Month: December 2006

When I was in primary school, there were no children of Catholic parents in my school. Those children went to a separate Catholic school.

We viewed them with fear and suspicion, fuelled by our parents’ prejudices. We chanted silly, insulting songs at about them in the street and they chanted them back.

Fortunately, it was at the tail end of widespread religious intolerance in Australia. By the late 1960s children of Catholic and Protestant mixed more freely. By the 1980s religious sectarianism was over. Before that religion could influence careers and economic advancement generally.

Australia was lucky that its economic position was generally so good that Catholics did not suffer the sustained economic or political repression that erupts into violence as in Northern Ireland.
Continue reading “forum for saturday 30 december 2006 iraq pay”

Police and fire authorities have been advising people facing fires this season to make a choice: either stay and defend or evacuate early. And having made your decision, stick to it.

It is advice that some Canberrans say they would have liked before the January 18 fires.

In past seasons, police have been known to order evacuations and in some states legislation has been passed to give them the power to arrest people to ensure they evacuate. The common-law position has always been that police have no power to arrest people without reasonable suspicion that they have committed an offence and that they have no power to enforce an order to evacuate private property.

The new position comes in light of more detailed research on the behaviour of fires. It now puts the decision on the home-owner, but a better-informed and better-prepared home-owner. Still it is an awesome choice.
Continue reading “forum for saturday 21 December 2006 decisions and fires”

The debates on Australian values and stem cell research this month have made it clearer where Prime Minister John Howard stands.

In voting against wider stem cell research he said, “To vote in favour of this bill is to embrace a relativist view of society and of the value of human life and what leads to it. This does, to use that cliche, get us perilously close to if not on to the slippery slope.”

He said also, “I think we live in an age where we have slid too far into relativism. There must be some absolutes in our society.”
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 16 December 2006 relativism”

It is now more dangerous for Australia not to have a Bill of Rights than to have one.

This week, a Bill of Rights came to the rescue in the US in a way that would not happen in Australia. A US court cited the Bill of Rights in striking down a Pennsylvania school board’s decision to order the unsubstantiated mumbo jumbo of “intelligent design” not be taught as part of the science course.

It is an appalling waste of students’ intellectual space to impose such “breathtaking inanity” — to use the judge’s words — upon young minds in the name of science.

US District Judge John Jones said, “Intelligent design . . . is a religious view, a mere re-labelling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.”

Jones, incidentally, is a Republican and a churchgoer.

The Pennsylvanian decision is a small advance in the face of considerable odds.

Bear in mind, it took the best part of 500 years for it to be (almost) universally accepted that earth is flat and not the centre of the universe. It has taken 500 years since Copernicus proved it that the vast bulk of humankind knows the earth goes around the the sun and that it is a sphere.
Continue reading “Forum for Saty 24 dec 2006 bill of rights”

Sometime in the late 1940s two High Court judges left the Sydney Town Hall after one of the ABC’s splendid “live” symphony concerts.

Justice George Rich thought the performance wonderful and turned around to Justice Owen Dixon and said, “Splendid concert, don’t you think?”

To which Dixon replied, citing the words of Section 51 of the Constitution, “Yes, indeed, but I cannot see the connection with ‘postal, telegraphic, telephonic, and other like services’.”

This has been the head of constitutional power that has enabled the Federal Parliament to regulate broadcasting.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 9 December 06 fairfax”

A bookstore in Batemans Bay told me this week that if I wanted to buy Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, I would be on a list of more than 20.

The book was released in Australia last month, and has sold out at many bookstores and is going into reprint. So it is obviously in some demand, even in rural and regional Australia.

In the book, Dawkins hammers the rebaked creationist idea of intelligent design. He says all the scientific evidence points to life (and systems in general) evolving to ever more complex forms from very simple forms. The rebaked creationists, on the other hand, suggest that the universe starts with a hugely powerful intelligence – and presumably goes backwards given the state of humanity today.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 2 December 06 dawkins”