A column about coups

Thailand is one of Australia’s favourite countries. It supplies us with wonderful holidays, delicious stirfried noodles, and Red Bull. So, like many Australians, I followed news of last week’s coup with great interest. While Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was addressing the United Nations, the Royal Thai Army rolled tanks into Bangkok and sacked him. In one of those classic developing country scenes, they promised to restore democracy ‘real soon now’, and accused the incumbent of forcing their hands through the sheer extent of his nefarious corruption. Same old story.

I’m not entirely sure how culpable Thaksin is – although you’d have to say that any country where the PM owns much of the media has a problem. (Imagine if John Howard owned TV stations here – it’d just be Bradman 24/7 on every network.) What I do know is that it’s pretty unlikely that something like that could happen here. Coups simply aren’t an option in developed Western countries – in fact, they’re unprecedented.

And more’s the pity. Because I can’t think of anything better for the Inner West right now that a bloodless coup d’état. It’s the most stridently left-wing area in the country, so after a decade of John Howard and the Labor Right in Macquarie St, a takeover by a socialist junta would be warmly welcome.

Plotting a coup is simple – they always follow the same formula. We’d just roll a bunch of tanks up outside the major political bodies, and hey presto, instant coup. It’d be so easy. Sydney Town Hall isn’t even in the area, and Clover Moore’s got so much on her plate that she probably wouldn’t even notice. While anyone who’s seen Rats In The Ranks knows Leichhardt Council’s a pushover, and you can’t tell me Marrickville’s Green mayor would put up any resistance.

Then we have to seize the region’s media outlets. Too easy. With the greatest respect to my colleagues at The Glebe, we wouldn’t need more than one tank to take it over, while a faintly aggressive look is probably all you’d need to take over Radio FBi. Whereas the ABC, which is on the edge of the Inner West, is already controlled by socialists. And that’s about it.

The first thing we would need is some kind of catchy name. Thailand’s junta has styled itself the Council for Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy. I would suggest that in order to win over the support of residents, the ideal name for our new junta would be the Inner West Democratic Reform Collective And Book Club.

'Collective' should get the hippies and ferals onside. And as anyone who's ever been involved in student or community politics know, a collective is where decisions are made by the most loud and self-righteous person in the group.

And those who aren't into the Collective, we'll suck in with the Book Club. First up for discussion is the new Noam Chomsky. Mmm, should be thought-provoking. The chai's on me.

Next we would need to appoint an interim leader. Ideally, we would need someone popular and charismatic who is widely respected throughout both the Inner West and the wider world. Obviously the mind turns immediately to the columnists within The Glebe. And while I’m sure Rebecca Le Tourneau would do a fine job, it seems clear to me that the ideal option would be myself.

Hey, it was my idea.

Then we need to seek retrospective permission from the head of state, as the coup plotters did with Thailand’s revered King Bhumibol. Actually, on second thoughts, it probably doesn’t matter – no-one even knows who the current Governor-General is.

Like all glorious coup leaders, I will gladly promise to restore democracy, but as with Burma, though, it might just take a few decades, during which time prominent opposition figures will be placed under house arrest. That’s okay – Paddy McGuinness doesn’t like to leave Balmain much anyway.

There’s only one problem I can detect with my glorious plan. King St and Parramatta Rd are so congested already that if we brought in a fleet of tanks to block them off, no-one would actually notice.

The native title scaremongers are restless again

It's been a while since native title was in the news. But Tuesday's Federal Court decision to grant the Noongar people native title over 200,000 square kilometres of the Perth metropolitan area has brought out some sour memories of the scaremongering during the Mabo and Wik cases, when ordinary, decent, mildly xenophobic Australians were worried that Aborigines would take away their precious quarter-acre blocks to hold corroborees on, or something. Now Philip Ruddock's saying he can't guarantee ocker Aussies'll have access to their beloved beaches. What a lame attempt to distract us from the IR debate.

So why is this whole thing rubbish? Oh, so many reasons.

Firstly, all the Noongar decision found is that native title could exist. Specific areas will be considered to see whether they have actually been used by traditional owners since before settlement. In other words, no land that anyone other than Aboriginal tribes have actually found a use for in the past 200+ years will be affected.

Secondly, native title can be extinguished by any Act of Parliament. So the WA Government needn't appeal – it can just enact an Act of Parliament to redress anything if has problems with. If Philip Ruddock wants to protect our beaches – which as AM suggested aren't exactly threatened anyway – all he has to do is amend the Native Title Act to clarify that beaches in regular use cannot be covered by native title claims. But somehow I suspect he'd rather warn us about some nefarious Aboriginal plot to block us off from Bondi Beach than actually solve this problem – which probably doesn't exist anyway.

Thirdly, native title has next to no value other than symbolic. I read the original Mabo decision in some detail at uni, and despite the common view that it was the most terribly dangerous piece of judicial activism, it's really a very minimal thing. The reasoning goes something like this. The Crown's assumption of Australia was based on the doctrine of terra nullius – that there was no prior ownership. But the court recognised that we know today that terra nullius was just plain wrong – there were existing Aboriginal communities with their own systems of ownership. Wherever title has subsequently been granted to anyone since white settlement, though, that continuing native title is superceded. If not, native title survives. It's not exactly a radical concept to say that Aboriginal tribes owned land, or that they still do if no-one else has owned it since. Even pastoral leases extinguish native title, as was established in the aftermath of the Wik decision.

Otherwise the unused land vests in the legal entity of the Crown. Personally I find it considerably less offensive to assert that the Aborigines own it than that it belongs to Queen Elizabeth.

Native title doesn't convey freehold title, though. It doesn't give the same rights to traditional owners as, say, we have to our houses. They aren't going to have much luck building fences and charging admission to visit the beach.

The sad thing about native title is that it's basically the least we can do, legally speaking, in terms of Aboriginal land ownership. It basically recognises that where there's an ongoing connection with the land, there's an ongoing connection with the land. And it benefits only the Aboriginal peoples who have successfully retained that ongoing connection – that is, who've been least impacted by white settlement.

We could do far more to redress the historical wrongs involved in white settlement – that, even under international law at the time, the UK needed some kind of treaty in order to assume control of Australia. By comparison with the situation in New Zealand, where the (admittedly better politically organised) Maori people were given land and political rights under the Treaty of Waitangi – and although it has no strict legal effect, much of it was honoured in practice. Seats in Parliament are reserved for Maoris in NZ, whereas we'd rather deal with Aborigines who try to claim land rights primarily by demonising them.

Okay, it's Friday afternoon... rant over; I'm going to take off my black armband now, and head to the beach. Before the Aborigines stop me.

Dominic Knight



Photo: Chris Lane

Get 'em when they're young...

I don't want to be one of those bloggers who just puts up a YouTube video and lets it do all the work for him, okay? But here's a YouTube video. It's a report about a documentary, Jesus Camp, on North Dakota's Kids On Fire camp – a junior Charismatic Christian camp that is both hilarious and terrifying. The kiddies speak in tongues, talk about dying for their religion, and one of them says "It's kinda like being trained to be warriors, only in a much funner way." Right...

Some lowlights:

• Kiddies sobbing, as if a photographer's stolen their lollipops for exploitative photos
• Kiddies speaking in tongues (I used to do that in acting class, only we called it 'gibberish' and didn't think it meant we'd been taken over by Holy Spirits)
• The boy with the weird green makeup who says "Speak the word of the Lord!" onstage, straight out of some kind of Schlock Eisteddfod.
• The sobbing kid shouting "no more, no more!" about abortion – although my impression was that no more emotional manipulation would also have been nice.
• And my favourite, worshipping a cutout of President Bush. Nice separation of church and state, there

The bit that's most scary, though, is the soundbite with Pastor Becky Fisher, from Kids In Ministry International. She is the camp's founder, and is helping to promote the documentary – which, bizarrely, she doesn't see as exploitative. (I suspect the filmmakers may have a slightly less positive impression of her work!) She says "I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel, as they are in Pakistan, in Israel, in Palestine and all those different places.

Of course, they don't preach the Gospel in Pakistan, Israel or Palestine really, but she's American so we'll give her a pass. But from all this talk of laying down lives and the Middle East, you could be forgiven for thinking that she's building an army of Christian suicide bombers.

Still from Jesus Camp doco – see trailer here

Most of us bleeding-hearted liberals in the West are concerned about the extremes of Islamic fundamentalism (and Zionism, let's be even-handed) in those countries. But Pastor Becky's decided that what's really required is to set up exactly the same kind of indoctrination outfit, only for Christians. And we even see her yelling out "This means war!" It really is Looney Tunes stuff.

Particularly disturbing is the scene with the kid who talks about how "A lot of people die for God and stuff, and they're not even afraid." I'm not sure that's admirable.

She denies these allegations, of course – and fair enough, the people who put this story together are probably your typical media liberals wanting the Christian right to conform to their view of them. (A charge I wouldn't exactly be innocent of.) So she's not running Christian terrorist training camps, or building a George Bush Hitler Youth, as fascinating a notion as that would be. But she is attempting to build that same level of fundamentalist devotion through extreme emotional manipulation, which is why I find her explanation of the crying and speaking in tongues worrying in itself:

Some of them experience a physical healing in their bodies. This is often where children are "filled with the Holy Spirit" for the first time and receive their "prayer languages" otherwise known as speaking in tongues. Sometimes children don't know why they are crying but they love what they are feeling. Typically this kind of intensity will go on for an hour or more. Nobody wants to leave because the atmosphere is filled with the sweet presence of God.

I'm sure that the Taliban view their religious indoctrination camps as "filled with the sweet presence of God" as well.

Now, I don't want to get into a religion-on-religion smackdown – the Pope's been doing enough of that himself lately. I just think that at least from a secular perspective, this level of emotional manipulation of children is disturbing, no matter which religion does it. Isolating and brainwashing kids isn't the right way to build converts, no matter how worthwhile a religion otherwise is. And promoting the concept of laying down your life for a religion at a susceptible age – whether metaphorically as Fisher claims she does (although judging by the clip, I'm not sure the kids fully understand that) or literally as suicide bombers – seems deeply irresponsible.

The appropriate response to extremist religious training camps in the Middle East is to monitor them carefully and oppose that practice in our own countries, not replicate them in the West for Christianity. And viewing the current conflict as a holy war merely legitimises the rhetoric of groups like al Qaeda.

If it's appropriate to criticise Jill Greenberg for deliberately making kids cry for art, and I think it is, it seems more reprehensible to do so over a number of years, to win converts to your religion.



Dominic Knight

Image (C) Jill Greenberg – used for criticism and review purposes.

The London eyes

George Orwell's Big Brother is terrifying. Not as bad as the TV show that came to take his name, naturally, but – if I can come over all high-school-English-essay for a moment, Orwell's dystopic vision of a world of perpetual surveillance was the ultimate privacy nightmare. So it's unfortunate that the English town of Middlesbrough has implemented one of his most sinister visions – surveillance cameras that bark orders at you.

In 1984, the telescreens screens are two-way – that is, they enable the Thought Police to spy on you as well as disseminating propaganda everywhere. In Middlesbrough, they recently fitted speakers to 7 of the town's 158 security cameras, and the monitoring team have been using the speakers to immediately reprimand antisocial behavior, as the Mail on Sunday noted:



[I] watched as a cyclist riding through a pedestrian area was ordered to stop.

'Would the young man on the bike please get off and walk as he is riding in a pedestrian area,' came the command.

The surprised youth stopped, and looked about. A look of horror spread across his face as he realised the voice was referring to him.

He dismounted and wheeled his bike through the crowded streets, as instructed.

Imagine the terrible shock you'd get! But soon this will be ubiquitous, presumably, and then we'll just get used to the idea that when we're in the street, faceless people can tell us what to do. But it's not a totalitarian thing, right? It's for our protection. As the mayor behind the scheme, Ken Mallon (a former policeman who's nicknamed RoboCop) explained to the Mail, "Put it this way, we never have requests to remove them."

In a way, it's actually more honest. CCTV cameras can be very unobtrusive. Whereas if someone barks orders at you, at least you know you're being watched!

The UK has a particularly large number of security cameras – over 5 million. Many, especially in central London, date from the days of the IRA. And the recent introduction of congestion charges has led to an additional blanketing of cameras on the streets. Walking around London, you also see private cameras everywhere – generally they're marked with yellow stickers showing who retains the information.

The cameras were credited for the rapid speed with which the London bombers (and their copycats) were identified by authorities, who sifted through over 2500 pieces of CCTV footage. The cameras, of course, have also been very helpful to wacky conspiracy theorists who seek to prove that the Government staged the whole thing.

As usual, the defence offered to those who complain about the intrusiveness is that the innocent have nothing to fear. That's what we heard when they tried to roll back civil liberties after 9/11 as well. But the innocent have to suffer considerable discomfort, with the unnerving sensation that everything they do is being watched. This unnerves many people. Others love being on camera. But that, as Hotdogs' case has shown, can be problematic as well.

We are clearly going to have to get used to universal surveillance. I'm writing this on a Mac with a camera built into it, and even though it's supposed to have a green light when activated, I assume a clever programmer could get around it. (Boy, the footage'd be boring though). The previous Mac iSight cameras had an iris you could close for privacy, but this one's always there. What's more, soon everyone will have 3G phones with cameras in them. It means the chances of guaranteed, camera-free privacy are genuinely slim. It also means ever more crappy amateur footage uploaded to YouTube. Neither of these prospects are exactly promising.

But the guy who operates the scheme, Jack Bonner, has some reassuring words for those worried about civil liberties:



Mr Bonner said: 'We always make the requests polite, and if the offender obeys, the operator adds 'thank you'. We think that's a nice finishing touch.

Yes – if we're going to have thought police, the least we can do is make them civil.

However the ubiquitous cameras in Middlesbrough could at least have one positive effect. Mark Viduka plays for the local football team, and as per one of my favourite bits of football slander (note its ubiquity!), the cameras will help us determine conclusively whether Viduka did in fact "eat all the pies".

Dominic Knight



PS: Note that the previous linked image of Viduka with pies is Photoshopped.

PPS: Before you comment, I know Middlesbrough is not in London, but I liked the title.

Bring on the full smoking ban already

It's great to see a reporter confirming what anyone who's visited a pub recently already knows: that the final step in our gradual transition to a full ban of smoking inside pubs is unworkable and stupid. Speaking as an asthmatic who finds smoky environments extremely oppressive and also objects to being forced to endure smoke that a) stinks b) makes your clothes pong for days and c) gives you cancer, next July's total ban can't come around quickly enough.

But despite them "openly flouting" the ban, I don't think the Department of Health should run around busting pubs for these silly infractions on technicalities. I think it should acknowledge that its gradual approach was foolish, and we should just wait until July and then it'll all be over.

In a typical Bob Carr offend-nobody move, the change to smoke-free pubs was put through at a glacially slow rate to spread the political grief. The complete ban arrives at the point where he's no longer in politics, of course – and just after the next state election in March. What an infuriatingly cynical approach. Of course, by the 2011 election, everyone will be used to it.

So until it's electorally convenient for the ALP, we have laws so artificial that in most pubs, they simply don't work. The current rules say:



• smoking is allowed in a maximum of one room, whether it is a bar, gaming or recreation room. This smoking room must not exceed 25% of the total combined area of bar/gaming/recreational rooms.

• if a venue consists of a single room (i.e. a single undivided enclosed space comprising bar/gaming/recreation area), then smoking is permitted in up to 25% of that bar/gaming/recreation area

As the example of the Clare Hotel cited in the article shows, not many pubs have an ideal smaller smoking room that is no more than 25% the size of their floorspace. Patrons at the Clare regularly come within 1.5m of the bar, which maintains the passive smoking risk. But otherwise they'd be pressed up against a pokie. It's absurd.

And some pubs have only one room, and how silly is the rule for those venues? 25% of the same room isn't much help at all if you end up sitting right next to people in the smoking bit. It reminds me of the time I flew British Airways and was seated one row away from the smoking section, and forced to inhale the frenzied puffing of chain smokers throughout the flight.

Bob Carr should have bitten the bullet and put in an immediate ban. Did he think people were going to slowly give up smoking during the gradual phasing-out? That they'd be down to 25% of that original pack a day by now and be able to flick off the switch come July. It was a politically gutless move.

The lameness of this kind of approach is also evident in the way they introduced electronic tolling. In Victoria, Jeff Kennett decided that everyone had to get an e-tag immediately or pay a fine, so everyone got one. In Sydney, we're still forced to endure unnecessary queues on our freeways because of manual tolling. On the Harbour Bridge, these queues can add half an hour to the journey. They should set aside one tollbooth for cash on the Bradfield only, and let the people who can't be bothered getting a tag wait for an hour in a queue. That'd make them get an e-tag.

The NSW Labor Party constantly takes an annoying, inconvenient middle ground to avoid offending people. John Howard never minds about offending the minority, but Carr and Iemma seem to want everyone to sort of mildly like them, so they never show any leadership.

Thank goodness that by July, the problem will finally be solved. There won't be foolish arbitrary 25% lines that are impossible to interpret. If it's an indoor space, you won't be able to smoke there, and no-one will be happier about that than me.



Dominic Knight

Free Naomi and the Papua 5!

Indonesia's prisons are full to bursting point with Australians. Not only are Schapelle Corby and the Bali 9 currently sweating in our northern neighbour's jails – though most of the latter group won't be for long, tragically – but the queen of tabloid current affairs herself, Naomi Robson, has been arrested along with her crew for having a tourist visa. Oh, the injustice.

The SMH report points out that this wouldn't exactly be hard to detect, since there's a full camera crew with her. Usually when reporters want to surreptitiously film under a tourist visa, they use one operator and a domestic-looking camera. Tourism visas may well have been the appropriate option. But I dispute any suggestion that they've got the wrong visa. Anyone who knows her work would find it completely credible that Robson would have hired a professional camera crew to shoot her holiday footage.

She must be freed immediately, because she has important work to do – not just for Seven, but also for Indonesia, if not humanity itself. I don't believe she wants report about cannibals and potentially embarrass Indonesia. It was probably just that someone in West Papua, who may or may not have been a cannibal, welfare cheat, rip-off merchant, or youth gone wild. I can guarantee that what she is actually there to do is condemn someone down on their luck, and possibly mentally ill, to provide a spectacle that confirms the petty prejudices of middle Australia.

Come to think of it, that might mean doing a report about how all Papuans are cannibals after all.

The sad thing is that the Yudhoyono Government could have worked with Naomi. They aren't happy about Australia's recent decision to grant asylum to a bunch of West Papuans, and who better to pick on possibly bogus refugees than Today Tonight? The Government shouldn't be kicking her out of the country, they should be leading her straight to Papua's shonky refugee boat operators, so she can harangue them about jumping the queue.

Seven's head of News, Peter Meakin, denied that Robson's uncharacteristic trip to cover a real story was a bid for credibility, telling ABC radio that "We don't decide what stories to do on the basis of journalistic credibility." Of course they don't! Had the interviewer ever watched the show? Let's just say that TT isn't generally angling for Walkleys.

So shame on to the Indonesian Government for deporting Naomi because she didn't have a journalist visa. I sincerely hope some junior reporter is dispatched to kick the relevant authorities' door in and ask the tough, simplistic questions. Come on – as if the host of Today Tonight would ever be involved in journalism.



Dominic Knight

Photo: Shaney Balcombe

It's still 9/11 24/7

(Sorry for the delay updating, I've been a bit unwell.) Well, we seem to have made it through 9/11 (that'd be 11/9 for local readers) in all timezones without any terrorist attacks. Which, given Al Qaeda's fondness for anniversaries, is something of a relief. But that's not to say we can let our guard down. Oh no. So thank goodness everyone's least favourite terrorist organisations have come out and promised a whole heap more attacks. Otherwise we might have had a break from all of this whole living-in-constant-fear thing.

Al Qaeda's new no 2 (who will surely only last a month or two before being captured like all the others – it's a high-turnover position) served up a metaphor more tortured than anyone stuck in Guantanamo Bay. "The days are pregnant and giving birth to new events, with Allah's permission and guidance," Ayman al-Zawahiri said. The video was interpreted as suggesting that the world's most feared terrorist organisation was planning to expand into the crowded field of terrorism in Israel. Why they'd warn of a place they were actually planning to attack escapes me, but the video certainly will have gotten everyone all nice and scared again.

And, closer to home, a former Jemaah Islamiah leader, Nasir Abas, warns that more terrorist attacks are on the way in the region, headed by Noordin Mohammad Top. Apparently we're in for one attack a year. Nice to know they're keeping regular. Does that mean that once we've had one, that's it for the calendar year? That'd be helpful. Or does it mean that, as usual, no-one actually knows anything much about their plans, and is making news on the whiff of an oily rag just to try and scare us all?

Ninemsn ran an article informatively titled "Al Qaeda is everywhere" today, containing the gem of an observation that Qaeda has no head. "You can't lop the head off, because there is no real head," says Deakin University's Assoc Professor Damien Kingsbury. I suspect Osama bin Laden wouldn't be too happy with Kingsbury right now. He's invested a lot in building his profile as the world's leading terrorist. And if lopping off his head wouldn't help, the CIA's been wasting a lot of time – and making itself look very silly –  unsuccessfully chasing a guy who apparently doesn't matter. And "conceptual, not physical conflict?" Tell that to our troops in Afghanistan.

The interesting point Kingsbury makes in the article is that "the more global attention al-Qaeda gets, the more it grows." Like through articles entitled "Al Qaeda is everywhere", for example?

As ironic as this may be, we must be willing to ignore the attempts of the Fox New Channels of this world to create a sense of constant siege. This kind of fearmongering is playing into the terrorists' hands. They release these tapes to create this sense of terror, as a way of exercising power over us. So we must we must remain vigilant, but not forget that very few people in our society are actually killed by terrorists, and that it's far more dangerous, for example, to drive a car. When we say they we won't let them change our way of life, part of that should involve not blowing the extent of the threat out of all proportion.

Meanwhile President Bush is still linking Iraq and American security, saying (in a pretty smh.com.au quote box, what's more) that "the safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad", because if we don't get 'em there, they'll get us here. That is probably now true. An excellent achievement.

But as President Bush finally acknowledged, Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. He was only ever just "a threat". And never to America. His involvement in a terror attack on US soil would have led to him being instantly deposed, and it was abundantly clear Bush was looking for a reason to get rid of him – so why on earth would he have provoked his own demise?

President Bush is right that there's no point leaving Iraq now, because it will descend even further into a lawless breeding-ground for terror, as Afghanistan has, and create more willing recruits for another 9/11. Whereas previously the Iraqis and Al Qaeda had been enemies. But the sooner America and Israel figure out that nothing makes you a terrorist target like unjustified invasions in Iraq and Lebanon, the better. We can't afford another distraction from dealing with Al Qaeda. The head of which is still very much alive, and still very much in need of being captured and interrogated.

Though Iraq is now probably the biggest front in the war on terror, it didn't used to be or need to be. We are faced with a much larger conflict than we needed, and our troops – and America's – are more thinly stretched than they should have been. Afghanistan is a live front again, and we haven't got the resources to deal with it properly.

We must never forget the nearly 3000 people who were murdered on 9/11. (Nor the symmetrical 3000 more Americans who've died so far in Iraq so that "America could be safe".) But nor must we forget how inappropriate the response to 9/11 was, and how much of the current conflict was the White House's own creation.

A column about deceased celebrities

As the remarkable outpouring of grief after David Hookes’ death showed us, the sudden, accidental death of an Aussie legend is the cause of much sorrow. His Test career had been brief, but his larrikin fame endeared him to everyone who loved cricket. So a week where two of our popular heroes die is, as the late, much-loved Steve Irwin might have put it, an absolute bloody shocker.

Steve Irwin and Peter Brock were both remarkable examples of Australian macho manhood. Irwin could wrestle crocodiles, and always prevailed. And, to the satisfaction of the more politically correct among us, he also translated that incredible enthusiasm into conservation, ploughing his television income back into buying land for wildlife sanctuaries and helping ban croc hunting in the NT. He was the real-life Crocodile Dundee, right down to the oversized knife in his khaki shorts and the sassy American wife.

Brock won the Bathurst 1000, the Holy Grail of everyone who’s ever done lappies down George St in a supercharged Holden or Ford, an unsurpassed 9 times. And he scored most of his victories in a Holden Torana. The only way you can get more Aussie than that is if he’d somehow managed to drive the gruelling 1000km of the race while sculling tinnies and playing two-up with his co-driver, all the while leaning his arm out the window holding a Winnie Blue.

The sense of tragedy we feel about both these deaths has been amplified by the fact that both were “doing what they loved” – meaning in other words that they had a rare moment of fallibility in fields where both were exceptional. Our sense of shock is as much because they didn’t prevail, as we expect them to. Both were as close as you can get to superheroes in our culture.

Irwin was remarkably brave, regularly swimming with sharks and playing with cobras, and had a remarkable way with animals. So for him to die while filming a sting ray, probably one of the least dangerous animals he’d ever encountered, for a documentary was an incredible shock. While Brock had conquered Bathurst so many times that he was dubbed “King of the Mountain”, but lost control in a rally he was competing in largely for fun. Again, it was the relatively light-on event that proved fatal.

As a stereotypical inner-city latte-sipper, it’d be fair to say that the blokey worlds of motorsport and crocodile handling haven’t exactly ranked highly in my consciousness. The Crocodile Hunter’s popularity within Australia was never as great as it was overseas, because the networks felt there would be a strong cringe factor. I watched several episodes of his work over the weekend as part of a non-stop marathon tribute, and it’d fair to say that the exuberant ockerness of his presentation probably plays a bit too closely to our stereotype for most Australians – as if a Frenchman hosted a show in a beret and a stripey blue shirt, holding a baguette and a roll of onions, constantly saying “Ooh la la”.

But like Brock – who will remain a Bradman-like legend in this country – Irwin was the best at what he did. In the episodes I saw, his bravery is just incredible. He steps into murky lagoons with crocodiles, and he leaps onto their backs and holds their jaws closed with his bare hands – and all so he could relocate them so they didn’t have to be killed. He was the real thing, and it’s fitting that all Australians are finally acknowledging this.

It’s hard to imagine a renowned painter or scholar being mourned like Brock or Irwin, even if their deaths had been equally tragic. The experience has shown us that Australia is still above all a larrikin country that likes its blokey heroes – and especially in the eyes of the world. But few people seem more deserving of so frenzied level of mourning than Brock and Irwin. It’s rare for two extraordinary, ordinary blokes to be so revered after their deaths. And rarer still that they so clearly deserve it.

Gratuitous Suri Cruise rumours

So, Suri's finally showed her remarkably tousled head, with photos in Vanity Fair. This was supposed to quieten down the rumour that she didn't exist, but all it's done is spark a whole new set of rumours. I've catalogued some just so we can all be appalled by how unfair they are.

Of course, if anyone litigious and connected with the Cruise-Holmes family happens to read this, let's be very clear that I am appalled by these very suggestions, and wholeheartedly endorse everything Tom Cruise has ever said. Well, except for the Scientology stuff. And MI:III being a great film.

1) Suri has an Asian ancestor. This one's all over the internet. This particular version is from a Chinese newspaper, no less. I could've gone to the source, but I thought the Chinese writeup was more amusing:

According to TMZ.com, website Jossip cheekily wonders whether or not Suri's delicate, almond-shaped eyes, the milky, pale-ish skin tone, the striking mane of dark, dark hair will lead to an article in Vanity Fair magazine as to why the tiny tot"has Lucy Liu's eyes"in "six years".

Hate to say it, I reckon Suri looks sufficiently like Tom and Katie for that not to be true. Although it'd be awesome if the baby was actually adopted from China. And even more awesome if it's real mum was Lucy Liu. Who knows – Xenu works in mysterious ways...

2) Jamie Foxx is Suri's godfather. Of course not, because a) Scientologists don't believe in God, and b) Jamie Foxx isn't one? As if they'd want a non-Scientologist to oversee Suri's spiritual development. C'mon people.

3) Suri didn't exist – as rebutted by the photos. I've got to include this for posterity, just to showcase the bizarreness surrounding Cruise, and the florid speculation that she didn't exist. Apparently there's a Scientological dictum that babies should be cocooned from the world to avoid corruption. Let me get this straight – that wacky unhinged actor guy who jumped on the couch was an after case for Dianetics, yeah; not a before case?

4) The couple's friends hadn't met her. Including fellow Scientologists John Travolta and Kelly Preston, apparently. Well, fair enough. Same religion or not, I wouldn't want anyone involved in Battlefield Earth corrupting my child.

5) Cruise ate the placenta and umbilical cord. And, some had speculated, the whole baby...

Lies, all lies. Add your own below so Tom Cruise can sue you, as well.



Dominic Knight

Images: Chinadaily.com, presumably from Vanity Fair

Greer and loathing in Queensland

Peter Beattie just won the Queensland election. Well, okay, he'd already won it. Any election campaign in which your Opposition leaders can't agree who'd be Premier if they won is pretty much yours automatically. But can you imagine how good he looks up in Queensland right now for dumping on Germaine Greer? Don't be surprised if his comments about forcing a law to double or triple the taxation on Greer's Queensland bush property are rushed to the electorate on Saturday as a referendum item, either.

Given the extent of community feeling on Irwin, it wouldn't surprise me if Beattie came out with a tough new law-and-order policy that would see Germaine Greer waking up in the crocodile pit at Australia Zoo next time she flies into Maroochydore.

Quite apart from Beattie taking on the task of being chief defender of Irwin's honour, some commentators have pointed out that the blanket coverage of his death is freezing the Opposition out of getting the media coverage they need to get their message out, much as 9/11 made Kim Beazley's campaign look like an irrelevance in 2001.

The ABC's electoral blogger Katie Franklin reported a hilarious comment from the Coalition's campaign director, Geoff Greene (I can't find it on the AFR site because it's pay-only):

"It's all over isn't it? Who could predict this?" Mr Greene said in today's Australian Financial Review newspaper. "The reality is, in this election Steve Irwin is the news from now until the weekend. Those stingrays are public enemy number one for us."

That's right, Geoff – forget the Irwin family, the real victim in all this is the Coalition.

Although his party might actually have a late chance if it brought out its own law and order campaign to round up all the stingrays Queensland at dawn, as Peter Debnam has promised to do with troublesome Muslim youth if elected in NSW. Only fitting for "public enemy number one", after all.

Ironically for Beattie, and as Greer pointed out, Irwin had previously supported the Liberals, labelling John Howard "the greatest leader in the world" in 2003. And that led to him being invited to a barbie with George Bush. Then again, as seems to be the case for so many Americans, Irwin was probably the only Aussie the President had ever heard of.

Greer's full article is worth a read – it's provocative and beautifully written. And it's reasonable to question the hype at times like these. Greer's piece is a form of obituary, of assessing the life's work of someone who has passed away. Sometimes these sorts of pieces can be harsh, but they're usually a valuable input into the endless discussions that inevitably follow the death of a much-loved public figure. The debate over Pope John Paul II's record on child abuse was a similarly controversial, but ultimately worthwhile, process of evaluation.

When I read her comments about snakes being mishandled and striking, I couldn't help but remember the Tim Webster incident at the Logies that I wrote about on Tuesday. I thought it had just bitten him because it wasn't a fan of Ten News, not because it was in distress. What a pity Lleyton and Bec's baby Mia didn't have venomous fangs she could have used to wreak revenge on her parents for awkwardly dangling her in the spotlight at this year's Logies.

Greer's comments may, typically, seem a trifle insensitive in places, but they certainly aren't "stupid", as Beattie has accused. I'm hardly expert enough to know whether Greer's point about disturbing animals is correct, but it may well be a legitimate criticism – I'd like to hear what a zoologist would think. But what I am enjoying is how she's disturbed populist ranters in their natural habitats – take for example the Tele's Luke McIlveen:



I suspect what irks Greer is Irwin was an Aussie who conquered the world but never forgot where he came from. Australians loved him. Who will mourn Germaine Greer when she keels over and dies in her mud-brick cottage in West Buggeryshire?

Well, I will mourn her, if Peter Beattie succeeds in throwing her to the stingrays. Society needs controversialists, who challenge our taboo grieving-Irwin bandwagon – as I kind of did in my last piece. (Well shucks, it was how I felt at the time.)

With such a remarkable ability to reinvent herself, and stir conservatives and wowsers, even after so many years in the spotlight, Greer is the academic equivalent of Madonna. Ultimately anyone who can write The Female Eunuch and go on Celebrity Big Brother in the course of a lifetime qualifies as one of the most consistently surprising, thought-provoking and valuable members of her generation.



Dominic Knight

Jihad for Dummies

Last week, al-Qaeda released a video with an American calling on his countrymen to convert to Islam and “join the winning side”. Unfortunately, its strategy shows an ignorance of marketing. For starters, it ignores the value of celebrity branding. Scientology would never get an unknown such as “Azzam the American” to promote it when it has Tom Cruise on board and even the shabbiest infomercial wheels out a B-grade celebrity such as Danny Bonaduce.

As the most wanted man in the world, Osama bin Laden has genuine star power and al-Qaeda is wasting his public appearances on incoherent ramblings.
Instead he could be delivering a compelling pitch. He should take a leaf from Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has challenged George Bush to a televised debate and even started his own weblog.
Then there’s presentation. Westerners have short attention spans and 48 minutes of a guy in drab clothes yelling at the camera isn’t going to convert anyone. They needed about three minutes, spiced up with slick editing, trendy camera angles and funky graphics and music.
And if al-Qaeda wants its clips to really take off on YouTube, a comic twist or gimmick is mandatory. To produce the kind of viral clip that people forward to their friends, the network should have had its message of global jihad delivered by a guy doing an awesome slam dunk, or perhaps a rollerskating dog.

What’s more, using American talent is hardly going to get Australians to view al-Qaeda sympathetically.
They could have overdubbed the video with an Australian accent for local audiences.
The West isn’t much better at communicating with Islamic countries. During the recent conflict, Israel inundated answering machines in Lebanese homes with threatening messages addressed to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. “Hassan, have you realised yet that the Israeli army is not as delicate as a spider’s web? It’s a web of steel that will strangle you,” one message said.
Many of them were made in the early hours of the morning, blurring the line between propaganda and prank call.
It wasn’t exactly a good way to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Lebanese. Judging by the angry reactions reported in the press, Israel has successfully done something I thought was impossible – invent a more annoying phone call than one from a telemarketer.
Both sides in the war on terror have a long way to go before we can break down the communication barriers that divide us. Still, I’d rather al-Qaeda try to release viral videos on the internet than anthrax in our cities.
Read more of Dominic Knight on the Radar blog at radar.smh.com.au.

Remembering the man whose snake bit Tim Webster

I try to cover the big story of the day on this blog, and today, there's only one possible topic of conversation in much of the world. It seems fitting that the tale of Steve Irwin's death should have been so dramatic, so much larger than our dull lives, like the man himself. Who ever heard of anyone being killed by a stingray? And even more extraordinarily, who ever heard of a creature that Irwin couldn't bend to his will? After all, this was the man who jetted into East Timor right after it was liberated to rescue two rogue crocodiles. I hadn't seen much of his show, and like many, found his public profile pretty bizarre. But I remember reading this story at the time and thinking – hype aside, that guy's the real deal.

It was an amazing story, even by Irwin's standards – well worth a read. (I've linked to the Google cached page here because Irwin's sites are down, no doubt because of the same overwhelming response from the public that saw thousands of comments on smh.com.au yesterday.)

After the liberation of East Timor, Australian troops found two crocodiles on the verge of death – I think they'd escaped from Dili Zoo, from memory. So the army flew Irwin flew in with his team, and he built new crocodile enclosures, and then saved them. I'll reproduce his own words, because how could you top them?

Now came the hard part, capturing, restraining and shifting the two crocodiles who didn't understand we were trying to help them. The local people got wind of the crocodile captures and thousands of them came to watch. The Australian Army did a great job keeping them from running in and getting chomped during one of the wildest captures of our lives. Maxine went easy. She was relatively subdued and only managed a couple of snaps and a death roll. I simply top-jaw roped her, pulled her out, and then she was easily restrained. We took her down to the sea where we washed her thoroughly and treated her injuries. She looked sick and had had her will to live bashed out. “Poor, poor girl – it’s ok. We love you and we’ll take good care of you.” She responded well to her new territory where for the first time she had water to submerge and swim in. Wow! She absolutely loved her new home and has been beaming ever since.

Anthony was another story. Oh boy – what a fight. He fought us all the way. I got top jaw ropes on with no problem, but being in such a contained area meant we couldn’t jump in and restrain him. He would’ve killed us all. It’s not his fault, he’s been through a lifetime of torture and as far as he was concerned we were trying to hurt him. He shook his head and death-rolled violently. He hit the concrete so hard it cracked; apparently people could feel the ground move twenty feet away. Finally, I’d had enough of him struggling and couldn’t take the risk of him hurting himself any more, so I jumped on him. Thank goodness Wes and the team backed me up with enough strength to drag him straight out, where we were able to restrain him on the ground. The Diggers jumped in too, so once we got him up we moved him quickly over to his new territory. He was totally disorientated and had never walked before so once we released him, he went into sensory overload. After trying to coax him into the water unsuccessfully, we finally dragged him in. As a final demonstration of his dominance, he death rolled. YES!

That's right, he jumped on a crocodile while it was trying to kill him.

And of course, he played down in his account that one of the crocs severed a tendon on his arm.

The other insight into Irwin that I remember is just how genuine his commitment to conservation was, as per this interview on Enough Rope:

Andrew Denton: A lot of people see you as this... this larger than life Steve Irwin, in some ways a one-dimensional, almost cartoon character. But what they, perhaps, don't know is you've bought huge tracts of land in Australia, Vanuatu, Fiji, US. Why have you done that?

Steve Irwin: I'm a conservationist through and through, Andrew. That's, er...that's why I was put on this planet, um, for the benefit of wildlife and wilderness areas. That's what I'm into. That's what makes me pumped, mate. That's what myself and Terry and our families have been all about.

Andrew Denton: So what's this land for?

Steve Irwin: Um, it's like national parks, mate.

Steve Irwin: We... You know, easily the greatest threat to the wildlife globally is the destruction and annihilation of habitat. So I've gone, "Right, well, how do I fix that? Well, making a quid here. People are keen to give me money over there. I'll buy it. I'll buy habitat." And I reckon the only thing wrong... Now, how's this? The only thing wrong with, you know, wildlife in Australia is that I don't own it. I could... Imagine how many kangaroos and crocodiles I could have if I owned Australia? It's, um... My wife is an American so she's got this, er... She's, um...you know, she's a good capitalist. And, er, she's very clever with money. Me, I'm not that clever and I don't really give a rip, but, er, she is. And, um, so whenever we get a...a, um...enough cash and enough...and a...and a chunk of land that we're passionate about, bang, we buy it.



It was ironic that he was called the Crocodile Hunter, ultimately, when he devoted so much time to protecting them. In fact, he was instrumental in stopping sport hunting of crocodiles in the Northern Territory.

The only time I saw him in person was during that famous incident at the Logies in 2003, when he brought along a carpet snake (I think there may have been a red carpet joke in there somewhere?) and jokingly pretended to get it to bite Eddie McGuire – but while he was joking around, he pretended to stagger down towards the audience, and it struck the Ten newsreader instead. I was sitting quite nearby, and saw it bite him. I was astonished anything could go wrong with Irwin around.

I guess he was used to such semi-supernatural rapport with animals that he may not always have appreciated the risks. He'd rolled the dice so many times and come up a winner that he was perhaps not always as cautious as he might have been – and that was what was so sad about all the criticism when he had his baby near that crocodile, which upset him enormously. He said he had been in control. The problem is that when wild animals are involved, that may not always be possible. But you have to admire him for taking those risks, even though they seem to have led to this death that has so devastated everyone. He was a man of his famously exuberant words.

Irwin signed off his lengthy account of the Timor rescue in bold caps, the closest you can come to rendering his personality in print:

I LOVE CROCODILES; ALWAYS HAVE AND ALWAYS WILL!



He's not a man for whom it seems appropriate to wish he rests in peace. So instead, let's hope he's still out there somewhere, jumping on the backs of rogue crocodiles.



Dominic Knight

Banksy, the Picasso of pranksters

I had only vaguely heard of guerilla artist Banksy before, but anyone who puts 500 home-made, insulting versions of Paris Hilton's album into stores in the UK is clearly some kind of a genius. I tracked down the images (note: the cover is somewhat M-rated – but art, so it's OK right?), and they're great. I've reproduced a few here – I'm sure an intellectual property renegade like Banksy won't mind. The dog's head in the final image might be a touch unfair, though. Dogs are quite intelligent.

Poor Paris – well, not poor in the wealth sense, but you know what I mean. Hardly anyone's buying her CD, and hundreds of those few who have are discovering they've instead bought something with far more artistic value.

And that it's flopped after all the headlines she customarily generates is particularly embarrassing. The publicity blitz was so great that Virgin Blue even played it as we landed the last time I caught one of their flights – as if the landing process wasn't nerve-racking enough without 'Stars Are Blind' as your soundtrack.

A quick look at Banksy's work shows that he's got an excellent c.v. of this kind of stuff. Among my favourites (mainly from the Wikipedia article):

• At London Zoo, he climbed into the penguin enclosure and painted 'We're bored of fish' in two metre high letters.
• In August, 2005, Banksy painted 9 images on the Palestinian side of the Israeli West Bank barrier, including an image of a ladder going up and over the wall and an image of children digging a hole through the wall
• In May 2005 Banksy's version of primitive cave painting depicting a human figure hunting wildlife whilst pushing a shopping trolley was found hanging in the British Museum.
• He smuggled a dead rat in a glass case into the Natural History Museum in London
• In June 2006, Banksy stencilled an image of a naked man hanging out of a bedroom window on a wall in central Bristol, England. The image sparked some controversy, with the Bristol City Council leaving it up to the public to decide whether it should stay or go. After an internet discussion in which 97% (all but 6 people) supported the stencil, the city council decided it would be left on the building.

You can buy a cheap Banksy of your own here, although they're currently sold out.

So much better than our closest equivalent, the serial pest Peter Hore. For one thing, Banksy never cost England qualification to the World Cup. I hadn't realised Hore was still being annoying – the media has probably decided not to give him any more attention:

• 11 August 2006 - Ran onto EnergyAustralia Stadium towards the end of a game between the Newcastle Knights v Manly Sea Eagles holding a guitar.
• 15 August 2006 - Burst into a Newcastle City Council meeting during a youth protest asking if someone "wanted [him] to make alot of noise...". He announced himself as the "future President of Australia"

I think it's been pretty comprehensively established that no-one wants Hore to make a noise, or in fact do anything at all.

Whereas Banksy's hugely popular – he has released numerous books (from which I learn that his first name is Robin, of course) designed the Blur album cover for Think Tank and has been acclaimed by art historians for placing unauthorised artworks in galleries. He's got a well-designed website and has been interviewed by Wired and The Guardian.

There's always been a debate over whether graffiti was art or vandalism. I'd only hope that more young graffitists would turn their attention to producing artworks that were so consistently amusing – and so effective as harsh social commentary. Particularly about Paris Hilton.

Harry Potter and the Caster-Out Of Demons

The Catholic Church really isn’t good with the mainstream media, are they? First they condemned The Da Vinci Code, providing Dan Brown’s potboiler – which no-one halfway to sane could conceivably have thought was real – with a massive free marketing campaign. Opus Dei’s outrage in particular gave credence to his silly story about self-flagellating monks. Now, the Pope’s personal exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth, has condemned Harry Potter as evil and satanic. (I’d have started with Voldemort, but apparently Harry’s just as bad.) But it’s Father Amorth who’s got me worried.

I guess it’s difficult to draw the line between fact and fiction when you devote your professional life to taking a book full of supernatural stories completely literally. So literally, in fact, that you swear off sex forever – in other words, it’s a pretty big call. After all, one book you read describes Jesus walking on water, and another describes Harry Potter flying on a broomstick. One’s provides the path to eternal life, the other is children’s fiction. Someone should probably save Father Amorth a bit of embarrassment and explain this to him.
Do readers really believe that Harry Potter is real? That the magic described could happen? Let’s just say that I’ve never heard of anyone breaking their nose running into a wall at Kings Cross Station.
Father Amorth takes particular issue with the distinction in the book between black and white magic – presumably on the basis that it isn’t possible for magic to be good. It’s all Satan. But unfortunately for Father Amorth, the bit that it’s most sensible to take issue with is whether any magic is possible. It’s not terribly sensible to get lost in the moral details of something that doesn’t exist.
The most worrying part of this story is not that Harry Potter may contain “the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil”, but that Pope Benedict employs a professional caster-out of demons. I’m not particularly reassured that the spiritual leader of hundreds of millions of people believes in demons enough to employ a professional Ghostbuster. Especially one without Bill Murray’s sense of irony.
What’s more, if demons exist, Father Amorth is doing a rubbish job, frankly. A simple process of vetting for demons before appointing candidates to the priesthood could have saved the church – not to mention the victims – an enormous amount of grief.
Father Amorth also said that Hitler and Stalin had been possessed by the devil – which might have been a more useful insight from someone inside the Vatican ahead of Hitler’s rise to power, as opposed to their initial support for fascism over communism.
While Father Amorth isn’t particularly convincing on the subject of demons or Satanism in Harry Potter or elsewhere, he has certainly provided ample evidence of the existence of fruitcakes within the Catholic Church.

Miss Universe: a formal complaint

Jennifer Hawkins and Erin McNaught look good today. And I don't mean in the bodacious-Miss-Universe sense, I mean they've gotten a whole bunch of good PR by agreeing to go to a couple of schoolboys' formals. Daniel Dilbey is taking Hawkins to his up in Bathurst, and Trinity Grammar's Jordan Avramides is taking McNaught to his at the Shangri-La – but only because Hawkins had filming commitments. Sure, their friends might think they're legends right now, and be high-fiving them on a gamble that paid off. But I don't.

This has disaster written all over it. Highly likely, these guys' bravado will collapse in a smoking ruin when these far older, far cooler, intimidatingly attractive women rock up to their formal, forcing them to endure a couple of hours of stammering hopelessness before gratefully escaping at the earliest polite opportunity.

Or, since these guys had the hide to see if Miss Universe wanted to spend an evening in their company, they may well be unbearably cocky, to the point of unpleasantness. I remember Year 12 guys like that – life has a funny way of taking the wind out of their sails by the time they hit 20, and no-one thinks they're cool anymore. Really, which adult wants to spend an evening with the Trinity Grammar Steve Stifler?

Jordan Avramides' behaviour hasnt't exactly impressed one woman – the Tele's dating ethics commentator, Amy Dale. She's concerned for the real victim in this – the girl Avramides dumped to take McNaught. He tried to justify this by saying she hadn't bought a dress yet, but Dale isn't buying that:

When Jordan justifies his choice by saying his one-time date hadn't even purchased a dress yet, it shows how much the young Lothario has to learn.

No girl goes out once, finds a dress and buys it. It takes months of flicking through dress racks.

In a sick way, it's part of the fun.

She could have friends going to the formal, which means locker-room talk is of little else.

I, like many girls, have done the nerve-wracking task of asking a guy to my formal, only to be told "I'd rather not''. Teenage boys can be cruel.

And I don't mean to sound old-fashioned but when you ask for a date, it's not an invitation until someone "hotter'' pops up.

Hell hath no fury like a Tele commentator empathizing with a woman scorned.

Well, I reckon you're well out of it, anonymous dumped-for-Erin-McNaught girl. You'd be better off being courted by someone who doesn't genuinely back himself with a supermodel, I reckon.

Sure, it's a nice joke, and it gets them good press coverage, but I reckon this is ultimately a lose-lose for Hawkins and McNaught. They'll have a boring night at best, and at worst something awful will happen. They'll be surrounded by drunk teenagers, and there's a genuine risk one of them will go home with a second corsage of spew.

And worst of all, what if one of the guys drunkenly tried to put a move on them? Can you imagine the embarrassment?

Plus, what about everyone else there? Dale is concerned for the other girls that won't look as good in the photos, but what about the guys? I'd have stammered like a typewriter if one of them had so much as glanced at me – right when I was trying to look my coolest. It was hard enough without having to be constantly terrified of making a fool of yourself in front of Jennifer Hawkins.

To be honest, I also object to this idea because I reckon there's a serious double standard in operation here. As the Radar blogger, I of course am inundated with many thousands of invitations to formals from schoolgirls who wish to be entertained by my urbane witticisms for an evening, but I turn them all down. Because it'd make me look really creepy – a bit like this guy.

Okay, so that isn't strictly true. But I would refuse on principle, if anyone had ever actually asked. Whereas if it's guys asking older women, that seems harmlessly cute. Well, that's just sexism and ageism rolled into one hideous corsage of discrimination.

Plus, why is it only supermodels who get these invitations? Why is no-one asking interesting conversationalists? It's almost like teenage boys are shallow or something.

Maybe I'm biased by retrospective fury with myself for foolishly asking someone I liked to my Year 12 formal instead of Elle Macpherson, who would have left me a quivering mess. Or my dream date of that era, Lynda Day from Press Gang. Sure, I was a geeky kid. Come to think of it, I was a quivering mess anyway.

But I can't help but think that formals are supposed to be about teenagers being awkward with one another, not with supermodels. It's a painful rite of passage to cap off the painful rite of passage that is the HSC. Adding Miss Universe into the equation adds up to an awful night for anyone – and especially the Miss Universe.

Dominic Knight



Photo: Danielle Smith

New chants for the old-school unionists

I heard the unionists protesting this morning. I wasn't able to get to the window, but I could hear a large crowd of angry people marching somewhere around the corner of George and Goulburn Sts, shouting "Hey hey, ho ho, WorkChoices has got to go!" I was struck by their passion for their cause. But mainly, I was struck by the realisation that they badly need some new chants. The Man and The System aren't going to hide cowering from the mailed fist of the Workers if the expression of their righteous fury sounds like the Seven Dwarves.

Seriously, that's the most popular chant at protests now. Even though it's a touch ironic, as the dwarves were singing "Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go". As opposed to "Hi ho, hi ho, it's off the job we go."

Later, they varied the chant. But they only varied it to "Hey hey, ho ho, Johnnie Howard has got to go." Guys, really – wishing won't make it so. Peter Costello's tried.

Now don't get me wrong. I am a card-carrying union member and I support the right to protest. Even though all my gigs are as an evil contractor, so those crucial awards negotiations don't particularly help me, and in fact depict those like me as "the problem". I firmly believe that the unions are vital to sticking up for the rights of workers who would otherwise be stuffed around by bosses even more. And when I was working part time at uni, the CPSU helped to get me a better deal when it emerged I was being underpaid under an award that no-one else in the university was even using.

I just wish that when they were out there, fighting the good fight, they had something really cutting to say.

One march I was involved in at uni had the lamest chant I've ever heard:

"Vanstone and VCs, say that we must pay fees

Bullshit... come off it... education's not for profit".

See our naivete back in the 1990s? Education not being for profit? Pah!

Anyway, let's just say that Amanda Vanstone and the vice-chancellor weren't exactly convinced, even if they could discern our words in spite of their awkward scansion.

I've been a bit unsure about the value of protesting ever since, at least in the Howard era. I have long assumed that the more people came out, the more he felt he was doing something right – a theory confirmed by four election victories. But if we're going to do it – and really, it's all we can do – we really need to come up with rhymes that strike fear into the hearts of the powerful. This is the era of gangsta rap, people. Can you imagine 50 Cent hitting the street with an offcut from Snow White? Would NWA have made such a statement if their explosive first single had been "Hey Hey, Ho Ho, the Police have got to go?"

I know Aussie hip hop is a bit lame by comparison, but even dodgier rhymes like The Herd's 'Scallops' ("Like a three dollar thirty bag of fresh hip hop, from your local fish n chip shop, ah scallops, with dollops of flavour on top, when we do what we do we give heads the bops") puts the union movement to shame. In fact, they should commission The Herd. Not only can they write, but they've got numbers. Perfect.

I'm not exactly a rhymesmith myself. (Although I know which word NWA would put in front of WorkChoices to make a far more eloquent point about the new IR legislation.) But please, if you are, submit any suggestions and I'll pass them onto the unions. Their need is even greater than the Socceroos', and it's clear that at this point they'll take pretty much anything. Hey hey, ho ho.



Photo: Nick Moir, of a protest last year

Fat kids need more than McPasta

McDonald's has given into the health-nazi wowsers, and launches a healthier children's meal tomorrow. Mackers is hoping that its unfortunately-named Pasta Zoo range will get the critics – and potential litigants – off its back, because children will now pester their parents for a slightly lower-fat meal in order to get a crappy plastic toy. Well, that's childhood obesity instantly solved.

The absurd thing about these new meals is that according to the SMH article today, it's only got 6g less fat than the cheeseburger meal – 19 instead of 25. Not exactly a weight-loss revolution, is it? If that's the difference, kids may as well eat the food they want. They're going to get almost as fat, so they might as well enjoy it.

Of course, they're also offering Crunchie shakes and sundaes, for a limited time only – just in case you though the burger giant had turned over a completely new leaf or something.

I'm happy to admit that McDonald's has made an effort with its Deli Choices and Salads options – many of those options contain less than 10g of fat. But really, who goes to Mickey D's for a bread roll? They're quite tasty, but not compared with, say, a turkish bread or wrap from a café. The only real point of them is to give parents something to eat other than Big Macs while their kids are pigging out on the good stuff.

I don't tend to eat their food during daylight hours or when sober, and really – when it's past 1am and you're on the way home, who's going to order a low-fat sandwich? Especially when you have to wait for it. Cheeseburger all the way – nothing tastes better than delicious plasticky cheese and sugary tomato sauce at that hour. Well, except a kebab.

Ultimately, this low-fat stuff is just tinkering around the edges. Kids are always going to eat reasonably unhealthily. It's not like kids didn't used to eat sweets and fried food. The main problem is that they don't exercise, not that they don't eat sufficiently healthy food. And all the Government has come up with is a lamo campaign featuring a dancing armchair.

It's actually not that hard a problem to solve. The state already gets complete control of kids during schooldays. If they want to spend $116 million on getting kids to exercise, they should crackdown on unhealthy food in tuckshops, make the school day longer and include an hour of mandatory sport or games every day, say from 3 to 4pm. Parents would appreciate having their kids taken care of for that extra time, and kids would really enjoy it as well. It would also reduce the cost of after-school care, and parents could reallocate some of the money they spend on that to sport.

I was pleased to see that they're already well on the way to doing this. The issue is that it doesn't appear to be mandatory, and seems only to involve regular sports – but getting kids simply to run around for an hour in the playground is helpful as well. If kids had to play brandings for an hour after school, that would make a huge difference. Nothing made me run as fast in primary school as the prospect of having a tennis ball pegged at my head.

(Well, perhaps when we used to play Catch and Kiss. Boys' attitudes to girls in primary schools are bizarre. Most guys I know spend most of their waking lives trying to catch girl germs these days.)

Television and computer games are the real culprit in the obesity crisis. And while I'm all for McDonald's making its food less unhealthy and not being allowed to target kids – which is only a milder version of tobacco companies marketing their unhealthy products to them, if you think about it – the best solution is to increase the number of calories kids have to burn, not just to attempt the almost impossible task of reducing their intake.



Dominic Knight

A column about snakes and planes

Flying isn’t what it used to be. For years now, the security wowsers have been whittling back the enjoyment of what was once one of life’s true pleasures. They took our boxcutters and scissors – terrible news for those who need to complete inflight craft projects. They took our liquids, punishing anyone who needs to reapply hair gel over the Pacific. They’ve even taken away our laptops and iPods on some flights, forcing us to endure the built-in entertainment system – or, worse still, talk to other passengers.

I haven’t been reduced to listening to the Qantas inflight audio in years, thankfully, but when I last did most of it seemed to be hosted by Mike Hammond. Really, how much more of this we can take?

While the actual act of flying is becoming increasingly stressful and unpleasant because of these restrictions, aeroplane disasters are becoming a popular culture staple. Lost memorably begins with one, and United 93 and World Trade Center are only the latest in a long line of films to use them as a backdrop for drama. But all these stories have been unrelentingly serious. It’s been a long time since a comedy was set on what’s now our scariest form of transport – right back to Flying High, probably.

But now there is Snakes On A Plane, the movie with the most brilliantly literal title in cinema history. When you hear it, along with the fact that it stars Samuel L. Jackson, the movie practically writes itself. And that’s exactly what happened on the internet. Thousands of bloggers were so taken by the name, with all the cheesy B-movie goodness it promises, that they began producing sample dialogue, song, movie posters – even mocked up scenes. Never before has such a thin premise produced such an avalanche of content.

The studio, New Line, was initially worried that the project was heading too far down the camp road, mistakenly believing that the best marketing pitch would be that the film realistically evoked the scenario of a crate of snakes getting loose on an aeroplane. They changed its name to Pacific Air Flight 121, and reined the script in, aiming for a PG rating. The internet exploded in criticism, and so did the film’s star, who had decided to commit to the project purely on the basis of its schlocky title.

Sensibly, the studio gave into the baying of the blogosphere. They changed the name back, and added an extra 5 days of shooting – almost all adding graphic R-rated (in America) scenes. Jackson had made the excellent point that when hundreds of snakes appeared mid-flight, people might swear a little, and the studio even added the line that the fans had predicted must surely be in there, and hadn’t been, when Jackson exclaimed “I have had it with these mother&$%#^@ snakes on this mother%$#%$# plane!” Giving the film a dramatic turning point as deliciously obvious as the film’s title. And lo, the fans were happy.

Our jaded, media-saturated society can see through marketing hype. But the hype over this film came from the grassroots. So much of the internet is about large communities agreeing on what’s funny, and even though the studio initially fought against the self-conscious ridiculousness of their film, they guaranteed themselves an instant audience when they decided to embrace the corniest B-movie conventions.

Nowadays, we see potential aeroplane disasters on the nightly news as well as at the multiplex. So it’s no wonder that in an increasingly worrying world, we are crying out for self-consciously silly entertainment. While reality remains this dramatic, the market for escapist silliness will remain strong. Which is why I’m currently developing a comedy-horror movie, Giant Squid On A Chairlift. (Tagline: “It really sucks. You.”) I just hope Samuel L. Jackson’s available.

Osama bin after Whitney

You know, we don't laugh at Osama bin Laden enough. He wants us to live in fear of eternal jihad? Let's not give in to his attempts to make us scared of him. Instead, let's laugh at him as if he were, for example, the terrorist version of Paris Hilton. And what better way to fuel that laughter than with a recent story that the world's most evil terrorist mastermind had a big crush on Whitney Houston? And yeah, I linked to that story from the Mirror. I know it quite probably isn't true. All I know is that if you don't find the prospect funny, the terrorists win.

The claim comes from a Sudanese writer, Kola Boof, who claimed to be bin Laden's sex slave. Well, in fact, she was his mistress, according to a clarification her publishers have been sending out, which is a shame – "sex slave" sounds so much more salacious.

She says she was raped and kept captive by him for several months a decade ago, I have to say, this keeping of sex slaves isn't exactly the sort of behaviour I expect from a religious extremist who wants to purge the decadent West by blowing it up. They really should think about arresting him or something. Although I expect a few thousand other murder trials might have priority.

Boof also said bin Laden kept Playboys in his briefcase. That's so unclassy. Other freedom fighters with true integrity, like Che Guevara, would never have dreamed of doing that. This shows us a new side of bin Laden – the Saudi extremist Hugh Hefner. So perhaps Mister bin Laden should think about punishing his own decadence before he calls us to account for ours? Really, religious extremists can be such hypocrites.

Plus, what poor taste! I have to say that my response to The Bodyguard wasn't to want to "spend vast amounts of money on meeting" it's star, but to rain holy fire on those involved. In my book, 'I Will Always Love You' is enough to justify a conviction on terror offences.

My favourite bit is the claim that "Bin Laden constantly spoke of how beautiful Whitney was and what a nice smile she had, how truly Islamic she was but brainwashed by American culture and by her husband – Bobby Brown." I don't know if Public Enemy No 1 has ever seen much of Whitney's work, but I think Osama must have been far beyond lovestruck if he saw her as a potential paragon of Islamic womanhood. Although he's probably right about being corrupted by her husband. Bin Laden probably didn't need to plot to blow up Bobby Brown, though. Brown's done a pretty good job of self-destructing by himself.

That would be a brilliant outcome for us all – even Houston herself, perhaps. According to some stories, some quality time away from decadent Western culture has been necessary for her in the past. And there's nowhere you'd have more pressure on you to go cold turkey than in a mysterious mountain hideout.

And just think of the reward she'd get if she turned him in. Sounds like she needs it, what's more.

That's not all. Not only would she be able to stop bin Laden from wanting to blow us all up, but as a strict Islamic wife, she would have to abandon her recording career. So frankly, I think Whitney should take one for the team.



Dominic Knight

A storm in a tea break

The Darrell Hair ball-tampering affair has gone from absurd to utterly farcical. Now ICC chief Malcolm Speed is flying in like a cricketing Kofi Annan, and Pakistani President Musharraf has shoved his oar in as well. And just when you thought the situation couldn't get more ridiculously overheated, Shane Warne butts in with an opinion that Hair isn't racist. Hate to say it, Warney, but in a racism controversy, I don't know that the words of a white Australian are going to carry much weight on the subcontinent.

John Buchanan hasn't exactly helped either by saying that Australia would never forfeit a match, implying that Pakistan are a pack of whingers with less moral fibre and regard for the much-vaunted "spirit of the game" (Which I think is Bundy, isn't it?). I guess it comes down to values. The Pakistan team apparently values making principled stances, even self-defeating ones, while Australia don't value anything so much as winning.

Surely there would be some issue of principle over which Australia would walk off the field and forfeit a match? Nah, mate. Not if it meant losing a Test. Not even if they disrespected the Don.

Not that Pakistanis haven't said irritatingly provocative things too. Mini-Hitler, Imran? Slight difference of degree here with six million murdered Jews, wouldn't you think?

It's virtually impossible to judge this situation until the independent inquiry. None of Sky Sports' 30 cameras on the site caught anything, which is troubling for Hair to say the least. I expect the umpires will be exonerated though, at least technically, simply because Hair seems like an absolute stickler for the strict letter of the rules, and willing to attract an almost unlimited amount of controversy where he feels he's in the right.

But umpires have to exercise good sense as well as rigidly applying the rules. And the biggest problem here is that everyone involved has been acting so self-righteously, to the verge of pig-headedness. Without knowing precisely what the tampering involved, the umpires' initial actions can't really be critiqued, but Hair's subsequent comments have been extremely provocative. While Pakistan's refusal to take the field was always going to invoke a forfeiture scenario, particularly when the umpires had already shown they were going to strictly apply the rules. And talk of libel is only going to seem Pakistan seem more inappropriately petulant. The time to act was after the match. After all, It was only 5 runs.

But something's got to give. Like the chucking issue that created Hair's other infamous media storm, this situation ultimately highlights a flaw in the game. I know everyone loves cricket traditions, but designing a ball which can't be tampered with – with a synthetic, unpickable seam for example – seems only sensible. Sure, it's good the way the ball changes over the time of the match, and that new balls have distinct challenges to old balls. But like diving in football, any situation in sport where cheating is relatively easy and gets you an advantage, but ultimately relies on the umpires' subjective discretion, is a recipe for disaster.

And further, any situation where the consumption of breath mints can potentially affect the outcome of a series is absurd.

Cricket traditionalists often sigh and say "it's just not cricket." The more appropriate thing for everyone to remember here, though, is that it's just cricket. There is more than enough distressing conflict in the world at the moment without needing to add so much energy to such a trivial issue as this one ultimately is. Everyone tampers with the ball. The only sensible thing to do is change the rules so that no-one can.



Dominic Knight