Greg Jericho outlined in this Drum article how bad the year is looking for the development of good policy.

Based on the reporting of Minister for Transport and Infrastructure Anthony Albanese’s speech to the National Press Club, journalism is in for a shocker of a year as well.

Reading the media stories that came out of the National Press Club lunch on Wednesday did not fill this young student journalist with a lot of pride for the profession that he would like to enter.

The first speaker at the National Press Club for the year, Albanese came to do three things. Talk up the Government’s previous successes, outline the changes that will occur in his portfolio this year, and get a few sledges off at Tony Abbott.

If the media stories that covered it were any indication, then he only managed to succeed in getting through the last message.

The big news out of his speech yesterday was not that the harmonisation of 23 different law jurisdictions into one would save an estimated $30 billion in compliance costs for freight companies. It was not that the Government had spent more money over the past five years on urban infrastructure projects than every other government since Federation combined. It was not about a second airport for Sydney, or further investigations into a Canberra to Brisbane very fast train.

It was that he quoted some lines out of the Aaron Sorkin film “The American President” and didn’t attribute them.
His exact words were “In Australia we have serious problems to solve and we need serious problems to solve them. Unfortunately Tony Abbott is not the least bit interested in solving them. He is only interested in two things, making Australians afraid of it and telling them whose to blame for it.”

Pretty much word for word the same thing that Michael Douglas’ character said in the film.

Fairfax, Nine, the ABC, News Ltd. They all focused almost exclusively upon the fact that the lines were from the movie. The Coalition was happy to play along with Abbott, Hockey and Pyne all getting in on the act of criticising Albo over it. The Daily Telegraph even somewhat amusingly named it a “controversy“.

While ripping off lines is certainly not something to be encouraged (at university we would fail the unit or even get kicked out if we plagiarised somethinbg), the relevance of it to the public’s understanding of public policy and governance is somewhere between nil and zilch.

The “controversy” has made three things obvious. The first is that almost nobody in the Parliamentary Press Gallery has the foggiest clue or interest in transport policy or reporting on it.

The second is that if you are a political hack and are going to pull lines out of The West Wing or any other of Aaron Sorkin’s series or movies for a speech then you’d better reference them.

The third is that if you are a political hack and need your minister to defend a stuff-up then just slip a few Aaron Sorkin lines into their speech and *don’t* reference them. When the media find out that the minister plagiarised a line from The West Wing it’ll be the only thing that gets reported. Crisis averted!

The newswire AAP were just about the only ones to write about anything other than the movie quote.

Then I thought I must have just been a late bloomer. That sooner or later I would start liking girls and then I could “get a girlfriend” like all the other popular boys at school were getting.

Then I thought it must have just been because I was at an all-boys school. I wasn’t friends with any girls and hadnt known many new ones since moving from my local high school in year 8.

It must have been year 11 when it started. I would find it easier to identify who was a good looking or cute man or guy than a good looking girl. Or rather I would “know” what a good looking girl looked like, but that they didn’t immediately jump out to me the way a cute guy would.

That was when I probably started acting more campy. Silly jokes and mannerisms which were not bloody or “cool”. The people around me probably realised I was gay before I did.

Even throughout year 12 as I would go to sleep dreaming of my cute classmates rather than an attractive female model I still wasn’t willing to accept myself as gay. I just wasn’t there yet. I was sure I would start liking females soon.

I tried telling myself that I was bisexual. That’s why I thought guys looked cute and why I complemented a particularly handsome classmate on how good he looked.

All the while my personality and mannerisms must have shown what I was.

I moved into the boarding house in year 11, in 2003. While it started off well for the first few days, as I already knew most of the boarders in my year, things quickly took a turn for the worse.

One individual chased me round and rubbed his ass in my face.

Constant mocking and taunting about being a “battler”. Making fun of the fact I liked the Lord of the Rings.

These things started to add up. Eventually the younger year groups saw that I had no respect among the people in my year group.

That meant they didn’t have to give me any respect. Some of the people in the year below me started to get in on it by mocking and bullying me. Performing floor duty to get the younger year groups into bed and shutting up, or cleaning their rooms in the morning became extremely difficult.

Once there was a used condom left on my pillow.

In university things improved, but I changed my personality as a result.

I became blander. More blokey. More cynical. I hid away the stuff that had happened during high school.

The words they said to me were the least of the things that they did. So if I was able to suffer from that during high school and come out “fine” then others shouldn’t complain.

But there was a different challenge. I had accepted that I liked guys in 2005 during my year away in China.

When I got back and started university I was planning on telling people I liked guys.

Then I got there and lost my courage. I feared people would treat me the same way as what happened in high school. So I kept quiet at first.

I was going to work up my courage, to go over and talk to one of the other gay guys in the college. But two of them were already a couple and the other two were, to put it bluntly, too camp.

Then I became best mates with someone who didn’t like gay people. I found my friendship with him was more important than trying to get together with one of two guys who I didnt like.

So I kept a part of myself hidden for years and years. Not able to try and find a relationship.

In 2008 I and a female work mate tried to have sex and I couldn’t “get excited”. That’s when I knew once and for that I wasn’t just bisexual. I was fully gay.

but I still could not act on it. For years and years I saw people forming intimate relationships, finding hook ups at the Uni pubs, hooking up among themselves and hearing about their various exploits. All the while I wasn’t able to, for fear of being found out and losing my friends.

Even when I returned back home after being oversea in 2008 I had to keep it hidden. My father doesn’t like gay people.

Whenever a news story about gay marriage came on he would complain about the Greens and the “do-gooders” wanting to change the definition of marriage.

So for another two years I had to live with a part of myself in secret, no relationships, no sex.

I decided I was not going to tell them I was out until I had a full-time job and able to afford rent and living by myself.

I finally got this in October 2010 and came out to a small group of close high school friends in December 2010.

I lost my virginity at the age of 24 in April 2011 when I stayed over at another guys house when my family were away on a trip and would not know I was gone.

I was forcibly outed in March 2011 when I brought a gay friend home from a club one night and he slept over in my bed.

I told my parents I was bisexual, rather than gay so it would be easier for them to take it. They still believe that. I still haven’t told anyone from university to make sure that it is not passed on to my university friends.I don’t know if I ever will.

A BIGOT is someone who refuses to see the other point of view. Articles by Peter van Onselen and James Valentine in The Weekend Australian smeared opponents of gay marriage as bigots, yet both men refuse to see the other point of view — and that means the point of view of the child.

Marriage is fundamentally about the needs of children, writes David Blankenhorn, a supporter of gay rights in the US who nevertheless draws the line at same-sex marriage. Redefining marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would eliminate entirely in law, and weaken still further in culture, the basic idea of a mother and a father for every child.

In informal logic this is what we call begging the question. The problem that lies in this argument is that the conclusion is based on a premise that already assumes the conclusion is correct. His premise is that children need a mother and a father based on a conclusion that two gay parents are bad, however he doesn’t explain how, why or give any supporting evidence to support this premise. It simply assumes that it is so, and incorrectly so as studies have shown that children of gay parents are likely to have the same educational outcomes as those of heterosexual parents, do better than those that live in a group home or orphanage, and that the major problem they face is bullying and discrimination, largely as a result of people holding views like David Van Gend.

I assume the irony of talking about the view of children and not asking any children of gay parents for their views themselves is lost upon him.

Here is the heart of opposition to same-sex marriage: that it means same-sex parenting, and same-sex parenting means that a child must miss out on either a mother or a father.

This is a perfect example of a straw man. Reduce your opponent’s argument down to a single point, refute that point and then claim that you have refuted their argument. The problem with this fallacy is obvious – same sex marriage does not mean same-sex parenting. There is no requirement for same sex couples to have children. In fact unlike heterosexual couples there is not even the possibility of a gay couple having a child unless they specifically use artifiial methods. We could point this problem in his argument out alone and Van Gend’s whole argument would fall over like a house of cards.

Marriage is a compound right under Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; it is not only the right to an exclusive relationship, but the right to form a family. Therefore gay marriage includes the right to form a family by artificial reproduction but any child created within that marriage would have no possibility of being raised by both mother and father.

The relevant Article that Van Gend quotes says “Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.”. I’ll give Van Gend the benefit of the doubt and just assume he didn’t realise that he quoting from a document (that Australia is nominally signed up to) which says that people, which by my reading should include gay people, should have the right to marry. Instead of accusing him of deliberately stuffing up his own argument by introducing a premise that counters his conclusion. Lol, always check your links people.

Obviously there are tragic situations where a child cannot have both a mum and a dad, such as the death or desertion of a parent, but that is not a situation we would ever wish upon a child, and that is not a situation that any government should inflict upon a child.

Yet legalising same-sex marriage will inflict that deprivation on a child. That is why it is wrong, and that is why all laws are wrong that permit single people or same-sex couples to obtain a child by IVF, surrogacy, or adoption.

This is a clever little red herring that Van Gend has done. Very clever. Notice exactly what he is saying – sometimes a parent dies or a leaves the family. Obviously the government shouldn’t advocate killing parents or suggest they abandon their children. But what about all the other situations where the government does inflict that on a child. If the government shouldn’t do that then why do they allow divorces that result in one parent being given custody of the child. Why are single parents allowed to carry the child to birth? Does he suggest that the government refuse to send people who are convicted of a crime to jail on the grounds that they have a child and don’t wish to leave the child without a father or mother? This is also a half-truth, in other words suppressed evidence. He wants to make us think that the government doesn’t already create families where children don’t have both a mother and father, when clearly they already do.

Take Penny Wong, for example, as van Onselen did. She is an effective politician, but she can never be a dad to a little boy. She and her partner tell us they have created a baby who will have no father, only a mother and another woman. Their assertion is that a dad does not matter to a child.

As ethicist Margaret Somerville wrote in these pages, such assertions force us to choose between giving priority to children’s rights or to homosexual adults’ claims. Yet trivial arguments frame the gay marriage debate solely in terms of the emotional needs of adults, ignoring the child’s point of view.

This isn’t so much a logical fallacy as it is bullcr*p, to use the technical term. Does Van Gend seriously want to argue that Senator Penny Wong, the holder of one the highest elected offices in the country, her child, a person who will be raised in a stable, wealthy, family environment will be less emotionally and socially developed when they are grown up than Ritchard of ACA/Today Tonight fame?

You have to admire his way with words though. He says it’s Senator Wong who has an ‘assertion’ that a dad does not matter to a child. Well no Dave, it’s you who has the assertion that they do. So far the research conducted by actual scientists (yes, in lab coats – well no, actually they are just psychologists) is that: “If gay, lesbian, or bisexual parents were inherently less capable than otherwise comparable heterosexual parents, their children would evidence problems regardless of the type of sample. This pattern clearly has not been observed. Given the consistent failures in this research literature to disprove the null hypothesis, the burden of empirical proof is on those who argue that the children of sexual minority parents fare worse than the children of heterosexual parents”. So his whole argument is not only riddled with logical fallacies but it’s based on a falsehood to begin with.

But wait, there’s more.

Such adult-centred narcissism raises the wider question: if gender no longer matters in marriage, why should number? If marriage is all about adults who love each other, by what rational principle should three adults who love each other not be allowed to marry? Academic defenders of polyamory are asking that question, and no doubt van Onselen will soon be slurring opponents of polyamory as binary bigots.

He clearly couldn’t help himself but to jump on the slippery slope in yet another of the most poorly constructed arguments I’ve seen yet. The slippery slope is of course a fallacy because just because we make changes in one area it does not follow that we will make changes in another. Serious people don’t even bother using this type of argument because it is so easy to see and easy to refute. The real fun comes from subverting the fallacy. If David Van Gend is seriously arguing that a child needs both a mother and a father to have a good life then surely it would mean that having two mothers and two fathers would be even better right? So if David Van Gend says that we should make sure that children have both a mother and a father then by what rational principle should we stop two sets of people from both being the parents to the child. No doubt Van Gend will soon be slurring opponents of dual parenthood.

While warm, fuzzy writers such as Valentine can imagine no possible harm to society from gay marriage, the serious minds behind the movement occasionally let us glimpse their wider purpose. US activist Michelangelo Signorile urges gays to fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely.

Uh well I’m pretty sure that redefining the institution of marriage completely is the whole point of the exercise. Like once gay people have same-sex marriage rights the institution of marraige will no longer represent the final form of government sanctioned discrimination left in our country today.

He sees same-sex marriage as the final tool with which to get education about homosexuality and AIDS into public schools.

Sure enough, we now have empirical evidence that normalising gay marriage means normalising homosexual behaviour for public school children.

What!? No! Curses. Van Gend has discovered our secret plot. All along we wanted to stamp out the establishment of prejudice and encourage acceptance of difference during the formative years of school. I’m laughing at Van Gend’s ridiculous assertion that children shouldn’t be educated about the danger of sexually transmitted diseases. Didn’t the government spend millions of dollars specifically to educate people about AIDS during the 80s.

I’ve held off calling Van Gend a bigot until this point cause Jeremy Sear pinged me for going straight to calling him a bigot on twitter, but also because he hasn’t outright been insulting gay people so far (I could make an argument about his ‘homosexual adults’ line but this post is going so long already). Van Gend says that normalising gay marriage means normalising homosexual behaviour for public school children. Normalising. Yep. In other words he thinks that gay people are currently ‘unnormal’. Unnatural. Immoral. Deviants. Freaks.

This is a man who says he is a doctor. Imagine that. Going to see a doctor who thinks you are a lesser human being just because of your sexual attraction. This is a man who claims to represent the “Family Council”. Is that the type of message that the “Family Council” want to send to teenage students who are questioning their sexuality? You aren’t normal. You aren’t like the rest of us. Go die or something.

You are a hateful man David Van Gend, and you have my pity.

Beyond the confusion and corruption of schoolchildren.

Some people would argue that making children and teenagers more understanding of the world around them is not corruption, but given that faith is the furthest emotion from understanding I can see why Van Gend would consider it “corruption”. This is also what is known as the Helen Lovejoy Defence. Won’t somebody think of the children!

the cultural consequences of legalising same-sex marriage include the stifling of conscientious freedom. Again in Massachusetts, when adoption agency Catholic Charities was told it would have to place children equally with married homosexuals, it had to close. As Canadian QC and lesbian activist Barbara Findlay said, “The legal struggle for queer rights will one day be a showdown between freedom of religion versus sexual orientation”.

I’ve dealt with this in an earlier comment that I sent to Crikey. In this case Van Gend is quoting the lesbian activist in what I assume is to be a negative way. Given that he is rightwing christian fundie I can understand why. I think I’ve perfectly summed up the counter argument to this point in my email (which I’ll note for once is an actual argument and not just a piece of fallacious nonsense) so I’ll just quote it with some amendments:

“The choice to belong to a religion is just that – a choice. The fact that someone is gay, or a female, or transs-xual, or is a single parent is not something that they can just change. I can choose to be a catholic, or an anglican, or a muslim, or a buddhist, or to worship any of the thousands of gods in the Japanese Shinto religion. Just as I can choose to be an anti-abortion activist or a climate change denier or a Green. But I cannot change which gender of person I am attracted to. They like to pretend that their right to discriminate against me through their choice of ‘religious belief and practice’ has the same standing as me having the right to not be discriminated against because of who I am.”

Blankenhorn warned, “Once this proposed reform became law, even to say the words out loud in public — every child needs a father and a mother — would probably be viewed as explicitly divisive and discriminatory, possibly even as hate speech.

All aboard the slippery slope! Let us know how that works out in a few years. This is the part where I like to laugh at them, haha.

Marriage is not a fad to be cut to shape according to social whim

A knowingly false claim. Interracial marriage was banned under US Federal Law until 1967 when people realised that that law was based on values that were both no longer held by then and what we nowadays consider unjust. Of course marriage has been shaped according to social whims.

Not all marriages do create children but typically they do, and the institution exists for the typical case of marriage. Homosexual relations cannot create children or provide a child with natural role models; such relations are important to the individuals involved, and demand neighbourly civility, but they do not meet nature’s job description for marriage.

Here Van Gend slips back into fallacious form. Here he hasn’t even fallen foul of an informal fallacy – but a full on formal fallacy in deductive reasoning.

Van Gend says that the institution exists for the ‘typical’ case of marriage. If the ‘typical’ case is one in which a couple produce a child then according to his reasoning only those couples who plan to have a child when they marry should be allowed to marry. However since heterosexual couples are allowed to marry and not produce a child then it stands to reason that the actual typical case of marriage is not one in which a child is produced. Rather the typical case of marriage in one in which two people are married. If heterosexual couples are allowed to marry and not produce a child it stands to reason that gay couples should also be allowed to marry if they are not going to produce a child.

I’ve already dealt with his unproven assertions that same-sex parenting is somehow ‘bad’.

As van Onselen notes, homosexual couples now enjoy equality with male-female couples in every way short of marriage. It must stop short of marriage, because the demands of adults must end where the birthright of a child begins.

He couldn’t resist throwing in another begging the question. Why does the birthright of a child mean that the demands of the adults can not be met? Basing your conclusion on a premise that you assume is correct without proving it, seems to be the modus operandi for anti-equality campaigners.

Marriage and family formation are about about something much deeper than civil equality; they are about a natural reality which society did not create and which only a decadent party such as the Greens, so out of touch with nature, would seek to destroy.

This is his viewpoint. I have a differnt one. I believe that marriage and family are also not just civil equality or being able to claim tax benefits. I believe they are about love and whether you are willing to give someone unconditional love.

I won’t even bother with dealing with that stupid sledge against the Greens.

Finally Van Gend’s whole argument is moot because same-sex parenting is already legal in WA, the ACT and NSW. Sucka!

Disclaimer – some of the logical fallacies in this piece should be attributed to David Blakenhorn rather than David Van Gend, but if Van Gend wants to use them under his name he has to wear them.

And on the topic of David Blankenhorn – the judge who presided over the Californian Proposition 8 hearing ruled that his testimony was unreliable and entitled to essentially no weight. Your witness Mr Van Gend.

While the more personally motivated reason I did it was because a nice guy I had met was also a member of the Greens, I wouldn’t have followed through if I wasn’t unhappy with the direction the Labor party was taking.

The 2010 election will be remembered as a visionary and policy nadir in Australian politics. Tony Abbott, under a crusade of repealing everything that happened over the previous three years and promising to do nothing to deal with the long term problems facing our country scared the Labor government into campaigning on a platform of mediocrity and non-reform.

Ironically the National Broadband Network, the only big government program advocated by the Labor government was what saved Julia Gillard’s political skin by allowing her to stitch up a deal with Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott to form government.

This same big government program is exactly the sort of thing that Gillard mocked in her speech commemerating a man who abolished fees for higher education.

We have moved beyond the days of big government and big welfare, to opportunity through education and inclusion through participation.

Putting aside the fact that a good education will see you emerge with a $20,000 debt on your head at the end of university, can any one explain to me how reducing the role of government is meant to achieve the aims that the Labor party is meant to advocate?

The Australian Labor Party was born out of the Labour movement. A movement where the poor, working classes unionised to force capital to provide them with pay and conditions suitable to living a decent comfortable life. It was a movement that valued equality of income, not equality of opportunity…er fairness of opportunity as the Prime Minister put it.

The historic mission of our political party is to ensure the fair distribution of opportunity. From the moment of our inception our mission has been to enable the son of the labourer, the daughter of the cleaner, to have access to same the opportunities in life as the son of the millionaire, the daughter of the lawyer.

Silly me. I thought the historic mission of the Labor party was to ensure their workers received a decent living wage. The historical mission of the Liberal party was to ensure equality of opportunity.

In equal opportunity for all Australians;

If someone came up to you and asked you “Which do you think the party that stands for opportunity and prosperity in the country is” it’d a pretty safe bet that you would say the Liberal party. But that’s exactly what Wayne Swan said.

In this period of reflection as well as action, there are many views about what has happened and what needs to be done. I want to leave the organisational matters to others and focus on the core purpose of Labor.

I have always summed it up in two simple words – prosperity and opportunity – that guide the focus on education and employment that lies at the core of this government’s policy agenda.

Seriously. Those words could have come from anyone in the Liberals or Labor (well apart from the fact that he mentioned the word Labor). John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull, Julia Gillard. It’s all the same. Vague statements about increasing economic growth that will magically lead to everyone doing better when all evidence and experiences point to the fact that a unrestrained free market with no government to side with the common man results in extrodinary amounts of wealth going to the very rich while everyone else gets shafted.

We all know what happens when you have a high amount of income inequality – your country turns to shit. In 2006 Australia had a Gini coefficient of 30.5. The United States, that bastion of deregulation and small government, had 45. I know which country I would rather be living in.

So why would I stick with a party like that. Why stick with a party that claims to represent the common person, who claim to be the descendents of the Labour movement when all they espouse are essentially Liberal party policies. Now admittedly the Liberals under Tony Abbott have vacated the field of the Liberal party and jumped headlong into conservative socialism. But if Labor thinks that there are former Liberal party voters to be found by moving away from their traditional base they are joking themselves.

It’s small wonder the Labor primary vote is in the low 30s. The parliamentary and party leadership have abandoned their principles and in doing so abandoned their base. Their base won’t come back. There is no more ‘Labor heartland’ because Labor does not stand for increasing income equality or equity. They don’t stand for getting a better deal for workers. They stand for the principles of the Liberal party but they aren’t able to out-liberal the Liberals.

So when the two parties have essentially the same philosophy execept one promises temporary upfront pain (aka a carbon tax) to avoid a devastating future, and the other offers hidden pain (aka using income tax already collected to do the same work as a carbon price) in the short term although it will ultimately lead to devastation in the long run, well it’s obvious that non-politically savvy are going to choose the ones who trick them into thinking they don’t need to suffer any pain.

The Greens don’t have this problem. They are clear about what they want. A more progressive taxation system. More money take from the corporatocracy that rule the Labor and Liberal parties and giving it back to normal people in the form of improved services. A more equitable society. They are clearly a progressive party, not like the Labor party half of whom are social conservatives, another third who are too scared to upset their electorate to try anything ‘non-mainstream’ and the final 6th who should be in the Greens anyway. How some members of the parliamentary Labor party can still call themselves a progressive party should be the subject of ridicule and scorn and thus I subject them to my scorn.

From within the Greens I will advocate for the party to become mainstream. I will advocate for it not just to support, but to replace the Labor party entirely. The Greens are the true heirs to the Labour movement tradition.

I describe myself as a social democrat but the party that claims to be the party of social democracy no longer uses the rhetoric of social democracy in its speeches, it no longer is guided by the values of social democracy in its policy. All it is filled with is union overlords who are as in love with power as the capital they profess to protect the workers against, careerists who entered the office of a member straight out of university and never had to deal with grind and drugery of working in a fast food restaurant, packing shelves, or applying for a proper job based upon the merit principle, social conservatives, bench warmers, people in love with being in power not because they want to improve the country but just because the idea of sitting on the benches in Parliament House.

There are still some members of the Labor party who are to be admired. My own local member Dr Andrew Leigh is probably the most qualified person to be in Parliament in Australia today. It is no strange circumstance that he was also selected on the back of the local members overthrowing a plot to place two careerist staffers in the safe seats of Canberra and Fraser. But his representation of me is not enough to keep me in the party alone.

I’m a public servant. I plan on making my career in the development of policies that will lead to good outcomes for all Australians, not just the richest.

So I look forward to becoming involved with the Greens. I hope to help develop policy for them. I look forward to the day when the Greens are considered the mainstream party for the left and income equity and progressive social policies are put back on the agenda. When that day comes the non-rich will have found their natural party of government again and we’ll be talking about safe Green seats.