Foul play
The Sydney Morning Herald of April 20 published a report titled, "The Day the Balmain Boys Beat the Reds", by Brad Norrington on the book launch of The Forging of Votes by Dr Amy McGrath. He eagerly quotes the book's author when she says: "No one was as institutionalised or systematically corrupt on a grand scale as the communists". But why pick on the Communists?
After all, it was the Balmain branch of the ALP, headed up by Tom Domican, who horribly beat up the present Minister in the Keating Government, Peter Baldwin. In his book Whatever It Takes, Richo (ex-Senator Graham Richardson) who talks about getting Labor into power hardly leaves one with the idea that everything was to be played fair and square.
Again too, I remember Don Chipp founding the Democrats with the slogan, "to keep the bastards honest", and I take it "the bastards" were the Liberals.
The present revelations about the goings on in West Australia around the activities of Crichton-Brown in the Liberal Party and the process of selecting supposedly democratically elected candidates also makes one wonder.
No doubt readers can come up with many other examples.
Jean Hale
Sydney
Feminism and rights
I often read and enjoy Kath Gelber's articles in GLW, but I disagree with her characterisation of the Helen Garner debate (GLW, April 26).
Helen Garner waded into the Ormond College sexual harassment issue in a partisan manner. I don't feel that that, in itself, taints all she says. She has also dealt with the issue as a writer concerned with complexity and contradictions, rather than as a political advocate concerned for clarity and simplicity.
But is Kath's feminism really so vulnerable or so fragile that it can't deal with the issues Helen raises, without branding her as a "sell out"? Is it really only the women who have "sold out", or the open sexists such as John Laws, for whom Helen Garner's comments have struck a chord?
It seems to me that Helen Garner's book has drawn attention to some important issues, such as: do we now face inhuman consequences of feminisms which have claimed, indiscriminately, that "a wolf whistle equals rape"?; when should a woman (or a man) go to the state for redress, rather than settling it locally?; and in what circumstances is it legitimate to both campaign politically against a harasser and attempt to invoke the powers of the state?
There might be no unfortunate consequences of any sort of feminism if we believed, as Kath asserts, that feminism is "innocent" — in other words powerless and ineffectual. But this is not the case. Feminists have intervened effectively and powerfully in a wide range of issues.
In addition to campaigns which have focussed on disadvantaged women, and on discrimination against women generally, some women's groups in recent times have supported repressive criminal justice policies.
Some victims groups and sexual assault centres, for instance, supported the harsher law and order policies in NSW over the last few years, which saw many more people arrested, jailed and dying in custody. Most of these were poor, working-class and uneducated males; many were intellectually disabled, illiterate and Aboriginal. The call for harsher penalties and harsher regimes was not initiated by the women-led victims' lobby, but it was led in the name of "victims".
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, reports from the NSW Women's Coordination Unit were urging "increasingly harsher" and more "deterrent" penalties for the perpetrators of domestic violence. While the aim of these reports was limited, they lent important credibility to a state government intent on generally extending prison sentences in the name of "victims rights".
Despite the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which had urged arrest and prison as a last resort, the NSW prison population exploded: Aboriginal imprisonment rose and deaths in custody rose. And the number of women in prison rose, too.
In the late 1994, the North Shore Hospital-based Sexual Assault Committee (SAC) effectively vetoed a move to reintroduce the dock statement. This has, for a long time, been the only means by which the illiterate, intellectually disabled and those with a criminal record could ever have a voice in a jury trial.
The SAC's support was necessary for Independent Member for Manly, Peter McDonald, to gain the ALP support required to pass a private member's bill on the issue. The dock statement had been earlier snuffed out with the support of the Women's Legal Resources Centre. Its resurrection, in an amended form, while supported by progressive feminists such as Jocelyn Scutt, was blocked by the fundamentalists of the Sexual Assault Committee. This was despite the fact that no more than 15% of jury trials deal with sexual assault.
There have been unfortunate consequences of fundamentalist feminism, which only has regard for the "women's angle" on any particular social issue. Progressive feminists, like all of us, need to watch out, so that, in carrying the flag for their preferred set of victims, they don't trample on the rights of others.
Tim Anderson
Glebe NSW
Ode to the Boutros and Evans snow job
Bou Bou is ga ga
and Gar Gar wants to be Bou Bou
so boo boo Bou Bou
and boo boo Gar Gar too!
Robert Wood
Surry Hills NSW
UN secretary general
Who would have the job of the UN Secretary General?
You come to Australia talking about tolerance and international law, then you have to take tea with Gareth Evans and Paul Keating who cannot tolerate a few crosses outside a foreign embassy, and who flout international law with the Timor Gap Treaty.
We demand an end to the cooperation with the New Order regime that occupies East Timor and violates the rights of ordinary Indonesians.
Stephen Langford
Australia-East Timor Association
Darlinghurst NSW
Saint John?
The recent changing of the guard at the Victorian Trades Hall Council, which saw John Halfpenny stand down as secretary and Leigh Hubbard take his place, saw varied appreciations of his term of office in the mainstream press.
Regular readers of GLW may however have missed the rather bizarre editorial in the April 28 Socialist Worker, paper of the International Socialist Organisation.
It argues that Halfpenny was basically a working class hero who represented the potential of a "fighting union movement prepared to take on Kennett" but that unfortunately, due to his "ties to Labor leaders like John Brumby", he was an "inconsistent fighter, at times selling the struggle far short".
It claims that despite "all his vacillations" Halfpenny was "a thorn in the side ... of Kennett, the employers, the right wing of the union movement and the Labor Party leaders."
At the time of the mass demonstrations in late 1992 against Kennett's first attacks, when the ISO were convinced of a "pre-revolutionary situation", they constantly tail ended the Trades Hall bureaucracy. According to the ISO, only Trades Hall could convince workers to act or mobilise, therefore it was the duty of socialists to uncritically back them to the hilt.
A few months later, when Halfpenny and company had succeeded in killing the struggle, the ISO decided that perhaps they had given Trades Hall just a little too much credit.
Halfpenny's term was marked more by the implementation of the Accord and forced union amalgamations than it was by any struggle against the employers. When Kennett took office, Halfpenny was quoted as saying that the union movement could work with the new government just as it had worked with the old. It has proved absolutely disastrous for Victoria's workers.
From the beginning of the anti-Kennett mobilisations, Trades Hall went all out to subordinate it to their goal of securing the re-election of Labor in Canberra and Victoria.
Halfpenny's reign was one of declining membership and ineffectual struggles as one campaign after another was isolated. Halfpenny was a thorn all right — in the side of workers and the progressive movement in this state.[Edited for length.]
Ray Fulcher
Melbourne