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A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on.
John Quiggin 
The response to the untimely death of Bill Leak has shed light on how badly the language and terms of political discussion – especially about where power lies in Australian society – has been distorted.
For some 20 years Leak was employed to draw a daily editorial cartoon for a national broadsheet newspaper published by the largest media corporation operating in Australia. The general outlook of that newspaper aligns with the interests of Australia’s most powerful business sectors, and with the dominant factions of the current goverment of Australia. Whatever may be said about Leak personally or about his cartoons, his was undoubtedly a position of power to shape the terms of public discourse, and by any objective criteria he was a member of Australia’s political and media elite.
However, in the days since his untimely death we have been regaled by claims that Leak was some kind of persecuted dissident on a par with Nelson Mandela in Robben Island or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in exile, that his daily offerings in the OzFail were some kind of courageous outsider critique of “the elites”. and that criticism of his cartoons by those who (justifiably or not) found them offensive was a species of totalitarian suppression.
This sort of Orwellian corruption of discourse about where power lies and how it is exercised in Australia needs to be incisively deconstructed and strenuously resisted.
@Paul Norton
Leak will be forgotten in a matter of days, except by his supporters at News Limited who will try to keep the flame alive. But it will be for nought, because, unlike the Charlie Hedbo cartoonists, he wasn’t murdered. He died of natural causes, albeit much too young.
This said, he shouldn’t have been pursued by the Human Rights Commission over the offending cartoon. Political cartoonists are supposed to give offence and it was a grievous error of judgement by the HRC to go after him. However, the claim, heard since his death, that his brand of cartooning was courageous, is ridiculous. His cartoons in the Australian appealed directly to the prejudices of the people who read the Australian. Sucking up to your readers is not courageous. If he’d published his cartoons in the Guardian – now that would have been courageous.
The thing is that it wasn’t the HRC that decided to go after him. A complaint was lodged pursuant to applicable legislation and the HRC had to consider the complaint in accordance with its complaints process.
https://www.humanrights.gov.au/australian-human-rights-commission-s-complaint-process-complaints-about-sex-race-disability-and-age
Further, in this particular case the woman lodging the complaint withdrew it before the conciliation process was able to commence.
http://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2016/11/18/woman-behind-bill-leak-cartoon-complaint-dropped-charges-due-harassment
Much of the commentary about this case has been avoidably mistaken about the second point. Most of what we read in the MSM about the workings of the HRC and its State and Territory counterparts is based on complete ignorance of the complaints procedures used by these bodies.
I have mixed feelings about Bill Leak. I didn’t like his reactionary cartoons on unions, power and wealth, safe schools, climate change and so on. Bit I think it was brave of Leak to take on Islam and the consequence of doing that was to make himself a potential terrorist target, according to Australia’s spooks. Apparently Leak moved house due to the threat. It is a great pity that much of today’s cultural relativist and identity politics Left fawns over Islam, as was the case when, in an argument with Jacqui Lambie, a self-promoting narcissist named Yassmin Abdel-Magied told us on Q&A that Islam the most feminist of all religions. After that event, the cultural relativist Left piled on to the soft target, Lambie, who is admittedly a fool, and portrayed Abdel-Magied as a victim. I didn’t see any attempt to deconstruct the nonsense claim that Islam is feminist or any attempt to deconstruct her claim that she is a poor little victim of racism who just so happens to be a ubiquitous media darling who quite literally gets to sit next to the prime minister for dinner and go on taxpayer funded junkets.
Bill Leak summed the situation up with a perfect cartoon https://twitter.com/ZanettiCartoons/status/832376552499261440
I appeared as a defence lawyer in the criminal courts for 40 years and I confirm of those I appeared for, often sex offenders generally for rape, indecent dealing or other child abuse offences, the defendants were almost 100% non-aboriginal. I cannot recall anyone including the now departed Bill ever satirising this obvious fact. The fact of aboriginal fathers being drunkards and ignorant of their childrens’ names or needs never came up in my experience. To so represent this as a fact with so little regard for the feelings of aborigines or more particularly aboriginal fathers is no more free speech in play than my walking down the street and abusing a 12 year old girl as being a “slut” because she wears a Justin Bieber T shirt.
“It is a great pity that much of today’s cultural relativist and identity politics Left fawns over Islam, as was the case when, in an argument with Jacqui Lambie, a self-promoting narcissist named Yassmin Abdel-Magied told us on Q&A that Islam the most feminist of all religions. After that event, the cultural relativist Left piled on to the soft target, Lambie, who is admittedly a fool, and portrayed Abdel-Magied as a victim.”
I think it is a great pity that some people see fawning in behaviour that is, in other less vindictive interpretations, simply a withholding of critique until it becomes appropriate to be critical without adding to the demonisation that the “admittedly a fool” Lambie and her kind are so willing and able to prosecute in this anti-Muslim climate.
I saw no victimisation of the “self promoting narcissist” – and isn’t that self-serving personality diagnosis a giveaway as to the possible personality features of people who choose to see fawning behaviour where it doesn’t exist.
I did ‘see’ in the claim that Islam was ‘for her’ the most feminist of all religions, an interpretation of Islam from an Australian perspective that is the way in which Islam will be integrated into Australian culture and become part of our way of life.
Bill Leak was not brave; just a brain damaged man with too many psychological issues that were present before his famous fall from a balcony, to be capable of summing up any situation with any insight.
Good news that the attention focused on One Nation in the lead-up to the WA state election has not led to any substantive results for that party at the ballot box.
A comment I have made in response to Smith @2 is held up in moderation. What it basically says is that the AHRC did not decide to “go after” Leak. It received a complaint from an Aboriginal woman which it then would have acted on in accordance with its procedures.
In the first instance this would have entailed writing to Leak informing him of the complaint (with a copy of the complaint attached), inviting him to respond to the complaint, and informing him of the AHRC’s procedures for resolving the complaint, which in the first instance would have involved a conciliation conference between Leak and the Aboriginal woman to allow the two of them to try to resolve the matter to their mutual satisfaction.
As the Aboriginal woman withdrew the complaint before it reached the conciliation stage, the only other communication Leak would have had from the AHRC would have been a letter informing him that the complaint had been withdrawn.
@Paul Norton
The only thing I would add to that, Paul, is that Leak’s lawyer has stated that he responded to an HRC communication by claiming the 18d defence, but as far as I’m aware, this was at an early stage – in response to the initial HRC notification, I think. Hence, I believe, Trigg was correct in stating that Leak (and/or his lawyer) had not made a formal notification re defences.
@Julie Thomas
Well put, JT.
I would note that there is actually some ‘objective’ evidence for claiming Islam as more ‘feminist’ that any variety of Christianity or Judaism, and that is the right of married women to retain their own personality, and their own property.
Islamic women have retained the right to own and control such property as they may bring to the marriage, whereas this right has only been extended to Christians very recently. Indeed, I can still remember when women in Australia (regardless of religion) could not get any kind of bank credit without getting a male ‘guarantor’ to sign the loan application.
So even a well off woman (say a female lawyer or doctor) couldn’t get a loan to buy a house without having the approval of some ‘guarantor’ male. That says a lot for so-called Judeo-Christian Civilisation, doesn’t it.
So personally, I wouldn’t rush to criticise Yassmin. I think she has a clearly objective case for the “religion” – but maybe not so much for the society and its laws, Sharia or otherwise. But then “Judeo-Christian Civilisations” haven’t obeyed their holy book(s) much either – “Thou shalt not bear false witness” ? Say no more.
Apologising for Islam is destroying the Left. It does more to delegitimise progressive politics than any amount of lying or cynical maneuvering or fake news from the domestic right.
Most voters in western democracies are poorly-informed and non-political. They don’t care about the fine points of Islamic theology and Koranic tradition, and they don’t think a lot about the complexities of post-colonialism and globalisation. They only know that 1.5 billion people are vocally and violently opposed to Enlightenment values and small-l liberal ideals, and also very keen to emigrate, en masse, to wealthy nations where those ideals are dominant.
What should those voters think when they see the Left falling over itself to excuse and protect religious ultraconservatives solely because it upsets their slightly less religious, slightly less conservative domestic opponents?
When I see Yassmin Abdel-Magied engage in David Irving style historical revisionism, or seek counsel from Hizb ut-Tahrir, I see a George Pell in drag, period.
@Julie Thomas
“Bill Leak was not brave; just a brain damaged man with too many psychological issues … ”
Wow, that’s unnecessarily vicious. As to Yassmin Abdel-Magied, she has constructed a infantile version of Islam in which it was progressive until the white colonialists interfered, which is a childish discourse that has appeal among certain elements on the Left.
junkee com/ junk-explained-heres-everything-jacqui-lambie-doesnt-know-about-sharia-law/42598
GruBleen:
In my view, she really is no such thing. Her victim’s version of history is objectively racist, pits white against the Other and fails to acknowledge the shortcomings of a religion which go back its brutal warlord founder who waged war, raped and enslaved, had a gaggle of wives and deflowered a 9 year old, which, even by the standards of the time, was pushing things (from my readings 11-12 being a more likely age).
A progressive Islam, Christianity or Judaism is only possible if it faces up to the horrifying events in their histories, the ugliness of the theologies and the wicked bits in the foundational texts (like the god-ordered genocide of the Canaanites in the Old Testament).
@Paul Norton
According to the Human Rights Commission website:
The complaint against Leak should have been immediately binned on the grounds that it was misconceived, lacking in substance and trivial.
Considering that representative Aboriginal organisations of the standing of the NSW Aboriginal Lands Council took issue with the cartoon that prompted the complaint, it would have been a cavalier use of the President’s powers under that section (which are, in any case, in practice exercised by AHRC staff on behalf of the President) to have immediately terminated the complaint rather than setting in train the conciliation process.
@Paul Norton
Well, no, given the content of the cartoon, Bill Leak clearly had no case to answer. Satirists, including cartoonists, should be able to go about their business without being molested by political lobby groups. Any satirist worth his or her salt will be despised by the half the community. I’ve read that the stress of legal proceedings is equivalent to the stress experience during a relationship break up or the death of a loved one. I once experienced it personally and I found that contention that to be a right.
Surely it is a human right to be free from vexatious weaponised litigation. Recep Erdogan is currently using litigation as a weapon in Turkey, Lee Kuan Yew (and his successors) used it to shut up opponents in Singapore and Gillian Triggs has done the same thing as President of the Australian Human Rights Commission. Of course Triggs’ misdeeds are an order of magnitude less than the other examples I cite but aren’t we supposed to be a genuine liberal democracy?
@HED PE
No, just a factual statement.
Wau, that’s unnecessarily vicious.
But isn’t that the very essence of colonial history: pitting “whites” against “the Other” ? Or have I completely misunderstood the European rape of Africa, in particular ? Of course it’s also true that “colonial history” pitted whites against whites in numerous so-called “World Wars”. Mere tens of millions killed in a couple of colonial adventures during the previous century.
Then your readings are very fallible – Mohammad was just as much a myth as Iesus Christos and Siddhartha Gautama. But I am interested: what was your reading ? The Quran in the original Arabic ?
Provided that we are talking about real histories, not myths such as the ‘Caananite “genocide”‘.
But what I was talking about was the distinction between the ‘religion’ as expressed in its holy books and its variety of canon law (eg Sharia) and the actual practice of the religion’s adherents. So far as I can see Muslims are no more rigorous at behaving according to their religion than Jews or Christians are. Go to any “believing” Christian and ask him how many sacrifices to Jehovah he’s made – you are aware that the Bible requires its believers to commit ritual sacrifices, yes ? And to kill sinners such as those who labour on the Sabbath ?
And that is what is called “the separation of Church and State”..
Nonetheless, there is much in Islam that was indeed more protective of women and their rights than in Judaism or Christianity – the marriage property laws being a prime example. We should all keep in mind that humanising our society has been a “long slow march through the institutions” since the liberation that was begun in the Enlightenment
@Sancho
Maybe, but it’ll have to take its place in the queue along with all the other things that are “destroying the Left”.
@Paul Norton
Triggs should have used her judgement and strangled the case at birth. The point of having someone distinguished, experienced and capable as HRC President is that they have the antennae to know which cases to pursue. If the HRC President is just going to be a box ticker who hides behind processes you might as well have the work experience kid in the job.
@GrueBleen
Colonial history, i.e. the history of colonisation, is an ongoing historial process for which we have evidence dating back to prehistory. The Middle East, including north Africa, has been carved up by various empires over many thousands of years. The Egyptian empire once stretched from Sudan to Syria, for example. Islam itself resulted in many empires and had some success in places you would presumably call white, like parts of modern day Ukraine, Spain, the Balkans, Sicily etc etc.
So where did you get the idea that empires were all about something called white? The Teletubbies? SpongeBob Squarepants?
No, he was an historical figure, although we can’t be 100% sure about the historical details.
@Paul Norton
To add to my point, GrueBleen below tells us that every historical episode of colonialism, including the work of the Aztecs and Incas, had white power pulling the levers (even though no white person ever new these empires existed until the 16th century!). Technically this is a racist claim and I could lodge an RDA complaint. But would this be in keeping with the principles of liberal democracy?
Surely the RDA should be about real and substantive racism that can have a major impact on people’s lives, for instance “x” calling for the mass liquidation or placement in concentration camps of everyone belonging to ethnic group”y”. I don’t think the rough and tumble of everyday banter should clog up the courts and that’s why I’m not going to sue Julie Thomas for her defamatory comments about me on this thread.
HED PE@16, only 3 per cent of complaints lodged with the AHRC proceed to court. The great majority are resolved via conciliation. The “ordeal” that Leak faced, had the complaint been proceeded with, was that of sitting down with the Aboriginal woman who lodged the complaint, or perhaps even just having a phone conversation with her, to talk about the cartoon and her concerns about it and to see if they could agree on an amicable confidential resolution of the matter. This conversation would have been assisted by a trained conciliator and both Leak and the complainant would have been able to have a support person with them.
Smith @19, perhaps Triggs used her judgment to decide that as a non-Aboriginal person it was not her place to cavalierly second-guess Aboriginal people about what they ought and ought not to take exception to.
As a matter of historical interest, Triggs was President of the AHRC when Shurat Hadin lodged a complaint with the AHRC under the Race Discrimination Act against acdemics involved in anti-Israel boycott campaigns. She did not exercise her powers to terminate that complaint either, which in the event fizzled out totally when it went to court. We know that the loudest outcry against her had she done so would have come from exactly the same quarters that think she should have strangled the complaint against Leak at birth.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/10/israeli-legal-centre-abandons-lawsuit-against-sydney-academic
In fact, we find that one of Leak’s QuadRANT hagiographers, Peter Smith, was an enthusiastic supporter of Shurat Hadin’s vexatious use of the RDA and the AHRC complaints procedures against supporters of the BDS movement.
http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2014/12/dancing-wailing-wall/
Paul Norton @22:
You say Triggs didn’t bin the Shurat Hadin complaint but you quite rightly acknowledge that it was vexatious rubbish. To my mind this is another example of Triggs’ inability to exercise sound judgement.
You also say:
I think most well rounded people are capable of empathy and as a woman Triggs should have ample personal experience of discrimination and she should have dismissed at trivial. Who cares what an Aboriginal person to takes exception to? As an opinionated retired diabetic, fat ugly middle aged working class white lefty guy raised by the dregs of rural white trash, I take exception to 100 things every day, including some of the comments on this thread, but I believe I have no right to use the judicial system to bludgeon everyone who annoys me. And no one has to care about my petty grievances either. In an open society, we should all be encouraged to take offence on the chin (different rules apply to children as bullying is objectively harmful and scary when you’re young).
If I was Bill Leak and forced into conciliation (the HRC legislation allows for mandatory conciliation) I would have told the complainant to GFY, bared my hairy bottom in her general direction, tolder her that her mother was a hamster and her father smelled of elderberries, then done a cartoon about it.
@Paul Norton
Further on this comment:
The legislation gives the AHRC President (i.e. Triggs) the duty of immediately knocking out complaints that are ” trivial, vexatious, misconceived or lacking in substance”. If Triggs can’t perform that duty, she is unsuited to the role and should resign. Or be sacked.
@HED PE
Yeah whatever.
Although I do have to point out to you that enlightened people understand that what you see in the people you deride is more likely to be true of your own self rather than an accurate analysis of the person you are judging. Have you ever wondered why you are so lacking in serenity and peace of mind?
You seem a bit annoyed at certain things that a good psychologist could help you deal with more effectively than your whinging and complaints suggest you currently deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?
But feel free to sue me. I have been threatened before in that way by right wing people who object to my freedom to speak.
There was an interesting interview on RN with Leak that occurred after his brain injury. Check it out and see if you can find any evidence that he had any interest in understanding the world around him from any perspective except his own as a fascinating and wonderful man who deserves to always be the center of everyone’s attention.
@GrueBleen
Passing strange how right wingers are so apparently worried about the destruction of the left. As if freedom and fairness could ever be destroyed by a religion that is so similar to the Christianity that hasn’t managed to destroy these ideas.
@Julie Thomas
Right wingers like you aren’t worth it and I have already said that I’m prepared to tolerates slugs in my garden as part of an open political ecology. I’m plenty serene, but you aren’t judging by your comment history, which looks like the contents of a toddler’s potty.
Maybe your advice would be best offered to the whinger who objected to Leak’s cartoon?
You enjoy trolling dead people before they’ve even been buried??! Now that’s creepy and offensive behaviour but I think it should still be legal. I’d be much more worried if you left your potty and computer and shared the streets with the rest of us 😉
Come on people. Let’s be civil.
I was hoping things would stay civil but that does appear to be possible with Julie Thomas. A quick google reveals a dozen occasions on which she has used the same types of insults when someone disagrees with her then she also likes to wheel out some sob story about mommy and daddy:
Strewth, the “intensely critical parent” obviously wasn’t critical enough!!
@Tim Macknay
Were the initial comments on the self proclaimed muslim woman’s personality characteristics were civil? Or should you be more specific about who is not being civil?
@HED PE
Slow down hon. Your grammar and ability to express your feeling are deteriorating.
You don’t like women do you?
@Julie Thomas
Rather obviously, you comments about me and Bill Leak’s still warm corpse were far less civil.
But as an adult, I know Tim is right. Sorry folks, I will not feed the troll in future. Or to put it another way I will not reply to its baiting.
Come now little snowflake. Julie is just stating her opinion.
There’s no need for all this pearl clutching. Take it on the chin, waffen-ssm.
Sorry, HED PE. I’ve only visited that Zanetti twitter account you linked to once.
Is that how they talk there? In oddly coded sexual humour and potty insults?
“@ZanettiCartoons @yassmin_a Total c*** #deport & retrieve the tax payer money wasted on this bush pig”
I’m not sure why you think it’s us who are harming his legacy?
I honestly don’t get that. Why aren’t you out there criticising those people?
Where’s the “ok mate, I know where you’re coming from, but tone it down a bit”?
@Nick
I have no idea who Zanetti is. I linked to the first google search result twitter account with the cartoon. I didn’t read the comments because all I wanted to do was show the cartoon. Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
@HED PE
Wau, that’s unnecessarily vicious.
So where did you get your historical “knowledge” from, The Teletubbies? SpongeBob Squarepants?
Technically, that is a totally asinine statement.
@Julie Thomas
Without the “Left” who could they blame for all their failures ? If “the Left” didn’t exist, it would have to be invented.
Well Christianity did quite a bit of at least repressing freedom over the years. Starting from Constantine’s installation of Christianity as the official religion of Rome (completed around 400 CE) to the Enlightenment which began the process of sidelining religion in the 1700s is a long time, and it must have seemed to many along the way that indeed “freedom and fairness” were dead.
Technically, that is a totally asinine statement.
If someone said that to you face-to-face you’d at least start to consider the possibility that there was something actually-clinically cognitively wrong with them, no?
@Collin Street
Technically, and in every other possible way, Collin, that was a totally asinine statement.
And yes, I do consider the possibility that you have some clinically cognitive problems.
@GrueBleen
You breathlessly told us that every colonial project ever undertaken on planet Earth is the work of white people, which means you think white people for toppling the Cham Kingdom, Genghis Khan, the Bantu expansion and the growth of the Incan and Aztec empires, in spite of their rather conspicuous absence, presumably through some type of sorcery. Asinine and cognitively impaired, anyone? And objectively racist.
@Paul Norton
This reinforces my point. Triggs should not have let the HRC be used as an instrument by people looking to make cheap political points. She should have been strong enough to call BS on trivial or vexatious cases. This is what a strong President would have done. Yes, she would have been p*ssed on from a great height, but that comes with the territory when you are HRC President. By waiving things through that should have been stopped, she copped it anyway, created pseudo-martyrs like Leak, and created an opening for those who would like to declare open season on minorities.
From wiki:
“The term “white race” or “white people” entered the major European languages in the later 17th century, originating with the racialization of slavery at the time, in the context of the Atlantic slave trade[12] and the enslavement of native peoples in the Spanish Empire.[13]
“It has repeatedly been ascribed to strains of blood, ancestry, and physical traits, and was eventually made into a subject of scientific research, which culminated in scientific racism, which was later widely repudiated by the scientific community. According to historian Irene Silverblatt, “Race thinking … made social categories into racial truths.”[13]
“Bruce David Baum, citing the work of Ruth Frankenberg, states, “the history of modern racist domination has been bound up with the history of how European peoples defined themselves (and sometimes some other peoples) as members of a superior ‘white race’.”[14]
Alastair Bonnett argues that ‘white identity’, as it is presently conceived, is an American project, reflecting American interpretations of race and history.[15]”
It is the “superior” judgement that ‘we’ (although being a woman means that I am never fully part of the category of superior beings like a white man is) came to have about our abilities and our progress vis a vis the rest of the human race that provides me with all the justification I need to constantly and so “breathlessly” critique western civilisation and consider that this is something that is all to the good of western civilisation which is sometimes regarded as a concrete thing rather than a continuing process.
Returning to the general political point about reactions to Leak’s death, since the sad news came through last Friday QuadRANT Online has published ten consecutive items prompted by it, some of them written in the purplest prose you will ever read outside of a certain kind of student newspaper. QuadRANT has published no articles about any other matter during this period, and certainly not the WA State election result. Compare this with Green Left Weekly publishing just seven articles in two weeks last November/December prompted by the death of Fidel Castro, without featuring him on the front page of either of those two editions.
Not a peep about poor old Bill Leak and what an awesome intellect he was on the Pauline Hanson page though.
Currently the main topic is the terrible cost of airport parking but surprise surprise very few of the fans seem to care about this and instead are wanting Pauline to do something about the cost of hospital parking.
@Julie Thomas
While I thought HED PE’s apparent determination to have an argument about Yasmin Abdel-Magied was a sign of trouble, his comments about her weren’t noticeably worse than what is often said about public figures on this blog. My comment was prompted more by you and HED PE being uncivil to each other, than about public figures. HED PE is clearly the main culprit, although I suppose I made my comment general because I would have found your characterisation of him as a right winger insulting had you directed it at me, so a read it as a bit on the uncivil side.
I listened to that RN interview with Bill Leak that you mentioned. I was very interesting, but I think it’s a little unfair to characterise Leak as overly self absorbed based on that interview alone, given that the subject of the interview was himself and his experiences. I think anyone’s responses in that context are likely to come across as a little narcissistic. It’s possible that he was a very self absorbed character of course. I wouldn’t know.
@HED PE
It’s always possible to stay civil.
As you seem to be a relatively new visitor to Prof Q’s blog, I feel I should tell you that some of the sorts of things you’ve said on this thread have in the past led to other commenters being banned. If you want to keep on coming here and participating in discussions, I suggest that you tone it down and particularly try to avoid name calling and deliberate insults. This is meant as friendly advice, and I hope you take it that way.
I’ll remind everyone and HDE in particular as a new arrival, of the requirement for civility.
@Julie Thomas
That should be “I read it as a bit on the uncivil side”. Sorry.
@Tim Macknay
It’s a little ironic that, in a comment where I took issue with you for characterising someone as overly narcissistic, I unintentionally typed the phrase “I was very interesting” instead of “it was very interesting”. Oops. 😉
@Paul Norton
I just read some of the Quadrant articles. It really highlights what a tiny, hermetic circle the Sydney rightwing commentariat is.
I tried to open the Pauline Hanson page, but it kept crashing by browser for some reason.