This means I really have no remit to have an opinion about absolutely anything, let alone gender, seeing as though my ilk is arguably to blame for the majority of the problems in the world (though in thirty years or so if I’m still childless I’ll have cause to blame population numbers for everything, according to Monbiot).

So really when I comment on Australia having its first female Prime Minister, I’m not exactly coming from a position of strength or authority. And perhaps that’s why I didn’t personally feel any great flood of emotion as one of the great glass ceilings in Australia was broken.

I know that plenty of my female friends felt differently, and I can empathise with them. I can see how having a female Prime Minister will be a direct inspiration to so many girls and women around the country.

Yes, Australian women have a lot of other great role models, the Governor General, a couple of Premiers, writers, sportsstars, public figures, the list is long, but the Prime Minister is different. She’s the leader of the government. The leader of the country. It’s a big deal.

It’s also be a big deal for a lot of males around the country. What a great thing for all boys to grow up in an era of improved gender equality. There are a lot of sexist twats and misogynists out there, carrying on the legacy of their upbringing and teaching their sons and daughters behavior and beliefs which just reaffirms archaic and discriminatory gender bias. It’s not even exclusive to men – many mothers teach their sons and daughters similar lessons through example. So how wonderful that whatever gender lessons parents unwittingly teach their children, this coming generation will be able to look at Julia Gillard and know that gender is no barrier to political power.

It will be a wonderful thing to for those immigrating to Australia from countries where that gender balance is even more skewed towards men: countries where women have no control over their reproductive rights; where girls are not as valued offspring as boys; countries in which for women a university education, having a job or control over their own lives is a far off dream, let alone leading their country.

So I can acknowledge that Julia Gillard becoming Prime Minister is a fantastic step for gender equity in Australian society, I still find it curious though that I don’t feel any kind of emotion. Regardless of the politics, shouldn’t I feel something, if only for an instant?

I don’t think it’s that I’m a robot – I’m a hyper-sensitive empath so emotional that I still cry in the same three sections of Little Women every time I watch it.

I’m thinking it’s because my family is full of amazingly strong women. The strength of character of my mother, sister, aunts and grandmother are core to who I am. My close female friends are little different. I know that there’s nothing the women in my life cannot achieve because I’ve seen them achieve it.

So I guess that while I appreciate and applaud that Julia Gillard has smashed forever a significant glass ceiling in Australian society, for me, in my life and the way I try to live it, that ceiling has always been an illusion.

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I stopped working a regular Monday to Friday gig – which was teaching English as a foreign language – over two years ago when I was on the tail end of my creative writing MA. The idea at the time was to work part-time and casual jobs – first teaching then as an IELTS examiner – and then to work more solidly on my writing.

To a degree it worked. I got a lot of writing done, particularly continuing work on the screenplay I’d finished the MA with, and also writing the first draft of a novel. But however much I was writing, it wasn’t looking like paying the bills, and with the work I was doing being particularly unsatisfying, I started looking for new directions to move in. That led me to looking for volunteer opportunities, which led me to the Greens, and here I am now working (practically) full-time.

So while the writing as a career didn’t really take off, taking the time out of full-time work to give it a go has led me into a completely new field. I get to use my writing skills – plus a host of others I’ve picked up over the years – the work is extremely satisfying, and I get to work and hang out with a fantastic bunch of people.

It reminds me of all the student theatre I did at uni – except for now I’m being paid and I haven’t had to wear a dress yet (a bit of a shame really). I’m hoping too the regularity of the work will get me blogging a bit more.

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You can check out my first post to the site here. Essentially it’s lamenting that the host of the show missed good opportunities to lynch a federal senator about his shenanigans.

It might not be that accessible if you’re not up on Australian politics, but I did put links into the post which will get you up to speed. The actual interview I’m writing about can be read or listened to here.

If nothing else, my wittiness and constant allusions and analogies should keep you entertained

Hooroo.

M

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1. I’m not going to be saying anything particularly personal or identifying about the person, and
2. It’s looking completely unlikely that we’ll be going out ever again.

Now the reason this woman and I are completely unlikely to ever go out again is something that I said about religion. Well, at least I’m assuming that was it. I mean, I’m hyper intelligent, have a wit to match Oscar Wilde and have rock-hard abs of steel (plus a tendency for exaggeration) so it couldn’t be anything else.

I should have known better, really. This is how it went.

She says she was born and bred a Catholic, which she follows up with, “and so do you have any faith?”

So I say “well, I was born a Catholic…” her eyes light up “and I still regard myself as having some spiritual beliefs…” still good “but I think religions are disgusting, unevolved and are responsible for most of the major problems the world has.”

That might have been the moment.

But then she comes back with a line of argument I haven’t heard before, about how when most religions started, they gave desperately needed order and guidance to a people who sorely needed. (She was the thinking man’s Catholic)

“Fair enough,” I say, “but they still went and fucked it all up pretty quick, didn’t they?”

If I hadn’t killed it earlier, that probably did it.

So I might have to work on my dating skills a little. Perhaps absolute honesty is not the way to go… I suppose though it was good to find out the whole clash on religion thing right at the beginning. In idle moments – you know, just walking down the street kicking an aluminium can – I’ve thought about my wedding, and have decided that there’s no way in the layers of hell (literally and figuratively) that I’m going to get married in a church. Unless it’s been deconsecrated of course. The last proper church wedding I went to I felt ill.

Just how would you go about deconsecrating something, anyway? Sacrifice a goat? Does consecration have an expiry date? Maybe it’s like a driver’s licence: you get your consecrating for 1, 3 or 5 years, depending on how much you pay, and then you have to get in a registered bishop or iman or rabbi or something to come out and do the whole thing again. If you pay enough, the Pope comes and does it and it lasts for 10-15 years…

Alright, now I’m rambling – post-failed date analysis over.

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• iphone killed the electronic dictionary
• Alvin and the Chipmunks vs mixed race marriage
• Brittany Murphy – Hollywood Fail
• Chopsticks in Thailand
• Betting on the Sumo
• Sex and Technology
• Tweet like Baby Jesus
• Barely Evolved
• The Gibberish Song

Just this morning I saw the under-siege Peter Garrett on the front pages of the abc and smh websites, and had mixed feelings I thought would be worth exploring on these pages. The nutshell version is that at first I felt sorry for him, but after thinking about it I don’t.

I think my sympathy came from the personal connection I feel with him. It was his voice, out the front of Midnight Oil, that exposed me to many of the social justice values that I now have.  And I was gutted when he entered politics he decided to join the ALP and not a party which actually had the values he seemed to embody for so long. But he chose his sleeping companions, and the grilling he’s getting from the Opposition is the kind of scrutiny and politician should expect.

The following video was the Oils performance that really hammered it home for me. I couldn’t listen to the band for ages once Garrett joined the ALP and started back-flipping on his principles. Now I see them as two different people.

To put the blogging piece of bread on top of the sandwich and finish off, writing/maintaining a blog is one of those things where a simple rule applies. The longer you haven’t done something, the harder it is to start doing it. I’m thinking that rule also applies to politics: plenty of people get into it with the right intentions, but after years of toeing party lines and compromising values, do they come out broken beyond repair?

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But other people do. This year, approximately 1.02 billion people were chronically hungry, about 15% of the estimated world population. This is up a staggering 166 million people from three years ago. The majority, of course, are in developing countries.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) defines chronic hunger as undernourishment. This generally covers protein-energy malnutrition which is the lack of protein and energy provided by the basic food groups. This undernourishment affects people’s ability to do basic physical activities such as work and study. Undernourished children grow slower physically and mentally than other children, and they have weaker immune systems. Undernourished mothers give birth to undersized and weak babies.

The average necessary daily intake is regarded as 1800 kcal per day. In McDonald’s terms, that’s about a large Quarter Pounder Meal and a McFlurry.

From 1969 to 2004 the proportion of the population of developing countries who suffered from chronic hunger had been falling steadily, from almost 35% of the population in 1969 to just over 15% in 2004. This coincided with a general decrease in the number of hungry people over the same period, from about 875 million to 850 million. The decreases in percentage and actual number are not proportional, likely because better nutrition meant that less people died from malnutrition.

But since 2004, both trends have begun reversing. From a low point of around 16% in 2004, the percentage of people in developing countries who are undernourished in 2009 is nearing 20%. In percentage terms the increase may seem to be not that bad (or not as bad as it could be) but in real terms, in numbers of people, the increase has been astronomical, especially in the last twelve months.

When I read figures and learn things like this, I am constantly at a loss what to do It’s such an obvious deficiency in the world. I’m no expert in this area (or any other for that matter) but you’d think that if there were easy answers, they would have been found and implemented by now. Through a cursory search it seems that the world produces around 1.5 times the food we actually need, and that most people who are undernourished live in countries which have food surpluses rather than deficits. The problem would appear to be that the people can’t afford to buy the food they need.

Yesterday, Christmas Day, I ate way too much food. I’m probably not alone there. I am also a pretty hefty eater, and a little overweight. I’ve felt crap and figuratively beat myself up about my weight and eating habits before. I’ve tried a number of the methods under the sun for cutting down on both, but none to date have been long-term solutions. But maybe something like eating less and sending the money I save to an organisation addressing hunger could do the trick. Good for the body, good for the soul? It’s worth a try.

Apologies for getting all self-reflective and soppy at the end there.

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From the sounds of things it was a whole lot of Japanese performance artists doing stuff. Like the guy who played guitar while a machine painted onto a canvas in response to his music. About halfway through the song the paint machine broke and stopped painting, so another guy came and picked up the brush and continued painting.

It sounds absolutely riveting, and I know you as well as I would have been overwhelmed by the level of profundity. From all reports, the Inner City Chic Crowd were totally engaged with the performance works and lapped it all up with furrowed-brow seriousness. I really wish I could have seen the dudes with electrodes attached to their faces.

Another performance that sounded unmissable was a music act called Trippple Nippples. There are many fine photos of these Japanese ladies I could share which could give some sense of just how solid they are. I hear on Wednesday they were using gaffer tape as a bra. Maybe like in this video?

And here’s a sample of their music. My friends from the Wednesday Night Dinner Crew said they were having trouble not laughing throughout the event. The main reason they didn’t was because everyone around them seemed to be taking it all so seriously.

Now I’m quite a fan of performance in many shapes and forms, but I really struggle to find words to describe things like this other than ’self-indulgence’.  It strikes me that the people who take this stuff so seriously must be completely out of touch with anything resembling reality. And the fact that these people are Sydney’s in-scene fills me not so much with horror as dismay.

I have no doubt that there are many fine performance artists out there. But I doubt they’ll be found at events put on by beer companies.

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KKK - NSW's new Premier

I know that technically, when we vote in a lower house election we’re voting for the local representative of a particular party, and if enough people in the area vote for that person they become the representative of that area.  If, across the country, enough representatives of a particular party win the local elections, that party forms a government, and the leader of that party, as chosen by the elected representatives, becomes the leader of that government.

That’s all well and good in theory, and some people may vote for whoever they think will be best for their area, regardless of which party they come from, but I believe the majority of people vote that way. When people are considering who to vote for (assuming of course that they do actually think about it and don’t just vote for who their mummy and daddy told them to) they take into account and are heavily influenced by the media coverage. And media coverage is generally focused on the leader of the party. When people are voting they are essentially voting for the vision of that party as embodied in the leader.

Nathan Rees: Not a happy chappy

The leader dictates the direction in which the party moves. A good example is the turmoil surrounding the position of the Liberal Party on climate change and what to do about it. Under John Howard, the Liberals campaigned in the 2007 election with an ETS, now, under Tony Abbott, the party just voted one down and are crapping on about a “tax on everything”. It’s a complete about-face in position, with Malcolm Turnbull’s abrasive people skills and inability to negotiate effectively with his own party a large part of the problem.

So the Liberals changed their leader. I don’t have a problem with that at all. Personally, those two weeks of political drama was all very exciting, providing high quality entertainment on par with The West Wing and The Wire. As a party, the Liberals obviously needed to sort out what direction they were heading in, and begin to provide a consistent position which would appeal (in their minds at least) to voters. Parties need to change leaders to change direction and provide that figurehead who they hope will lead them to government.

But where I have a big problem is when a government changes their leader and we get a new Prime Minister or Premier, such as what happened last week in NSW. The NSW Labor Party changed leader, and direction, but the direction and leadership of Kristina K Keneally has been neither publicly elected nor endorsed. Neither, for that matter, was the person she replaced, Nathan Rees. Sure, you can argue that the people who put them in the top job are themselves publicly elected and so in their actions are the vestiges of their constituents, but I don’t think this justifies how easy it appears to be for a government to change leaders. Morris Iemma, the NSW Premier previous to Nathan Rees, was actually voted for by the people of NSW in the March 2007 election, but he himself became Premier two years before that, when Bob Carr retired. Each time the leader is changed we get someone we didn’t vote for in the top job.

Didn't vote for Morris either

Now if the policies and direction of a party, embodied in the person of the leader, become unpopular with the public, and the party sees that that in the next election the public might not want to vote for them, it’s only natural that they might want a new leader to lead them to the next election. All well and good. The American system of presidential pre-selection, for example, covers this quite well. But putting that person in the top job a year or two before the next election is a bit like cheating. Whether or not the government changes its direction to something the public approves of (and in NSW it’s arguable that each change of Premier has moved the government further away from public interest) there is the impression that this has happened, because the public embodiment of that direction has changed.

In the eyes of many voters, all the baggage the previous Premier carried is removed with that person, and the new Premier has a certain amount of time to distance themselves from that baggage, not necessarily by changing anything, but simply on the virtue of being new. Behind the scenes a government can continue with business as usual, and at the same time gaining ground over the opposition in the lead-up to the next election via the free publicity being premier provides. They get a nice little election slogan of ‘well, I’ve done alright so far, haven’t I? Give me a chance to show you what I can do,’ taking the kudos for any recent successes and popular decisions while blaming anything unpopular on the predecessor.

Bob Carr - the one we voted for

Whether this is going to work with a Kristina K Keneally led Labor Government in NSW is debatable. NSW Labor is a putrid rotten apple, spraying it with red paint isn’t going to make it edible. Whether a Liberal government in NSW would be any better is also up in the air. Personally I think that however bad the Liberals might be, Labor needs to be stopped from destroying NSW. It’s a shame not enough of the public regard the Greens as a viable alternative.

Obviously, a party has the right to change their leader. But when this happens while the party is in government, I personally think that on a successful leadership challenge, fresh public elections should immediately be called, regardless of how recent the last election was. In this way the government would be able to promote a platform of how the new leadership and direction government would benefit the people involved, and if the people approved of it, the party would retain government. But the way it works right now to me seems to be furthering corruption in the state and biasing elections towards the incumbent party.

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I found it on the always entertaining ABC Arts Blog, Articulate , and they got it from internet newspaper the Huffington Post, which has a whole section of diagrams for songs. I like this Meatloaf one.

I was going to embed the film clip for this song, which I recall being VERY 80’s, and then I found this great video which is a literal video version. Funny stuff.

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She’s written a couple of articles recently on the upcoming Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

The first one was originally published in Rolling Stone. For a left-leaning Green like myself it’s a bit of preaching to the converted, but also a better expression of the scope of the thing than I could manage. It’s a good introduction for those who are sympathetic but not fully up on it all. Fanatical fans of Uncle Kevin need to get an education. Those all the way to the Right should just stay there with the other deniers.

The second piece focuses more or the activism that’s likely to occur in Copenhagen.  I’m It’s starting to feel like Copenhagen will be the sequel to Seattle. Let’s hope it’s up there with The Empire Strikes or Aliens back in terms of quality sequels to quality originals.

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