Presidential elections?
Look out, Aussie, look out. Don't get fooled again! The establishment is trying to turn the Constitutional Convention into a farce. They want us to get embroiled in an argument about whether we elect, or appoint a President who will be nothing more than a store dummy they dress up and trot out for the cameras to preform unnecessary and meaningless ceremonial duties. If they succeed, they'll have us totally enslaved. Which of course is their ultimate aim!
It doesn't matter how the President is elected, or even if we have one! What we must get out of this is not the power to hire. We've already got that and it's not worth a damn! No, what we must get is the power to fire Governments and individual politicians. If we get the power to fire them, they can get the job by applying to an employment agency. We'd get a better bunch of employees than we've got now, or I'd be sacking the employment agency!
Canungra, Qld
Constitutional Convention and MAI
There seems to be a lot of wrangling about some very ho-hum matters at the Convention, given developments around the other side of the world (Paris) where our leaders are about to sign the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.
This secret agreement, the MAI, will remove from governments their right to legislate on matters to do with transnational corporations. Just when aware people are thinking that they should have more rights, and that these should be framed in a constitution, the multinationals are grabbing some rights that will definitely curtail the rights of the individual.
With so much power in the hands of multinationals, you won't even hear about assaults on the environment and social fabric, let alone be able to influence your elected government to legislate. The bland managers will have their brave new world in which greenies (or any other colour-ies) won't have a voice.
The Convention must expand its terms of reference, and recommend a clause in the constitution that will prevent governments signing secret agreements with interest groups, or having any agenda other than the good of the people.
Gordon NSW
Housing cuts
Doug Everingham ("Multicultural democracy", letters, #GLW 303) says "proportional representation ... should reach into Cabinet, not just parliamentary Committees ...". Too right.
As a member of a housing co-operative, I put in a submission to last year's Senate Enquiry committee on social housing (public housing, housing associations and housing co-ops). This netted me the privilege of a free copy of the Enquiry's report.
It cited highlights of the strongest submissions received, to back up two dozen recommendations. These, if implemented, would have got social housing back to where it was before the Keating ALP government first weakened it. That's way back from the Howard Coalition government's present stage in a program to destroy it.
Good!, you say. The kicker is at the end. The minority report by two of the three Liberal members of the committee says, in effect, "We didn't listen to a word of the evidence. The government will continue, as it always intended, to gut social housing."
Brompton SA
Labor and uranium
Justin Harman (GLW #304) correctly notes that it was the WA state Labor government of Carmen Lawrence that paved the way for uranium mining in Rudall River national park.
It was bad enough that the government proposed opening up any sort of mining in the state's three largest national parks in areas comprising half the total area covered by national parks in the state (under the banner of "a clear policy against mining in national parks"!). There was only one mineral that could be commercially mined from the Rudall River site (now Kintyre): uranium.
Of course, Carmen Lawrence swore black and blue that there would be no uranium mining at Rudall River or anywhere else under her government. Unlike many other promises of ALP politicians, this one turned out to be true. But what were those promises worth if the only logical consequences of the government's actions were (a) for the promises to be broken or (b) to make it easier for the Liberals to do what Carmen Lawrence said she wouldn't do herself?
Hobart
Cuba's youth and the Pope
For a campaigner like Pope John Paul II, Cuba should have been overflowing with opportunities for demagogy.
He could have demanded the right to freedom of worship. But that has existed since the 1959 revolution. In fact, the revolution greatly increased religious freedom, by legalising the religious practices of much of the country's black population which draw their sources from African religion.
Regardless of the counterrevolutionary role played by Catholic and Protestant churches in the early 1960s, at no time has Cuba broken off relations with the Vatican.
He could have called for fairer treatment for the poor, as he had done in other Latin American countries. But since the revolution and subsequent land reforms, massive social inequalities no longer exist in Cuba.
He could have called for improvements in health and education. But Cuba already has health and education systems which put much of the First World to shame.
He could have criticised Cuba for the sort of problems which he experienced in his Polish homeland. But as early as 1984, prominent Cuban leader Ricardo Alarcon was explaining to international visitors that it was logical that the workers and farmers of Poland should revolt. This was a result of the policies of the Polish government, he said. At the time the popular uprising led by Solidarnosc was being blamed by the Polish government on CIA interference.
But the Pope still found a message: outrage at the system of secondary education which gives young Cubans from their early teens the right to attend boarding school regardless of the views of their parents.
The Pope described as "traumatic" this separation of parents and children ("Relief" is probably a more common reaction, on both sides) saying these schools cause "the spread of promiscuous behaviour, loss of ethical values, coarseness, premarital sexual relations at an early age and easy recourse to abortion".
The wonders of a devout religious upbringing have long been debated. In his 1880s work The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler asked, is "any decrepitude so awful as childhood in a happy united God-fearing family?"
The book so disgusted Queen Victoria that she is said to have burned it. Pope John Paul continues this long tradition of youth-hating.
Canberra
[Abridged.]