More here and here.



To quote James Bradley of City of Tongues on Twitter, “The level of casual misogyny directed at the PM is truly appalling, and says a lot about those who endorse it.”

There is a well-defined legal process for such projects, developments or activities in a place of national significance, under section 68 of the Environment Protection, Biodiversity and Conservation (EPBC) Act. In early January, before they sent the cattle in, the DSE was supposed to notify the Federal environment minister, Tony Burke. After that, the Minister is required to publish the notice on the internet and invite public comment. After “consultations with the public and relevant ministers”, the Minister is required to decide whether the activity is a Controlled Action under the EPBC Act.

The impacts must then be assessed (and there are already reams of information on the damaging impact of hooved grazing animals on the Alpine environment, such as the 2005 Alpine Grazing Taskforce report and the 2006 CSIRO study into the Alpine ecology, grazing and fire.) Following assessment, the Minister then may determine whether or not to allow the Controlled Action under the EPBC Act.

It is an offence to carry out activities which may be Controlled Actions without the consent of the Federal Minister for the Environment.

According to news reports on January 12, the (Victorian) DSE claimed to have sent a letter to the Minister, but this letter appeared to have mysteriously disappeared en route.

The Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment has written to Mr Burke’s office advising it of the trial and has offered a full briefing, but it has received no reply.
But the federal Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities has not received the letter.
”Under national environment law, the onus to refer an activity falls on the person carrying out the activity,” a spokesman said.

The cattle are already in the park, so they were in breach of the law already by mid January. I haven’t seen any calls for public comment by Tony Burke for assessment of a Controlled Action under the EPBC act – anyone else seen it? At any rate, the legal process has hardly got to square one.

It’s wrong. And don’t fall for the argument that as a city dweller, you have no right to oppose it. For one thing, this is a Heritage area which belongs to all Australians, not just a handful of families. For another, it’s your taxes at work.

The $5.50 per head fee paid by the graziers when the practice was stopped in 2005 (calves born while up in the high country travelled free) represented a massive subsidy by the taxpayer to a privileged few families, since the tiny fee went nowhere near to covering the damage caused by the cattle. If the Baillieu government is hell bent on allowing these people to do their damage, will the new agistment fee be set at a more realistic level?

Also, when Alpine grazing was ended by the Bracks government, an ex gratia payment was made by the Victorian government to the tune of $100 per head of cattle for the three years after that, up to $100,000 per license holder. (H/T Wilful.) So we were still paying for them.

Now that Alpine grazing has been brought back, will they be required to pay back that money?

You or I would be sent to the wall if we attempted to do something like this, but for the macho men of the Liberal and Country parties, the law is for the little people. We saw the damage that favours for “Labor mates” did to Victorian governance under Bracks and Brumby. Stand by for government by Liberal / Country Party mates. Plus ca change.

A Balcony reader has nudged me to put up something about this article in last Saturday’s AGE by Cordelia Fine, and yes, the writing of this very fine psychologist and academic (yes I know, hilarious, I’m sure that’s never been done before) need to be disseminated far and wide, in fact, hammered into the heads of all the nouveau-essentialists, in the media and out of it, with a giant cluebat. Here are some quotations from the article by Suzy Freeman-Greene:

At one point in Delusions of Gender, for instance, she writes: ”It is appalling to me that one can, apparently, say whatever drivel one likes about the male and female brain and enjoy the pleasure of seeing it published in a reputable newspaper, changing a school’s educational policy or becoming a bestseller.”

*Applause*

…(T)hree years, ago when [son] Isaac was at kindergarten, Fine discovered his teacher reading a book that claimed his brain was incapable of forging the connection between emotion and language. ”And so,” she explains in Delusions of Gender, ”I decided to write this book.”
The teacher was reading Why Gender Matters by US physician Leonard Sax. An influential campaigner for single-sex education, Sax once claimed that the areas of the brain involved in language and fine motor skills mature about six years earlier in girls, while those involved in maths and geometry mature about four years earlier in boys. Fine dismisses such ”neurononsense” and quotes American linguistics professor Mark Liberman’s description of Sax’s use of scientific data as ”shockingly careless, tendentious and even dishonest”.
What did she say to her son’s teacher? ”I explained to her that this was not a scientifically valid claim. And she was very responsive to it.” The exchange, she says, sparked the teacher’s interest in the issue.

*Cheers*

Read the whole thing. This is where the academic rubber hits the social change road.

On the other hand, Elizabeth Farrelly, who, unfortunately, is a regular in the Fairfax opinion stable, says anything about gender that pops into her head!

(The BER project is)…a Gillardist fem-coup to make the Rudd assassination pale in comparison. Or, more sinister yet: a Third World plot to effeminate the West.

…Now that almost every school has a major chunk of its ”open” space fenced and scaffolded, what will give?
Boys, and boy-ness, for a start. As even boisterousness becomes frowned-upon and the fighting that is bound to erupt in such pent conditions becomes punishable by that boys’ own worst-possible penalty, endless hours of raking-it-over talk, just being a boy becomes a problem.
The incentive is to stay static, watch the screen, make like a girl, gossip, get fat. Which is where the double whammy kicks in. Estrogen.
Double whammy, double mammy. For not only does estrogen generate fat; fat also generates estrogen. Add this feedback loop to the xenoestrogens already ubiquitous in the environment and you have a very interesting development in endocrine politics.

*Golf clap*

Yes, it goes on, and yes, it’s all as hateful as that or worse. (Notice there is material for a whole other post on fat hatred in there. It’s an all-round trainwreck.)

Cordelia Fine holds a PhD in neuroscience, is a Senior Research Associate at Macquarie University, Australia, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Elizabeth Farrelly used to be an architect. I have no idea why Fairfax consider Farrelly qualified to witter about absolutely anything and everything in the opinion pages. Oh, yes, I forgot – women who seem to hate their own gender are always given a megaphone in our media.
 
 
 
Crossposted

Well – not quite. Now, I’m not saying a food writer can’t write convincingly about gender politics. Look at Crazybrave Zoe and Twisty at IBTP. But unfortunately, it doesn’t look as if Lewis will take this topic to their level of excellence.

Yet figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics bear out a startlingly even spread of domestic and professional labour: a 2006 study into how Australians used their time found that men spent a combined average (over seven days) of 11.44 hours per day performing professional, childcare and domestic tasks. And women? They came in at a combined average of 11.35 hours – nine minutes less than the men.

All credible studies, from the ABS (including more up-to-date information), the Australian Institute of Family Studies and HILDA surveys, tell us what we already know: women still do the bulk of domestic work, whether working or not. Notice how Lewis slipped the “professional” in there? That’s not part of the domestic load. It’s paid work which goes on the CV and contributes to your superannuation.

And as you begin to take on more of the domestic load, even where your share – minus Lewis’s numerical massage – is less than half, guess what? It’s tiring! Which is a bit of a shock. And kind of demeaning, because it is ballbreaking for men to do housework, which is coded female. So we get sad, sad pictures like this



…Why is he “holding” the mop like that? Is the ignominy of it all so crushing he has to appear entirely bemused by it? Is he a store dummy? Why is he wearing a nice suit to do the housework?

And this (from the Daily Mail in the UK)



Gah! You can see how hellish life has become for these poor, poor men! And according to Lewis, not a word of appreciation!

“There is a legitimate desire from men to be acknowledged,” says Jones, who suggests that the modern man’s role in society is vastly different from that of his father…Feelings of neglect arise, they say, when the stresses and strains of their lives – now as complex as those of their wives – go unnoticed.

Ok, about the appreciation thing. It goes back to the same principle as referring to the bloke’s contribution as “help” – the notion that the woman still owns the domestic load with a limited potential to delegate, rather than the man taking on an equal share of the responsibility, including the planning and remembering component. I’m not against partners giving each other appreciation, of course, it’s wonderful. But it’s assumed, to some extent, that a mature adult will perform certain tasks on a fairly regular basis. As far as women getting more appreciation: really? We still assume, even in 2010, that a mother is going to do various boring household tasks without being thanked for it – apart from the ritual “thank”fest and Hallmark card on Mothers day. Or as Rebekka said here, “they’re kidding, right?”

Expecting recognition for day-to-day housework is an indication that you believe your role in that housework constitutes a heroic act above and beyond the call of duty.

Guys, welcome to our world. Yes, you may find it frustrating and annoying at times. We certainly have.
 
 
 
Crossposted

A senior lecturer in psychology at Charles Darwin University, Dr Peter Forster, says there is no truth to the argument that testosterone levels make men more aggressive.
He says social factors such as the rise of feminism in the last few decades could be behind the rise in violence amongst women.

I’m happy to give him points for biology not being destiny – a refreshing change from most antifeminists I’ve read – but what actual evidence does he have that the “rise of feminism” has kicked off a rise in violence among women? Has he demonstrated that there is a rise in female violence?
Has he told us what the increase(s) are and from what bases they’ve increased? No. Has he teased out increases in actual violence from increases in arrests and charges? Nope. Has he looked at whether violence overall is rising or static, and if so, is male violence rising as well (See also previous point)? No.

Has he mentioned that if you look at historical sources of milieux such as Victorian London and accounts of colonial Australia, the idea of women as gentle and delicate creatures who never threw a punch was somewhat class-based? No.

I went off in search of more information, because I thought that if the ABC had seen fit to publish an article about Dr Forster pronouncing on women and violence, it must be that Dr Forster and/or his department had come up with some ground breaking research, perhaps resulting in a report or peer-reviewed paper which we could read.

Apparently not. In fact, my usually effective google-fu hasn’t unearthed any publications or reports put out by Dr Forster on women, violence, or women-and-violence at all. So what’s he got?

…(P)eople were now looking at other contributing factors, particularly at social and cultural factors such as the effects of several decades of feminism which have largely removed the expectation that women would behave differently to men, and, more recently, the binge-drinking culture among young people, for the rapid rise in female violence.

“Studies have shown that at the age of 14, girls were just as likely as boys to be involved in fights, threats and stealing,” he said.

“This is supported by studies at the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, where they have found similar rates of binge drinking by men and women, and women are also catching up in the use of illicit drugs, and these behaviours are linked with aggression.

“People” are looking at contributing factors. “Studies” have shown. I’ve seen undergraduate essays, let alone blogs, with more demonstrated evidence – and active verbs – than that. Well, there is a citation of sorts, the AIHW, which does exist, although would it kill him to point to the studies themselves? And there doesn’t appear to be anything to do with women and violence, but women and “behaviours (which) are linked with aggression.” Right! Men binge drink and set women on fire and king-hit other men on King street, while women binge drink and “get themselves” raped. See, equal!

The only actual piece of work done within the walls of Charles Darwin University that he seems to be able to point to is a study of road rage by his colleague Mary Morris.

“The research by Dr Morris has clearly shown that, in such aspects of road rage as aggressive gestures, sounding their horn at another driver and verbal abuse, there is no significant difference between male and female drivers. There used to be differences, but not any more,” Dr Forster said.

Road rage covers a continuum up to and including stabbing, shooting, thumping and running over people, so I don’t see that an increase in female horn-sounding and verbal abuse is very useful evidence of an epidemic of violent femmes. I haven’t been able to find Dr Morris’s study either, but I’ll take his word that it exists, so that’s one more on the topic than I’ve been able to find for Forster. It’s ironic that given that the subject is the evil power of feminism, he took her work and ran with it as “Expert Warns”.

Dr Forster hasn’t even begun to demonstrate any link between feminism and violence.

I have no idea why this should have been put out as a media release by CDU and why it should have been news, but unfortunately it’s one more brick in the wall of the bullshit “Feminism gone wrong” story that the media is hellbent on giving us, no matter how dodgy the source might be.

Pavlov’s Cat links to a chilling piece of Southern Gothic by Bobbie Gentry. I’m loving the set design. The little guitar is interesting. Words and chords here.

Boynton shows us Masterchef, 1941. One of those young gels is going to have to do a pressure test, for sure.

And Tigtog gives us a typical hospital emergency scene, featuring doctors who are, er… very highly… trained.

Update: How could I have forgotten this? Erk. Double erk. But as Barista would say, “strangely compelling“.

Sex-education classes are failing to teach young women the skills they need to resist having sex they will later regret, an academic has said…

…Often neglected was the importance of teaching young women negotiation skills so that they could resist pressure from their peer group and partners.

Researchers at the University of Western Australia interviewed 68 girls aged 14 to 19 about the first time they had sex.

Read the whole article. What is missing here? Yup, that would be boys. And men.

I’m so sick of this deeply-entrenched idea that it’s is the responsibility of women and girls to police the boundaries of sexual behaviour and that, as we’ve seen in the Matthew Johns furore, men and boys are simply aggregations of brainless erectile material that can only be corralled, never asked to take responsibility themselves. As I’ve said elsewhere, and many have said before me, that view isn’t particularly complimentary to boys, is it?

I’m all for teaching girls to be more assertive, naturally. It comes with the territory of feminism. But not where it’s intended merely to compensate for boys’ bad behaviour. Why didn’t this study advocate behaviour modification as a necessary element in sex education for boys? Why can’t sex education address the rape myths and other toxic elements in our culture that keep the same bad things happening year after year?

As the events of the last few weeks have shown us, again, it’s not all about the girls.

(Update: H/T to Lauredhel for the totally-not-blaming-girls image, found on a page displaying the same article in the Independent Weekly.)

 
 
 
Crossposted at Hoyden About Town

I’ve mentioned Bag News Notes before, the blog which analyses images from the US news. I’d love to hear what they would have to say about this image.

Top Scientist says ‘No’ to Abortion Bill

* Nick Miller and Leo Shanahan
* September 2, 2008

LATE-TERM abortion “survivor” Gianna Jessen will address a meeting at Victoria’s Parliament House in a bid to sway politicians over proposed abortion laws.
The meeting will also hear from Victorian scientist and surgeon Graeme Clark, inventor of the bionic ear.
The 2004 Australian Father of the Year will tell the meeting that he is not anti-abortion in all circumstances, but he believes the proposed Victorian law is not the best solution.
Under the bill, which has the support of Premier John Brumby but not some members of his cabinet, abortions will be decriminalised up to 24 weeks and after that will be legal if approved by at least two doctors.
The meeting was arranged by an inter-faith religious group and all Victorian MPs are invited.
Ms Jessen arrived in Canberra yesterday to lobby senators to support a separate bill, proposed by Liberal senator Guy Barnett, that would result in the abolition of Medicare funding for abortions conducted between 14 and 26 weeks.
Ms Jessen, who has cerebral palsy as a result of being deprived of oxygen during a botched abortion at 7½ months, will put her case to senators over the next two days….

First of all, do you see what they did there? The byline gives the clear impression that a Top Scientist has come up with some, you know, scientific reason for not decriminalising abortion. If you read the article, it’s nothing of the kind. He’s one of two celebrity speakers engaged by the godbag lobby group the Australian Christian Lobby, and he’s speaking as an ordinary (if celebrated) citizen who is personally squicked by the idea of abortion, even though he isn’t even 100% against it.

Second, Guy Barnett’s medicare bill. I’ll get around to that I hope, but tonight I’m mainly concerned about the “meeting” itself. And thirdly, again, they’ve managed to make the debate “about” late-term abortion – which is the rarest kind and may even get more rare once women don’t have to jump through legalistic hoops to have an earlier one.

It’s simply pandering to the religious right by the Victorian parliament. What can possibly be the Brumby government’s excuse? OK, some questions for you, Mr Brumby:

*Even if it’s sponsored by an outside group, this must be consuming Parliamentary resources (venue, catering) and the time of government and opposition MPs, whose salaries we pay. What is the cost of this meeting going to be?
*Why does the Australian Christian Lobby get to hold this meeting at Parliament house? Surely this is according them rights above and beyond the normal ability of community groups to protest tabled legislation. Other groups, like the anti-pipe protesters and Blue Wedges, have been snubbed and also sued by this government. Why the preferential treatment?
*Will a pro-choice organisation, such as ProChoice Vic., be invited to conduct a similar meeting with speakers of their choice, so as to provide some balance?

Some information about the godbags organising this thing:

Two other organisations that both began in 1995 with a Christian right focus and agenda were the Australian Christian Coalition, now known as the Australian Christian Lobby, and Salt Shakers. The Australian Christian Lobby has its headquarters in Canberra with State Offices, whilst Salt Shakers has a single office in Melbourne. Over time the Australian Christian Lobby has moved from the political right to a centre right position whilst Salt Shakers has not. Both have had their wins and losses over the 11 years that they have been operating.

Gianna Jessen is a singer who works the lecture circuit as an anti-abortion agitator with a unique selling point: she’s a late abortion survivor with cerebral palsy. Now I know that having cerebral palsy sucks mightily, and she would naturally have issues with her biological mother. However, unlike many people with CP in this country, she has made a nice little earner out of her vanishingly rare situation; here’s her booking agent. She wouldn’t be speaking for free; presumably the ACL paid for her. They should have also had to pay for a venue of their own instead of being given a forum in our (supposedly) democratic Houses of Parliament.

So, what should be a parliamentary debate is being biased by forced-birther organisations with money and influence. Not happy, John (Brumby).

The bag of oranges and the carton of milk, on the other hand, will be history.