mining tax, which was killing local businesses and sucking millions of dollars out of the local economy each week. "Talk to the mining contractors and ask them about how they are suffering." Then one bloke stood up and declared: "I’m a mining contractor and my business is going gangbusters. Which mining industry are you talking about?"

Some bloke surnamed Kelly lambasted the ALP over its broadband plans in Tasmania and then asked Christensen a dorothy dixer about the LNP’s NBN proposal. Christensen then lambasted the ALP’s proposal as being based on outdated technology like optic fibres. He must have been a little perturbed to see on Lateline Tony Smith says that the Coalition’s plan is built upon the same outdated technology. And the questioner, Mr Kelly, wouldn’t have been happy to be identified by the Greens candidate as being the husband of former National Party MP De-Anne Kelly

The only sombre moment was when one brave woman stood and said she was a consumer of mental health services. She wanted to know what each party was doing to attract mental health service providers to the area. On this issue, the candidates decided to stop verbally punching each other and address the issues.

As I walked out with the crowd, I could see some Convention Centre staff looking rather desperate to get home. "Full house?" I asked one. They sniggered and responded: "Should have advertised it as a mass debate."

First published on the Crikey website on 19 August 2010.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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