Taking stock

Today I got another five robinia seedlings transplanted. That makes a couple of dozen, now, I think. About half the western fenceline is planted out and waiting for spring. As I was digging the holes for them it began to rain softly. Just after I finished up and came inside, it started to pour. I’ve heard people say that when you have more trees you get more rain, but I didn’t think it was supposed to work that quickly.

This Summer just past was so hot and dry that most of the things I’d planted in the first couple of years here died. It was pretty demoralising, to say the least. The nice little spot in the middle of the back yard with the lemon tree surrounded by stawberries is mostly straw. Surprisingly the goji berries fared pretty well. That lemon was never going to cope with the hard frosts so it’s probably as well to replace it with an apricot or something. Most of the herbs are dead including all the lemon balm, nepeta, oregano, marjoram and chamomile.

The lovely big bush of lemon thyme managed to hang on in one tiny spot. I’ll leave the dead branches around it to help protect what’s left from the frost. We’ll see how it comes up in spring. The insect repellent Southernwood and Tansy around the house have done okay.

Among the debris of the main veggie patch there’s been a couple of pleasant surprises. The broccoli from last winter survived under the remains of the arugula stems and are starting to produce flower heads. The green mignonette lettuce that I’ve been selectively breeding for about six generations looks like it’s crossed with the wild lettuce… Seriously. We have wind blown volunteer lettuce popping up in shady spots that are in between cos, mignonette and spiky lettuce. It tastes pretty much like cos, so that and the baby rocket have been making up a few salads for us. Chards, of course, are popping up all over the place. They’re just bomb proof and one of the most versatile things you can grow in a veggie patch. My lovely red cos and bronze oak leaf lettuce set seed but don’t look like they’re doing much. A bit more rain might help that. Or not. Probably the best result has been all the Asian greens. Everything like wom bok, bok choy, pak choy, mizuna and something that might be perilla are going nuts. Kale and red eschallots are starting to appear too.

That’s all great, but what’s this about the trees? Earlier I wrote about the condition of the soil here, or more accurately the lack of topsoil. One of the first things that went in to the new garden when I got here was the obligatory compost heap. In early Summer I turned it over to spread some compost on the veggie patch only to find that it’s been so dry that nothing’s broken down much at all. It will have to be covered in newspaper or plastic or something to help keep some moisture in. With that, the wilt diseases and the long dry it became apparent that the whole thing has to be completely reassessed.

Fortunately Geoff Lawton and others have a billion great videos about desert and arid area permaculture techniques to get things going. Around here it’s pretty much totally flat, so there’s no need for contours, although swales around the edges and through the paddock would help develop the soil and keep water available to the roots of the plants. Until we get a bit more rain and the ground is soft enough to get into with a shovel, I’m starting with transplanting seedlings that will be the canopy planting. That’s where those little robinia seedlings come in. While I probably wouldn’t put them in a suburban yard, their deep roots are great out in the paddock. They’re very hardy, the autumn leaves will help build up the soil and they won’t go up in a fire the way Eucalypts would. Plus there’s hundreds of them self-sown all over the property. All I have to do is put them in the right spots.

Over summer there wasn’t much to do but watch everything dry up and die. Instead I passed the time going through plenty of videos and reading to find some more ideas to get stuck into this in a more productive manner. Something more appropriate to the climate and soil. I really must link to the TEDx they did in Dubbo. There’s some great stuff in there for gardeners and farmers alike. I’ll link to Guy Webb’s talk first because he says the same thing I’ve been saying about not burning stubble haha.

Another fascinating thing he talks about is how the roots of perennial grasses can create new topsoil from the bottom up. This is the same principle Michael Pollan and Joel Salatin have discussed in some of their lectures on organic farming, but I found it very encouraging to see it being integrated into Australian broadacre farming. In pasture cropping this stuff is great for stopping the depletion and erosion of farmland and restoring fertility in degraded areas.

A bunch of that native grass, windmill grass, has prospered even in among the buffalo around the yard and paddock. It’s a brilliant native perennial.

The technique is simple. You let the grass grow a bit. The amount of roots the plant has are mirrored in the amount of growth up the top. You send through your cattle or goats, or mow it, and the plant will shed roots to keep itself in balance. These extra roots that are no longer needed become food for worms or soil organisms and break down into topsoil. And this windmill grass that is growing around here is just perfect for that. It’s a fairly slow grower so you don’t have to mow too often, but if you want it for pasture it’s quite resilient when grazed. Being indigenous it’s frost and drought hardy. Doesn’t cause allergies like buffalo and is nowhere near as invasive as some other types. Also you don’t get the seeds like ryegrass that can cause problems in fleece or getting into ears of animals. (Or your socks.) Out here at the moment I’d been encouraging it because it competes well with a bunch of weeds that are resistant to herbicides. Now there’s even more reason to keep it going.

I’m disappointed that it took me nearly three years to realise that I can’t do the same things here that I did in suburban blocks, although in hindsight that should have been obvious. It will be a bit slower going, since it’s starting from scratch in quite a different manner, but I’m looking forward to spring now. Can’t wait to see those little robinias take off.

Anzac Day

Kurt Vonnegut writes about how he taught his sons never to be happy about a massacre of the enemy. To despise the machines of war and those who think we need such things. I didn’t need to learn that from him. I’d already learnt it much earlier, from Erich Maria Remarque. All quiet on the Western front. It was one of those books prescribed for English study in high school. Children don’t read books like this any more for English. They read about young boys in strange situations trying to find meaning and identity. I was a girl, I didn’t have an identity.

We could have easily as read Slaughterhouse 5 but Vonnegut mentions penises. You can’t have that. The school chaplains wouldn’t approve. Remarque only mentioned shit. That a soldier’s vocabulary consisted of things he had to live with perpetually, like shit. But not fear though. They don’t talk about fear a whole lot, but you know it must be there. It’s not manly to be frightened. A lot of people must be frightened by warfare, though. Why else would one be shot for desertion or cowardice? Heinlein, I think it was, mentioned it in the original StarshipTroopers. That a soldier’s life is 99% boredom and 1% unmitigated terror. It could be the other way around. It’s so long since I’ve read them.

It doesn’t do for children in school to be reading novels that describe the pain of warfare and the immorality of the politicians that send young men to war. Not when politics and the media are in full swing trying to sell us another war. In school we also read Brave new world and 1984. Now I’m living in some strange amalgam of the two. Taking soma every night with a few glasses of wine, so I can sleep. Constantly struggling to parse the newspeak and reinvention. Go overseas to die, don’t do it here. You can’t have guns here. That would be uncivilised. If you die by the hand of some desperate peasant overseas in an occupied territory, you’re a hero. If you get shot at home, you must have been a druggie or a biker gang member or something.

Die defending the flag. People on the tellie get red faced and bluster about how our diggers fought under that flag. But the flag they’re waving didn’t exist until the 1950′s. There must have been a time warp or something. Menzies became popular with that flag, after the war. He is spoken of with some reverence as a good Liberal Prime Minister. Liberal, of course, meaning conservative. Australia speaks fluent Newspeak. Now Menzies looks like a communist in comparison to those who would lead us. So the joke’s on them. Or us. Some days it’s hard to tell. Like you can’t tell if the time warp really happened, or it only happened in the tellie.

99% boredom 1% unmitigated terror. It sounds like my marriage. The terror wasn’t of bombs, bullets and blood, though. The terror was the Sunday church sermons and childbirth. Attended by a never ending stream of men in white coats wanting to manhandle and invade your body and men in pulpits who legitimised the whole affair. But you must produce healthy offspring. What does it matter how you feel so long as you produce live children for your owners. Be a good girl and take your pants off. We’ll stitch you up afterwards so you can still be of some use. Stiff upper lip, old girl. Suck it up, Princess.

Nowdays they tell young women to have three children. One for mum, one for dad and one to go overseas and get shot, perhaps. To have their lives, and deaths, sanitised and commodified for approved public consumption. As ANZAC day itself has been. Buy a lapel pin made in a sweatshop. Or perhaps you’d like this commemorative biscuit tin, made by a company that was bought out by a US conglomerate years ago.

They don’t shoot you for doing it, or not doing it, eventually failing to comply. When you’ve popped out enough babies and are all hollowed out. They let you live through it and then just leave you alone to live with it. Your body somehow becomes your own property again, at last. When there is no more use for it in their interest. You get to live with the unfuckable leftovers. The fear is leftovers too. You’re not really terrified of people you meet down the street when you go shopping or to the post office. But the leftover fear stays there anyway. Like the smell of fish in an old fridge. One pencil stub in an empty biscuit tin.

You might not know you were alive otherwise. If it didn’t rattle when you leave the house. You’d just be numb, mouthing the scripts of the social and smiling along. Sometimes that quiet clatter on your nerves is the only thing that’s real any more. The only thing that’s genuine. Everything else is just scripts. From war movies. Brave men shooting one another in some distant country, to defend their wives who are back home, listening to church sermons.

Afterwards you don’t talk about it. You just drink a lot and take the soma. It’s the Australian way. Serve the Empire. Serve your country. Run up that hill into those Turkish machine gun nests. Do what you’re told. Obey.

Recycling for 3D printers.

No doubt this will be all over all the technology and sustainable design sites, but it’s a great idea and worth talking about.

Filabot

Filabot is a desktop extruding system, capable of grinding various types of plastics, to make spools of plastic filament for 3D printers. Not only is it user friendly, but it is also environmentally friendly. The Filabot can process things such as: milk jugs, soda bottles, various other types of plastics, and bad prints, to make new filament for a future print. Filabot will bring the real power of sustainability to 3D printing, allowing for a one stop shop to make anything.

In theory then, you can throw in your recyclable plastic stuff and use it to print up new things. The project is in the final stages of producing its first prototype units. They’re also starting work desiging a system that will print much larger things, potentially including portable shelters.

There is such incredible potential with a system like this. Recycling plastic, in particular drink bottles, is a brilliant idea. So much plastic junk ends up in waterways and landfill that could be repurposed quite easily with this sytem. It would allow for all sorts of design upgrades, trial and implementation of consumer products that can now be recyclable products. If possible, it could assist the move from petroleum based plastics to bio-plastics made from nut shells and such.

Instead of ordering or buying stuff that has to be shipped from overseas, you can download a design to use in a 3D printer at the local library, take your recyclable plastic in to make it, and Bob’s your Auntie’s live in lover. Less waste, less pollution, less transport miles. More opportunity for crafty people at home to start making and trying their own designs instead of relying on lawsuit hungry multi-national corporations.

What if we could design a portable solar power system that rental tenants could use to fit on the roof like a tv antenna, and just plug in to the switchboard? Or solar systems similar to those being implemented in Bangladesh, where people are bypassing old fashioned infrastructure altogether in favour of things like solar powered floating schools.

Restoring fertility by restoring forested areas.

These lessons could be very well applied throughout the Murray-Darling region.

Breaking the taboo.

Shipping container design and building. Pros and cons.

French container house, via Treehugger.

French container house via Treehugger.

When politics and social justice news gets all too depressing, which is fairly frequently, I hop on over to the green design blogs like treehugger and inhabitat for some nicer stuff. Especially treehouses. Those and many other green design sites report on the growing trend in building with shipping containers. People are doing some pretty impressive stuff with them.

Back in February I wrote a roundup post with a whole lot of photos of container housing and it continues to be very popular. Today there’s been a heap more articles on the topic around the traps including a couple investigating the downside of using old containers for habitation. I must confess, I’d never thought of the toxins in the paint that the things are covered in, in order to survive months at sea.

There’s lots of gorgeous photos in the article at Designbloom.

At ArchDaily Brian Pagnotta wrote a very thoughtful article considering all the ups and downs of building with containers and I thought it was worth sharing.

Shipping container architecture gets a lot of encouraging coverage in the design world as a trendy green alternative to traditional building materials, and seems like a smart choice for people looking for eco-consciousness. However, there are a lot of downsides to building with cargo containers. For instance, the coatings used to make the containers durable for ocean transport also happen to contain a number of harmful chemicals, such as chromate, phosphorous, and lead-based paints. Moreover, wood floors that line the majority of shipping container buildings are infused with hazardous chemical pesticides like arsenic and chromium to keep pests away.

That’s a fair point. Not many people would use treated pine in their gardens, especially if they’re growing food. So you wouldn’t want your family walking around on the stuff all day and night.

Here’s a studio design that worked around a few of the problems by using a refrigerated container that had been designed for transporting food. In theory that should be at least lined with safe material.

The owner of that studio has written his own article investigating the reality of shipping container buildings.

I grew up around shipping containers; my dad made them. I played with them in architecture school, designing a summer camp out of them, fascinated by the handling technology that made them cheap and easy to move. But in the real world I found them to be too small, too expensive, and too toxic.

Well they’re certainly small when it comes to width. As a bedsit, it would have to be a single bed. Many of the current designs stack them next to each other and cut away sections for this reason. In Australia they’re also much more expensive. You can pay $2,500 or $3,000 for a container and then have to shell out hundreds to get the thing delivered. While you don’t need permits to use them, currently, there are still building guidelines in many municipalities that limit new homes to having to be a certain number of square metres, or on small blocks, or even what colour they’re painted. Large McMansions on small blocks is rampant stupidity when it comes to unsustainable planning, yet it continues because of appearances.

But the high cost, unsustainable practises and huge amount of waste created by building conventional houses makes alternatives look better and better. Earth bag, adobe, rammed earth and mud brick are more labour intensive but cheaper and cleaner than conventional or container housing.

So what are we going to do with all these empty containers that are just sitting around the place? Steel does recycle pretty well, although there’s still the issue of the toxins and contaminants in the paint. If they get turned into low cost public housing, it’s likely to turn into slums. Well planned student accomodation and bed sits are an option, although all this raises the point, yet again, of why we continue to ship plastic crap in laps around the planet in order to prop up growth economics and consumerism. Surely the better option is to address that, since it has such enormous and harmful impact on the planet.

One of the more personal reasons for supporting secular government.

*Trigger Warning:* Bad religion, abuse, suicide.

It’s been a tough week. Couple of weeks, really. About a month ago an old friend of mine suicided. He’d been having trouble for quite a while. Long story.

He’d been dealing with some of the same issues that trouble me, with depression and so on. The hangover of church indoctrination.

My friend, I’ll call him “John,” had a lot going for him as I remember him when we first met, probably 25 years ago now. He was reasonably intelligent, fairly well educated, not bad looking and quite friendly. A chirpy little green eyed blonde with braces and a bit of a lisp. Great sense of humour. His family hailed from Sydney and both parents were professionals, so he had some resources available on top of his education to get him sorted and on his way in life. Unfortunately he got involved in the same church I had become caught up in during a vulnerable period. I can’t imagine what his parents feel. Ugh. All that potential. All that life, derailed and crushed. Christ, I’m gonna cry again.

One might call it a church, but it would be more honestly described as a cult. Not that they call themselves cults, of course. They talk about living a better life, being a better person, making the world a nicer place and all the loving god and loving your neighbour stuff. It’s not until a way down the track that you start having trouble, things don’t add up and you find yourself realising the devotees have cut off contact with family and friends. Or sold their car or house to give money “to the church”. Which actually means handing over cash to the pastor’s family. Who all have their own quite nice homes and cars, and make a tax free living off the church members, mind you.

This church runs the “Bible college” that John and I attended. It’s a private affair like many of the pentecostal/fundamentalist groups have these days. They teach western fundamentalist traditions, trying to read the bible literally as a scientific or factual document which is hugely problematic since it wasn’t written as such. But far more troubling than the detail of the teaching is the emotional manipulation with which it is enforced in the members. I’m a bit at a loss as for how to describe it, but imagine someone being so caught up in a belief that they get it into their heads that if they sell their family home, the roof over their and their children’s heads, they’ll be demonstrating their love for god and separation from the carnal and corrupt natural world. Imagine someone who feels that they might be in danger of spending an eternity in hell, boiling alive forever in a lake of fire, if they continue contact with family members who are not also devotees of the church. And of course there’s the demon possession and exorcisms.

Anyone who questions the church’s teachings or seems to be thinking for themselves may be hinted as having a contrary or rebellious spirit. Any woman who displays anything like a spine is probably possessed by the spirit of Jezebel. Women have to be seen to be obedient to their husbands and/or church leaders. The medieval gender roles are strictly enforced. I can recall the trainee pastors being instructed to always refer to a couple’s children as his children, as that made it more difficult for an abused wife to leave. It was known that it was hard for a woman to leave her children and that was exploited in order to keep them in the group and subservient.

After about ten years of this, thinking I was doing the right thing but somehow going crazy, I had to leave behind my two very young children and flee pretty much with the clothes on my back. The guilt I felt was horrific, but trying to live with the church and its teachings was so much worse.

Like many others, including John, eventually I went back to study. I needed some way to make sense of what had happened and sort out what I had been taught. Or have another go at “serving god” and acting out the programming. It’s pretty telling to note that the professors and tutors in the “progressive” college that I attended later went out of their way to put people in contact with counselling services and to speak openly and frequently on the emotional difficulties that students often experienced when they started learning the rest of the story.

Calling the history and archaeology of the church and its early origins “progressive” is probably a bit misleading. It’s not going anywhere forward, it’s simply not entrenched in blinkered tradition. “Progressive” theology is merely theology as distinct from misogynist, homophobic, exploitative fundamentalism. The reason why so many students have so much trouble is not the information itself. No one in their right mind really believes that stone age property laws really apply to women today or that they’re inferior to men. Given the chance to have a good, clear look at it, people don’t actually believe they were possessed by a demon when they thought twice about selling their car to give money so the pastor could go overseas. It’s the emotional exploitation that is involved in all this. You have to feel pretty bloody guilty or fearful to believe that you might be in danger of burning in hell if you don’t sell your car. And it requires a whole group of people surrounding you, enforcing the views and interpretations, in order for it to seem real. When everyone’s crazy, crazy seems normal. Hence cutting off contact with non-members. When that contact is restored and one sees one’s behaviour in the light of day, it’s a painful time. A lot of people have enormous trouble with it. They find out that everything they’ve based their lives and beliefs on is essentially a fabrication. A lie. Not only have they been suckered into believing something that has no basis in fact, it’s irrelevant as far as their spiritual life is concerned. And they may well have spent years, wasted years of their life, following in good faith, teaching that is in someone else’s interest at their expense.

And that’s a lingering pain. A “long, dark night of the soul.” Some people heal to a degree and go on with their lives and jobs coping with the continuing sense of emptiness and exploitation. Others are so betrayed that they suffer much, much more. The student of theology who moves on from fundamentalist or charismatic tradition to an academic study of the cultures and era of the origins of the bible discovers that the tradition is simply that. A fancy. A set of teachings handed down by word of mouth, largely, from one ignorant or fraudulent preacher to the next. Loose interpretations and misreadings of the words of the bible with no attempt to put them in context. Twisted to serve political purposes. And the brainwashing, abuse and manipulation is required to con people into accepting what is patently unbelievable and harmful.

But what is worse. What is so much worse, is that after a time one discovers that people know. They know. Those who teach these regressive, malignant traditions know that they’re only made up teachings and that they do damage. But they do it anyway. And they’re allowed to go on doing it because it’s politically expedient. The politicians who fund the churches and who are elected by votes from the devotees… They know.

The church that caused a breakdown and marriage breakdown for me, that caused so much heartache for John, has not only not been called out and investigated as a cult or shut down, it now has government funding to continue its teaching. Other groups with similar fundamentalist beliefs, whether conservative in appearance like the Brethren and Sydney Anglicans, or loud and demonstrative like Hillsong, continue to teach these traditions and bludgeon people’s minds into the stone age, with government approval.

In our most recent State Government budget we saw cuts to funding for trades and health while church schools and prisons were given hundreds of millions of dollars more. With a smile on his face, our Premier speaks of these policies. Support of the groups that are sticking with teachings that have been known to be both false and harmful for hundreds of years. When Darwin’s Origin of the species was first published, rather than there being an outcry about it, the church of England said nothing much, because they’d been teaching for some time that the bible was a mythological work and its importance was one of meaning and Jewish national origins, not anything rational or scientific. There was no conflict. Now though, many groups propose creationism and reject evolution on the grounds that it isn’t biblical. That’s not even traditional, it’s outright regressive. It’s gone backwards. And these teachings are taking our whole society backwards. Putting pressure on education boards to teach creationism and stone age ideas about an eye for an eye.

In the 21st century when the human species could be dealing with issues of global pollution and sustainable living, these groups are getting themselves funded and elected by insisting that gay people are an abomination and should not be permitted to marry or raise children or that men are the head of the house and family violence only occurs when women don’t submit properly. Ideas that became part of the New Testament that had their origins in Roman legal codes. In Roman politics. As is apparent with the agendas of fundamentalist and pentecostal groups that support the idea of “dominion”, in which christian soldiers lord it over the rest of us and enforce their beliefs on society at large, the whole thing is about politics, power and money. They go to great lengths making themselves look good, doing charity work and counselling school children, as a vehicle to promote their organisation and world view. It is deceptive and insidious. It’s not even like any of their work is purposeful. Any of that stuff can be done by secular or public organisations without the strings.

There’s a large body of research into the structure and practice of these groups, the way history has been twisted into their traditions and the way emotional manipulation and abuse is used to con people into supporting fundamentalist ideals and dominionism. Many studies, many papers. And stories by many survivors.

In the end, after more than a decade trying to deal with all this, John came to the end of his tether and checked out. He OD’d and his body was found in a motel room. A human sacrifice to the ghost of Roman politics.

For nothing.

Asylum seeker hysteria in the media, again.

There’s been an ad on tellie in the past couple of days, for one of those after the news “current affairs” type shenanigans. You know, the ones where reporters ambush people with leading questions and shouting like people are running around with their hair on fire in hysterics over someone returning a chicken at the local supermarket or getting a big bill and pretending that it’s really super important news. This particular ad is about a “special investigation”, so some poor bugger got to spend all day editing together footage from youtube and online newspapers about asylum seekers. Apparently Australia is girt by leaky boats full of rich people who risk life and limb to enter the country by boat rather than plane. It’s on the same channel that shows the Airline safety and Air crash investigation special reports, so you’d think they’d have some sympathy for people who are afraid of flying. Well, Kerry Stokes did make his fortune by terrorising pensioners so it’s not entirely surprising.

After the last election you may recall that Murdoch’s minions went absolutely spare. The voters elected a minority government that included some Greens senators and a few independents. Since then, there’s been nothing but bitching from the tabloids. How dare the citizens of Australia elect anyone other than the king whom Murdoch had selected! And he’s still promoting the Mad Monk Tony Abbott although most people seem to view the options offered by the major parties as scraping the bottom of the barrel. Kerry Stokes, unable, apparently, to concoct any agenda of his own, blindly follows the lead of the self-appointed king maker and evil overlord Murdoch. So while it’s fine and dandy for Abbott to make the promise that the “baby bonus” should be doubled, if Gillard goes ahead and does so, that’s vote buying. For our sins, to whit electing someone other than that ordained by the media, we’re now subject to continual foaming at the mouth, screeching and yelling until we cave in and vote properly. For a good Liberal. Like Menzies. Well, technically belonging to the same party as Menzies anyway. Just ignore that the party actually does and listen to their pre-election promises. She’ll be right. Promise.

So yeah. Apparently 22 million people isn’t enough so we need to pay people to have children. But at the same time, we don’t want any more people coming here. Except if they have skills we don’t. Then they’re skilled labour migration. That’s also a fine idea when a Liberal politician proposes it, but a terrible one when someone else does. If you’re confused at this point you’re not alone. Nobody has ever claimed that media hysteria makes any sense.

But since we’re encouraging young women to leave school and employment to take money and have babies, I had to wonder what was going on with all these asylum seekers and how come brown babies coming into Australia is so much worse than babies born to women who are already here. So I did a little digging. You know, because I’m one of those “difficult” people who won’t take the media’s word for it and I don’t believe what I read in the papers or see on tv ads. Suffice it to say it’s no wonder the media is throwing tantrums and ranting and raving while sweeping the rest of the story under the rug. I’m not expecting you’ll be surprised at all if I tell you it’s all just another big con job.

For a start, most of the people who migrate here don’t stay permanently. People come to study, do business or get jobs and after a while they move on. State and Federal governments keep cutting funding to public schools and universities, and religious schools tend not to be huge trainers of trades jobs, so the people to do this work have to come from somewhere else. Most of them come by plane, because it’s quicker. Most come on a business basis, because having money is the easiest way to get into Australia. Let’s just leave aside for the moment that this will actually make it easier for organised crime or drug business to get in… That doesn’t suit the border patrol or security image being pushed on certain channels.

Here’s a pie graph of people coming into Australia for the year 2008-09. As you can see, quite a few are migrants. Quite a few are births. If you squint really hard at that little pink section you’ll see the asylum seekers segment. You have to look hard because it’s so tiny.

Here’s another graphic for the calendar year 2009. Again, most of the incoming are either migrants or births. This one looks a bit different because there’ve been more births and it only takes into account permanent migration. Again, the actual number of asylum seekers who arrive by boat is very small.

These current affairs shows and tabloid scoops that focus on asylum seekers take great pains to make it seem like Australia is this kind of continental floating ark that is surrounded by boats. It’s a sort of gory image. A bit like an egg floating by, surrounded by sperm or something. They’re all out there, trying to get in. Ew. Plus they’re all made out to be “queue jumpers” or otherwise illegitimate. And Australia is vulnerable to them all. Or so it seems.

But just how many people are out there trying to get into Australia? How come we have to do it all? What about all the other developed nations? Why don’t they go somewhere else? Good questions. Let’s have a look at that.

How many asylum seekers were there, in the whole world, in 2010? Just over one and a half million. On a planet occupied by 7 billion people, a bit over 1.6 million were displaced by war or other threats and sought asylum in other countries. Who took most of them? The USA, France, Germany, Sweden and Malaysia. The stats on detention periods is also interesting, partly because of the trauma involved to the refugees and partly because of the cost. In Canada, 8 days. In Australia over 200 on average. You can tell the Murdoch and Stokes families aren’t being hit with that bill. But that only reflects our arse backwards approach to funding, like spending $200,000 keeping a kid locked up in juvenile detention but not wanting to spend half that on education or housing that could prevent the crime in the first place. 8,000 people in total applied for asylum seeker status and a fraction of those came by boat. Eight thousand out of over a million and a half, and yet the media represented this as us being swamped by boat people. Well, remember what we were saying about not believing what you read in the papers?

This one is a bar graph that shows asylum seekers as a proportion of the total population. Look carefully because it’s not what it seems. At first you think the total is 100%, but this is focused on detail. Here Lebanon is the highest but their total up the top there isn’t 100%, it’s just over 1.2%. Again, you have to look way down the chart to see where Australia figures. And there we are. With a massive total of less than 0.2% of the entire population as asylum seekers ever having come here. That’s less than one fifth of one percent. That’s for all the years asylum seekers have been coming here, by plane or boat. Swamped, I tell ya. We’re swamped.

Apart from the sheer numbers, or lack thereof, there are other arguments about asylum seekers in Australia. One that was hinted at above was that they’re all actually criminals or terrorists. The reply, which was also hinted at, is that if someone really wants to come into the country and start a drug syndicate or terror cell, all they need is a front company and a bit of investment money. It doesn’t take much to turn up at the desk in a suit with a briefcase and say you’re here on business. And what do drug lords and organised criminals have if not money?

Despite the fact that claims are made that “boat people” pay lots of money to “people smugglers” to get them in here, what is it really that’s happening? Why on earth would a person leave a home, uproot their family and take a hell ride on a leaky boat to a nation renowned world wide as “White Australia”? Why do they have to apply as asylum seekers? Where are their papers?

Again, there’s some pretty simple, straightforward reasons. (Just ignore for a moment that straight forward and rational doesn’t sell papers, ok?) If you want to travel overseas, what do you do? You queue up for a while, fill out papers, take photos and apply for your passport. Then you apply for your visa. You need i.d., photos, papers and what not. It’s a hassle even if you’re in a stable, democratic country just looking to take a holiday to Bali. If you’re being targeted as a member of an ethnic group or if your country is a fucking war zone, you’re not going to be standing in line with your birth certificate, waiting for the next bored, pasty public servant to eyeball you while bombs and rocket launchers may or may not be going off in the street outside.

Your country may not even technically be at war. Is Afghanistan even a war now? Or Sri Lanka? When you start to look at internally displaced people, the situation gets pretty muddy. No one declared war on the indigenous Tamil people any more than the British declared war on Australian Aboriginals or native Americans or Africans.

Here’s an x-ray of a woman who had nails driven into her hand. If you thought standing in line at a government department was torture, try that on for size. Apart from the problems with even seeking a passport or visa when you’re in a state that has identified you as a “problem” or an “ethnic problem” there’s the added bonus of not only being denied application for either passports or visas but the threat of detention, torture or death for yourself or your family if you’re apprehended.

Plenty of people don’t make it out alive.

But what if you’re not even an “ethnic”?

This little girl was tortured for refusing to be married off as a child bride.

While Australian diggers are being blown up by roadside IEDs in the service of our imperial overlords, just like Gallipoli or Vietnam, the Mujahedeen, now known as the Taliban, are still trying to force implement the same fundamentalist religion as the Wahabis in Saudi Arabia, where women can’t vote or drive a car.

Oh wait, hang on… That was blood from a US sponsored torture and murder of a “suspect”. Because, you know, when the US starts wars and invades other countries over resources and puts people in death camps and Australia jumps on the band wagon and goes along with them, that’s just totally different from what Japan did in World War 2 that everyone remembers every April 26th and swears to never forget and never make the same mistakes.

This is just a guy. A guy who happened to be apprehended by the US and imprisoned and tortured by our allies…

So sure. Watch the current affairs shows’ special investigations about all these illegal, evil, wicked asylum seekers who jump the queue and try to invade Australia as an easy target and a soft… whatever catch phrase the media are using this week to try to set your hair on fire with worry about a whole thousand people in boats. Jesus tapdancing christ, if I’m losing sleep tonight it will be about how on earth my children are going to be able to afford to pay off their own homes, not some other poor bastard who’s desperate enough to cross an ocean to find somewhere safe for her/his babies to sleep.

Kerry Stokes can kiss my arse if he thinks I’m gonna buy that shit. Go scare some more pensioners, you cheapskate fear monger.

Religion had its chance.

Today a group of doctors, Doctors for the Family, apparently signed a senate submission against same sex marriage on the grounds that they think same sex marriage is not as good for kids as hetero relationships.

The AMA immediately replied that this is essentially rubbish:

But AMA president Steve Hambleton has rejected the claims, saying there is no evidence that children with same-sex parents are any different to those with heterosexual parents.

“There is a growing body of evidence that says there’s no difference in their psychological development, their general health, their sexual orientation,” he said.

They also claim that heterosexual marriages are more stable than same sex unions. That’s an interesting claim since one in three marriages in Australia end in divorce and nearly a third of all Australians don’t marry. (We’ll leave aside the issue of whether neolithic property laws are really appropriate for partnerships in the 21st century anyway.)

But apparently 150 people in Australia who are vested with the authority to make diagnoses or decisions and offer treatment with regard to human health disagree with the rest of the AMA and substantial research into parenting. You guessed it, they’re a religious mob.

So who are the Doctors for the Family?

Doctors for the Family was established in November 2011.

Its convenor is Dr Lachlan Dunjey.

Dr Dunjey is a Perth GP and a right-to-life campaigner who has run as a Senate candidate for the Christian Democratic Party in multiple elections.

He was president of Baptist Churches of WA in 1989/90.

Dr Dunjey set up Medicine With Morality in 2006 to lobby politicians on issues including cloning and euthanasia.

In case you’re interested in what kind of doctor Dr Dunjey is, here’s a handy review.

Waited over half an hour for my appointment. Was rudely admitted and barely looked in the eye the entire appointment. Made homophobic and offensive comments. Concerns I had coming in were ignored.

Dr. Dunjey has run for Senate previously, but after years of Stephen Fielding and Brian Harridine, it seems the electorate were having none of it. Not being elected doesn’t seem to have dimmed his enthusiasm for foisting his beliefs onto others, though.

Along with the results of the recent Qld election, where a bunch of good christian soldiers were elected as LNP candidates and budgets increasing funding for religious schools while cutting funds for other education, this is a further increase in the influence of US style conservative religion in Australian politics. There are two big problems with this. Firstly, according to its own internal logic, seeking political power and to Lord it over the rest of us is what Jesus accused the Pharisees of doing. It is associated with gentiles, high priests and Judas. Secondly theocracy seeks to enforce antiquated mythology to the whole population via legislative means. Rather than giving people the liberty to make their own spiritual or religious decisions in private, according to the freedom of religion enshrined in the Australian constitution, these moves paint broad strokes out of the beliefs of a small percentage of the population onto all 22 million of us. And we’re not talking simple morality here. Theocracy or as it is sometimes known Dominionism, belongs to a relatively small group of pentecostal and charismatic groups with a peculiar fundamentalist retrograde theology*. This is “man is the head of the house and women must submit” stuff. Lazy teenagers shall be stoned. A raped woman must marry the rapist, that sort of thing. It’s not about spiritual practise, it’s largely an enforcement of those property laws we were talking about earlier. Hence the repeated protests against gay marriage. If two men get married, which one is the brood mare? If two women get married, which one gets to be a life support system for a wallet?

While many of us grow up hearing religion connected with morality and statements about reward and punishment sometimes seem to make sense, mostly because of simple repetition, there’s not any real sense to it. These ideas are taught because of their appeal to the traditions of some religious teaching and not because they actually apply to human communities in reality. As we see with the number of priests who get busted for child molestation. As we see with incarcerated felons who become more violent after serving time or children who grow up with domestic violence and end up stuck in this themselves. We grow up with certain ideas taught to us about life and behaviour and about values as if they’re absolute unquestionable truth. This is a real problem when these values are the basis for our voting decisions and support for legislation. Ideas such as heaven being “pure” and the earth below being “fallen” or “corrupt” go back to Aristotle’s cosmology that depicted the planets resting in shells of coelestial aether. While it was a work of genius in it’s lifetime, it’s now 2,500 years out of date and was wrong anyway. The planets do not orbit in shells around the earth. Likewise ideas of humans being innately sinful, educating children with beatings or subjecting the mentally ill to punishment or death. Being tough on crime, supporting patriarchal ideals and demanding an eye for an eye can sound tough and perhaps even practical in certain portrayals in the media but they are based on a worldview that is essentially mythology. It isn’t necessary for people who wish to practise their own religion and it doesn’t carry any weight in light of the reality of human behaviour. As I wrote yesterday, some politicians would like to apply a bigger stick in the apparent belief that if a little doesn’t work, a lot will. The example was of a doctor telling you that you’re sick because you haven’t had enough mercury.

Well, we’ve learnt in the past couple of hundred years that we don’t need mercury to cure consumption, or arsenic to cure hysteria. Nor do we use cocaine in tooth drops any more. So why bow to emotional blackmail and the threat of hellfire and brimstone when deciding what consenting adults can and can’t do in the privacy of their own partnerships? Why take the cultural practices of desert dwelling nomadic tribes from the stone age and apply them to 21st century Australia? We have laws against things like rape, fraud and child abuse, so we don’t need it to justify enforcement of morality. We have freedom of religion so people can go to seance church twice on sundays if they really want to.

The bottom line is that we don’t need these groups preaching to us or our political leaders in order to have space for them to practise their religious beliefs. We certainly don’t need the beliefs of a few fundamentalist lunatics influencing the laws of the nation in ways that will result in more problems. There is enough crime. There are enough murders, rapes and people serving time in prison. There are enough homeless people. Governing by the book, where the book belongs to the neolithic era, is not cutting the mustard. How about we try something that works instead?

*This is also turning up more and more frequently in Sydney Anglican circles. See Dr Muriel Porter’s The new puritans for an extensive study on this and Marion Maddox’ God under Howard for some history in it’s rise in Australia.

No improvement expected from MPs.

Well, the other shoe has dropped. Craig Thomson and the HSU have been the subject of quite a media feeding frenzy in recent weeks. It’s now officially a probe. No pun intended, one assumes. Although money changing hands under the table and backdoor lobbying of politicians looks pretty unsavoury, it seems there weren’t any laws broken. But it’s been in all the papers so our illustrious leader has suggested making some changes. A few improvements like a code of conduct for Federal MP’s, no less. Trouble is, they don’t want it.

Under current rules, an MP must either become bankrupt or be convicted and imprisoned for more than a year before they can be kicked out of parliament for being naughty. So we’re not even talking about people being held to account for their behaviour. This does seem odd. In a nation where politicians are currently increasing penalties, increasing prison spending and toughening laws that apply to everyone who’s not in parliament, how about the leaders of this country being required to behave themselves? Do as I say, not as I do, it seems. And this is simply a code of conduct, not corrections, penalties or transparent oversight.

So while Tony Abbott is making hay out of Craig Thomson’s credit card bills, his own party don’t want himself and others to be held to the same standards they wish to apply to others. With manufacturing jobs being slashed, money leaving the country and there not being enough homes to house people… Among other serious issues… You’d think the law regarding lobbyist spending might be clarified and then move on to doing something constructive.

But that is not how the Ministry of Information seems to work in Australia. It’s all bread and circuses. Fortunately there’s enough Transition, Downshifting, Permaculture and other grass roots sustainable initiatives going on that you can do something useful and largely ignore the also rans in parliament. Except to point out to your kids that if they ever behave like that, no one would respect them for it.