Women and violence
Your cover story (GLW #153) "Violence Against Women: debate over strategy" by Kath Gelber disturbs me.
From all the reports I have heard, the situation regarding violence against women is presently a worst case scenario and new legislation seems to have minimal effect. This is greatly due to the attitudes of police officers — "women start it all", "women ask for it", — the courts — "a little rougher-than-usual handling" — and the attitude of the community at large.
While Gelber takes care to qualify what she says, she tends to want to explain the extreme of violence against women as having "a very material base" and to favour the idea that these extremes may be the result of poverty and oppression on men.
The violence that too many women typically experience in their relationships with men — fathers, partners, sons — is continuous. The law — the police, the lawyers, the courts — seldom helps these women and often makes things worse for them.
There are women in this country who are constantly moving to keep away from their violent partners/ex-partners, trying to keep out of the hands of the law because they have run away with their child/ren against the orders of a court; they trust no-one.
It would not help these women one iota to hear that "socio-economic pressures are a contributing factor to violence" and that this "helps to explain that violence, as a social phenomenon, has a very real material base and it is only when the material factors are changed that social behaviour can also".
Which brings me to the sentence, "People who are under stress and marginalised will tend to act out their oppression in ways in which, under different circumstances, they would not", a comment attributed to Moira Raynor.
In a sexist/heterosexist society, women are always the most marginalised, oppressed and stressed people. Women internalise their oppression and women who behave violently or destructively are treated as mad/sick or bad, and dealt with via the most appropriate medical or legal channels. Even women's violence against their own children — and, less commonly, male partners — is not regarded as a symptom of women's marginalisation and often violent oppression.
Considering their oppression and marginalisation in their homes, women are remarkable for their lack of violence. Considering that men do not live with people who behave in this manner towards them, they are remarkable for their violence.
The National Strategy on Violence Against Women was right to specifically reject the pressures of unemployment, wage differentials, poverty and other socio-economic factors as significant in the context of a strategy to overcome violence. Its "vague" (according to Gelber) arguments for women's "attainment of equal rights ... regardless of ... economic or political considerations" are much more to the point.
The National Strategy is not being "vague" at all, merely recognising the enormity of the phenomenon of male violence towards women, and the pointlessness of simplistic approaches to either explaining it or making up strategies to deal with it.
So it really worries me that Gelber can conclude "Given that the National Strategy was commissioned by a federal Labor government which has, over the last decade, presided over a massive redistribution of wealth in favour of the rich, the report's focus on men, rather than government policies, is not all that surprising."
The government, like the Opposition and state governments, consists largely of men; and the major beneficiaries of the massive redistribution of wealth has favoured men, who again are "the rich".
Why should it be at all surprising that the National Strategy asserts that "all men need to take responsibility for men's violence against women by challenging the existing construction of masculinity"? Women can't be responsible for it.
All I can do, as a woman and as a human being, is challenge the (male) Establishment, and refuse to accept shallow reasoning and simplistic answers, wherever they come from.
Paddie Cowburn
Malak, NT
[Edited for length.]
Solar energy
Your cover stories (GLW #150) "Solar energy the breakthrough that's being ignored", correctly points to the real concerns of business, being their money that is invested in their businesses that will be most affected by solar energy breakthroughs.
The article fails however to mention another important factor that must also be considered in attempting to shift industry to solar energy. Intelligent planning and government intervention are important. But it must be pointed out whilst people and corporations can own the energy resources themselves, in the ground, it is not possible to own the sun.
Profits from oil and coal, for example, came from land ownership, as well as from investment in capital. Profits from the various forms of solar energy come almost exclusively from capital.
So any attempts to shift industry investment to solar energy simply must include measures like higher rates charges on the value of land, land dues, resource rent taxes or the issue of resource extraction licences on a leasehold system. Measures such as these reduce the profits made from private ownership of what is really a public resource.
Phil Anderson
Tax Reform Australia
Melbourne
Greenhouse effect
David Wheeler (GLW #153) claims that "there is not one shred of physical evidence supporting CO2-induced warming'" and that the greenhouse effect is therefore a myth. My article (GLW #150) on the Business Council of Australia's support for a similar view, however, went into some detail to show that the scientific evidence for the warming effect of CO2 and other trace gases (net of countervailing negative feedback mechanisms such as cloudiness and the temporary masking effects of industrial pollution) is well-established and non-controversial.
We, and other life forms, would not be on our planet if we didn't have the right amount of CO2 in the atmosphere unlike the lifeless Venus and Mars for example.
If Wheeler is claiming that the human-generated quantity of CO2-equivalent gases is not sufficient to make a difference to this natural greenhouse effect, there is, however, evidence to the contrary.
The historically unprecedented increase in CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation since the Industrial Revolution has coincided with an increase in mean global temperature which cannot be explained by volcanic activity, sunspot activity or other warming mechanisms. This correlation is only contingent, of course, and does not amount to proof, but it is strongly suggestive evidence.
Wheeler claims that greenhouse science is too complex to ever be able to know what is going on or to predict what will happen — all the computer models are hopelessly inadequate simplifications. The consensus that exists on the greenhouse effect, however, is not without recognition of the complexity and uncertainty in the field of atmospheric science, nor without prudent reservations deriving from the imperfect nature of computer-modelling.
A healthy scepticism is a fundamental part of the scientist's kitbag but so too is the capacity to entertain plausible hypotheses in the absence of ideal experimental circumstances, especially when the stakes are our one and only planet. The hardened sceptic who requires absolute certainty and perfection in such an unwieldy field as long-term climate prediction is asking too much.
Phil Shannon
Curtin, ACT
[Edited for length.]