My Sunday Age piece this week was on stupid spending by local councils: “Where’s the local goodwill when it comes to rates?“

(Click on the thumbnails to see the full images)

Malcolm Turnbull’s easy confession on Q&A last night that he smoked marijuana when be was younger raises the obvious question - does he, and the other Australian politicians who also admit to having dabbled in this drug, think that he should have been arrested for doing so? If not, then what distinguishes him from others who have been subject to legal sanction for youthfully experimenting with marijuana?

Certainly, Australia’s drug laws are not as draconian as those in the United States - many first time offenders receive cautions if caught in possession of small amounts - but surely something that politicians seem to treat as a rite of passage should not also involve the risk of a career-crippling criminal record?

I am displaying three new artworks in an absinthe-themed art exhibition next Friday the 26th of September, at the McCulloch Gallery in Melbourne.

Once the pieces have been shown, I’ll pop them up at this website for those who can’t make it.

This pub promotion - “No Undies Sundie”, where women get free drink cards for removing underwear - makes the pub sound grotesquely bogan, but is that any reason for it to be banned by the government? Moral suasion - as was being applied by the Australian Hotels Association - is a far better way to deal with tasteless promotions like these.

And, let’s be frank, a lot of people like bogan pubs and their cringe-inducing gimmicks - does anybody really believe Sue Mclellan’s claim that they had to ban the promotion merely because it was “encouraging irresponsible drinking”? This is transparently a regulatory decision made on moral grounds, not health grounds.

But Victoria’s liquor regulators are desperately looking to score some runs on the board, so it’s no surprise they swung at this when they read about it in the papers today.

In the latest edition of Overland, Shane Cahill responds to my critiques (here and here) of his argument that the wartime Institute of Public Affairs was sympathetic to Japanese fascism. (His new piece is not, unfortunately, online, but it still deserves a response. The original piece is available here.)

Cahill appears to have ceded the first, most rhetorically powerful part of his argument - the anonymous letter breathlessly accusing the IPA of being a Japanese fifth column, and the subsequent CSS investigation in no way reflect any anti-Australian treachery or anything else on the part of the IPA. It is that letter’s screedish accusations that allows Cahill to bandy around the word “fascist”.

Nevertheless, let’s temporarily grant him his claim about the ideological context of the Japan-Australia Society. If David Lloyd Jones and William Aberdeen Mackay - who are counted among both the early members of the IPA and members of the Japan-Australia Society - were actually seeking to undermine Australian democracy and liberalism, those sorts of views are in no way reflected in the IPA’s views while they were involved. (If you are interested, an impression of the early views of the IPA are available in the back issues of the IPA Review, and from the CSS file which Cahill selectively describes - go to the National Archives and search for “Institute of Public Affairs”.)

So either Jones and Mackay were unable to convince their fellow businessmen that the IPA should pursue “pro-Japanese” fascist ends - and then Cahill’s story is at best trivia - or they were not fascists. I can’t help but repeat my earlier point:

If… the IPA council was trying to sow the seeds for Japanese-style fascism in Australia… condemn[ing] totalitarianism and centralised government seems to be a strange way to go about it.

Rather than try to thread elaborate conspiracy theories, the IPA’s left wing critics would do better to actually read what the IPA has had to say over the last 65 years. There’s enough in there to hate without resorting to fantasy.

My Sunday Age piece yesterday was on late night violence in Melbourne: “Get off the turps: idiots are the problem, not alcohol“

A fun article by Quentin Dempster in The Australian today, in which he lathers on the moral outrage and argues that it would be better to deprive the ABC of money than get it from evil commerce. Stay vigilant.

Call me a cynic - and you certainly couldn’t call me a criminologist - but I’m not entirely convinced that the Victorian police’s acquisition of five rental hummers is going to have a huge impact on late night violence in the CBD.

Who would go to the barricades for Melbourne’s Kings St strip clubs? Hot off the widely acknowledged failure of the 2am lockout, the state government is considering imposing special liquor licence conditions upon venues that offer stripping and pole dancing, including the possibility of an outright ban on alcohol.

It is much easier for govenments to target disreputable or ’sinful’ activities that most people would be ashamed or embarrassed to broadcast that they enjoy. Strip clubs no doubt have their supporters - and we know they have staff - but it unlikely they will amass on the steps of state parliament in their thousands to angrily protest the government’s policies.

As this new proposal implicitly admits, the problems of late night alcohol-fueled violence are concentrated on just a few establishments. Such concentration could allow for more targetted policing - that is, if the Victorian government were willing to prioritise getting more police on the streets rather than trying to ride the publicity wave of the federal government’s binge drinking strategy. Remember, in Melbourne, it isn’t alcohol that is the problem, it is violence. It is best solved by law and order, not the liquor code.

After its lockout failure, it is not surprising that Spring Street is falling back on softer targets.