April 2006

Delay Lunch Day 1: Police brutality, press corps sitting on pitch

Submitted by rickeyre on

Dear readers, opening the newspaper you must have been first taken by surprise, then by anger. The second Test between Bangladesh and Australia has got underway in Chittagong on Sunday, but no coverage on that.

Dear readers, we beg your apology for this. In fact, we have been forced to deprive you. We too love cricket as much as you do. But to protest the medieval barbarism that police carried out on the journalists, we did not have any way out other than this.

It was not possible for us to file reports while fellow journalists languished in hospital, victims of brutal police assault. To protest this unjust police torture the journalists immediately held a meeting and decided to boycott the Bangladesh-Australia series until the incident was fairly investigated and the guilty police officials were punished. All the national newspapers of the country, local newspapers in Chittagong and all private television channels will carry only the scoreboard of the series. We sincerely feel sorry for the readers for this inconvenience. At the same time we hope that you will also stand by us in this protest by perceiving the whole situation from a pragmatic standpoint.

- from the sports section of the Daily Star, 17.4.06

Media sit-in at ChittagongOf all the reports I have seen over the years of crowd disturbances at sporting events, this has to be one of the most amazing, and I'm not talking just cricket.

It all started before the game when photographer Shamsul Haq Tanku was reportedly assaulted by police after his request to bring his auto-rickshaw onto the perimeter of the field was refused. The story continues as told by Nabila Ahmed of the Fairfax press and by the Daily Star's Chittagong correspondents.

The extraordinary media protest and police reaction have, so far at least, received little coverage in Australia, where there has been more interest in the fact that Australia dismissed Bangladesh cheaply. The headline on the AAP wire report as posted to News Limited's Fox Sports website, treats it all rather flippantly. If you read the report from Sportal on the Cricket Australia site, the only dramatic event all day was the controversy of Aftab Ahmed's dismissal.

And you really have to laugh at not just the selection but the layout of the ABC's picture gallery of Day One action.

I trust we'll hear a lot more about this disgraceful episode. Cricket grounds need to be a safe place not just for players and spectators, but for the workforce who make their living at the Test in varying capacities. That said, it's a kneejerk over-reaction to say at this stage that international cricket should be banished from Chittagong because of this.

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Bloggage of Lent

Submitted by rickeyre on

Now that this blog's enforced downtime is out of the way, I'm going to begin a series of posts covering the last days of Christ through from Lent to his crucifixion, resurrection and ascention. This is my first Easter since becoming serious about Christianity, and you can expect to see more reportage of religion in these parts in future.

The day transparency died

Submitted by rickeyre on

What was the answer to the following question, asked at the Cole Inquiry on Thursday:

MR AGIUS: Q. Prime Minister, your full name is John Winston Howard?

Was it:
(a) "It is."
(b) "I have no recollection of that."
(c) "Disclosure of my identity would be a threat to national security."
(d) "No that was the last bloke, I'm Peter Costello."

Answer at this end of this article.

After the agony of Mark Vaile's amnesia on Monday, and the slapstick buffoonery of Alexander Downer's arrival for Tuesday's hearing via the Sydney monorail, we had an appearance by the Prime Minister on Thursday so perfectly choreographed that Ric Birch could not have staged it better.

From his morning power walk, to the triumphal front-door entrance to the courthouse, phalanxed by the usual crowd of security bovver boys, to the meticulously crafted answers under John Agius QC's unusually powder-puff questioning, it was all predictable. And irrelevant.

Howard calls this inquiry "transparent". It's not. He set it up basically as a set-up, to investigate the conduct of companies directly implicated in the oil-for-food scandal. But not into a government under whose watch it all happened.

AWB's reputation is in ruins and several of its executives have quit, some of them likely to spend their retirement years in custodial accommodation. Other companies, including BHP Billiton, are likely to get their wrists slapped.

However, the conduct of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and its "responsible" ministers are not accountable to the Cole inquiry under its existing terms of reference. Thanks to JWH's carefully-worded terms for the inquiry, there can be no findings made in respect to the government's role in this mess.

DFAT's culture appears little different to that of the Immigration Department and that of the Attorney-General's Department - a dangerous cocktail of slackness, "whatever it takes", and reactionary ideological bias. The responsibility for all this rests solely with the man who rules his cabinet with an iron fist.

Every day I have more and more trouble understanding why anyone could think John Howard is a good prime minister.

In any decent Westminster-based democracy, the responsible ministers, and possibly the government as a whole, would have fallen on their swords by now. Howard has torn up the Westminster system in Canberra, made a mockery of the concept of ministerial responibility, and made selective amnesia an essential part of the job description for any politician or senior company executive. And, quite separately to all this, he is systematically dismantling democracy in this country.

Howard's legacy to Australia is that he has turned impropriety and deceipt into acceptable "Australian values", and made decency subservient to wealth accumulation and ideological jihad.

Don't rule out a snap early federal election some time in 2006.

David Marr and Marian Wilkinson's brilliant dissection of the AWB story so far appears in today's Sydney Morning Herald. All the hearing transcripts can be found on the Attorney-General Department's website.

(The correct answer was (a). As boring as the man himself.)

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"Well I'm back," he said.

Submitted by rickeyre on

Almost a fortnight of the most unbelievable comedy of errors is over, as I have left my previous hosting service for hopefully greener pastures.

Some catching up on blogging to do. Goodness me, the English domestic season starts in a few minutes!

(Update: I've managed to recover a couple of blog entries posted between the most recent backup and the final crash. Google's cache is good for something after all!)

Carn the Brown Caps

Submitted by rickeyre on

The Surrey training shirt goes well with braces. (October 2004)It’s official. The Surrey Lions are no more. From this season onwards, the Surrey CCC limited-over team will be known as the Surrey Brown Caps.

Why? Because, funnily enough, they wear brown caps.

Which, of course, explains the colour of the Surrey training shirt that I bought at The Oval in 2000 (picture at right)

Surreycricket.com has the official story.

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Damn grubs

Submitted by rickeyre on

This website is back in action after approximately 40 hours off the air. Initially described to me by my host’s tech support as a GRUB issue, it finally involved a complete reloading of the operating system followed by a complete reload of the configurations and data on every hosted account on mulroney (yep, my provider has named all their servers after Canadian prime ministers).

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