Cheers

Venise

You’re right of course. Advertising aims to sell product, and it’s not enough for the advertisement to be seen, it has to also fall on fertile ground. And the most fertile ground is an audience that has been semi-hypnotized into a mouth-breathing state of idiocy. So intelligent shows, even if they get high ratings, aren’t much good for advertisers, and therefore aren’t much good for networks.

Sorry about all of that.

Cheers

venise

Because you-it was you wasn’t it? had been kind to me, I thought to pass it on.

That’s all.

Sincerely

V.

The biggest ever mass demonstration in Australian history the following February, as well as enormous demonstrations against NT criminal mandatory detention laws in ‘01 and related issues, tends to support my impression that voters were much more interested in humanitarian issues that year than Labor was.

That was the reason Labor lost. Kim Beazley talked big but when his moment came he had no spine. The newspapers during that election campaign did the finest season of reporting that I’ve ever seen. Australia, it seemed to me, was ready for a new era of maturity. Beazley stubbornly ignored them and in the final weeks of the campaign he and Howard together succeeded in bludgeoning the papers into settling back into what he called “traditional values” — i.e. the distribution of wealth. Forced to choose a party on economic issues alone, voters chose the one with more economic credibility.

That’s how I remember it, anyway. So there was a moment there when as a society we almost grew up. I’ll never forgive Beazley for stepping up as opposition leader and then not having the guts to take take us that step forward.

Cheers

Venise.

Oblizzard has given me a lesson in manners recently and in that vein I provide the following. If you’re able to refute any of this factually please do, if not just embrace the truth. I know it hurts but it’s all rational people have.

1 – No, we didn’t have a referrendum nor a referendum for that matter (sorry James Mc). We had a general election. Elections are different, they are counted differently succeed or fail differently have different electors and different outcomes. For an excellent account of the way the issues of immigration and asylum seekers were treated during that election campaign you could do worse than to read David Marr and Marion Wilkinson’s ‘Dark Victory’ (ISBN / Catalogue Number: 9781741144475).

2 – Yes I’m a bleeding heart (that’s what the BH stands for, you can speculate on what the ‘S’ stands for). That means I see the distress of my fellow human beings as my problem too. I don’t think this makes me a weaker, smaller or worse person.

3 – Who are these Australians you speak of. Many, many of your fellow citizens on both sides of politics find the vilification of refugees as ‘illegal queue jumpers’ as offensive as it is factually wrong. See point 7 for more detail.

4 – there is no queue.

5 – see post above – people seeking asylum are legally entitled to come here and seek asylum, they are not illegal

6 – Yes we (bleeding hearts) continue to remind people that your Government lied to you about refugees throwing their children overboard. But it’s not just us. Anyone who thinks that honest, open and accountable government is a good thing would be horrified at the depths the government sank to during that campaign and I doubt there are many people in this country who think governments should lie to the electorate. So yes it’s a very important point that needs to be remembered

7 – seeing as you treat the 2001 election as some kind of opinion poll for the whole Australian electorate consider these figures. In that election, the ALP outpolled the Liberal party with 4.341 million votes to 4.254. The Nats which supported the Libs got 643,000 however the Dem who opposed the policy and the Greens who vociferously opposed the policy both achieved swings in their favour polling 620,000 and 569,000 respectively (http://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/federal_elections/2001/results/index.html) continuing to use the 2001 election results in the way you do is simply not supported by the way people voted.

8 - Do you personally know of any data that supports the contention that ‘rich’ people come to Australia by boat and get preferential treatment? If so, let’s hear it. If not why do you keep making the assertion.

9 - The idea that this is an ‘easy’ question beggars belief. H.L Mencken sums up thus “”There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

But then, some people remember trying to have a referendum on refugee and other human rights issues in 2001, but being thwarted by a me-too Kim Beazley who steadfastly ignored what the papers were talking about, refused to discuss human rights in his election campaign, and tried to out-Howard Howard by proposing a whole new security force for rounding up “queue jumpers” and “sending them back where they came from”. At which point voters said well if we can’t have human rights, we’ll at least have some economic competence.

According to those of us who remember the second scenario, no, we didn’t have a referendum on this.

So Rena