Not in the Olympic Spirit

The Australian two-person female Bobsled team will compete at the Olympic Winter Games starting on Saturday, Australian time. I'm sure the ladies involved are very happy, and I'm also sure the Irish team are happy that the Aussies have been included as an extra team, and not at the exclusion of the Irish.

But I'm not. Not because I don't care about winter sports, or because the Court of Arbitration for Sport was required to make a ruling in regard to this matter. No, I'm unhappy because I think that the people involved haven't truly embraced the Olympic Spirit.

The rules with regard to bobsledding at the Olympics state that one team from both Asia and Oceania are entitled to compete, as well as the best eighteen performing bobsled teams. Australia argued successfully they were entitled to the Oceania spot in the competition. I'm sure many Olympic events would have similar rules allowing competitors who could not qualify, but come from weak areas for the sport, to attend and compete at the Olympics.

However, weren't these rules created to ensure teams that struggle to compete at the Olympics can? While Australia are a minnow when it comes to bobsledding, that is certainly not the case when it comes to the Olympics overall.

Australia have never had a problem sending a conventially-qualified team to any Olympics. We've won gold medals at the last three Winter Olympic Games. We've competed in 16 Winter Olympic Games. We've won 438 Olympic Medals overall.

These spots were created so people like Eric Moussambani could compete at the Olympics. He's from Equatorial Guinea, a nation that has never won an Olympic medal, and in all likelihood, never will. Hardly anyone from Equatorial Guinea would compete at the Olympics if not for these spots.

Sorry if I'm not terribly concerned by a couple of Aussies missing out on an opportunity to finish in the last two in an Olympic Event. It's not in the spirit in which these rules were created, and not in the spirit of the Olympics.

Religion and Sport

Tim Tebow is a champion quarterback for the University of Florida football team. He's a interesting case from a sporting point of view, because many argue his skill set isn't easily transferable to the professional game, the NFL.

He's also a devout Christian. So devout, he writes Bible verses on the black stickers he wears under his eyes. And he's about to cause some controversy in the USA.

Tebow and his mother will star in an ad due to run during the Superbowl on CBS on Sunday evening US time, which will detail his personal story. Tebow's mother suffered complications with her pregnancy, was advised to abort the child that became Tim, and went contrary to that advice and carried the child to term.

The ad will advocate a strong pro-life position, but it is the placement of a major sporting star at the centre of perhaps the most contentious political and moral issue facing the USA today, during the most popular sporting and television event of the US calendar, that makes this all the more interesting.

One could argue that this sort of thing could only happen in America. Sports stars routinely thank God for intervening and helping them make a major impact on the sporting field.

The fact is this simply cannot be the case. God is not picking favourites in a mere sporting contest - if he did, the sentimental favourite would always win.

In Australia, we've always been a bit more muted in this regard. Matthew Hayden copped some flack when he crossed himself whenever he scored a century. Shaun Hart mentioned "his Lord and Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ" when he won the Norm Smith Medal, and Gary Ablett did a similar thing.

The difference between Hayden, Hart & Ablett's utterances and some of the utterances that occur on the other side of the Pacific is the Australians were merely thanking God for making their performances possible. That's not the same as making the performances happen, or altering that ethereal element we know as luck to favour one side over another.

Tebow is crossing another line again - he is proselytising. He is doing so in a time and a culture where the idea that God is intervening in the everyday lives, and in particular the politics, of people, is becoming more prevelent. That Tebow feels the impulse to make the sporting field an arena for publicising certain extracts from the Bible demonstrates how strongly he feels, but it also makes intensifies the idea that all sports people are role models.

This may lead to some thinking Tebow is some sort of expert on this matter. He's a professional athlete; a "jock" if you will. He's not a theologian, or even ordained. But many, many young people would look up to him, certainly more young people than would a famous evangelist or Archbishop.

I, for one, hope we don't ever go down this road in Australia, and this opinion comes from a church going Catholic. God, whatever God is, doesn't care about recreational pastimes such as sport, even if they are careers for many people. I don't like playing the perspective card when it comes to sport, but this blows sport's importance out of all proportion.

I have a very strong view that religious belief is something that is very personal: a covenant between a person and God. Lord knows I've looked to the heavens and implored God's intervention in a sporting contest, but those have been moments of illogical weakness, brought about by the performance of a beloved sporting team. To use the sporting field as a platform for religious conversion is something that is inappropriate and potentially dangerous, and also doesn't sit well in a pluralist, multicultural society. The less of this, the better.

Ancient History

There's a by-election in Altona on February 13. According to the calendar, this by-election will happen in 2010. According to the ALP's election ads, it will happen in 1997.

At the 2006 State Election, the ALP attacked Ted Baillieu for the role the company he was a director of and bore his name, Baillieu Knight Frank, played in selling the land and buildings that had been government operated schools, before the Kennett Government closed them down. This occurred at the same time as Ted Baillieu was President of the state Liberal Party organisation.

Whether these ads were effective is unclear, but Steve Bracks secured a comfortable election victory. winning about 54.5% of the two party preferred vote.

Now it is 2010, and the good people of Altona are being informed of the role Baillieu Knight Frank played in selling Laverton Park Primary School.

Regardless of whether you think that closing schools with something like 30 students, or classes called "1/2/3/4/5/6A", is bad policy or good rationalisation of precious government resources, there needs to be a discussion about whether going this far into the past for election ad content is fair game.

The facts are these: some people voting in their first state election later this year would have been born after Jeff Kennett was elected in October 1992, and would have been in Grade One when he lost the premiership in October 1999.

At the other end of the scale, someone born in April 1978, meaning they'll turn 32 in two months, would have never voted in a state election that the Coalition has won. I was born in May 1980, and have voted in the 1999, 2002 & 2006 state elections.

When the Kennett Government was closing and selling schools with low enrolment in an effort to rationalise government resources, Paul Keating was Prime Minister, the best player in the AFL was Gary Ablett (not the one now, but his father), the West Indies held the Frank Worrell Trophy, Billy Ray Cyrus was #1 on the charts, and Apple was a company that made those huge, slow computers with the black and green screens that sat in the computer room down the corridor from home room. Mobile phones weighed kilograms and people had just started watching Seinfeld in this country.

The ALP obviously want you to think of the Liberal Party as that party that did all those horrible things in the 1990s. Forget repaying the ALP's state debt, building CityLink, the Casino and the Exhibition Centre, reviving the state's economy and reducing unemployment, and modernising the state's public service. They want you to remember the (necessary) cuts made to ensure that Victoria stopped spending what it didn't have.

That the ALP have nothing constructive to say in order to win a seat they held with 70% of the two party preferred vote at the last state election is an endictment on the fact that there is not much good to say about the performance of the Brumby Government. In fact, the only spruiking of their own "achievements" that is done is done with taxpayer's money. (Don't worry - it's all part of the plan.)

So it's about time the ALP moved into the 21st Century, and stopped relying on ancient history.

2010: Rudd's last election

Before you start, this is not some bold prediction about the result of the upcoming 2010 Federal Election, made on the back of this morning's Newspoll that shows two party preferred voting intention at 52-48. I still think the ALP will win the Federal Election comfortably. In fact, if you offered me a 52-48 result at that upcoming election, I would take it in a heartbeat.

So I think Rudd will win. However, I also think that Rudd won't be around to fight a third election as leader of the Australian Labor Party.

A number of things influence my thinking on this matter. The first is Julia Gillard.

Ms Gillard is undoubtedly the success story of the first Rudd Government. She has successfully navigated changes to the industrial relations system, but her implementation of the MySchool website has been popular, while aggravating the education unions. This means that Gillard gets points for standing up to those who supported her my advocating and introducing an unpopular (with unions) policy.

She's also had plenty of practice at being Prime Minister, with Kevin Rudd out of the country for so much of his Prime Ministership. Mr Rudd has been away for parliamentary sittings, important events, and Gillard has handled her duties with aplomp.

On top of that, she is also a much improved media performer, and as time has passed, she has appeared more comfortable in all kinds of situations.

Helping her in her ambitions to be our first female Prime Minister is the conclusion that Kevin Rudd does not see the Prime Ministership of our fair country as the apex of his professional life.

Andrew Bolt can tend to be a little bit obsessive, to put it lightly, but I think he has hit the nail on the head when he suggests that Kevin Rudd holds a deep desire to be Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Think about it: Rudd, the career diplomat/politician, former Shadow Foreign Minister, enamoured with all things global, noted sinophile and expert on everything related to China, lumbered with a job whose purview is mainly domestic.

To lead the world, not just our little island nation, across the morays of 21st Century geo-politics, maybe win a Nobel Peace Prize, and effect the world profoundly as the most senior diplomat, would be a pretty daunting legacy for any other Australian Prime Minister to emulate. And it's right in Kevin Rudd's wheelhouse.

So, if anyone does actually enjoy Kevin Rudd - Australian Politician, enjoy it while you can, because by about mid-2012, we might be saying goodbye to Rudd PM as he boards a plane to take on one of the most important jobs in the world.

Measuring Education

There is good politics, there is great politics, there is transcendant politics, then there is the introduction of the MySchool website.

I've got in trouble on here before for wading into the muck that is talking about education in this country, but the verdict is clear: Australians love having the ability to see how their kids' school compares to other schools.

I've seen Principals and Education Union Leaders get on TV shows regularly since the start of last week. And they talk about inappropriate metrics, and mitigating factors, and the effect MySchool will have on enrolment levels at their particular schools.

The problem for them is that none of this matters. They may as well be speaking Cantonese, or whatever language the Prime Minister chooses to speak. The populace is not listening to them.

In short, schools (particularly those operated by government) in this country have been sheltered from competition for too long. Education Union leaders can talk until their blue in the face about what sort of a school culture overt competition creates, and children slipping between the cracks, but the reality is that if we, as a nation, can create a system or metric that can help children in schools know more, you know, stuff, that will be beneficial.

Trust me, I know teachers deal with a ton of stuff that is well outside of what should be in their job description. But with the crisis in the quality of parenting in this country, they are often the only ones that are consistently raising, and in some cases feeding, this nation's children.

But we need to do better. To increase the number of children who know more. Who know how to spell, how to multiply (I'm talking numbers not teenage pregnancy), who Henry Parkes was and why he is important, and stuff like that.

And any tool that puts upward pressure on these things, that cause them to be more likely, has to be good. Suddenly schools will be focussed primarily on educational results. Schools should be educational facilities, not mass child raising centres. That schools feel that they have to be mass child raising centres is a tragedy that will not get addressed, I fear, until it is not politically radioactive to call parents on not raising their children well.

On top of all that is the fact that most parents love this sort of thing. Why do you think Mr Rudd is already talking about expanding MySchool's scope, despite the site not being operational for even a week? He's knows how good this website is politically.

So you won't get me criticising the government on this one. It's something that should have, but unfortunately could not have, happened under the previous government.

The uncontrollable Politician

Tony Abbott would like his daughters to think long and hard before having sex.

The story is not that he thought it, or even said it to his daughters, who in all probability, rolled their eyes about their hideously dorky dad if the above conversation did occur.

No, the story is that he said it to a reporter from that great bastian of all that is accurate and fair in hard news, the Womens' Weekly (which is issued monthly, but no one would dare call a publication the Womens' Monthly).

The thought occurs that maybe someone in Abbott's office with the word "Media" in their title should have advised Abbott not to make the above remark.

However, after a bit more thought, it occurs that maybe someone did provide this advice to Tony Abbott, and either told them where to go or just quietly ignored it.

All this is pure speculation, but is Tony Abbott impossible to handle? Not in the way Malcolm Turnbull was, impossibly smart and completely aware of his mental superiority, and therefore incapable of tolerating work not up to this personal standard, but in a "Tony being Tony" way, where Tony will just do what Tony was always going to do. Maybe there is very little use in advising him in this way.

It's certainly a point of different between him and Kevin Rudd, whose language sometimes sounds like it's been "advised" to within inches of being a language almost irreconcilable with English. Not a lot unlike that sentence I just wrote.

We here all the time how politicans aren't like other people, live in a alternate reality away from "real people", and are so driven by issues and media presentation that we can't tell anything about who they really are.

On the other hand, there is Tony Abbott. While many in the middle to far left would disagree strongly as a matter of principle, I think Tony Abbott wants people to know who he really is. He's either not interested in spin or couldn't be bothered participating in it. From this we get quotes like the ones this week that have driven the media cycle for days on end.

There is a larger issue of politican's families and private lives that comes into play here. Abbott opened the door, even if he did it absent-mindedly, Julia Gillard played it for all it was worth, and George Brandis jumped all over Gillard's comments and played the "no children" card, and now we're off to the races. The truth is Tony Abbott was asked what he would tell his daughters about sex before marriage. Julia Gillard took this honest, if ill-advised, answer and used it to work to her goal, which is every woman outside of Abbott's household voting Labor later this year. It may backfire, but probably only if the Libs keep their counsel a bit more, which has as much chance of happening as the Pakistani cricket team becoming world leaders in fielding and running between the wickets.

Tony Abbott is what he is. Expect an eventful year with plenty more of stuff like this.

My Australia Day thoughts

I did something yesterday I can never really remember doing.

I did something celebratory on Australia Day.

Normally, I usually just sit at home and watch Australia play someone at cricket, occasionally flicking over to the tennis. If the day is a Monday, it may coincide with the Championship Games in the NFL. In short, I'd probably give the answer about Australia Day that the little kid in the BigPond ads does.

However, yesterday I went to one of Rose's school chums' places for a barbeque and some fun in her pool. Despite all attendees being required to wear Aussie Flag temporary tattoos, I somehow got out of that. And Skye's family house is a testament to pretty much all that is good about Australia: her father is caucasian, probably of British heritage, while her mother is Muslim. All over the house are posters promoting Australian flora and fauna, a very kitsch "Advance Australia" rug in the hall way, pool and barbeque out the back. It was, on all accounts, a very good day.

I'm not really comfortable with overt displays of patriotism. While I deplore the word "jingoism", I like to think that Australia has always embraced an understated patrotism, one that doesn't surface during while the National Anthem is being played (an ordinary, but fairly inoffensive anthem by international standards), but does surface after events like Black Saturday.

Australia is moving towards more overt patriotism: there's not much doubt about that. This can manifest in something as benign as wearing the Australian Flag as a cape, but can also move towards racism and intolerance, which is actually when you stop celebrating Australia Day. After all, almost everyone in Australia is from someone else. While I would like to think we could stay as respectful and dignified about our national pride as we were before, we are becoming a little more like the US in wearing our patriotism more obviously.

There is also the unease many people feel with celebrating a day such as January 26, when the white man landed and never left. However, the fact is that most any date that Australia Day could be celebrated, would be problematic. And there are no dates of national significance in August or September, when people (especially in Victoria) really need a day off.

In the final analysis, we need to accept, celebrate and acknowldge who we are and where we've been. We're a country that has a national broadcaster who has the same post office box in every capital city because it was a cricketer's final test batting average. We have another national day which commemorates one of the greatest mistakes in military history, but we see it as the birth of a national spirit. We have a holiday for a horse race. We've had a Prime Minister almost encourage people to take the day off work, and another who crowd surfed while in office. We have highways named after footballers and lanes named after rock bands.

I don't know what you'd call that, but I call it pretty close to the best country in the world. Hope you had a good one.

This Australia Day, here's something to give thanks for...

If any of you have seen Michael Moore's film Sicko, you probably don't want to get sick in the United States of America. While his movies are more essays than documentaries, he paints a picture of the USA being almost the worst place in the world to require medical attention. To prove his point he travels to Cuba, and is assured he will receive low-cost quality care.

Probably quite a few people who watched Sicko voted for Barack Obama in November 2008. The reasons they voted for him are wide and varied, but many of them would have agreed that the health system in the USA was fundamentally flawed. It needed fixing.

Therefore, armed with the Presidency, a large majority in both houses of the US Congress, Obama championed reform and a bill was introduced.

Now, it is said that the two things you should never see how they are made are laws and sausages. (I would add black pudding to that list.) The process of how a bill becomes a law in the US is one of the more convoluted legislative situations in the world today.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the passage of any bill through the US Congress is the Senate filibuster.

In Australia, the party which has the majority of the members in the house can stop any other member talking by simply moving a "Point of Order" that the member who is talking no longer be heard. This is called "the guillotine", and is usually used by governments to ran through contentious legislation at speed.

This is the same in the United Kingdom, and in many parliamentary democracies all over the world that subscribe to the Westminster tradition.

However, in the United States Senate, the tradition that members should debate any issue or bill uncensored and uninhibited prevails over nearly all other rules.

Therefore, as long as a United States Senator can stay upright, and keep talking, they never cede the floor. There is no time limit on how long any Senator can speak. They can speak for as long as they are physically able to. This is known as a filibuster.

Over time, the US Senate has worked to put some roadblocks in front of the filibuster. Currently, it takes 60 Senators to invoke what Australians would know as the "guillotine", that is, to stop another Senator talking.

Yesterday, Democrats lost their 60th member of the US Senate, as Massachusetts elected Republican Scott Brown in the Senate seat that has been effectively held by the Kennedy family since 1953. The seat became vacant due to the death of Ted Kennedy.

This will almost certainly kill any chances of meaninful reform to the health care system in the USA. So the next time you are lamenting the sort of country you live in, or the inability of governments in Australia to get anything done, look over the Pacific Ocean, and thank your lucky stars.

Drawing (and rambling) a long bow

It has been an interesting week in God's Own Country, otherwise known as Victoria. Between 43,000 attending a sport bastardised and the beginning of this nation's yearly fortnight-long obsession with tennis (immediate correction - we will get interested in the second week of Wimbledon if an Aussie is still playing), quite a bit of stuff has happened.

In Collingwood, The Tote, a legendary live music venue that I never attended (being from Elwood anywhere north of Victoria Parade is Woop Woop), closed down due to exhorbitant increases in the cost of it's liquor licence. This event was mourned by those who frequented the place, many who didn't understand why it was closing, and directed their momentary anger at those in charge of writing and administering this state's laws.

The Tote is a victim of the State Government's focus on curbing alcohol fuelled violence on our streets. Many people, mostly young men, but often innocent bystanders, are being maimed, paralysed, and even killed in attacks by men who have filled their bellies with booze, and then searched for a target for their anger, now ready to escape after being supressed inside ever since the last time they decided to have a drink or 23.

Probably, no one ever got more of a scratch outside The Tote, or inside for that matter. But because the statistics say that The Tote is a high risk venue (amount of alcohol stored, location of venue, hours of operation), this place where friends met each other, had a few pots of Coopers and listened to some live rock music now must close. The statistics say this place is as dangerous to society as QBH, or a litany of places on King and Queen Sts.

I think what most people should object to in the case of The Tote is a unintelligent application of the law, where individual circumstances (and results, as The Tote had been proven a safe venue) were not taken into account. As I am always saying, we live in a world in many shades of grey, not one of black and white.

On the same side of town over the weekend, but closer to the urban fringe, 5 young men lost their lives in a car going at a speed of 140 kilometres an hour. On any scale, this is a complete tragedy. The driver was driving on a restricted Probationary licence, and was carrying five passengers, one of which miraculously survived.

What do these have to do with each other? Well, this morning many people were calling on governments of all levels to do something more to stop carnage on our roads.

Forget the fact that the National Road Toll is significantly less than it was 35 years ago. The main factors in this reduction have been government action and enhanced safety features in cars, such as seat belts, roll cages and airbags. There's no way around it: huge improvements have been made, and they have produced results.

What should not be forgotten is that the driver was already speeding. He was already breaking the law. What makes anyone think that more law would have prevented this situation occurring? Maybe the real tragedy here was that, from a legislative standpoint, this event was largely unavoidable.

I can tell you what you won't hear from governments: any mention of poor parenting.

The main reason for both the tragedies that happen on our roads or outside our drinking establishments, which were the driving force for the regulations that brought about the death of The Tote, is the lack of respect for authority.

In previous generations, playing up while drunk would have meant either a beating at the hands of the police, or at the hands of a stroppy parent. We've moved on from that barbarism of older times, but what we haven't done as a society is replaced it's effectiveness as a tool of societal control.

Quite simply, many people today aren't afraid of what the authorities can do to them. A speeding ticket will get paid. A night in the lock-up will come to an end the next morning, minus the bruises it may have contained in the times of our parent's youth. Discipline is about making the perpetrator of an offence feel worse than the victim, so he or she does not commit the offence again. In our modern language, it's about a disproportionate punishment.

The Tote is gone, partly because case-by-case administration costs money that no one is willing to pay, and partly because the thugs who started this mess feel untouchable.

The young men who died in Mill Park in Saturday night probably felt untouchable as well. Their whole lives ahead of them, unable to be conquered until their youthful exuberance and hubris brought on the final consequence. We pray for their families as they try to make sense of what cannot be made sense of.

Yet we have to. Two diametrically different events on the one weekend may bring a turning point in how we, especially young men, act in our society. If so, I'm all for it.

A predictable result

Insanity has been described as doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting different results. Someone should tell the Pakistani cricketers.

After dropping Ricky Ponting yesterday, the writing wasn't on the wall so much as it was on the scoreboard, or it should have been, even before it has technically "occurred". Because once Ponting had been put down on nought, in one of the worst dropped catches of all time, he was always going to score big. You couldn't change it any more than you could change what you had for breakfast a week last Thursday.

Pakistan coach Intikhab Alam lamented a cultural indifference to fielding in Pakistan, but unless that is turned around, this will inhibit the Pakistani side much more than any inability to play Test Matches on home soil. In short, "catches win matches" is a cliche not just because it rhymes, and the sooner Pakistani cricketers learn that, the better.

The defensive tactics shown on the fourth morning in Sydney that played a vital role in letting Australia bat to a position they could, and ultimately did, defend, were also revived as Pakistani captain Mohammed Yousuf decided the best way to play Australia was to stop Ponting and Michael Clarke score boundaries. Half an hour into the second morning they are both still at the crease, having scored a combined 260+ runs, with less than half coming from boundaries.

One would suggest that Pakistan would have to try something different, but they never do, so why should we expect them to now? They've always been a side that has seen cricket, and particularly Test Cricket, as a purely linear game. Pakistan has always solely relied on the batting and bowling talent of their players.

Unless you are the West Indies of the 1980s or the Australians of the early 2000s, you simply cannot consistently win Test Matches without some other method of gaining the advantage. You can either put a increased focus on fielding and catching, as the Australians did in the mid-1980s when their talents stocks were low (replicated by Zimbabwe in the 1990s and New Zealand in the early 2000s), or find a innovative thinker, make them captain, and try new things like opening the bowling with a spinner or setting attacking yet unorthodox fields. For this method think Martin Crowe at the 1992 World Cup.

However, Pakistan seem committed to mediocrity in much the same way George Pell is committed to Catholicism. They seem to want to win only one way, which is irresistable brilliance with bat and ball. Not only is this method unsustainable for long-term success, it's also incredibly lazy. They seem to have an aversion to working hard or thinking in an innovative fashion.

The fact that Australia has Pakistan on their calendar again in a few months augurs well for the confidence of the Australian Cricket Team leading into next year's Ashes series. That is, unless Pakistan do something different. Don't hold your breath.