The Baillieu Government, like so many state governments around Australia, promotes a “tough on crime” agenda. The media happily tags along, creating a fear of youth driven crime waves that, according to any statistical analysis, simply doesn’t exist. It’s a gigantic rort perpetrated on an unwitting public who feel the fear and in turn shriek for harsher sentences.

The Baillieu Government is moving forward with its plan to introduce mandatory minimum two year sentences for offenders between the age of 16 and 17 convicted of crimes involving violence.

It’s not just a political stunt. It’s much worse than that. The social cost of fixed mandatory sentences for youth offenders can only be measured after the Baillieu Government is long dead and gone.

Firstly, there is no suggestion that the juvenile justice system is in any way offering sentences that are inappropriate or systematically lenient. Young offenders who pose a risk to the community are locked up but custodial sentences remain at the discretion of a judiciary mindful of the long term costs of detention both to the state and the individual.

If the Baillieu Government took the time to understand the reports from its own sentencing advisors, it would quickly learn that the existing data shows that mandatory sentencing, as with longer sentences, offers no deterrent value to youth or adult offenders.

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After 10 years of nurturing my hatred of John Howard, I should have been ecstatic at his defeat, I should still be dancing about it even now. I’m not, but thanks to him I understand a little better, why the Convoy of No Confidence/Occupy Things/ Talk Back trolls are so incoherently enraged.

On election night 2007 I was banished from the lounge room because our guests, given the choice, preferred Kevin Rudd’s acceptance speech over my half-drunk yelling at the TV.

I sat on the edge of the bed, swaying softly and wondering if banishment extended to No More Beer For You Mister So Stay Out Of The Kitchen. I also wondered what it was that I had just seen and why it made me so sad; the night should have been a celebration, gloating and cheering and inventing new, clever ways to say “Bye bye, Johnny”. But it wasn’t.

Partly it was Rudd’s speech; a collection of buzzwords and bland mission statements, delivered without passion, without promise, without soul. Mission Accomplished, Rudd seemed to say: we’re here now, we’re in government, that was all we had to do.

“After eleven years of Howard”, I yelled, “THIS is what we get?” But despite Rudd’s ability to suck all the life from a room, his speech wasn’t the only thing that had given me pause.

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Let me say up front that as someone who has been ‘out’ as a lesbian for 27 years, I just don’t get this push for gay marriage. I don’t understand why it has become a headline issue in the push for equal human rights, especially when our rights in other areas are being slowly eroded by some state governments. In the ‘80s we fought for the right to be different. Now it seems that we’re fighting for the right to be the same. I don’t get it.

Having our relationships recognised as valid and legal is one thing, but why on earth go as far as wanting to get married? I’m not the only one who thinks this way. One of the saddest things I’ve seen at a Pride March was two years ago where a lone, brave man carried a sign saying, ‘I don’t want to get married. Do I still belong?’

Brief from my editor: “How are things in your brain at the moment? Got any thoughts you’d like to throw together for us? Something political if you have it lying around...”

Well, yes I do, I guess — I mean everything is political at some level, right? I mean if you think about the fuel you burn driving to the supermarket and the working conditions there and the petrochemicals in washing powder you buy and the conditions for the workers wherever it is they make the glorified soap and the fuel burnt to transport it here and the coal burnt to provide power for the washing machine and the petrochemical residue you then flush into the waterways, all to make your shirt white for work... then all stuff has a political element. Although the above example works best if you work for a petrochemical company. Oh, yes — if you manage third world labour for a petrochemical company. See? Now it works good.

What has happened to me though, as I have aged, is that all my political thinking has become broader, like the broad majestic Shannon. Or something. I have decided to age in a situation where we need to be mindful of the weather and the climate, of the soil and all the beetles, bugs, spiders, birds, possums and quolls in order to get along alright, to have food for ourselves and a place that we feel we are living in with some semblance of balance. Or something. I’m not getting my point across all that well with that last paragraph — but think about the fact that I had to break off from writing it to rescue some beetles that had flown into the outdoor bath we’re preparing before the fire got hot enough to do them harm. There we are. All clarity and light now, eh?

I HAVE TAKEN LEGAL ADVICE REGARDING THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE/ESSAY/WHATHAVEYOU BUT IT WAS NOT TO MY LIKING AND SO I HAVE LARGELY MADE UP ALL LAWS AND LEGAL REFERENCES. IF ANY OF IT IS TRUE IT IS BY CHANCE ALONE.

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Julia Gillard has problems but they are not the ones usually mentioned in the media.

Her problem is not the way she replaced Kevin Rudd as leader, or that she ‘broke’ her ‘promise’ about a carbon tax (and yes, those terms are meant to be in scare quotes because I do not accept the pervasive media version of these matters).

Her problems are even less about the way she speaks or the way she has, allegedly, buggered up the asylum seeker issue.

Those things are problems, but they are what I would call going-to-happen-anyway problems. They are issues that raise the ire of people who will never vote for her anyway and who would’ve found a bunch of other matters to get upset about if these ones hadn’t presented themselves.

No, her real problem is that she has alienated a core Labor constituency and has thus encouraged them into silence, if not outright hostility.

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The asylum seeker debate has almost never been about the facts, it’s about fear. Most often it’s about baseless fears, cynically manipulated by politicians looking for traction and the mainstream media looking for linkbait and headlines.

Having said that, there have been a number of pieces published in a variety of places that attempt to debunk the disinformation gettting way too much attention in the rest of the media. This is yet another one of those, because the only way to fight hysterical shrieking of myths is with calm reiteration of facts.

Boat people are jumping the queue

An asylum seeker is someone who is seeking asylum but has not yet had their claim assessed; a refugee is someone who has been recognised under the 1951 Convention Relating To The Status Of Refugees as genuinely fleeing persecution and is unable to return to their home country.

Anyone who knows me knows I have always been a friend to the gay community. I regularly watch Glee, and once I listened to a Lady Gaga song. I even know someone who’s met a gay. I think. He may have said “Gary”. Not sure. Not important. Point is, I love gay people in my own way, and I have only their best interests at heart.

Recently I have heard a lot about gay people and their desire to get married. Which I thought was a really positive development, until I realised they meant they wanted to marry each other. This, frankly, worried me. I’m all for gay fellows settling down with a nice girl, but settling down with a nice boy seems to me to be, to say the least, outré. It’s not normal, is what I’m saying. My parents, for example, have been married for forty years and at no point in that time has either of them even considered being the same sex as each other. The very idea would, no doubt, shock them to their core. And if it’s good enough for my parents, why isn’t it good enough for gay folks? Would they rather my father have married a man? How absurd. Moreover, as a married man myself, I am now rather worried that if gay marriage is instituted, I may lose my own wife, since I could hardly blame her if she decided to look for greener pastures – if women could marry other women, why would any of them marry a man? I would never marry a man in a million years; it would be unfair of me to expect my wife to do any different. That’s why I rely on the law to deny her the Sapphic pleasures I wouldn’t have the heart to.

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And so, with the demise of 6.30 with George Negus, Australia’s dirtiest secret has been exposed. There’s no longer any point denying it, now the courageous programming innovation featuring the moustachioed one has come to an end. The evidence is clear: we’re a country of Philistines who couldn’t give two hoots about serious news and current affairs.

It’s not that we didn’t already know this; we just didn’t want to accept it. We tried to ignore the fact that more Australians would rather watch grimace-inducing talent shows than hard-hitting investigative journalism; listen to crank calls than probing interviews and read celebrity gossip than analysis.

It’s this conundrum that casts a shadow over the future of Australian media. Are the punters always right? Is the only commercially sensible option to give consumers what they want? Or should the media favour its public-interest role and give people what they should want?

Henry II was a short, stocky, bad tempered ranga who married the wealthiest and most desirable heiress in Europe. At the height of his powers he liked to brag that his empire rivalled Charlemagne’s and yet he died alone, after losing a war against his own sons. Along the way he presided over the beginnings of the modern jury system, the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the invention of the umbrella.

Henry II was the son of Geoffrey of Anjou, known as Geoffrey the Handsome and also nicknamed Plantagenet because he wore a sprig of the native Angevian flower, Planta Genesta, in his hat. Henry’s mother, Matilda, was the only surviving child of Henry I. After Henry I died she inherited Normandy and attempted to claim the throne of England, but the English barons, horrified by the idea of an arrogant powerful monarch being in possession of a vagina, crowned instead, her cousin Stephen. Matilda, with unwomanly stubbornness, refused to give in to her inferior genitals and thus begun twenty years of crushing civil war in England.

There was a slight frisson of excitement amongst pundits last September when word got out that Labor left figures had vehemently argued in caucus against the Malaysia people-swap deal. Though some observers smirked (‘where has the Left been all this time?’), there was a sense that maybe the ‘party of principle’ of which Gough Whitlam once spoke, was not entirely lost.

Much has been written about the decline of principle in the ALP. Yet, that most acerbic of Labor statesmen, Paul Keating, asserted recently that the party ‘hasn’t lost its soul, but it has lost its story.’

It is the Great Australian Story. From post-war nationalist awakening, to the union struggles that later enshrined collective bargaining, to the fight for equity which gave us Medicare and superannuation, to the modernisation of the economy, to an aborted repositioning within East Asia, to a belated acknowledgment of the dispossession and suffering of our Indigenous peoples, this story has been written more willingly and successfully by Labor than by any other political party

The manager is standing over me as I peruse his lengthy cheese platter.

‘The one on the far end is especially piquant,’ he says.

‘Oh?’

‘Oh yes. Especially,’ he says.

I am about to make two decisions, but I think I’m only about to make one.

‘Can you tell me more about it?’ I ask, leaning out from under the lee of his vast and slightly intimidating moustache.

I’m out at dinner in town with spouse/super-villain The Evil Sulphura. We don’t come to town for dinner much, partly because we have a four year-old son and partly because we live in a distant village where the weekly carriage out of town is often pursued by flaming torches.

As a result of this, I’ve put a huge weight of expectation on this dinner-and-a-show being a magical evening of sophistication and romance, which has been slightly dented by the evident conviction of QI Live’s producers that Australia has spawned no greater intellect or raconteur to sit on their panel than Jono Coleman.

He sat next to Julia Morris. I’m honestly not making this up.

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The “occupy” movement in Australia would be funny if it wasn’t so infuriating and ignorant. It’s a little solar system with a small sun of a genuine point, then orbiting socialism groups, anti-vaccination superstition, 9/11 “truthers” and every other conceivable wholegrain nutbar and the whole thing is a gajillion light years away from the actual problems that motivated the action in the US. The American originals aren’t without their share of bongo drum aficionados and people who are at one with themselves, but it’s a whole different beast there.

When I was about eleven, my parents separated and eventually divorced. Unremarkable in this day and age I suppose and only mildly remarkable back then. Over the years both would both move on in much the same way, both remarrying and both relocating — my mother a couple of hundred kilometres away with myself and my sister, and my father to the United States. The final thing they would do similarly would be to both develop cancer.

In the last few weeks, I haven’t been sleeping so well.

I wake up in the middle of the night, with an anxious feeling gnawing at the pit of my stomach. I lie in bed, trying to go back to sleep and breathing slowly and deeply to calm down and fall asleep. I fall into periods of a deep, helpless rage. I’m going for a lot of walks by myself.

Now, I didn’t get kicked or capsiscum sprayed in the eviction of Occupy Melbourne from City Square. I’m not one of those to experience real violence (of which there are quite a few). I did cop a fist to the side of the head when people were moved on up Swanston Street on the day of the eviction, but a thick ear isn’t anything at all in comparison to what happened to some of the folks I’ve met lately.

One of the things that makes me look forward to Spring is the accelerated rate at which my lawn will grow, meaning that there’ll be plenty of opportunities to mow the lawn. I didn’t always enjoy mowing the lawn, in fact for the first five or six years that we owned our home I detested mowing the lawn and saw it as a pointless chore. After all the grass would only grow back. It took a strange confluence of events to change my attitude, and with it discover the wonder of those parts of my life that I’d previously dismissed as a waste of time.

What kicked things off for me was my Dad’s 60th birthday, a surprise party that we travelled 900km to attend. Dad’s 60th birthday was, unsurprisingly, a time of reflection for all of us and it got me thinking a lot about how I’d felt Dad’s influence when I was younger. It also got me thinking about what sort of father my son would think I was. The age gap between my father and me is almost identical to the age gap between my son and me, and this little detail struck me incredibly hard.

The mainstream media has been convulsed in an orgy of navel gazing over leadership speculation recently. Not just fuelling the stories, but actually creating them and then feverishly pulling them apart and putting them back together again - to the point where it overrides common sense and the actual events they should be examining.

Take the recent Qantas debacle as an example. In the week following the FWA hearing that got the planes back in the air, there was a lot of political manoeuvring in question time. Industrial relations was a hot topic and the spectre of WorkChoices was lurking in the background like an embarrassing uncle at a bar mitzvah. But what the papers served up to us was renewed speculation that Kevin Rudd was priming himself for another tilt at the job he lost last year.

Whenever you hear the phrase “Australian Classical Music”, you get a variety of responses. “For the elites”, “old people listen to classical”. “Classical? Boring.” “Music Appreciation Classes”, “Keating liked that stuff, didn’t he?” Perhaps you hear names like Richard Gill, the Director of Education at the Sydney Symphony. He tells us that music education is in a parlous state, which needs “proper” teachers teaching the “proper” music. Or, more likely in some circles, Mrs. Carey — as in a music teacher at the Methodist Ladies’ College in Burwood, NSW. She of the high profile advertisement for MLC School, Mrs. Carey’s Concert. More elitism to be associated with classical music. Classical, as we define music performed by orchestras and groups of a particular lot of instruments, is seen as something to “appreciate”, not enjoy.

The contention of a recent paper by former Canberra Music Festival Director Nicole Canham is that such pigeonholing of classical music poses a long term danger to many of the performers and organisations associated with its performance - because the long term, steady audience for such performances is in gradual decline as the audiences get older and are not replaced by younger folk. The generations for which “classical” music was an integral part of their education are those in the Baby Boomer category, not Generation X.

Given how early and how aggressively retailers put out their Christmas product it’s nothing short of a Christmas miracle that the studios don’t go overboard with seasonal cinematic spirit. But for those of us who do like to get festive, is Arthur Christmas in 3D going to cut it?

That depends, if you prefer your holiday cheer to be full of action then sit down wtih Die Hard (1988), if you like a little gore go with Gremlins (1984) and if you’re into slasher flicks, there’s nothing more fantastic than Black Christmas (the 1974 original not the remake) but if you’re lucky enough to have a repertory cinema on your doorstep, or, even if you don’t you can always go support your local rental store and to make sure your Christmas viewing includes It’s A Wonderful Life.

Some years ago, friends and I drove from Manhattan to Provincetown on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. We sampled the local lobster along the way — stopping off at the likes of ‘Clem and Ursies’ Diner for the infamous lobster roll of the region. We continued stuffing ourselves with these treats at ‘Ed’s Lobster Bar’ on Lafayette when we returned to Manhattan. My friends retained the lobster roll as the standard holiday snack for their holiday house on Shelter Island.

While most memorable — these classic lobster rolls were not my first introduction to such an easily procured luxury. Ever since growing up in the Wimmera in Victoria I have recognized the merits of cramming crustaceans between slabs of bread and butter with lots of salt and pepper. Those crustaceans were locally caught yabbies, fresh water crays or a rock lobster hailing from nearby Robe. On summer holidays and weekends we would conduct the ritual of catching, cooking, peeling and eating them with the relaxed enjoyment holidays bring. We would be seated around a newspaper clad table in the garden, the racket of the last galas and cockatoos retreating for the evening, a flame colored sky, the sting of sunburn and the battle with the mosquitos that avoided the zapper, are all memories associated with this event. Trips with friends down the Great Ocean Road were never complete without gorging ourselves with beer and rock lobster tails on the roadside. The flies and the wind and the sun and the blue of the ocean are all part of this memory too.

I recently returned from an extended trip to the States that took me to both California and Pennsylvania. The two states offered up a world of difference in terms of what, where and how (which may also leave you with many whys) you can buy wines.

Pennsylvania is the most archaic and depressing experience as it is still 100% owned and operated by a State government agency called the LCB (Liquor Control Board). It is a thriving, billion dollar piece of Communism right in the heart of the land of democratic freedom that, as much as it strives to be better (creating so-called ‘Premium’ wine centres) is very much the McDonalds of wine. No matter what store you visit, the wine selection is always the same, ordered from a centrally controlled and managed Politburo list.

California, on the other hand, is the vinous version of free love, with not just excellent wine stores dotting the landscape but everybody and his mother (supermarkets, dairies, bodegas, delis) stocking the stuff and completely free to make their own varied selections from whatever corner of the world that may tickle their fancy.

Cryptic goodness.