Having spent most of Saturday at a polling booth in the Canberra suburbs handing out how to vote cards for the Green candidate I was moved to reflect on the significance of what I was doing and how it related to my fundamental convictions as a follower of Jesus.
For a reflection on the moral significance of the election see Adrian Glamorgan:
http://www.newmatilda.com/election07/index.php/2007/11/26/the-morning-after-the-eleven-and-a-half-years-before-reflection-2/
The key issue that emerged for me was that to frame the activity in terms of active non-violence in the shifting of power was to highlight an element of what was going on that we take for granted. Pacifists are often derided yet to peacefully transfer executive power is a massive achievement when we consider the alternatives and the record of violence in the struggle to control the levers of government.
A friend of mine with a long experience of working in the Philippines in a situation of complex conflict commented:
I suppose you breathed more a weary sigh of relief than shouted with euphoria. Yet, our political atheism as Anabaptists means our work has changed faces not gone away. How does one such as Rudd remain accountable and not drift off into political heights as so many have done.
Framing politics within the Christian task as a "non-religious" issue, from a position as political atheists in which we are called to participate while neither over estimating the significance of political action nor denying it as being a form of service to the neighbour and living with the reality that structures designed to serve human good can become destructive is difficult.
The potential global significance of the election of Kevin Rudd as a factor in accelerating movement for international action on combating both climate change and global poverty should not be underestimated, either.
Australia will now ratify the Kyoto Protocol and actively engage in the debate about shaping a crucial post-Kyoto settlement. The country is now effectively decoupled from alignment with the United States reticence on this issue, and that change of stance will leave the United States further isolated internationally. See my comments in the Ekklesia story "Australian Christians wrestle with a political Ruddslide"
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/6359
Thursday, 29 November 2007
Tuesday, 13 November 2007
Grappling with technology
A while since I have posted but I am now experimenting using Firefox as a brwoser with Scribewire add on to give me greater flexibility than was possible using Safari.
Thursday, 4 October 2007
Bloggers day for Burma
INTERNATIONAL BLOGGERS' DAY FOR BURMA
go to
http://faithinsociety.blogspot.com/
Bloggers in the UK and globally push Free Burma message
By staff writers
4 Oct 2007
The internet, including social networking site Facebook, has played a major role in galvanising global solidarity and protest on behalf of the repressed democracy movement in Burma. Now bloggers in the UK and elsewhere are joining in on the action.
The "International Bloggers Day for Burma" began earlier today (4 October 2007) and has already drawn support from thousands of people across Britain, and many thousands worldwide.
The think-tank Ekklesia, which reports, researches and comments on religion in society, is joining the action to back peaceful change in Burma - where Buddhist monks and others recently took to the streets to challenge the brutal militart dictatorship which has been in power since the 1960s.
"We want to set a sign for freedom and show our sympathy for these people who are fighting their cruel regime without weapons", said an organiser of the bloggers' day.
"Bloggers are planning to refrain from posting to their blogs on 4 October 2007 and are just putting up one Banner then, underlined with the words 'Free Burma!'."
The Free Burma site also has a petition widget and links to other campaigning organisations. http://www2.free-burma.org/index.php
Saturday 6 October has been declared an international day of action in support of the Burmese people, with public demonstrations and boycotts planned the world over.
Ekklesia co-director Simon Barrow commented: "No-one should underestimate the scale of the task involved in challenging a heavily armed and ruthless dictatorship in Burma. But as the Burmese people show extraordinary courage, the scale of worldwide nonviolent political and economic action is also unprecedented. This international bloggers' day is a good way of mobilising opinion and support, as well as highlighting fresh approaches to social action for justice and peace."
go to
http://faithinsociety.blogspot.com/
Bloggers in the UK and globally push Free Burma message
By staff writers
4 Oct 2007
The internet, including social networking site Facebook, has played a major role in galvanising global solidarity and protest on behalf of the repressed democracy movement in Burma. Now bloggers in the UK and elsewhere are joining in on the action.
The "International Bloggers Day for Burma" began earlier today (4 October 2007) and has already drawn support from thousands of people across Britain, and many thousands worldwide.
The think-tank Ekklesia, which reports, researches and comments on religion in society, is joining the action to back peaceful change in Burma - where Buddhist monks and others recently took to the streets to challenge the brutal militart dictatorship which has been in power since the 1960s.
"We want to set a sign for freedom and show our sympathy for these people who are fighting their cruel regime without weapons", said an organiser of the bloggers' day.
"Bloggers are planning to refrain from posting to their blogs on 4 October 2007 and are just putting up one Banner then, underlined with the words 'Free Burma!'."
The Free Burma site also has a petition widget and links to other campaigning organisations. http://www2.free-burma.org/index.php
Saturday 6 October has been declared an international day of action in support of the Burmese people, with public demonstrations and boycotts planned the world over.
Ekklesia co-director Simon Barrow commented: "No-one should underestimate the scale of the task involved in challenging a heavily armed and ruthless dictatorship in Burma. But as the Burmese people show extraordinary courage, the scale of worldwide nonviolent political and economic action is also unprecedented. This international bloggers' day is a good way of mobilising opinion and support, as well as highlighting fresh approaches to social action for justice and peace."
Whistleblowing and accountability
RS Gilbert in his letter on "Whistleblowing" in the Canberra Times, October 3, 2007 missed a significant element of APS accountability, the accountability to Parliament. Perhaps he missed it because he framed the argument in terms of responsibility rather than accountability.
While APS accountability operates through the Minister, it cannot be reduced without remainder to serving the Minister and the Government of the day.
Parliamentary Committees for example, have asserted APS accountability to Parliament in terms of keeping Parliament informed and assisting parliamentary scrutiny of public administration and expenditure through a range of activities, not least of which are the "dreaded" Senate Estimates hearings. Accountability of the APS to Parliament also takes place through the reports of the Australian National Audit Office and the Ombudsman on the performance of the APS.
To attempt to reduce the role of the public servant to simply serving the Minister reflects the current emphasis on responsiveness to the Minister as the prime, indeed overriding account of how public servants are to understand their role. This is an emphasis that, it is now acknowledged, has lead to episodes that have brought the APS into disrepute, from the Children Overboard Affair onwards.
Given the more nuanced account of public service accountability that has developed in Australian practice, it is hard to see how "whistleblowing" could be subject to the blanket dismissal of R S Gilbert as "contrary to the principles of an apolitical public service and good public administration". It may be on the contrary that specific instances of "whistleblowing" are nothing more than an attempt to make accountability relationships work in situation where the formal mechanisms have broken down.
While APS accountability operates through the Minister, it cannot be reduced without remainder to serving the Minister and the Government of the day.
Parliamentary Committees for example, have asserted APS accountability to Parliament in terms of keeping Parliament informed and assisting parliamentary scrutiny of public administration and expenditure through a range of activities, not least of which are the "dreaded" Senate Estimates hearings. Accountability of the APS to Parliament also takes place through the reports of the Australian National Audit Office and the Ombudsman on the performance of the APS.
To attempt to reduce the role of the public servant to simply serving the Minister reflects the current emphasis on responsiveness to the Minister as the prime, indeed overriding account of how public servants are to understand their role. This is an emphasis that, it is now acknowledged, has lead to episodes that have brought the APS into disrepute, from the Children Overboard Affair onwards.
Given the more nuanced account of public service accountability that has developed in Australian practice, it is hard to see how "whistleblowing" could be subject to the blanket dismissal of R S Gilbert as "contrary to the principles of an apolitical public service and good public administration". It may be on the contrary that specific instances of "whistleblowing" are nothing more than an attempt to make accountability relationships work in situation where the formal mechanisms have broken down.
Sunday, 16 September 2007
Dealing with moral panic and why concern with"values' gets us nowhere
Simon Barrow continues to be on target with his commentary on contemporary public debate about morals and values.
I like the following passage from a column that he wrote for the Guardian recently discussing a BBC poll which found that 83% of people in Britain thought that society was experiencing moral decline.
One of the galvanising agents for this used to be religion, something that has clearly shrunk in terms of affiliation and receded as a shaping force in social life in modern Britain. It is interesting, therefore, that while nearly a third of people reject religious purpose as having a constructive role in moral formation, 62% still say it can be a guide for us.
Because "religion", in a plural society, invariably takes many shapes and sizes - a fact that spiritual hardliners and new wave God-bashers alike tend to ignore - it is hard to determine what this actually means, short of a generalised yearning for more "rooted values": things such as a concrete feeling of social obligation to neighbours, personal rather than purely instrumental reason, civility, a sense that freedom requires the cultivation of self-restraint, and the nurturing of traditional commitments (in contrast to "the contract culture").
However it is equally evident that institutional religion (the kind that grew up under Christendom's alliance of church and governing authority) finally failed to deliver such things. By imposing its interests, it took away people's ability to develop a deeper moral sensibility, something that grows out of voluntary mutuality rather than rule-based prescription.
So where from here? The inchoate sense that "something is wrong" soon collapses into a welter of different hypotheses and prescriptions. The clinical psychologist Oliver James terms the problem "affluenza"; John Gray blames too much idealism; Richard Dawkins points accusingly at a tide of irrationalism and residual superstition; Zealous Christians and Muslims believe their way is the only one; and politicians of all parties fail to persuade many of us that they hold the managerial key to a better life in a post-ideological environment.
In these circumstances, trying to reach some theoretical "moral consensus" is increasingly unpromising, and talk of "shared values" rapidly becomes vacuous. What creates commonality is not an idea of "community", which we are then expected to inhabit, but concrete and realisable deeds that point in the directions we want to go. We act, therefore we are.
So, in the face of violence, we need more people willing to experiment with non-violence and take risks for peace. Confronted with selfishness, we need those who can cultivate new possibilities of sharing. To combat xenophobia, we need gestures of hospitality. Instead of waste, we need more people willing to conserve. Where bitterness disables us, we need forgiveness, and so on.
I'm not suggesting that such voluntary "alternative" behaviour diminishes the need for large-scale structural action to combat the gross moral affronts of poverty, war, terror, environmental destruction, sexual abuse, and so on; rather, that a culture of civic action creates the climate for pressing collective responsibility."
This is a passage that could usefully be thought about by leaders from the conservative wings of the Christian church before opening thei mouths in public on the issue of perceived moral decline. Much of their commentary around this topic betrays a wistfulness for a Christendom approach and top down solutions.
I like the following passage from a column that he wrote for the Guardian recently discussing a BBC poll which found that 83% of people in Britain thought that society was experiencing moral decline.
One of the galvanising agents for this used to be religion, something that has clearly shrunk in terms of affiliation and receded as a shaping force in social life in modern Britain. It is interesting, therefore, that while nearly a third of people reject religious purpose as having a constructive role in moral formation, 62% still say it can be a guide for us.
Because "religion", in a plural society, invariably takes many shapes and sizes - a fact that spiritual hardliners and new wave God-bashers alike tend to ignore - it is hard to determine what this actually means, short of a generalised yearning for more "rooted values": things such as a concrete feeling of social obligation to neighbours, personal rather than purely instrumental reason, civility, a sense that freedom requires the cultivation of self-restraint, and the nurturing of traditional commitments (in contrast to "the contract culture").
However it is equally evident that institutional religion (the kind that grew up under Christendom's alliance of church and governing authority) finally failed to deliver such things. By imposing its interests, it took away people's ability to develop a deeper moral sensibility, something that grows out of voluntary mutuality rather than rule-based prescription.
So where from here? The inchoate sense that "something is wrong" soon collapses into a welter of different hypotheses and prescriptions. The clinical psychologist Oliver James terms the problem "affluenza"; John Gray blames too much idealism; Richard Dawkins points accusingly at a tide of irrationalism and residual superstition; Zealous Christians and Muslims believe their way is the only one; and politicians of all parties fail to persuade many of us that they hold the managerial key to a better life in a post-ideological environment.
In these circumstances, trying to reach some theoretical "moral consensus" is increasingly unpromising, and talk of "shared values" rapidly becomes vacuous. What creates commonality is not an idea of "community", which we are then expected to inhabit, but concrete and realisable deeds that point in the directions we want to go. We act, therefore we are.
So, in the face of violence, we need more people willing to experiment with non-violence and take risks for peace. Confronted with selfishness, we need those who can cultivate new possibilities of sharing. To combat xenophobia, we need gestures of hospitality. Instead of waste, we need more people willing to conserve. Where bitterness disables us, we need forgiveness, and so on.
I'm not suggesting that such voluntary "alternative" behaviour diminishes the need for large-scale structural action to combat the gross moral affronts of poverty, war, terror, environmental destruction, sexual abuse, and so on; rather, that a culture of civic action creates the climate for pressing collective responsibility."
This is a passage that could usefully be thought about by leaders from the conservative wings of the Christian church before opening thei mouths in public on the issue of perceived moral decline. Much of their commentary around this topic betrays a wistfulness for a Christendom approach and top down solutions.
Indigenous Stolen Wages
ANTAR have just released a national survey, Hard Labour, Stolen Wages: National Report on Stolen Wages by Dr Rosalind Kidd that provides a comprehensive survey on what is known about indignous stolen wages in every state and territory.
Ther report can be downloaded for free from the ANTAR website. Read it get angry and chase your local member on the issue.
Each chapter of the report provides a narrative account of the history of controls over indigenous people particularly as it related to their participation in the labour market and what is known about the handling of funds that were managed by pastroal stations, missions, other employers and the state and territory governments.
The detailed account of the conditions of near slavery and the fraud, mismanagement of funds, negligence by public officials and cost shifting by state governments, witholding of Commonwealth govrnment payments to individuals and using those funds to reduce state expenditure on spport of indigenous communities is worthy of the wrath and vocabulary of an Old Testament prophet. Micah or Amos could probably do a good job on this issue. There is an unbelievable amount of grist for their mill in this report.
"In 1934 the government was notified that ex-workers were starving to d death, but it refused to supply rations arguing this was the responsibility of station management" (p.73)
The amount of money that has been ripped out of the indigenous community over the past two centuries cannot be calculated precisely but is likely to run into several hundreds of millions of dollars at bare minimum and probably several times that amount.
And now we are heading off again down the track of government withholding payments to indigenous people. If the lack of recognition of the history of this sort of enterprise were not a matter so laden in pain and marinated in suffering for the indigenous community there might be space for black humour. History repeats itself (Marx said, I think) first as tragedy and then as farce, or was it the other way around?
Ther report can be downloaded for free from the ANTAR website. Read it get angry and chase your local member on the issue.
Each chapter of the report provides a narrative account of the history of controls over indigenous people particularly as it related to their participation in the labour market and what is known about the handling of funds that were managed by pastroal stations, missions, other employers and the state and territory governments.
The detailed account of the conditions of near slavery and the fraud, mismanagement of funds, negligence by public officials and cost shifting by state governments, witholding of Commonwealth govrnment payments to individuals and using those funds to reduce state expenditure on spport of indigenous communities is worthy of the wrath and vocabulary of an Old Testament prophet. Micah or Amos could probably do a good job on this issue. There is an unbelievable amount of grist for their mill in this report.
"In 1934 the government was notified that ex-workers were starving to d death, but it refused to supply rations arguing this was the responsibility of station management" (p.73)
The amount of money that has been ripped out of the indigenous community over the past two centuries cannot be calculated precisely but is likely to run into several hundreds of millions of dollars at bare minimum and probably several times that amount.
And now we are heading off again down the track of government withholding payments to indigenous people. If the lack of recognition of the history of this sort of enterprise were not a matter so laden in pain and marinated in suffering for the indigenous community there might be space for black humour. History repeats itself (Marx said, I think) first as tragedy and then as farce, or was it the other way around?
Saturday, 15 September 2007
Iraq
The following comments from Simon Barrow's excellent blog Faith inSociety.
I am still workng out how to get the links to work - using the Safari browser seems to be part of the problem. Working on switching to Firefox
Doug
Monday, September 10, 2007
TURNING THE TIDE IN IRAQ?
Getting Iraq’s war surge to trickle towards peace (Ekklesia, 10 September 2007) Talk of the efficacy or otherwise of the US 'surge' is a smokescreen, says Simon Barrow. There is no long-term military solution to Iraq’s nightmare. But behind the scenes viable alternatives are being sought within civil society - and in conversation with those who have faced the uphill tasks of peace and justice in Ireland and South Africa.
The Daily Star in Lebanon adds: Ironically, Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces some of the same dilemmas as coalition forces in Iraq, though there is certainly no moral equivalency between the two. Both are driven by ideologies that are for the most part alien particularly to Sunni tribal sheikhs. Neither advocates of Western-style democracy nor the champions of strict Islamic orthodoxy offer an appealing vision for Iraq's future. Both sides are led by foreigners and viewed by a majority of Iraqis as occupiers, not liberators. Both are condemned for what is viewed by locals as the indiscriminate killing and brutalization of a civilian population caught in the crossfire of a conflict over which they have little say. Both are well financed and view Iraq as the battlefield for a global struggle that leaves no room for compromise.
I am still workng out how to get the links to work - using the Safari browser seems to be part of the problem. Working on switching to Firefox
Doug
Monday, September 10, 2007
TURNING THE TIDE IN IRAQ?
Getting Iraq’s war surge to trickle towards peace (Ekklesia, 10 September 2007) Talk of the efficacy or otherwise of the US 'surge' is a smokescreen, says Simon Barrow. There is no long-term military solution to Iraq’s nightmare. But behind the scenes viable alternatives are being sought within civil society - and in conversation with those who have faced the uphill tasks of peace and justice in Ireland and South Africa.
The Daily Star in Lebanon adds: Ironically, Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces some of the same dilemmas as coalition forces in Iraq, though there is certainly no moral equivalency between the two. Both are driven by ideologies that are for the most part alien particularly to Sunni tribal sheikhs. Neither advocates of Western-style democracy nor the champions of strict Islamic orthodoxy offer an appealing vision for Iraq's future. Both sides are led by foreigners and viewed by a majority of Iraqis as occupiers, not liberators. Both are condemned for what is viewed by locals as the indiscriminate killing and brutalization of a civilian population caught in the crossfire of a conflict over which they have little say. Both are well financed and view Iraq as the battlefield for a global struggle that leaves no room for compromise.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)