In defence of the character test

This response to Osman Faruqi’s article, The folly of appealing to Fortress Dutton, published by Overland yesterday, started as a Facebook post. I’m a bit hesitant to write anything at all, but as my recently-deactivated Twitter profile stated, I’m the holder of unpopular opinions. I might as well stick with it.

Faruqi’s central argument relies on a homogenous interpretation of section 501 of the Migration Act 1958 (the ‘character test’) and incorporates frankly tiresome ‘Australian men rape/commit violence against women too’ rhetoric. Sorry, but anyone capable of reading to Year 9 level knows that the majority of sexual violence in Australia is carried out by people known to the victim; there is nothing new or clever in this.

He contends that Ministerial discretion in applying the character test is a slippery slope; invoking a muddle-headed critique of feminists and progressive campaigners ‘weaponising’ immigration controls’ which takes in Gamergate, honour killings, Chris Gayle and the despicable treatment of Faruqi’s mother, NSW Greens MP Dr Mehreen Faruqi, by immigration officials in the US.

The author, Albert Santos, led a campaign against actor Adam Baldwin’s attendance at the Supanova pop culture exhibition. He takes pride in not seeking to have Baldwin’s visa revoked on character grounds, that ‘grovelling at (Immigration Minister Peter) Dutton’s feet’ is an exercise in cognitive dissonance from progressive campaigners – all sans one detail: Baldwin was not invited here to spout hate to small groups of persuadable men and demonstrate how to demean, verbally and physically intimidate women. If you didn’t want to go to Supernova because Adam Baldwin is an A-Grade misogynistic, anti-feminist, anti-abortion, gun-loving, trans-hating, cyberbullying arsehole, you didn’t have to. A hashtag was launched. A Facebook page. Santos’ online campaign – all to have Baldwin ‘disinvited’. Supanova stood its ground, hypocritically claiming to support diversity and inclusion while promoting Baldwin, but he was kept on a tight leash – his abhorrent political views weren’t given a platform. I have little doubt that if he had, the groups Santos (and Faruqi) disparage would have launched a campaign against him through the immigration department.

Unlike Baldwin, Jeff Allen and Julien Blanc came to Australia with one aim, appealing to one audience: Australian men eager to improve their success as sexual predators through any means necessary. For Faruqi to state, ‘progressive campaigners would be better off protesting, organising rallies and boycotts and running public awareness campaigns designed to educate the community’ is an insult to the thousands of people who suffer, or work with those impacted by male entitlement to women’s bodies, including physical contact or intent of physical contact of a sexual nature that a person does not consent to – recorded crimes under the definition used Australian and New Zealand Standard Offence Classification. Allen and Blanc teach men how to commit crimes for profit. RSD tours have one aim: to put the techniques they promote online into real-life. The deficients watching YouTube in their bedrooms bond together in a room, then hunt women in packs, emboldened by, and with encouragement and approval of a group. There is strong evidence that adopting a mob mentality makes men more dangerous to women. What could be more empowering than being told you are an Alpha male, not a Z Grader; that you can convert women into submitting to you sexually by what is (at the very least) unwanted physical contact? That you too, can ‘bang babes’. And when those ‘babes’ don’t want you? When the Alpha male delusion falls apart? The rage must be infernal.

Faruqi goes on to ‘be clear’ that he is ‘not advocating for the public incitement of violence against women’ and that other remedies, including civil disobedience and criminal law, are available to prevent Jeff Allen from doing so. What he fails to consider is that when Julien Blanc was kicked out of Australia on character grounds, visible disruptive civil action was possible because activists knew where RSD’s seminars were being held. This time, RSD went to extraordinary lengths to hide the locations of their seminars, demanding credit card details, doing background checks & not releasing times/dates – people who signed up had to wait for a text messages to find out where they would be inculcated in the ways of the Alpha male sex god who can *make* woman have sex with them. It made protest almost impossible. It also made it difficult to have him promptly charged with inciting violence. So what were ‘progressive campaigners’ left with in Allen’s case? New Matilda editor, Chris Graham, made public how difficult it was to gain information about Allen’s tour. Faced with the hammer of immigration law, or allowing a man to make money from teaching men how to commit crimes, they chose the blunt object.

Faruqi links the use of section 501 6(d) against Allen (tl;dr – it exists to prevent harassment, intimidation, vilification and inciting discord impacting a section of Australian society) with the 2011 amendment targeting the character of refugees and asylum seekers. Advocating s501 6(d) be ignored because the Minister might use it to target refugees and asylum seekers is specious. The provisions Faruqi (& others) rely on to argue the slippery-slope case are not one and the same. Arguing against the application of s501 6 (d) does not stop the Department or Minister from implementing section 501 6(aa) or s197A; allowing Jeff Allen to conduct some sort of covert proselytising operation to affirm to Australian men that they are indeed, the proper owners of Australian women’s bodies because Peter Dutton can apply different powers to target refugees and asylum seekers is a false equivalence.

Very few people argued against the refusal of David Irving’s visa back in the 1990s. Irving failed the character test because he denies facts about the Holocaust. Irving argued that this is a crime that only exists in Germany. The argument that can be made in the Allen case is that the character test is being used to limit speech; that we should accept this bunch just as we should have allowed Troy Newman to come here to show the Right To Life mob how anti-abortion action is really done, or David Irving to come here and deny evidence of the Holocaust. Implied causality between these high-profile cases and the application of the character test to refugees and asylum seekers is intellectually disengenuous. Campaign for the amendments which specifically target refugees and asylum seekers to be removed; but do not draw a bow between the treatment of asylum seekers and the treatment of white dudes who make money by teaching other dudes how to commit crimes against women.

No, I didn’t sign the petition, by the way. I despise the toxicity of the people who abused others who expressed discomfort with the character test being applied to Allen, but I do question the way this argument is structured. Further, there appears to be little space for consideration of an alternate view which holds that Australian women deserve to be protected under Australian law from people who want to come here and exercise normative social influence on Australian men and incite them to commit crimes.

It is about feminism…

Feminism is an entire world view or gestalt, not just a laundry list of women’s issues.

~ Charlotte Bunch 

Ah, International Women’s Day (IWD).  Nothing like the klaxon of a UN-endorsed day of faffery to raise the hackles of the conservative commentariat, including Elle Hardy in her 6 March column for The Daily Telegraph, in which she lambasts modern feminism and casts humanism as the preserve of exponents of liberal democracy to address the plight of worthy victims of ‘real’ oppression, while ignoring the scholarly interpretation (i.e. the literary knowledge and linguistic skill required to be able to comprehend and practice the ideals of ancient and Renaissance thinkers).  Hardy quotes Cicero without providing the context that shaped his legacy, his translation of the Ancient Greeks and introduction of their chief philosophical schools to enable a new, distinctly Roman voice.  Hardy’s critique is a quasi-Pat Robertson rant against socialism, based on the quaint notion that the first & second waves of feminism were ‘noble‘, while the current or third wave of feminism, ‘has become a by-word for the persnickety and the banal; a banner under which to air boutique grievances … (the) cultural minutiae in the West’.

Piffle.

Third wave feminism is a reaction against the second wave ignoring the voices and agency of women of colour, differing abilities or gender identification.  In scorning the third wave, Hardy scorns the Ciceronian legacy she professes to admire; for we move further along the path of ‘kindness, generosity, goodness and justice’ through welcoming and celebrating diverse voices, not mocking or ignoring them.  Hardy’s column is a strange exercise in confirmation bias: ‘my weltanschauung* is better than yours and I am here to liberate you’; yet most of her criticism is reserved for middle-class, white, female feminists.  Yes, she is correct in using the dread ‘socialism’ tag twice in four paragraphs: International Women’s Day was started by groups of European socialists.  In 1911, more than one million women and men attended IWD rallies in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, campaigning for women’s rights to work, vote, be trained, to hold public office and end discrimination.  I’ll repeat that for the peanut gallery: women AND men joined together to give birth to this crypto-socialist feminista wankfest.  A week later, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire claimed the lives of 140 women in New York City, cementing labour standards and working conditions as a key angle of future IWD observances.  I love this clip, full of socialist ratbags such as Angela Merkel:

Elle Hardy’s desire to stick feminism in a museum display case because she wants opportunity, not equality is naïve.  Opportunity stems from structural equality, particularly socio-economic equality.  As one of my favourite tweeters, Nigerian journalist Jennifer Ehidiamen wrote on 6 March, ‘Gender equality is giving equal oppr. It is not disenfranching 1 group over another’.  Hardy’s assertion that 60 per cent of the wealth of the United States lies in the hands of women is unsourced, so here’s a little something I prepared earlier: while women fill 51.4 per cent of management, professional and related occupations in the US, only 8.1 per cent of the country’s top earners are women. Fewer than 15 per cent go on to executive officer level (source: Catalyst.org).  The pipeline for women to progress beyond broad-based management positions (which, as defined by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, includes occupations such as ‘lodging’ and ‘food service’ managers) to the pointy end of the pyramid doesn’t exist.  Australian women are increasingly occupying middle-management roles, but the same growth is not seen in senior leadership ranks.  Given all of the opportunities our postcodes of birth offer, the Elle Hardys are more likely to remain team leaders than thought leaders.  Yes, as a white Australian woman, I am better served than a black man.  We’re both better served by society than women of colour.

Giving a paternalistic pat on the head to the good people who work in rape crisis centres and shelters does not excise them from feminism.  Violence against women is rooted in gender inequality (I forgot, don’t worry about inequality ‘because opportunity’).  Poor maternal health care is rooted in gender inequality.  Lower rates of access to healthcare among women affect generational, whole-of-family wellbeing.  As for liberal democracy solving these problems, take a look at these infographics:

#IWD2014: 1/3 of women are abused by partners & 600 million live where this is no crime http://t.co/WWhmhEen5T Facts: pic.twitter.com/s9Xqy1WMvs

— European Parliament (@Europarl_EN) March 8, 2014

The King Canutes railing against feminism and International Women’s Day in 2014 do so because feminism is more powerful, richer in context and influence than it was 100 years’ ago.  They deny the essence of humanity that the third wave (and whatever comes next) brings.  Feminism belongs to more people, who interpret and live it as suits them – not ‘us’.  Who is likely to effect the greater social change?  Those who impose their belief systems or local agents for change?  As Jessica Valenti states: “Feminism isn’t simply about being a woman in a position of power. It’s battling systemic inequities; it’s a social justice movement that believes sexism, racism and classism exist and interconnect, and that they should be consistently challenged.”

*I believe there are concepts certain languages do justice to; in the case of ‘worldview’, it’s German.

32

Meet Marika Ninness.

Marika died in John Hunter Hospital on Saturday, 21 December 2013, from injuries sustained after she was allegedly king hit and allegedly knocked to the ground outside the George Tavern near Stockland Green Hills shopping centre in East Maitland on 7 December 2013.  Marika’s husband & sister held her hand as she died, 80 hours after life support was withdrawn.  Marika’s funeral was attended by more than 350 mourners.

Marika’s boyfriend, Ross Albert Merrick was arrested at the scene and charged with causing grievous bodily harm by an unlawful act, recklessly causing grievous bodily harm and causing grievous bodily harm with intent.  A statement of facts tendered in court accused Merrick of elbowing Marika to the head during an argument before midnight. He was subsequently accused of punching her and was bailed at a hearing on 13 December 2013.  The charges were upgrade to murder on 22 December 2013.  Merrick was remanded in custody until 23 December, when he was granted bail unopposed by the prosecution.  Merrick missed a scheduled court appearance on 12 February due to ‘miscommunication’ between the defence, prosecution & court.  That is the last report I’ve been able to find on Merrick’s case online.  Apologies to the Hunter region media if they reported on the matter (the next hearing was set for 19 February), but it looks as though the case is not newsworthy enough after just three months.  Marika Ninness died just 10 days before 18-year-old Daniel Christie was attacked in King’s Cross, but barring five paragraphs on 22 December, her case wasn’t reported by the Sydney Morning Herald (she didn’t even rate a mention in the Daily Telegraph).  I understand that Sydney news editors might deem the death of a 35-year-old woman from a Hunter Valley town as of little interest to their readers, but that didn’t stop the Herald using her beautiful face in a gallery of 15 victims of street violence attached to this article calling for a political response to an ‘epidemic of street violence’ after Daniel Christie’s death.  The O’Farrell government’s ‘one punch’ legislation, drafted on the back of a fag packet after a media campaign focused on the deaths of two Sydney teenagers,  is inner city-centric (barring the statewide mandatory band of off-license alcohol sales after 10pm) & will do nothing to prevent the ‘epidemic’ from affecting women, men and children in suburban, regional and country areas.  Of the 15 people the Herald refers to as victims of ‘king hit punches’, two (Thomas Kelly & Daniel Christie) lost their lives within the O’Farrell government’s ‘CBD Precinct’.  Six of those pictured died in Victoria; one in Queensland. Of the NSW victims, two died in Maitland (including Marika Ninness); one in Windsor; one in Woolooware in Sydney’s south; one at Kingscliff, near Tweed Heads; one in Coffs Harbour and one in Griffith:

• Christopher Leicester died in Woolooware, near Cronulla in 2007 after he was punched, knocked to the ground &  kicked in the head repeatedly by three youths who thought he had insulted them. They were found guilty of manslaughter in 2009.
• Connan McLeod died after he was punched by Michael Ryan in the car park of Windsor KFC in May, 2011. Both men were heavily intoxicated. Mr Ryan was acquitted of manslaughter in 2012, the jury deeming the punch self-defence. Mr McLeod and his brother-in-law (who, the court heard, has a long history of violence) had been involved in a scuffle inside a pub. A few minutes’ later, Mr McLeod chased Mr Ryan through a shopping mall, shouting, ‘I am going to kill you’. Mr Ryan punched Mr McLeod once, & pushed him away. Mr McLeod lost his balance and fell.
• Scott Snodgrass died after an altercation with a 20-year-old man at a taxi rank in Coffs Harbour in May 2013. The man was questioned by police and released without charge & the matter remains under investigation.
• 50 year old Kelvin Kane died at Kingscliff, near Tweed Heads. His alleged killer, Craig Field, has been charged with murder, with the case adjourned until 7 March.
• Jamie Purdon died after he & his friends were chased by a 17-year-old & 15-year-old at Maitland Show. The 17-year-old’s custodial sentence was reduced to periodic detention for giving evidence against the 15-year-old, whose conviction for manslaughter was overturned as a miscarriage of justice by the Court of Criminal Appeal (he awaits a re-trial).  The teenager who punched Mr Purdon was subsequently charged with assaulting another man a year later.
• Andrew Farrugia‘s teenage killers were convicted of manslaughter.  It is a monument to the Sydney Morning Herald that the dreadful, racist ranting of columnist Paul Sheehan was picked up by the ‘white nationalists’ at Stormfront. Really, what a feather in your cap.

These are stories of Australian men and boys – at homes, in parks, at restaurants, at parties, at pubs and clubs.  Verbally & emotionally abusing, harassing, stalking and physically attacking people.  Kicking them, stomping on them while they’re on the ground. Assaulting strangers, acquaintances, friends, and at least once a week, killing female partners.  It’s symptomatic of a pervasive culture of impunity, a word Westerners are more comfortable assigning to African warlords.  People who think that it is OK to do as they see fit, whether it’s getting into a fight with a stranger or verbally degrading the person they ‘love’.  They aren’t cowards. ‘Coward’ implies they lack the courage to do or endure dangerous or unpleasant things.  Instead, they rely on a cowardly society which is uncomfortable with intervening in ‘unpleasantness’.  We fail to stand up & say, ‘hey, you: if you want to behave like that, you’re not welcome here.  You do not meet the standard we as a society expect of you’.  We set the ‘what’s acceptable’ bar so low, & make it pointless by looking away when it’s breached. As Sydney city’s top cop, Commander Mark Murdoch told the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘you could close every pub in Sydney at midnight and have a million cops on the street, but it won’t do anything when people believe they can behave in that fashion and get away with it’.

People convicted under the new NSW government ‘one-punch’ laws may not ‘get away with it’ thanks to mandatory minimum sentences, but it is my view that mandatory minimums will prove as useful in preventing assaults as antibiotics are in killing a virus.  Keeping people in prison for a set period of time, with no prospect of leniency, mitigation or change removes any incentive to learn and practice good behaviours.  As I wrote previously, imposing mandatory minimums as a deterrent is based on the assumption that people are rational actors when they commit a crime.  Randomly assaulting a person on the street is right up there with the least rational crimes. In what fresh hell could Wally Hung, who killed Scott Parnell be deemed ‘rational’? Both men were drunk at a 21st birthday party at Moreton Bay’s Bribie Island Rugby League Football Club. Parnell had previously hit Hung’s friend. While on bail for manslaughter, Hung delivered another single-punch assault while drunk. Hung was convicted of manslaughter in the Parnell case & assault occasioning bodily harm in the second case. Wally Hung is a violent man from the Planet Stupid or Ignorant. What he is not is ‘rational’, nor are the men & boys who killed the other people named in this article.  If charged & convicted under the new mandatory minimum laws, they would have been locked up for longer periods, but would their behaviour have changed?  Would a 15-year-old sentenced to eight years leave adult prison in his early 20s a reformed character? As Richard Ackland notes in The Age, there are no studies to assess the effectiveness of mandatory minimum sentences as a deterrent to crime in Australia, but US Attorney General Eric Holder (with a wealth of data & research available to him), last year issued a memo urging prosecutors not to lay charges that would trigger mandatory minimums for certain non-violent drug offences.

Worse, we have these bright & shiny punitive measures while services which attempt to address the causes of violence, drug & alcohol abuse are being cut back, or are thin on the ground (NB: I’ve attempted to source this information as widely as possible, if any readers know of preventative or educational strategies & services specifically targeting alcohol, please let me know, I will publish an update).  According to NSW Health’s Mental Health and Drug and Alcohol Office (MHDAO), the NSW Government Drug and Alcohol Budget for the 2013/14 financial year is $170 million, with more than $120 million allocated to Local Health Districts to provide frontline drug and alcohol services, almost all focused on treatment. The rest is farmed out to non-government organisations and other agencies to provide:

• residential rehabilitation services;
• education and prevention services; and
• encouragement to pharmacists to engage with the pharmacotherapy program

NSW Health’s Your Room project produces a fact sheet on alcohol abuse and the ‘Your Guide’ series on dealing with alcohol & how to have a good night out, available here.  Programmes delivered through Life Education NSW cost $20 per student. Receives $1.8 million NSW Government funding (approximately $6 per student); The Department of Education & Communities (DEC) chips in $4 through ‘fundraising and other initiatives’, leaving parents to pick up the rest of the tab. For some people, $10 for a non-compulsory school activity is unaffordable; for many, it’s a disincentive.

Department of Education & Communities’ Drug Education Unit: closed. The Australia Drug Law Reform Foundation’s submission expressed reservations as to whether the Unit’s role had been effectively replaced:

“The highly regarded NSW Alcohol and Drug Education Programme (in the Education Department) has recently been closed. The work on alcohol previously undertaken by this department is now being undertaken by Drinkwise, an organisation which is, in effect, a branch of the alcohol beverage industry.”

DEC responded to the Foundation’s concerns with bureaucratese: the Unit hadn’t closed, it had been recalibrated. Screw that: a dedicated unit established & funded has been abolished, its work now delivered as part of the Personal Development, Health and Physical Education (PDHPE) curriculum. Individual teachers decide how much time is spent on alcohol & drug education. Over years 7 – 10, students undertake 300 hours of PDHPE, while in years 11 and 12, Government school students must participate in the Crossroads program for 25 hours.

According to its website, Drinkwise is funded by the following companies:

• Accolade Wines Australia Ltd
• Aldi Stores
• Bacardi Lion Pty Ltd
• Beam Global Australia Pty Ltd
• Brown-Forman Australia Pty Ltd
• Coles Group Ltd
• Coopers Brewery Ltd
• Diageo Australia Ltd
• Carlton & United Breweries
• Lion (Lion-Beer, Spirits & Wine Pty Ltd)
• Moet Hennessy Australia & New Zealand Pty Ltd
• Premium Wine Brands Pty Ltd
• Suntory Australia Pty Ltd
• Treasury Wine Estates Australia Ltd
• Woolworths Ltd

In 2006 the Howard Government contributed $5 million over 4 years. In 2012 the Gillard Government contributed $600,000 for point of sale educational material to highlight the message ‘it is safest not to drink while pregnant’.  Terrific. We have an ‘epidemic of alcohol-fuelled street violence’ and the body largely entrusted to deliver a preventative strategy is funded by grog merchants and a piss-ant government handout. Six of the 13-member Drinkwise board represent the alcohol industry.

On 31 January 2013, the University of NSW’s National Drug & Alcohol Research Centre announced a new school-based drug & alcohol study of 3,000 Victorian & NSW Year 8 students, one of several projects conducted by a new $2.5 million National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Centre for Research Excellence (CRE) in Mental Health and Substance Use, launched by then federal Minister for Health Tanya Plibersek and federal Minister for Mental Health and Ageing Mark Butler. Given the Abbott government’s approach to science, research and y’know, facts, we’ll see how long that lasts, and what, if anything, is done with the baseline data.

As for the ‘Newcastle Solution’ and the drop in assaults in non-domestic settings in the ‘CBD entertainment zone’, much is made of the non-displacement of violence, i.e. that drunks aren’t strolling off to venues with close proximity to the lock-out area to continue drinking.  This straw man argument fails to give proportionate weight to the fact that venues in neighbouring suburbs are in largely residential areas & close before the lockouts enforced under the ‘Newcastle Solution’ take effect.  In this eight-page report by researchers from the University of Newcastle & the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics & Research, only one paragraph acknowledges this as a factor in the non-displacement argument.  Ugly exceptions to the ‘Newcastle Solution’, such as the near fatal assault of 23 year-old Kelsey Johnston on the night Marika Ninness died, are swept under the carpet by its advocates.  Kelsey suffered bleeding on the brain from an alleged single-punch attack outside the Prince of Wales Hotel at Merewether.  Merewether is a few minutes away from the Hamilton end of the lockout zone.  The Prince of Wales closes at midnight.

On International Women’s Day, and the first real test of the new arrangements in inner-city Sydney, I remember Marika Ninness.  While she died outside her home, her alleged killer was her partner.  I remember that among the backflips Barry O’Farrell has performed on mandatory minimums was dumping them for sexual assaults.  I remember that the deaths of 32 women in NSW in domestic violence situations last year sparked… a framework & a task force.  If the epidemic of violence against women in NSW incited a response equal to the moral panic over street violence, we’d remember those 32 names – but it doesn’t, & we don’t.

UPDATE:  Marika’s sister, Charnie Braz, contacted me this week.  Merrick’s next court appearance is scheduled for 9 April 2014.  In Charnie’s words, ‘the best thing you can do for us is promote fair and responsible reporting of violence against women’.  This report by Nick Ralston, Amy Corderoy & Inga Ting in today’s SMH is a step in the right direction. I hope the editors feel their work is worthy of a broader campaign – & at least devote the same coverage to Merrick’s trial as it will Shaun McNeil’s (the man charged with murder over the death of Daniel Christie).