explodedlibrary.info

embarrassed and ashamed by the Australian government’s continuing contempt for its human rights obligations

I’ve been meaning to write about this topic for a while, but the topic has proven quite overwhelming. Where to begin? Mandatory detention of refugees (including children) in detention centres which are effectively legal blackholes, Australia’s homegrown version of Guantanamo Bay. The threat to free speech and legitimate protest embodied in the Gunns 20 lawsuit against the Wilderness Society and other environmental activists. Australia’s ongoing disgraceful treatment of its indigenous population, including abolishing ATSIC and the NSW government’s urban renewal plans for Redfern, urban renewal being code for squeezing out the Aborigines.

Australia’s human rights record has once again been condemned by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (link to pdf of the Committee’s March 2005 report, CERD/C/AUS/CO/14).

To quote a portion of an article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald about this (David Marr, “Geneva v. Canberra,” Sydney Morning Herald, Mar. 28, 2005, at 13):

Canberra has learnt one lesson superbly. Instead of raging and complaining about Geneva's intrusion into Australia's domestic affairs, it's much better to shut up. The effort ministers put into denigrating the committee system the last time round only gave the issue more oxygen. After the latest verdict a little more than a fortnight ago, there was no thunder from Howard, Downer or Ruddock. Not even a press release. Silence effectively killed the story.

The Howard government is masterful in its ability to manipulate Australian public opinion and deflect all forms of criticism. But I really hope that they don’t get off the hook quite so easily on this one. To be fair to them, the Howard government isn't  causing the Gunns 20 lawsuit or the racist Redfern redevelopment plans, but they are still answerable to the international community for all human rights abuses which occur in Australia, whether committed by state governments or corporations.

By the way, I'm partially retracting some of the opinions I stated in a previous post which discussed the merits of written versus unwritten constitutions. No system is perfect, and every system can be manipulated by those in power. That said, if Australia had a written constitution with prohibitions against discrimination and guarantees of due process and freedom of speech, it is quite unlikely that these abuses would be happening in Australia today.

my IOU to Fiona Apple

[This post was followed up on 2 November 2005]

Dear Fiona,

I owe you approximately $US 10 for downloading your album “Extraordinary Machine” which has been suppressed by your record company Sony. I will pay for this as soon as Sony decides to respect your artistic ability and release this record. If you haven’t done so already, I would suggest that you speak with Aimee Mann, who also suffered at the hands of tyrannical record companies. Aimee Mann seems a lot happier since she decided to go it alone and ditch her record company which had such a fundamentally different vision of what makes good music.

On the off-chance that Extraordinary Machine has been leaked deliberately as part of an unconventional marketing campaign, I would be extremely surprised and slightly disappointed, but I would forgive you, because it is a very good album.

self-assembly misery

I think there should be a special place in hell for reserved for those people responsible designing “self-assemble” furniture with inadequate instructions.

Assembling furniture must rank up there as one of my very least favourite household chores to do - ever. Today my arms are sore and the skin on my thumbs has been scraped off by working on this yesterday, and that was just on two pieces. I would be willing to pay at least $500 for somebody to take this work off my hands. I don’t know why furniture shops don’t provide assembly assistance as an additional service. They could do very well out of this. No, I know the reason – it’s because they would hate doing that work as well! Everybody does. I know a builder who's quite the handy man, but he told me yesterday that he hates this stuff too. Once he was given a job of assemblying some IKEA furniture with some other builders, and that after a few hours, they were ready to chuck the pieces of furniture around the room!

I admit that although I do OK with computers, I am somewhat mechanically challenged. If only they’d taught us relevant stuff like this in school, maybe that would be easier for me now. Geez, I wish my wood work teacher had shown me how to assemble a bed instead of a making a bloody spice rack!

does anyone know what's going on with bloglines this weekend?

It's as if it has been taken down for maintenance or something - the site is totally down when I try to access it. It doesn't even have that pesky plumber saying that maintenance is going on. Next time I use it, I'm definitely going to download my OPML file so that when things like this happen, at least I'll have a backup of all my feeds.

closing thoughts as the dust settles

[23/5/05 update: this post has been partially followed-up here]

• Why do I care, as an Australian, what what the President Elect of the American Library Association says about blogs? The fall-out from Michael Gorman’s ill-advised remarks aren’t limited to the US. After being slashdotted and appearing on number 11 on the Daypop top 40, this story has taken on a life of its own and has generated negative words about librarians all around the world. I don’t care if Michael Gorman doesn’t like blogs or the Blog People, but I do care when the President Elect of the most prominent library professional association in the world says such things. It doesn’t matter if he said he was joking or that he wasn’t wearing his President’s hat at the time, it still makes us all look bad.
• I agree with Michael Gorman on at least one thing: that “blog” is a really stupid name for what we do. I think that it’s a testimony to the strength of blogs that they managed to do so well despite being saddled with such a dumb name. On the other hand, that’s what it is right now. We’ve passed the point we could easily change it to something better. I could argue that “serial” was a bad choice of a name too (don’t even get me started on OPAC), but libraries are kind of stuck with it. At some point, you need to accept that things are called what they’re called, and you look start to look stupid if you dismiss a whole phenomenon because it has a silly name. It’s like judging a book by its cover, something I’m sure Michael Gorman would never approve of.
• Since writing my previous post, I have learned that Michael Gorman’s technological conservatism was no secret, especially to those who move in ALA circles. If any good comes of this, I hope that this will never happen again – that somebody who despises blogs and bloggers slips in under the radar. It’s fine for someone holding these opinions to be elected in his position, but this choice ought be a deliberate and informed choice by the voters.
• The US (and Australia) is so deeply polarized these days over politics that it is refreshing to be reminded that politics isn’t the only division in society. Also disturbing too – that at least on this issue, I found that I had something in common with Michael Gorman’s right-wing critics. I am not such a political fundamentalist that I could forgive his anti-blogger comments because issues of technology aside, his heart is in the right place and he’s a lefty. Then I wondered, does this make me a blogging fundamentalist? (see this comment Steven Bell left in Library Stuff wondering if the reaction to Gorman might be a chilling effect) I hope not – I think that this is just a realization that I, like many others, have multiple loyalties and interests.
• Yes, this topic has been beaten to death and I hope that this is the last time that I’ll need to mention it. But I can’t promise anything because I suspect that this isn’t the last time that librarians are going to be embarrassed by Michael Gorman during his term, which hasn’t even started yet. I wonder if he feels that compared to him, us bloggers are like a multitude of irrelevant little ants swarming around because he has kicked open our nest.

fellow Aussie library bloggers

Last week I reached a little blogging milestone. For the first time I met some other bloggers face to face - Fiona of Blisspix who's been an occasional commentor on this blog and Sean of snail's trail, whom I discovered was in a couple of classes with me in library school. It was great to meet both of them and I appreciated the blog-related camaraderie between us. This was a couple of days before the Michael Gorman fiasco (I'm afraid that I have one more post about that and the fallout percolating), which is a shame, because I would have loved to have a face to face conversation about that.

I would also like to mention another new Australian Blog Person. Fran, who's in Melbourne and is a frequent contributor to the aliaNEWGRAD list, has announced her new blog.