Why I was once fired from a State government bureaucracy

It has just occurred to me that I have never written anything about the time I was sacked from the NSW Public Service.  It has never been a secret.  It just didn't seem important in my scale of values.  But maybe there are some small lessons to learn from it.  Though it was over 50 years ago now.

When I had completed my B.A. degree with honours in psychology from the University of Qld. at the end of 1967, I decided I needed a change of scene from Brisbane so I moved South to Sydney.  Being Mr Frugality, I had a comfortable level of savings, no debts and a sky blue VW beetle -- so the transition was an unproblematic one.

I did however want a job.  So I went along to the Army recruiting office.  From my time in the CMF in Brisbane I was a fully qualified Sergeant in the Psychology corps so thought I might get work there.  They grabbed me.  An extra qualified hand was very welcome.  So within days of arriving I  was back in the Army! 

I was not however interested in an army career so I looked around for an alternative.  So I took the selection test for the NSW public service.  Taking tests is one of the few things I am good at so I got an immediate welcome.  One of the tests I did was a test of computer aptitude.  Bill Bailey was the man in charge of that so he called me in for a chat. He revealed that I had gone off the scale for the test. I had got every single item right.  Bill wanted to see who this freak was!  The reason I did well, however, was not very freakish.  I was by that time already an experienced FORTRAN programmer.  When I told Bill that he was greatly relieved.  It meant that his test had given the right answer after all

I was assigned to the Dept. of Technical Education as a graduate clerk.  Their graduate clerk program was however a typical bureaucratic bungle.  The only work they had for me was filing, something I had done years ago as a junior clerk in the Queensland Dept. of Public Works.  I was quite miffed at being given such dumb work so I refused to do it.  And it was all downhill from there.

Eventually I was transferred to Head office where they gave me some slightly more interesting work. I did what was asked but there was not much of it so I had a lot of spare time on my hands.  I was at the time enrolled with the M.A. program at the University of Sydney so I mostly used the spare time on academic work.  The managers apparently felt unable to do anything about that.

But one morning, just after I had handed in my Master's thesis at U Syd towards the end of the year, I unintentionally slept in and arrived at work late.  That was it!  They had me. Lateness was something they could act on.  So I was promptly fired that day.  There would have been access to an appeal but I didn't bother. I knew I was going on to other things next year.

So I went and saw Harry Beanham, whom I had worked for at one time in Brisbane.  Harry had been impressed with my work in Brisbane.  I sold lots of diehead chasers for him, if anybody knows what they are. Few do. Anyway Harry promptly put me to work preparing his stock for sale.  So in the space of less than a year I had got 3 jobs, none of which were advertised!

Lessons:  Don't be late in a bureaucracy and finding a job is easy if you have usable skills and qualifications -- JR.






Complaint lodged against judge who made 'offensive', 'discriminatory' comments to Aboriginal defendants

He was simply describing Aboriginal reality

A previously-reprimanded Northern Territory judge's comments to Indigenous defendants were "disparaging, discriminatory and offensive, insulting and humiliating to Indigenous Australians based solely on their race", the president of the Law Council of Australia has said.

Comments made by Alice Springs Judge Greg Borchers will now be the subject of a formal complaint.

Court transcripts from the past year show Judge Borchers — who was sanctioned in 2017 for "harsh" and "gratuitous" commentary and "inappropriate judicial conduct" — accusing one Aboriginal woman, who appeared before him after breaching a court order, of failing her children.

"Yesterday probably was pension day, so you got your money from the Government, abandoned your kids in that great Indigenous fashion of abrogating your parental responsibility to another member of your family, and went off and got drunk," the judge told her. "Got the money from the Government, straight down, buy grog, pour it down your throat."

He told another defendant's lawyer that "anthropologists" might one day study "what's called Indigenous laissez-faire parenting" to shed light on "why it is that people abandon their children on such a regular basis".

In another transcript from March, Judge Borchers told an Indigenous defendant who had "dragged" his partner "though the house by her hair" that he was "just like a primitive person".

The comments appeared in the media last week.

"There is no doubt that these comments are racist," said Arthur Moses SC, president of the Law Council of Australia. "These comments are racist because they are disparaging, discriminatory and offensive, insulting and humiliating to Indigenous Australians based solely on their race.

"Those type of comments are not appropriate for anybody to make, let alone a judicial officer within a courtroom. "Engaging in racist stereotypes or making racist remarks is not upholding the rule of law on behalf of the community, and no individual worthy of the name of a judge ought be making such remarks."

It is not the first time Judge Borchers's courtroom comments have caused controversy. Two years ago, an official complaint was lodged against him after he told a 13-year-old boy that he was "taking advantage" of his mother's murder.

The judge told that investigation into his conduct there was "no excuse" for some of his remarks, but spoke of the "unremitting process" of churning through matters involving violence and the abuse of children, with "no days off" and "no counselling".

He was subsequently sidelined from youth matters in Alice Springs.

Now, a week after the latest comments have been made public, another official complaint about the judge is being lodged by the NT Criminal Lawyers Association.

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Australian troops training Filipino forces to combat ISIS threat

Australian troops deployed to the Philippines say the threat of ISIS is now on Australia’s doorstep, as the terror group moves closer to home.

More than 100 Australian troops from the army, air force and navy are currently based in the southern Philippines, training local forces in combat techniques they learnt on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Their mission - known officially as Operation Augury - is not only to equip Filipino forces with new battle techniques, but to also help safeguard Australia’s own regional security.

“We just need to be ready and make sure we can counter it,” Group Captain John Young tells 60 Minutes reporter Liam Bartlett. “It may not be in Australia, but this part of the world is in our backyard… they’re our neighbours.”

Highly-skilled at fighting in the dense jungle, the Philippines military were caught off guard when ISIS forced them to the streets of the major urban city of Marawi.

ISIS seized Marawi City in the southern Philippines in May 2017 and claimed it as their East-Asia headquarters.

Marawi was once home to more than 200,000 people. Now, it is a ghost town. Homes and shopfronts have been bombed out, with all the cities infrastructure in ruins.

Though the siege ended in November 2017, the streets are still too dangerous for locals to return home with hundreds of unexploded bombs hidden in the rubble.

The Marawi city siege was the second time in five years that Islamic extremism brought mass bloodshed to the southern Philippines.

But the destruction and devastation is a reminder that ISIS is not a far-off threat for Australia - Marawi city is just three-hours flight time from Darwin.

60 Minutes reporter Liam Bartlett confronts the threat of the Islamic State head-on, in an astonishing interview with radicalised Islamic State recruits.

Initially lured to extremism by the promise of a wage and better life, the young ISIS recruits sitting across from the 60 Minutes cameras now believe the sickening ideology of those who recruited them.

In a shocking interview, 24-year-old Filipino ‘Sadam’ says he joined ISIS three years ago – and tells 60 Minutes he is ready to fight for Islamic State – both at home in the Philippines or across international waters. “We’re just doing what God told us to do,” Sadam says.

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The balls now in feminists’ court

If a penis is female, does it enjoy human rights? A Canadian trans woman, Jessica Yaniv, who retains intact her boy bits, believes she’s entitled to a Brazilian wax. Rejected by 16 beauticians in Vancouver, including migrant women working from home with children, Yaniv trotted off to a human rights tribunal. Some of the beauticians paid money to make her go away, some still face the prospect of being branded hateful transphobes and ordered to pay fines.

Ignored by most mainstream media, this has Twitter transfixed as the #WaxHerBalls case. British comedian Ricky Gervais tweeted: “It’s a sad state of affairs when a lady can’t have her hairy balls waxed.” All of which gives the impression it’s nothing more than the latest grotesquery of social media. But Gervais has detected a fundamental question of principle that Victoria’s politicians — and Anglophone elites generally — seem mostly oblivious to.

An Andrews government bill allows a self-declared trans man or woman to go back in time and alter the sex on their birth certificates, even if they’ve had no surgery, no treatment, no change at all, apart from a stated wish to make their debut with a new pronoun. The bill is back before parliament next month.

“It’s seen as the next civil rights issue — oh, now we have gay marriage, on to the next thing,” says Holly Lawford-Smith, a young University of Melbourne philosopher and lesbian writing a book on radical feminism.

But there are stirrings of civil war in what’s called the LGBTI community, and angry sniping over who qualifies for an entry pass to women’s sport, toilets, dorms, prisons and, yes, the waxing studio. For the Yaniv case is seen not as an aberration but a logical extension of pick-your-own-gender into the anti-discrimination apparatus. If blokes can become official sheilas in the blink of an eye, what happens to the rights, protections and political culture inspired by feminists and gay activism?

In Australian sport, where hormone controls can complicate things, an awkward debate has begun but it is more advanced in Britain. Brits have a well-organised lobby, Fair Play For Women, and this week The Guardian surprised readers with an even-handed piece by sport blogger Sean Ingle, who declared: “No longer can men tell women, such as Martina Navratilova, that when they stick up for a separate women’s sport category that they are ignorant or prejudiced.”

It’s a question not only of competition but also trust and vulnerability. Troubled by the Yaniv case, National Review writer David French has warned that a proposed Democratic change to US law might expose schoolgirls to so-called “female penises” in toilets and locker rooms. As well, he said, “the very act of objecting to the sight (of a penis) could itself be considered to create a hostile environment for the trans girl”.

Meanwhile, sex is turning philosophy into fight club. This month Australia’s thinkers had their annual talkfest at Wollongong University. Lawford-Smith was booked to argue the case for excluding “all male people, regardless of gender identity” from female-only or lesbian-only spaces. Activist academics tried to “deplatform” her and student agitators girded their loins for a demo under the banner “F..k off Holly Lawford-Smith”. Their Facebook post said she was “not welcome to spew her disgusting discriminatory and exclusionary hate speech at our university”. They ignored her nuanced arguments, dismissing her as a TERF or “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”.

The Australasian Association of Philosophy, the conference organiser, issued a statement acknowledging “serious concerns” about Lawford-Smith’s presentation. There followed a sprinkling of diversity-speak platitudes. No stated concern about the abuse and threats directed at Lawford-Smith, no defence of her academic freedom.

She felt “quite intimidated” going in to her talk, but the university had beefed up security and the protest was muted. Even so, this is not how philosophy is supposed to be. “It’s our bread-and-butter to really dig down into the details of things and have these really difficult conversations in a calm, dispassionate way,” Lawford-Smith says.

Like other “gender critical” feminists, she has been banished from Twitter. It’s supposedly “hateful conduct” to use pronouns in a way that tracks sex rather than gender identity. But this “progressive” platform allows #punchaterf as a trending hashtag, and trans activists can attack a TERF as a “c..t” or “bigoted piece of shit” with impunity. Anti-TERF tactics include campaigns to dislodge people from their jobs, smearing them as fascists, threatening harm to their families and, in one case, pissing on an academic’s office door. Nobody denies there are genuine cases of distress among trans people, and some gender-critical feminists may seem high-handed.

One Oxford don took to Twitter with the hashtag #transawaythegay, conjuring up a story that “Emmett wasn’t allowed to be a lesbian and had to wear skirts and makeup. But when he realised he was supposed to be a boy and started taking testosterone, his church accepted him. All better now!”

In March, activists successfully pressured 3:AM Magazine, a fearless online journal of radical philosophy, to pull an interview with Lawford-Smith because it touch­ed on the TERF war. Her remarks seem temperate: “My stance is that a person can’t change sex (not even with sex reassignment surgery), that ‘gender identity’ has no bearing on sex, and that with very few exceptions gender identity should have no bearing on a person’s sex-based rights.”

Things have got so unpleasant that 12 prominent philosophers from around the world, including Australia’s Peter Singer and Melbourne-based Cordelia Fine, felt moved this week to publish an open letter deploring the attempt to silence gender identity sceptics with “frequently cruel and abusive rhetoric”. The letter says: “Policymakers and citizens are currently confronting such metaphysical questions about sex and gender as What is a man? What is a lesbian? What makes someone female? Society at large is deliberating over the resolution of conflicting interests in contexts as varied as competitive sport, changing rooms, workplaces and prisons. These discussions are of great importance.”

This month Lawford-Smith interrupted the chorus of bland approval for Victoria’s law, which magically transforms the enduring truth of birth sex into the changeable wish of gender identity. In a Melbourne newspaper she wrote: “Despite the fact that this bill changes what it means to be a person of a particular sex in law, and despite the fact that sex is a protected attribute in both the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act and the Australian Sex Discrimination Act, the group that faces the most sex discrimination — namely female people — have not been consulted about the bill, and the implications of the bill on their legal protections, if any, have not been adequately acknowledged or explored.”

Might horrified fascination with Canada’s #WaxHerBalls case rouse our MPs to ask some hard questions? This week Vancouver-based writer Meghan Murphy (banned from Twitter) issued an “I told you so”. “(The Yaniv case) is precisely what feminists tried to warn politicians, the media, activists and the public would happen should we accept the notion that it is possible for men to ‘identify’ as female. How can we possibly protect women’s boundaries, spaces and rights if men can be women, regardless of their male biology? No woman should be bullied into touching a man’s penis against her will.”

Surprising things keep happening. Early this year at a free-market think tank in Washington, DC, radical feminists and political conservatives made common cause in a public debate on the trans conundrum. “Together they argued that sex was fundamentally biological and not socially constructed, and that there is a difference between women and trans women that needs to be respected,” reports gay conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan. Some may feel schadenfreude recalling the feminist track record of denouncing mainstream research on sex differences as a patriarchal plot. And the anti-trans argument built on biology is a delicate one for gay and lesbian identity.

The whole agonising affair is a reminder that abstruse ideas on campus can turn the world on its head. Without postmodernism and its reality-busting offshoots, who could ever have imagined a troublesome “female penis”?

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 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here