ASYLUM SEEKERS AND THE DEPTHS OF DESPAIR

When I lived in South Africa during the apartheid years I desperately wanted to get myself and my family out of South Africa. I was, in fact, an asylum seeker in the 1970s. The basic difference between my situation and that of current day asylum seekers around the world was that I had a few advantages which were in my favour and so was much luckier than today's hundreds and thousands who are fleeing in desperate circumstances with no advantages other than a desperate desire to get out of their state of persecution and oppression and torture to a country - any country - which will let them in and allow them to have a safe home for themselves and their families.

I was a white, English speaking, qualified professional with other personal advantages in my favour, and therefore able to gain admission into Australia, which, in 1978 seemed such a good place to live after so many years of living in apartheid South Africa with deteriorating circumstances and more political oppression than had ever been seen in that country at that time.

Now we come to apartheid Australia in 2016 where politicians of all sorts forget that modern Australia was forged from "boat people" arriving here very often in desperate circumstances and doing their best to destroy indigenous people and their cultures and take over the country from the dispossessed who are now treated like squatters in their own country.

Then we get the world's horrors where Australians have gone to countries to fight wars which have nothing to do with Australia's security, causing refugees to flee from their countries and try to get to Australia to gain asylum. Those who managed to get close have now been removed to concentration camps set up by Australia in Manus - part of Papua New Guinea - and Nauru - where they are now left with no hope of getting into Australia because the government has determined not to allow them in.

How do you go on living under such circumstances and why is there no outcry from the Australian population?

Man's inhumanity to man or people's inhumanity to people - it is all scandalous and unforgiveable, particularly as the numbers trying to enter Australia are literally miniscule in relation to what is happening with asylum seekers in other countries.

It makes one embarrassed to actually be a citizen of this country with its disgusting behaviour and cruelty to fellow human beings.

AGED CARE FACILITIES IN THE NEWS

Aged care facilities are in the news because many are privately owned, are making vast profits,and providing reduced services with less staff and less support.

My partner is 93 and I am 89. We are very fortunate. We own our home and our illnesses at our advanced years have not required us to be hospitalised for any length of time, despite the seriousness of some of the problems.

We do not own a car and are still able to do most things on our own without requiring much assistance, although a very good friend who has a car helps us with shopping twice a week to do the heavy shopping.

We are determined to stay out of those institutions till the end as far as is humanly possible.

Everybody reading about some of what goes on in some of these institutions would be scared out of their wits at the thought of ending their days in one of them or having to be incarcerated in them at all.

We have been fortunate with our health care providers and also with our health in general and we anticipate continuing to help each other as long as possible without being institutionalised.

No doubt many aged care facilities are excellent with outstanding services, but publicity about some rogue operators perpetrating appalling control does not inspire confidence.

We hope to be able to talk about the issue until a happier outcome is achieved for all requiring aged care in an ever ageing population.

FEED-IN-TARIFF - BETRAYAL BY A SO-CALLED LABOR GOVERNMENT

As long as governments in Australia continue to support the coal industry, so much longer will it take to wean everybody off coal-fired generating plants and on to environment friendly renewable energy producers, such as wind energy, solar energy and other alternative energy generating systems.

The smoking lobby has been very successful for the last 100 years and more in trying to prevent governments advising populations of the deleterious health hazards of smoking.

The coal lobby has either learnt from the smoking lobby or vice versa and between them they have continued endangering lives and the health of large population groups.

The latest disaster on the renewable energy front is the secret and secretive decrease of the feed-in-tariff available to those who have alternative energy systems such as people with solar panels on their roof tops. The tariff, low as it was at 6.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, has been reduced to 5 cents and we can only assume that the coal lobby has got at the Victorian State Labor government to induce them to make this reduction.

When solar panels were first introduced into Victoria about 10 to 15 years ago, feed-in-tariffs apparently ranged to up to 60 cents - now in 2016 dropping to 5 cents.

FROM RENEWENERGY:

Victoria solar feed-in tariff to be slashed to 5c/kWh in 2016

By Sophie Vorrath on 25 August 2015

One Step Off The Grid

Less than a week after the Victorian Andrews government promised to fight network discrimination against rooftop solar households, the state’s Essential Services Commission has confirmed it will slash the feed-in tariff for solar power exported to the grid to 5c/kWh.

The ESC said in a statement on Monday that it has decided to set the minimum rate for purchases of small renewable energy generation electricity at 5 cents per kilowatt hour, starting January 2016.




It said that it had come to this price by weighing up the marginal cost of the equivalent amount of electricity that would otherwise need to be purchased from central generators, as well as “the locational value of electricity produced close to the final consumers compared to relatively distant central generators.”

The ESC said the energy value of PV electricity had been calculated as a weighted average of the forecast spot market prices for Victoria for each half-hour period of 2016, as prepared by ACIL Allen Consulting.

Ironically, the Commission also said part of its decision to go with the lower 5 cent rate, down from the previous 6.2c/kWh rate, was due to a lower forecast wholesale market price of electricity, particularly during daylight hours when PV electricity was being generated.

The commission said it did not take into account any environment or network benefits of rooftop solar, because of a “lack of evidence”. The decision was panned by the solar industry, who say the fair value of solar should be at least twice as much, if not equivalent to the full retail rate.

“This decision delivers a transfer of wealth from solar PV owners to electricity retailers,” said Australian Solar Council chief John Grimes.

“Solar energy exported to the grid is sold to your neighbors at the full retail rate, often upwards of $0.25 per kilowatt-hour. So paying a solar owner $0.05 cents per kilowatt hour for that exported energy is simply unfair.”

Solar Citizens national director Claire O’Rourke said the ESC had got its decision wrong, and was sending a starkly different message to Victorians that the state government, which just last week announced a Renewable Energy Roadmap aimed at achieving a renewable energy target of no less than 20 per cent by 2020 and with the stated goal of promoting rooftop solar uptake, and protecting the rights of existing rooftop solar households.

“The slashing of the feed-in tariff by the ESC is extremely unfair and risks undermining increased renewable energy as part of Victoria’s energy mix,” O’Rourke said in a statement on Tuesday.

“The Victorian government has committed to a review determining what a fair price should be later this year, but this could be too little too late if the ESC feed-in tariff cuts get the green light.

“It’s not proper process to cut the feed-in tariff now, before we know what a fair price for solar fed back into the grid should be.

“Energy Minister (Lily) D’Ambrosio should delay these changes until the results of the upcoming State Government review are available.

“It punishes tens of thousands of households that are likely to lose a large chunk of the already small financial return they receive from providing clean, renewable energy back into the grid.

“This cut will also make it more difficult for the thousands more families in Victoria who want to make the move to solar and enjoy the cost savings on electricity that rooftop solar can bring.”

This article was originally published on RE sister site, One Step Off The Grid. To sign up for the weekly newsletter, click here.

JOURNALISM IN AUSTRALIA

Journalism in Australia has deteriorated over the years as the media has narrowed its ownership and freedom of speech is only what governments and media bosses allow.

This does not mean that journalists have to become sloppy in how they write articles, reports, analyses and other items in papers including reviews of art shows, theatre, performers and performances.

Facts are still facts, even though media bosses try to distort them, but for really downright careless reporting, Steve Dow's "theatre" report about William Kentridge's forthcoming art show "Winterreise" takes some beating for one of its main errors of fact from start to finish.

William Kentridge's father was known around the world for being the leader of Nelson Mandela's defence team in the notorious treason trial which ended with Mandela being incarcerated on Robben Island and mainland South Africa for 27 years.

He was also known as Sydney Kentridge, one of the best and ablest barristers in apartheid South Africa.

Is this FACT so difficult for Steve Dow to establish, knowing how easily one finds out information on the internet?

I think not!

Sydney Kentridge was NOT called Stanley - ever! - unless Steve Dow can prove otherwise.

November 17, 2015 from CounterPunch

From Pol Pot to ISIS: the Blood Never Dried

by John Pilger

Following the ISIS outrages in Beirut and Paris, John Pilger updates this prescient essay on the root causes of terrorism and what we can do about it.

In transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on everything that moves”.  As Barack Obama wages his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Francois Hollande promises a “merciless” attack on that the rubble of Syria, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger’s murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery – including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields – I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today’s Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of “fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders”. Once Nixon’s and Kissinger’s B-52 bombers had gone to work as part of “Operation Menu”, the west’s ultimate demon could not believe his luck. The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They leveled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left giant necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors “froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told… That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.” A Finnish Government Commission of Inquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the “first stage in a decade of genocide”. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.

ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of at least 700,000 people – in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common. Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.
Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism. Al-Qaeda – like Pol Pot’s “jihadists” – seized the opportunity provided by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed. “Rebel” Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf state ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote, “The [Cameron] government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy – and in particular our Middle East wars – had been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here.”

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington, London and Paris who, in conspiring to destroy Iraq, Syria and Libya, committed an epic crime against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in “our” societies, making accomplices of those who suppress this critical truth.

It is 23 years since a holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations Security Council and imposed punitive “sanctions” on the Iraqi population – ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam Hussein. It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, “blocked” – from chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with Depleted Uranium. Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, explained why. “The children’s vaccines”, he said, “were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction”. The British Government could get away with such an outrage because media reporting of Iraq – much of it manipulated by the Foreign Office – blamed Saddam Hussein for everything.

Under a bogus “humanitarian” Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire society’s infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water. “Imagine,” the UN Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von Sponeck, told me, “setting that pittance against the lack of clean water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable.” Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior UN official, had also resigned. “I was instructed,” Halliday said, “to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults.”

A study by the United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, found that between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000 “excess” deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. An American TV reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United Nations, asking her, “Is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “We think the price is worth it.”

In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, Carne Ross, known as “Mr. Iraq”, told a parliamentary selection committee, “[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire population a means to live.”  When I interviewed Carne Ross three years later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. “I feel ashamed,” he said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and maintaining the deception. “We would feed [journalists] factoids of sanitised intelligence,” he said, “or we’d freeze them out.” Last year, a not untypical headline in the Guardian read: “Faced with the horror of Isis we must act.” The “we must act” is a ghost risen, a warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq for which the Blair Government shared primary responsibility, Hain abused him on the BBC’s Newsnight as an “apologist for Saddam”. In 2003, Hain backed Blair’s invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed the invasion as a “fringe issue”.

Here was Hain demanding “air strikes, drones, military equipment and other support” for those “facing genocide” in Iraq and Syria. This will further “the imperative of a political solution”. The day Hain’s article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other across a table. Why not now in Iraq and Syria? Instead, there is a vapid, almost sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Hollande, Obama and their “coalition of the willing” as they prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the blood of previous adventures never dried. They seem to relish their own violence and stupidityso much they want it to overthrow their one potentially valuable ally,  the government in Syria.
This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence file illustrates:

“In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces… a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals… a necessary degree of fear… frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention… the CIA and SIS should use… capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension.”

That was written in 1957, although it could have been written yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. In 2013, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that “two years before the Arab spring”, he was told in London that a war on Syria was planned. “I am going to tell you something,” he said in an interview with the French TV channel LPC, “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria… Britain was organising an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate… This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned.”

The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the west – Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and now Russia. The obstacle is Turkey, an “ally” and a member of Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf medievalists to channel support to the Syrian “rebels”, including those now calling themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of the most ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.

A truce – however difficult to negotiate and achieve – is the only way out of this maze; otherwise, the atrocities in Paris and Beirut will be repeated. Together with a truce, the leading perpetrators and overseers of violence in the Middle East  — the Americans and Europeans – must themselves “de-radicalise” and demonstrate a good faith to alienated Muslim communities everywhere, including those at home. There should be an immediate cessation of all shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the region’s most festering open wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear. Palestine also offers hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world around them.

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq, and the Nato and “coalition” crimes in Libya and Syria. With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger’s latest self-serving tome has been released with its satirical title, “World Order”. In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a “key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century”. Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his “statecraft”.  Only when “we” recognise the war criminals in our midst and stop denying ourselves the truth will the blood begin to dry.

John Pilger can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com

 

More articles by:John Pilger

 

next – Out of the Blue: Hillary’s Sociopathy Revealed in Des Moines,

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IAN MACNEILL OBITUARY FROM GAY EBOOKS.COM.AU

Author - Ian MacNeill

Above: part of 'Querelle of Glebe' 1993, Gary Dunne. Ian requested that Gary Dunne read this poem at the funeral service. Lana Turner has collapsed! I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see a headline LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up Frank O'Hara Biography and bibliography Ian MacNeill, with his sharp unique style, has been a contributor to the Australian gay lit scene for a long time. He's appeared in a number of Australian gay anthologies including Travelling on Love.... and Pink Ink. His published books include Red and Silver, Libbing, and Beaches and Billabongs. Available for download from here are pdf remakes of his chapbook TV Tricks and the novel Red and Silver. Also available is his novella Portraits for the Blind. Ian's blog: ianmacneill.blogspot.com Ian has contributed widely to gay-ebooks publications including: [title, publication link, date] Haloed Perverse Verse Feb 2006 [poetry collection] TV Tricks Feb 2006 Diary of Percival Geraint Boy's Summer Collection Nov 2006 Portraits for the Blind [novella] Portraits for the Blind Feb 2007 The Correspondent My Boyfriend's back July 2007 Le baiser de la fee Queer Hearts Dec 2007 Reconnaisance Flight Justified & Ancient Feb 2008 Barebacking Man Overboard Nov 2008 In the Marble Bar I am a Camera Feb 2009 The Red Hat I need some Dec 2009 Editor for Catching On July 2010 Out of the desert and, then, he kissed me March 2011 Red and Silver (novel) Red and Silver April 2011 Queen Lear When you're a boy Oct 2011

Farewell With deep personal sadness, we record the passing of Ian MacNeill on 27 November 2011 from liver cancer. Queen Lear, his story in our collection When you're a Boy, was completed at St Vinnie's Hospice in Darlinghurst. Ian's literary output over four decades of writing included poetry, fiction and biography as well as journalism, reviews and commentary pieces. What is perhaps less well known is the extent of his personal support and encouragement of other writers, from the days of the emerging gay press in the seventies, through the Mieli, Burn, BlackWattle and QueerLit era until now. Ian's unique style, his personal courage and, most of all, his abiding friendship will be greatly missed. Tributes are welcome. Please send to gary@gay-ebooks.com.au Ian MacNeill: a tribute I go to my bookshelves. (How nineties.) Ian is there. He’s there in many of the key anthologies and journals that formed Australian gay and lesbian writing and publishing: in Gay Information (1984), Love and Death (1987); Cargo 1 –the opening story – (1987); Travelling on Love in a Time of Uncertainty (1991); Pink Ink (1991); Fruit (1994). Together these publications mark the years when deaths from AIDS were rising inexorably, when BlackWattle Press took on a central role in publishing and consolidating gay and lesbian writing formations and the Mardi Gras festival was at its finest. I notice what seems initially to be a gap in Ian’s writing between 1987 and 1991. It’s not. In 1989 BlackWattle Press published Ian’s first book: TV Tricks and other poems. In 1990 he published a collection of essays, Libbing. In 1990 and 1991 two of his plays were read during Mardi Gras at the Belvoir Theatre. In 1992 there were two novels: Red and Silver and Beaches and Billabongs. These two novels, as well as Libbing and a later third novel - Looking for Ms Warscewicz (1998) - were published under the imprint Miele Press. In the years after Pasolini was murdered/assassinated, Italian gay liberationist Mario Miele was part of a collective political and theatrical response to the social power of heterosexual privilege. In his meditation on Miele’s suicide ‘Recalling Mario Miele’ (Pink Ink) Ian wrote, ‘He was not just a gay Rosa Luxemburg; he ate shit, actually’. Ian continued the honourable practice of publishing with small presses and self- publishing, common amongst many feminist and gay writers, sometimes out of choice, sometimes out of necessity. He was in good company, much of it female: poets like Margaret Bradstock, Pam Brown, Lee Cataldi, Jill Jones, Louise Wakeling; novelists like Jan McKemmish, Finola Moorhead. Gay community publishing launched writers like Damien Millar, Phil Scott, Christos Tsiolkas, Ian understood these collective practices, just as he understood the experimental writing they supported and how they enabled new voices and new writing. Ian was a member of the organising collective for the 1993 QueerLit conference and is published in the conference proceedings, A Cold Collation. He was well versed in various traditions of homo posturing, and what produced them: you turned your back and comforted yourself with Debussy, or everybody. (Love and Death) He loved Nina Simone and knew which china he wanted to live up to. Put simply, Ian was there, but that compliment says too little. It was clearly a period of both great personal creativity and community engagement. TV Tricks is still my favourite of Ian’s works. The sources of the poems, he said, were ‘tawdry and elevated’. I am fond of quoting from ‘Hyperreal Juke Box Number’: But I swear on a stack of bibles this high, I wouldn’t have let him fuck me If he hadn’t looked so much like Elvis. I’m sure I heard Ian read that at the Harold Park Hotel, but I can’t swear, at least not with his studied elegance. In 2005, Ian wrote in Art Monthly Australia about curator Brian Finemore who was murdered in his Melbourne home in 1975. Finemore, he said, kicked against the needless social austerity of the post-war world – The wanton dullness, the mindless conservatism, the fearful resistance to change … the resistance to pleasure and to happiness that characterizes so much of Australian history … homosexuals were locked up in so many ways. And as a homosexual man of conscience Finemore must have felt obliged to rattle the bars. It’s worth remembering that rock ‘n roll (‘Elvis’) gave relief from dullness, celebrated pleasure and preceded gay liberation. Ian knew this. It was part of his story. Gay Liberation was a politics. It was also an opportunity to dance. Ian was there in 1978 at the first Mardi Gras, arrested, publicly exposed. In Libbing he rattled the bars, railing against various aspects of politics, literary culture, discrimination and how some were failing to respond adequately to AIDS. In the 1990s he wrote novels for teenagers offering those who were different alternative ways of understanding their world. In the poem that follows ‘Hyperreal Juke Box’, Ian’s writing took and takes my breath away. The poem ends: This is Amelia Earhart I’m coming in. Then there’s ‘Pedophilia: The Libretto’ that appeared in Craig Johnston and Paul Van Reyk’s collection Queer City (2001). The libretto was in part a response to the cheap but dangerous sexual politics of the Wood royal commission (1995-1997). Early in the Libretto, Ian writes: ‘A child cavorts in a restaurant. Her mother demands to know what she thinks she is doing and who taught her to act like that.’ Ian wrote what was possibly the first history of the Solomon Islands, Sweet Horizons (2000) and kept writing, editing, publishing right through the 2000s with www.gay.ebooks and his long time friends and collaborators Gary Dunne and Laurin McKinnon. All of this deserves proper documentation, a scholarly bibliography, memoir. I am paying tribute here to Ian’s literary reach, his verbal deftness and experimentation, his wit, his eye for the ironies and awfulness of social life, for the tawdry, the delightful and the tender. Just weeks ago, Ian wrote on his blog: I espresso the coffee and pour it into my heated coffee pot then I pour the coffee in its thick flow into my Japanese copy Viennese demi-tasses; they almost tremble on their tiny saucers. Michael Hurley Melbourne 30/11/2011 I met Ian when my first book 'Dangerous Desires' came out in Sydney in 1992. We became friends when I subsequently met him at the Melbourne Writers Festival. He was wearing an outrageous bright pink leopard skin suit. We staggered off to hear a mediocre one-time cultural anti-hero, the poet Yevtushenko and shrieked into our wine glasses at how hideous time was. There was something about Ian which I loved: his sly wit, his defiant almost wrought iron campness and then there was his deep seriousness about things which mattered - art, truth and the way homosexuality could inform your view of humanity. I realised over time we came from a similar family background: one haunted by war, and by the strictures of a pre-war world which had to do with courtesy and a certain level of formality in behaviour. One could call this manners. Just through conversation - and hand written letters on his part - he became a mentor. Perhaps the fact he was in a different country gave him the ideal distance. He could take the long view. But he was also a passionate New Zealandophile, his letters arriving in the box always delivered to the future: Aotearoa New Zealand. He guided me through the rocky landscape of being a contemporary writer. I learnt to interpret his eloquent silences. He always gave me confidence in the importance of the act of writing itself. In some ways it was like an ideal love affair - one without the interruptions of sex. I did love Ian very much. He came and visited me in New Zealand and on his last visit here I took him out to visit one of the great landed properties of Hawke's Bay. It was a hot dry day and inside the enormous wooden mansion something seemed amiss. A young matron in bare feet came to the door and took the money we offered to view the garden. Then an older model in pearls, with sculpted vowels, jumped out of the woodwork. What exactly were we doing there? Who were we? Ian appreciated this encounter with the redoubtable old school. (It turned out the great property itself was changing hands that day, leaving the ownership of the original family who had held it for 120 years. Things were mysteriously afoot.) We sauntered off into the remains of one-time magnificent garden. Birds sang. Always curious, Ian inspected foliage in detail as well as taking in the grand landscape effect. We found a seat. So we sat there and in the great silence of a hot February day we just sat beside each other. There was no need for words. This was as far as we got. It was like a Jamesian walk into some eternal sphere. Friendship, I like to think, is like that: a penetration into distant views, an ability to sit beside one another in silence. Now Ian has joined himself to some eternal silence. But I like to think of certain things: that thin yet defiantly jaunty smile, his individual refusals to join in mass cults of belief - I can hear him say, 'Oh Peter, come on!' - his nicety with detail - and his listening aware silence which I like to think willl encompasses us all for some time to come. Peter Wells For Ian That precise pile of words computer wrangled/ scratchy pen scrawled can't be the sum of your left creations. Each poem, story, treatise each and every new one teased, mirrored and challenged us, veraciously recasting last years model 'Oh, you do what you can,' you'd say as you carefully stepped around drama mountains and summarily dismissed our unreconstructed protests. gentle man and gentleman generous and kind lover and loved hero and legend speaker of truths Missed already. Laurin McKinnon 29 Nov 2011

Ian MacNeill - Red and Silver ISBN 0 646 09818 7, Mieli Press, 1992, 156 pages Re-release: April 2011 in pdf format, 145 pages A5 Phillip joins Chrissie, Helen, Ben and Mario at his new school. It is Year 11 and they are pleased to have one another to face life as seniors together. The pressures take their toll: goals shift, resolutions waver, relationships intensify and dissolve. Ian MacNeill's novel addresses issues which concern them. Life is not all sex, drugs and study for high school students. They've got other things to deal with as well. A novel for mature adolescents by Ian MacNeill more information download now [pdf file <2mb p="">

Ian MacNeill - Portraits for the Blind  Released February 2007, pdf format, 72 pages A5 Three Aussie kids on a beach in the eighties; it may be paradise but they're not happy. And soon they have to grow up and leave home. A story about what no-one wants to see. A novella exclusive to gay-ebooks more information download now [pdf file <2mb p="">

Ian MacNeill - TV Tricks  ISBN 1 875 243 00 3 June 1989, 48 pages, A5 [Released Feb 2006 as a pdf] From the Foreword: "These poems are offered as gay, camp, 'intensely' personal and propaganda. I would confess they are proselytising but I am not sure to what they beckon the reader." more information download now [pdf file <2mb p="">

Ian's work also appears in:
And then he kissed me more info download [pdf file >2MB]	Audio recordings more info	Catching On more info download [pdf file >1.2MB]	I need some more info download [pdf file <2mb p="">	Justified and Ancient more info download [pdf file <2mb p="">
I am a camera more info download [pdf file >2MB]	Man Overboard more info download [pdf file >1.2MB]	Queer Hearts more info download [pdf file <2mb p="">	My boyfriend's back more info download [pdf file <2mb p="">	Boys' Summer collection more info download [pdf file <2mb p="">
Also Perverse Verse 2006 more info

See also these paperback books:

Libbing, Mieli Press, ISBN 0 646 01502 8, 1990, 84 pages
Beaches and Billabongs, Mieli Press

Mieli Press PO Box 738 Potts Point 2011

ASYLUM SEEKERS AND CONCENTRATION CAMPS

As the asylum seeker situation spirals out of control, the international crisis is one in which most countries around the world have responsibility, both for causing the crises in so many countries and for then needing to deal with the situation in which hundreds and thousands of people who have fled disasters have to be housed and given sustenance and everything else to keep them alive and address the problem.

Most countries in Europe are affected, and the situations in the Middle East and Asia join the disasters from the African continent fleeing to Europe for some hope of survival and a future life.

One of the countries least affected by many thousands of asylum seekers is Australia. The number trying to get to Australia has always been small, the majority having tried to get to countries in other parts of the world.

An Australian prime minister who was nominally from a political party of the left introduced the first concentration camps to Australia in 1992, and in the last 24 years the crisis of asylum seekers has deteriorated so that some thousands of people are imprisoned in countries other than Australia and where they have no opportunity of ever obtaining justice for being locked up for "crimes" they never committed.

As a South African who lived in apartheid South Africa for the major portion of his life, I saw the consequences of the people who were incarcerated in the British concentration camps during the South African war of 1899 to 1902. Those people who had been locked up lived with the traumas ever afterwards and passed the traumas on to their children and grandchildren and beyond, to this day.

There will be the same outcome for the people Australia has locked up in its offshore concentration camps in Nauru and Manus Island of Papua New Guinea.

The population of Australia is to blame as much as successive governments because politicians and the media have continued to demonise innocent people fleeing tragedy and disaster in the countries from which they have fled.

Very few politicians do anything about remedying the disaster and the horror continues.

We need to use whatever forums we have at our disposal to keep on pursuing the issue until something is done to stop the tragedy unfolding.