Under 94A

As the media struggles to articulate what has been one of the worst months for a government in recent history, Speaker Bronwyn Bishop has removed all doubt about her unsuitability for the role.

This week she has set records in parliament, for the most number of ejections from Question Time under 94A by a speaker in a parliamentary session (285), the most number of ejections under 94A in a single Question Time (18), and more the likely, the most lopsided ejections in both of the other categories (98% ejections from the opposition).

Even more extraordinary, her first record – the most ejections ever for a single parliament, has been achieved in under 15 months – less than half of the term of the 44^th parliament, should it run its full three years. If she is allowed to continue at this rate, she will more than double the previous record.

In Question Time, there are ways to go about things, and it is the Speaker’s responsibility to govern behaviour and standards in the House. Her chief weapon is Standing Order 94A:

"Sanctions against disorderly conduct", allows The Speaker to take action against disorderly conduct by a Member. Item 94A, "Direction to leave the Chamber", means The Speaker can direct a disorderly Member to leave the Chamber for one hour. This direction is not open to debate or dissent, and if the Member does not leave the Chamber immediately, the Speaker can name the Member under 94B, suspending them from parliament for anywhere from one to seven days.

The definition of ‘disorderly conduct by a Member’ is left to the Speaker’s discretion, and this is where Ms Bishop is setting new standards.

Yesterday, she ‘booted’ eighteen MPs, all from the Opposition, under 94A, which would give the impression that the Opposition is a rowdy mob of bored troublemakers, which seems to be in line with the Speaker’s opinion. 

Mr BURKE (Watson—Manager of Opposition Business) (15:13): At risk of adding to the total, I should note that 18 people being ejected in one question time is an all-time record since Federation.

Mr Pyne: On the point of order, it is very apparent, and the Australian public should know, that the Labor Party have run a deliberate strategy of ejection from the House today. They have deliberately attempted to be thrown out, and if they intend to continue to behave like idiots then they will deserve to be thrown out. And trying to now make a political point out of it is so transparent and so pathetic. They are so transparent. They have so few members left because you told them all to get thrown out, and now you want to try to make the point that the Speaker has thrown your people out. We are behaving and you are not.

The SPEAKER (15:13): I would simply say to the Manager of Opposition Business that the behaviour today was an absolute disgrace. Looking at the list, I can see that quite a few of them are indeed Victorian members, who perhaps wish to go back and campaign. Others may wish to have early planes, but there was a deliberate campaign of noise and disruption, and I am fortunate in having standing order 94(a) with which to deal with it, otherwise it means naming people and taking up the time of the House. Simply to stand there and try to say that you all behaved like little angels and that you were picked on is pathetic.

It’s no coincidence that that as the government appears to lose its way, the Speaker’s attitude towards the Opposition becomes harsher. When, six months ago, Ms Bishop was favouring the government in Question Time, she is now openly running interference for the government. The government is besieged on many fronts: the questionable performance by Tony Abbott just two weeks ago at the G20, unpopular cuts to the ABC, Defence Minister David Johnston’s extreme linguistic flourish regarding submarines and canoes, the confusion about the fate of $7 GP copayments, and the continual denial by the government of lying or breaking promises. 

This week in particular, the Abbott government appears to be unhinged, leaving plenty of opportunities for the opposition to attack.

And attack they should. That’s part of their job.

The obvious partiality of the Speaker places the opposition is in a no-win situation every time the House sits. The Speaker will not allow them to be heard, and the few minor ‘stunts’ they’ve tried – orchestrating laughter, holding up newspaper front pages that are critical of the government - are basically ineffective.

There’s one thing left to try.

What would happen if the entire opposition failed to attend Question Time, or if they walked out as a block…or if the Speaker ejected every member under 94A? What would the consequences be? The Labor Opposition tested this in 2012 in the Victorian State Parliament. There were a few ripples, but no lasting impact. 

The Federal Opposition should try it. Question Time has virtually no credibility and serves no real purpose under Speaker Bishop, and a major statement like a walkout would at least force the performance of the Speaker to come under additional scrutiny.

Mark Latham: Horse's A*se

Knuckle-dragging Neanderthals like Mark Latham are the reason why feminism exists. In today’s Australian Financial Review, former Labor Leader Mark Latham has used his fortnightly column to disparage workingwomen, non-working women, feminists and mental illness, and all because of Lisa Pryor's somewhat flippant column about ‘caffeine and anti-depressants’ knocked him off his chair:

I am not depressed, I am anti-depressed. Though it may not win me admiration and a sponsored lifestyle blog, a little bit of neurochemical assistance helps me actually enjoy the glorious disaster of raising two small children while studying medicine full time.

I suspect there’s now a long and feisty queue of both women and men who’d like to knock him off his pedestal. 

Unlike them, I was delighted with Dr Latham’s column. His methodology was impressive and his logic, faultless. How few mental health subject matter experts would go to the trouble of conducting a scientifically credible social experiment to prove a theory when they can just rant about it in a national newspaper?  His substantial sample of one – Lisa Pryor – along with his probing psychiatric examination of her 300-word column and some pithy anecdotal testimony from an unknown number of women who apparently live in Western Sydney, have provided him with ample ammunition to overturn decades of methodical research and undermine years of painstaking social education. 

So how on earth did Dr Latham manage to get his degree in medicine? Clearly he must have medical and psychiatric qualifications to be publishing such learned material regarding a medical condition that effects up to 20% of women in Australia. How blessed we are this morning that he has chosen to share his wealth of professional medical wisdom with us. Too many people just dash off meaningless medical frivolities without a care for acres of specialist knowledge that exist.

Until I read Dr Latham’s column this morning, I could’ve sworn that depression was a devastating medical illness, often related to complicated chemicals called neurotransmitters in the brain. Who knew that it was simply an rort employed by weak, indolent women to allow them to exist more easily in a hostile professional world where men make the rules? If only these pathetic female creatures could cast off their psycho-political neuroses and stay at home with their babies, they wouldn't need to be chemically enabled. Hooray!

But Dr Latham knew – thank god! If only he’d told me years ago, I could have avoided thirty-odd years of struggling, and sometimes failing, to get out of bed in the morning. I could have skipped that fabulous conversation with my boss about why I’d been able to drive to work and park the car, but couldn’t actually get out of it and walk into the building where I’d worked for ten years. I could've missed that $200 chat with the clinical psychologist who had lost my file, forgotten who I was, and recommended that I join some professional networking groups... despite the occasional crippling bout of depression-related agoraphobia. 

It’s comforting to know that the whole thing is just a manifestation of my personal weakness. My cowardice. My failure. I’ll throw out my pretty green-and-blue anti-depressants and just get on with it, shall I? Cold turkey? Just like that? It’ll be fine...although I don't have children, so my life will in all likelihood remain meaningless.

I was surprised to learn that depression is a girl thing, like owning colour co-ordinated bra and undies sets and always carrying supplies of sanitary lady-products in your handbag. Apparently men don’t suffer from depression. I hope the boffins at beyondblue get to read Dr Latham’s comments, because those silly folk seem to think that 1 in 8 men will suffer depression in their lifetime. It says so right here on their website. They’ll have to change that, now that the truth about this massive conspiracy of lefty feminist depressed women from places that aren’t Western Sydney has been exposed. 

The real authority of Dr Latham’s revelations lie in the link between depression and feminism. His piercing wisdom regarding depression sits well alongside his knowledge of the vast morass of those generic, ovaried types who self-describe as feminists. With nary a thought given to the debate raging around him about the nature of contemporary feminism, its forms and relevance, Dr Latham has walked down the path beaten so long ago by Emmaline Pankhurst, paved by Germaine Greer, and these days, occupied by Joint Destroyers, Frightbats, and a haphazard collective of inner city, Cosmo-sipping militants with their happy pills and sad attitudes…and then he said mean things about them.

Thus left feminism is akin to a psychoneurotic disorder: externalising personal feelings of distress and deficiency into the demonisation of children.

I’ve learned so much from reading Dr Latham’s column this morning that I cried. I cried the big, fat, wet, noisy tears of a woman liberated from her own worst self. I am cured! 

Yes Mr Latham, your words have brought me to tears.

The author was first diagnosed with depression at the age of 19. She has survived living in Western Sydney while working in a male-dominated industry, being female, being depressed and being childless, all at the same time. She is a medical miracle.

Evidence-based

If I hear one more conservative commentator or right wing social media hack complain that the ABC – and particularly QandA – is biased in favour of the left, I will not scream, or swear, or set fire to anything. I will calmly invite them to share some evidence of bias with me, because I haven’t seen it. I doubt it exists.

What I have seen is a reasonably well balanced series of programmes which aim to promote a discussion of issues and policy, rather than the usual patchy reportage about the characters involved and their manoeuvring for ever-increasing power and wealth.

But no – the accusations of bias continue from the usual suspects. After the episode on March 31 focusing on Human Rights, Andrew Bolt wrote:

Last night’s episode of Q&A was one of the most outrageously and offensively biased of an ABC show that has been uniformly biased.

It was also an insight into the broad Left’s loathing of free speech and the West, and into the racism that informs its anti-racist posturing.

Apparently some conservative politicians and commentators prefer not to appear on QandA because the audience applauds more loudly for Labor politicians and guests from the left. QandA has even been labelled ‘hostile’ by some on the right. The Australian’s Media Editor Sharri Markson was ready to take on the ABC from Day 1: 

Monday's ‪#‎QandA panellist, Sharri Markson is up for the battle between News Corp Australia & ABC - “I enjoy a good media war”

Still others claim that the panels are unbalanced, favouring the left and constantly criticising the government. At least that’s easy to quantify. A quick analysis of the guests on QandA this year show that of those 109 guests whose political leaning is immediately recognisable, there are slightly more guests paddling the right side of the QandA canoe. It’s not enough of a difference to suggest a conservative bias; to the contrary, it suggests very little bias. (A complete list of guests on this year’s QandA episodes is attached to the bottom of this post.)

The rumour on social media last night was that Sharri Markson had been scheduled to appear on the show, but had cancelled, leaving her more moderate News Corporation colleague Sarrah le Marquand to fill the spare seat. Ms Markson is a consistent critic of the ABC; Ms le Marquand somewhat more balanced.

The key here is that if its critics feel that the QandA is biased, they have no-one to blame but themselves. I don’t know if the marquee level conservative commentators – Alan Jones, Andrew Bolt, Chris Kenny, Sharri Markson et al – have been invited to appear on Qanda, but if they have, they haven’t taken the opportunity. If they haven’t been invited, they should be putting themselves forward for the job. If they don’t make an effort to redress what they see as an imbalance, they have no credibility when they complain about it.

And then there’s the Government itself. They have been able to field an appropriate MP for most shows, but with obvious omissions: Joe Hockey’s only appearance was in May, after the Budget. Rather than being a member of a panel, he had to show to himself. High profile ministers Julie Bishop, Mathias Cormann, Scott Morrison and Andrew Robb, plus the near invisible Health Minister Peter Dutton have successfully avoided the QandA experience this year.

And neither has the Prime Minister, despite a standing invitation. It’s now 1908 days since Tony Abbott has been on QandA. Why?

Like it or not, it is Our ABC, and it’s up to all of us to ensure that it’s what we want it to be and that’s going to take more than partisan whinging.

 

G20: Winners and Others

The G20 is not a democracy. Neither is it a sporting competition, a chess game, a reality television show, a raffle or a pie eating contest. In fact, the G20 should not be a competition of any kind. It’s extraordinary, then, that we have a clear loser, and it’s the captain of the home team.

Prime Minster Tony Abbott has been comprehensively conquered on every front during the past week, but his greatest defeat is no-one’s fault but his own.  By all accounts, he got his G20 welcome speech wrong, dismissing climate change and world affairs to focus instead on his domestic agenda.

Tony Abbott at the G20 Summit

The real problem for Prime Minister Abbott was context. In isolation, the Abbott Speech was the wrong content for the audience and the event, and was delivered in his trademark halting cadence. Just hours earlier, American President Barack Obama delivered a masterful speech at the University of Queensland, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s outlined his priorities for this G20 Summit. Both leaders emphasised that climate change must be addressed first and foremost. 

The official G20 schedule afforded Tony Abbott, as host, the honour of speaking first and welcoming the world’s leaders to Brisbane. So what happened?

Firstly, the timing was dangerous. Leaving a ‘free’ morning on Day One allowed participants to make their own plans for that half day. President Obama saw a window in which to schedule a speech, unrelated to G20 matters, during that free morning. He spoke about his own global agenda, which includes human rights, climate change, the world’s response to the Ebola crisis, focus on youth and the matter of equality for women and LGBT groups.

President Obama is a brilliant orator, with some of the best speechwriters in the world. In contrast, public speaking is not Tony Abbott's strong point, and while the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet employs close to40 communications staff, costing well over four million dollars annually, he still prefers to write his own speeches.  The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen explained this and other weaknesses: 

In Abbott’s office, a team of speechwriters co-ordinated by Paul Ritchie helps the Prime Minister with his speeches. Using the input as a guide, not a script, the PM prefers to write his own speeches, especially the more important ones.

The results were on show yesterday for the world’s leaders to see.

The second issue is quite simply, stubbornness. If Mr Abbott is a competent speechwriter and if he is the great intellect that Ms Albrechtsen suggests, he would have been able to make quick adjustments to the speech he delivered to world leaders yesterday afternoon. It doesn’t look as though any last minute adjustments were made…unless his original speech was explicitly against taking action of climate change, in which case, Mr Abbott has probably jumped to Plan B and picked up a draft he had only half finished, planned to deliver to the local branch of the Liberal Party at their Christmas Party. 

If, on the other hand, the welcome we heard from Mr Abbott yesterday was the speech he intended to deliver, Liberal boss Brian Loughnane needs to take Tony Abbott by the shirtfront and introduce him to his communications team. It was inappropriate for the occasion.

President Obama loves Australia, but I'll bet he says that to all his allies.

The third issue, and the one which underpins the rest, is the question of whether Tony Abbott has the potential to be a Statesman. He is consistently out of step with most of the rest of the world’s leaders on the big issues, as illustrated by the stark differences between the content of Obama’s remarks at UQ and Abbott’s address to G20 leaders. Furthermore, he seems to possess the political instincts of an potato. His relentlessly thuggish style made him a powerful opposition leader, yet is unsuited to that of a leader.

Finally, there’s shirtfronting. Everyone was waiting to see how Mr Howard would deal with Mr Putin, how Mr Putin would deal with Mr Abbott, and how everyone else would deal with the fallout. Ultimately, very little happened, yet it cast a surreal and unstatesmanlike shadow across the event. Tony Abbott’s occasional lapses of control are well known in Australia, so really, anything from minutes of furious silence to a bit of physical argy-bargy between the Russian Judo master and the Australian former boxer was possible.

Tony has been able to lead the members of his own government on most issues – Paid Parental Leave notwithstanding – and the committed Liberal voters have largely remained committed to his policies. He hasn’t really converted anyone else though, and his net approval rating is nothing to rave about. It remains to be seen if this disastrous performance as host of the G20 will hurt his approval further.

But enough about losers. Did anyone actually win the G20? Here are my picks:

Gold:          Barack Obama for brilliant political strategy in grabbing and controlling the agenda

Silver:        Angela Merkel for visiting some of Brisbane’s Friday night watering holes and taking selfies with the crowds

Bronze:      Margie Abbott for showing up to wrangle the female spouses and koalas

Commendation: Brisbane, for doing a great job, despite being deserted.

Shock and Awful

It appears that along with booing at funerals, criticising the recently deceased and threatening to shirtfront foreign leaders, it’s now acceptable to use sites of national significance for corporate functions. 

The Official Launch of Northrop Grumman Australia will be held at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra on next month. Northrop Grumman, an American company founded in 1939, has been a supplier of military hardware to the Australian Defence Forces, and others around the world for years, and employs over 400 people in Australia. 

Their close affiliation with Australia’s defence industry might seem like a natural fit with a war memorial, making it an obvious venue for a defence-related knees-up. But the Australian War Memorial is not just any old museum. 

According to the official website, 

The Australian War Memorial combines a shrine, a world-class museum, and an extensive archive. The Memorial's purpose is to commemorate the sacrifice of those Australians who have died in war. Its mission is to assist Australians to remember, interpret and understand the Australian experience of war and its enduring impact on Australian society. 

I’d think that’s how most Aussies see it, and want it to remain that way. 

The Northrop Grumman function has caught the attention of social media users after Crikey published a teaser on Tuesday. The Twitterati are aghast at the thought of using our war memorial to hold a function which could just as easily be held in the ballroom of the Holiday Inn. That the War Memorial even has a function space for hire comes as a surprise to many, including some Canberra residents. 

The function venue is Anzac Hall, a large military-themed function room located within the memorial grounds, and it seems to be marketed to corporations for events like this launch. They even provide the option of guided tours and mementos as part of your special occasion. 

So is this just another example of righteous indignation from the reactionaries on social media? I asked my partner Rob, a career Army Officer with over twenty years’ experience in the ADF, for his thoughts. He was surprised, and appalled. For Rob, the War Memorial is sacred ground, a place to remember and honour those who came before him, and those yet to follow. It shouldn’t be a quirky option for trendy wedding receptions, or a commercial venue for multinational defence suppliers to celebrate their profit margins. 

And yet it is, complete with the blessing of the Australian War Memorial Council, which includes several decorated military veterans and public figures. 

So let’s put it down to shock value. We were surprised. We didn’t know. I won’t be rushing to hold my next big event in the Anzac Room, but as long as it’s okay with the majority of veterans and the families of those we lost, I’ll climb down off my high horse and continue to see the Australian War Memorial as the very special place it is.

Gee Whizz

It’s possible that Australians, and Brisvegans in particular, might be more interested in the G20 if our Prime Minister wasn’t such a total pillock.

The G20, melting

As this year’s host of the annual get-together of the world’s leaders, Prime Minister Tony Abbott is the Big Man about town. It won’t be all schmoozing and shirtfronting at Brisbane’s G20 Summit; there’s economic growthy business to be done! On the sidelines, there’s even more more to delight: sporadic attacks of light displays, really big signs, plane spotting, exclusion zones, motorcades, barricades, a massive media centre with food, random protests and secret cultural activities will fill the otherwise deserted streets of Brisbane.

And in the meeting halls of Brisbane’s Southbank, there is an infinite number of opportunities for Prime Minister Abbott to embarrass us. His warm up efforts at APEC were impressive. He has admitted – proudly? - that he told Mr Putin to stop trying to relive the glory days of Soviet supremacy.

TONY ABBOTT: "One of the points I tried to make to Putin is that Russia would be so much more attractive if it was aspiring to be a superpower for peace and freedom and prosperity, if it was trying to be a superpower for ideas and for values, instead of trying to recreate the lost glories of tsarism or the old Soviet Union."

You bet you are…you bet I am, Mr Abbott.

Cutting through the clarity of the G20 Agenda is a hazy national awareness that this was Prime Minister Abbott’s best opportunity to make good on his promise to shirtfront the Russian leader. Demonstrating his consistency to a global audience, he failed to live up to his word…as you would, with an extreme 1.5% of the Russian navy floating around off our northern coastline.

There’s also the very real probability he will shame us all without saying a word, particularly as regards his favourite topic, climate change. It will be hard to stay coherent in the midst of Brisbane’s heatwave, where temperatures on Sunday are forecast to be at least ten degrees hotter than the average for November. The biggest challenge in the history of humanity remains stubbornly off the official G20 agenda; the untimely emissions reduction agreement by China and the United States nothing more than a distraction.

Ittoqqortoormiit - pretty, isn't it?

Luckily, Australia has plenty of coal, and Tony Abbot knows that coal is good for humanity. He may just announce that Australia can save the world.

Let’s face it: most of us will have G20 experiences far away from the action. Even those of us who live just outside the Brisbane CBD and Southbank precincts will stay away and observe the goings-on from a safer distance – probably our lounge rooms. Without that subdued glow of national pride, the little fizz when we recognise a local landmark in the B-roll of the news footage, the G20 could be held in Ittoqqortoormiit. (That’s a real place in Greenland, I think).

Earlier this morning, the Lord Mayor of Brisbane Graham Quirk was on the radio, asking residents to brave the empty confusion of the G20 weekend, and come to town to see the barricades and the media, pigheadedly reporting on the effectiveness of the barricades. The fear is that the eleventy thousand visitors and media in town for the G20 will see Australia’s New World City – yes, that’s really Brisbane’s official tourism marketing slogan – entirely devoid of life.

Lord Mayor Quirk’s fears were valid. Does the G in G20 stand for Ghost-town?

Unsurprisingly, Brisbane residents have fled, and the government must take responsibility for that. They declared a public holiday in Brisbane for today, gave G20 delegates free access to public transport but graciously allowed residents to pay full fares and at the last minute, offered insufficient free parking. After saturation coverage of the massive security preparations, why would any sane person go anywhere near the city during the G20?

Brisbane, in her party frock

CBD offices are closed, although the shops and eateries are – optimistically - open. The multi-laned motorways out of town have been clogged for hours with locals pouring out of town and into the Gold and Sunshine Coasts and Hinterlands.

Those of us left behind in suburbia will absorb the greatness of the G20 through the media. Yesterday’s highlight was Clive Palmer phoning 612 ABC Brisbane to answer a quiz question. Today, Channel 7’s Bill McDonald power-sweated through near-desolate city streets, looking for someone to interview. He found a pair of kids who were most interested in seeing “anyone”, and a group of buskers who were on a break.

Regardless of how and where you choose to avoid the G20, the most important factor is to manage your expectations. Keep it real. It’s a bunch of really important blokes – plus Angela Merkel and Christine LeGarde – at a puffed up networking event being hosted by the Blunder from Down Under.

Gee Whizz.

For the best in G20-related information, refer to First Dog on the Moon's excellent explainer.

The Hunt for Red November

So, it appears that Russian leader Vladimir Putin is so affronted - or possibly amused - by Prime Minister Tony Abbott's threat to shirtfront him, that he's brought a few ships from the Russian Navy with him. 

Meanwhile, News Corp's daily press is determined to revive the Cold War - just look at the imagery on its front pages. No-one in Australia this morning, including members of the international media who are here for the G20 this weekend in Brisbane, is in any doubt about the location of a few Russian warships.

More likely, the Russians are taking this rare opportunity to flex their naval muscle in front of the world's media. Putin has a history of muscle flexing, with and without a shirt front, and the presence of Russian warships off the Queensland coast is a handy if ridiculous distraction from the unsatisfactory investigation into the MH17 disaster, and from the Russian troops which are currently pouring across the border into the Ukraine.

As much as Mr Putin might like to draw focus to his military power for all the world to see, and as much as the News Corporation editors have taken the bait, this is not about Australia. 

We are, however, in a position to take advantage of the gift. Our Prime Minister, along with Premier Campbell Newman and Brisbane Lord Mayor Graham Quirk, can take control of the agenda, undermine any perceived Russian hostility, and create a new paradigm of G20 inclusiveness with a simple invitation to Mr Putin for his troops to visit Brisbane while they're in the area. Come in and enjoy all South East Queensland has to offer. Accommodation is not an issue, as the sailors would sleep on their ships, and the city is geared up as never before to host international visitors. The Gold Coast and Sunshine Coasts are less than an hour from Brisbane, and who wouldn't love an impromptu few days in subtropical Queensland?

And the message that we could send to the world? That Australia is friendly, welcoming and inclusive That Brisbane really is Australia's New World City, as the marketing people like to say...and as an added bonus, the tension between Tony Abbott and Vladimir Putin could be defused with just a few words.

Who knows? If Mr Abbott was to welcome the Russian sailors off the coast of Queensland now, he might just learn now to welcome other people who come to our shores by boat.

The News Blues

Is the news bad for you? Some experts seem to think that it is. Fair enough, too. A quick look at the headlines on any given day will feature many more bad news stories than good news stories. If you consume enough of it, and if you care about what you’re seeing, it’s bound to have an impact.

Headlines from news.com.au

Swiss author and intellectual Rolf Dobelli discusses in his 2011 book The Art of Thinking Clearly, the many many reasons why consuming news is damaging to your mind, your career, and even your health. In fact, Mr Dobelli has given up news altogether, and says he feels better for it. 

Bully for Rolf. It must be liberating to be able to live without any information about what is going on in the world. For those of who are news addicts, the concept of giving up the news is on a par with giving up coffee, chocolate, red wine…oxygen… Aside from the immediate rush of horror we might feel at the idea, there’s also the practicalities of living on the anti-news equivalent of a desert island.

The news is more than politics. Consider these scenarios: There’s a safety recall on your car. Your favourite restaurant burned down. You have to vote next week. There’s a cyclone heading your way. The stock market crashed and your life savings are worthless. We’ve been invaded by little green men from outer space.

How do you get by without that information?

The impacts of too much news – and let’s be honest, most of it is bad news - are potentially worse for people who are already suffering from depression and anxiety. Some psychologists advise their clients with depression to avoid the news, and there’s certainly a push on some internet fora that if you do suffer with depression, it’s better to avoid news reports.

Is there really link between depression and consumption of news? If there is, are we talking about news content or the way in which the news is presented? Could people who are suffering depression improve their mental health by ditching the news? 

I suspect there is a relationship between depression and anxiety disorders and engagement with the news, but not a causal link. It surprised me to learn that there is a lack of research into this touchy issue, so let’s see what we can find out!

Please complete the short (non-scientific) survey below. It’s completely anonymous, and if the results are at all indicative of a correlation, we’ll look at formalising the results with an academic study.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Thanks very much for your contribution. If you have any feedback, please leave a comment at the bottom of this post, and please forward this survey to your contacts.

Panic at 7.30

Effective immediately - or as of 7:30pm last night, to be specific - you can stop worrying about co-payments, uni fees, asylum seekers, metadata, climate change, Ebola, racehorses, budget emergencies, budgie smugglers, soldiers’ salaries, girlie-men, burqas, destroying the joint, legalising the joint, exams or what’s for dinner. Those trifles aren’t gonna matter in the face of the Next Big Threat: the Petrol Crisis.

The ABC’s nightly current affairs show 7.30, in cahoots with Senator John Madigan, has delivered to us a new reason to panic. Australia could run out of petrol. Here's what the Senator had to say:

SEN. JOHN MADIGAN, INDEPENDENT: In the event that there is a threat what do we do? At the peacetime when everything is going along nicely there isn't a threat, but in the event that something does happen what is the plan, how are we going to do it? Other countries in the world have mandated fuel stocks. We don't.

Al Qaeda, the blueprint for Islamic terrorism and forerunner to Daesh, has urged its followers to consider a disruption to the world’s SLOCs – literally, “Sea Lanes of Communication” but more commonly, the usual maritime trade and naval routes around the globe. Specifically, Al Qaeda has mentioned the Malacca Straits, a narrow passage of water between Malaysia and Indonesia, through which impressive quantities of the world’s shipping passes.

Ensuring safe passage through the Straits of Malacca is of particular importance to Australia as the majority of ocean imports from Asia and Europe will pass that way. This includes oil. Unlike the USA, Australia has no strategic oil reserves, so when we run out, that's it until more arrives. What we do have are dwindling on shore processing facilities and limited domestic oil production, so any interruption to ocean freight through the Straits of Malacca will impact our oil supply.

The 7.30 team interviewed an impressive range of subject matter experts and opinion makers from the oil industry, the military, motoring bodies and petrol retailers, yet not one of them could quantify the likelihood of an attack. 

Everyone except the oil company man (whose industry controls the amount of petrol in the market at any given time) agreed that any interruption to our ability to import oil would be bad. Very bad.

JOHN BLACKBURN, AIR VICE MARSHAL (RET.): If there's an interruption to the fuel supply chain coming in from overseas, after about a week we're going to run into serious problems. Without fuel can't go to work, can't get to school, you can't get food.

GRAHAM BLIGHT, NRMA: Imagine if everybody lost 50 per cent of their fuel, what would happen to industry? What would happen to agriculture? What would happen to Defence?

So this can mutate into a very serious issue for us.

Oh god! Now it’s mutating! Panic faster, people! Run around in tiny circles, stopping only to wring our hands until we've set aside reason, experience and evidence and replaced them with fear. Only then can we shove our thumbs in our mouths, hide under the desk and rock back and forth. We are alert, we are alarmed, and goshdarnit, we’re all doooomed!

Shipping in the Straits of Malacca

Did I mention that the threat is coming from Al Qaeda? With close to 1 in 4 Australians already admitting to negative feelings towards Muslims, let’s throw some petrol on those flames too.

Actually let’s not: let’s conserve every last drop! In fact, why aren’t we rationing petrol already? Rationing always goes well with panic and war and stuff.

But back up a moment. How, exactly, could someone disrupt the flow of vessels through the Straits? The answer would obviously be by blocking it with something substantially bigger than Lego blocks. It’s actually less than 3km wide at the choke point near Singapore, but I doubt Al Qaeda is into building bridges. That would be kind of obvious, it would take at least until Johnny Farnham’s next retirement, and wouldn’t block the strait anyway. I just like bridges.

They could block the choke point with a flotilla of hostile vessels. The problem there is that ships are expensive, and while they might be able to cobble together a flotilla from the pirate boats that already practice terrorism in the Malacca Straits, the flotilla would need to be fairly still…which makes them an easy target for the goodies (TM Tony Abbott) to destroy. Just call in an airstrike or three, and boom! No more nasties, other than the world’s largest environmental disaster, which would just coincidentally, also close the Straits of Malacca.

The aftermath of Gulf War 1: fire on water

They could try sinking ships, one by one, as they enter the Strait. In fact, sinking just one ship would prevent the rest from entering – it’s that colossal environmental disaster thing again -  so there’s the Strait, out of action. Now, every ship would have to transit via the other SLOCs nearby:  Lombok Strait, Makassar Strait, Sibutu Passage and Mindoro Strait. They’re all longer and hence more expensive, so businesses don’t use them unless they have to.

But they could. The world will not stop - it'll just take a detour.

There are others options too. We could consider trans Pacific supply from the Americas, or surface transport north to Europe, east across the top and ocean freight via the Sea of Okhotsk and Japan. Both would be hideously expensive – but so would Australia running out of petrol.

Thankfully, we've got that covered too: 

IAN MACFARLANE'S STATEMENT: At any given time Australia has crude oil and refined product on the way to Australia by diverse shipping routes... In the unlikely event that fuel supply is severely disrupted the Australian Government has powers to prioritise essential supply.

ANDREW BREWER, GM SUPPLY, CALTEX AUSTRALIA: I look at how Australia has handled fuel supply interruptions in the past. We've seen multiple events internationally; Fukushima, GFC, local events such as Queensland cyclones, and in all those cases the industry has been able to provide fuel reliably and securely for customers.

So dial back the panic just enough to consider this: we still don’t know if it’s likely to happen, and there’s nothing you or I could do about it anyway. The great news is that there's untold sh*t-tonnes of metadata doing something impressive, and that's supposed to keep us all safe.

So thanks, Senator Madigan and 7.30, for loading us up with something else to fret about. We'll take a pass this time. 

Everyone, stand down and resume your normal internet panic stations. Here are some kittens to help.

Hey Nick, I found your intolerance

When I wrote yesterday’s blog post, I wasn’t expecting much reaction, yet even this took me by surprise. Someone of twitter, someone with whom I have no connection at all, tweeted these responses:

The blog post that elicited that response on twitter is about my reasons for accepting the science of climate change. It’s not about multiculturalism or discrimination or intolerance or Islam. Regardless, this person has decided that it’s okay to challenge my writing, my point of view, my friends, and my ethnicity, and it is important to challenge the ideas, although not so much the personal. 

What’s fascinating is that the tweeter has taken a guess at my cultural origins, probably based on nothing more than my surname (although s/he could have read my previous blog posts, which spell it out), and has done so utterly out of context. S/he also accused me of not showing my face. Oh, how that accusation burns, coming from a twitter account with an egg for an avatar, and the twitter handle retarded muzi voodoo. (I tweet under my real name.)

I feel no need to justify my blog post or my existence to this git. This post is primarily to highlight that regardless of how happy and contented Australians are, there is an aggressive element of intolerance against Muslims that runs deep and profoundly stupid within our society. Followers of the Intolerance Cult – to paraphrase Tony Abbott and his ‘death cult’ - takes clumsy shots at anything that sounds even vaguely Middle Eastern or Muslim.

In today’s Australian, columnist Nick Cater’s opinion piece “Search for the missing intolerance” cites a new survey from the Scanlon Foundation, suggesting that perhaps we’re mostly happy little Aussie Vegemites living in one of the happiest places on the planet. 

Welcome to Disneyland. 

The overwhelming majority of Australians — 92 per cent — feel a sense of belonging. Nine out of 10 express pride in the Australian way of life. Eight out of 10 think this is a land of opportunity. Eight in 10 think ethnic diversity has been good for Australia. Six in 10 think the immigration level is about right or could be higher. “This is possibly the highest level of positive sentiment towards immigration in the Western world,” says Andrew Markus, the author.

Nick Cater goes on to suggest that as “racism” seems almost inconsequential in our happy-go-lucky utopia, we should be looking at casual racism, which he proposes is a less serious, almost trivial and usually accidental form of ethnic slight.

Since there is no evidence of institutional racism, we are told to be wary of “casual racism”, petty linguistic crimes that few of us are clever enough to be aware we are committing.

Mr Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre which, as the name suggests, is politically aligned with the Liberal Party. I imagine Mr Cater would be quite accepting of Attorney General George Brandis’s casually divisive language on QandA last night, when he continually referred to Muslim audience members as ‘leaders of their community’ – as opposed ‘leaders of our community’, which if Australia is as socially cohesive as the Scanlon study indicates, would be the same community. 

But that’s just “petty” and unimportant, right?

Actually, it’s an essential element of intolerance in Australia, particularly if you read the research presented by Scanlon Foundation’s 2014 Survey, and not just Mr Cater's summary. Intolerance comes in many forms and has many targets: race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physicality, political leaning, social strata and more. While racial intolerance seems fairly low, religious intolerance towards Muslims is not, with 1 in 4 Aussies feeling negative towards Muslims. 

From the Summary, we see this:

Questions on attitude to Christian, Buddhist and Muslim faith groups find that, as in past surveys, a very small proportion are negative towards Christian and Buddhist faiths (close to 5%), but a proportion almost five times higher (close to 25%) towards Muslims.

Furthermore, on reading p50 of the study, 

First, when questions were asked in specific terms with regard to immigrants who have settled in Australia, there was a very low level of negative sentiment (at or below 11%), with one significant exception, the attitude to Muslims (44% negative).

Nick Cater should’ve looked just that little bit harder. The evidence of intolerance he is seeking is right there, in the key document of his own op-ed.

We may not be racist – although some Australians undoubtedly are – but we are a society divided.

I encourage you all to browse through the Scanlon Foundation 2014 Survey – there are some terrific insights lurking within.