East West 101

When the film crew came to a local street to shoot some scenes, the drug dealers ran for cover when the actor cops showed up. Can’t wait to see the end result. — Comment by Wahid on the East West 101 site.

I mentioned this new SBS cop show on On not inflaming hatreds a few days ago. In the Sydney Morning Herald Robin Oliver wrote:

Libel: Blogging Rights and Wrongs

Timethief in Canada — a name any of us who visit the WordPress forums will know — has a top post today: Libel: Blogging Rights and Wrongs:

Here we go again 2

Repetition is no guarantee of truth, so when you read yet again here, here, and here:

One only needs to look at the parlous quality of state and territory curriculum to know where the true explanation lies for falling standards. Literature, especially classic texts, is no longer pre-eminent as students are asked to deconstruct SMS messages, graffiti and movie posters. Across Australia, many students are able to complete Year 12 English without ever reading a substantive novel or play.

Here we go again…

…as Miranda Devine says:

Feel-good apology of little use to young dead from abuse

Here we go again. Smug white folks have reactivated the “sorry” debate, demanding our new political leaders demonstrate their non-racist bona fides by apologising on behalf of the nation for the “stolen generation”.

Yes, I thought, here we go again indeed with Miranda continuing to fight the culture wars of the 1990s. The hook for Miranda’s column is the latest awful events from the more dysfunctional elements of Australian society, and I say that deliberately because recent problems centring on cases DoCS may or may not have done a good job with cover the gamut of dysfunctionality, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal.

We should not apologise for the “Stolen Generation”, says Miranda, because “saying sorry usually means you will never again do the thing for which you are apologising. It means, as abused and neglected Aboriginal children in NSW and elsewhere discover every week, that welfare agencies will remain reluctant to remove a child from life-threatening conditions.” She rightly says there are times when that should happen, and there are times — and I agree with her here — when considerations about what carers may be “culturally appropriate” may not always lead to the best outcome for the child; in the case she cites the outcome, from what we know so far, was indeed the worst outcome possible.

If only past policy was just about “past removal of Aboriginal children by well-intentioned welfare authorities.”