Update on gay marriage, Marcel, Jim, Rabbit and David Smith…

Marcel has posted a follow-up. (See also here.) It contains a dreadful pun… Carefully argued, though. Again I anticipate more discussion.

Very serious note: yesterday Thomas posted Today’s news, one item concerning someone he had been in primary school with: Reward offered for missing Matthew. See also Help Find Matt. Not looking good, that, and it does seem it may be a reminder of the dark side of homophobia.

Related, but lighter: I see in SX News (Sydney) a write-up of the 12th annual Gay Parade at the Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro.

It seemed a good idea at the time…

I am contrary, I know, but whenever Julie Bishop is enthusiastic about something I tend to take the opposite view. Yesterday, for example, speaking in defence of the ideologically driven (and short-sighted) abolition of compulsory union fees at universities — see The Sydney Morning Herald — she remarked: “The challenge for student unions is to attract student support by being relevant and efficient.” The context for that “Let them eat cake” utterance is this.

Students used to pay several hundred dollars a year in compulsory union fees, which subsidised services such as child care, international student support, food outlets, sporting clubs and infrastructure, student newspapers and social clubs, but the Federal Government passed laws banning the practice in 2005. Since then the sector has lost $167 million in annual income, resulting in a 50 per cent funding cut to inter-university sport, a 40 per cent funding cut to sporting clubs and more than 1000 people employed in student services losing their jobs, the study found.

Nationally 100 sporting services such as elite athlete support have been shut down or reduced, while the same has happened to 261 union services.

But the money students have saved will not necessarily remain in their pockets, with the study calculating they will spend more than that amount in the increased cost of services and rises in HECS fees.

My South Sydney Herald piece

Inside the Whale

Former ABC Middle East correspondent Mark Willacy doesn’t just take you into the news or even behind the news. He takes you under the news – and I for one wanted to scream. Not at Willacy, but at the leaders of this world…

Mark Willacy will be at Politics in the Pub on Friday 23 November from 6 pm to 7.45 at the Gaelic Club, Level 1, 64 Devonshire St., Surry Hills (across from Chalmers St exit and Devonshire St tunnel at Central Station). Parking is usually available in side streets. Afterwards you may have dinner at the Royal Exhibition Hotel across the road.

Imagine this. “The 17-year-old was just a torso and a head. His legs had been blown away, and his stomach had been peeled open. He looked like the android from the movie Aliens after the alien queen has torn him in two with her stabbing, serrated tail.”

This was a suicide bomber. It is the first scene to confront Mark Willacy as he takes up his appointment as ABC correspondent in Jerusalem in 2002. It is the first paragraph in his recently published The View from the Valley of Hell: Four Years in the Middle East (Macmillan Australia 2007 $35rrp).

Friday Australian poem #12a

We couldn’t have a #13, could we? In fact if you check “Men in Green” again you will find a revised version. There had been an overlap last week between my role as an English tutor and that poem; I have a coachee, John, who was born in Shanghai in 1995. I had happened to bring an anthology to tuition and he had been given the task at school of finding a ballad or story poem to learn and recite. (I am glad some English classes still do this.) So we settled on “Men in Green” which he rather liked. I gave him a bit of context for it, and last week and yesterday we talked about it — among other things such as vocabulary and grammar exercises. (He has only been speaking English for about three years.)