I’m going to use this in my year 9 English class as a media dissection exercise.  Brilliant stuff.

I’ve had a few questions from people, both asking me to explain the current Labor leadership spill, and for my opinion on it.  So here we go!

Yes, I think it’s damaging for the Labor party (even though I love political drama!  I know most people are sick of it, but not me!).  They are looking more and more like a group of in-fighting teenagers who can’t make up their mind and can’t get along, which leads to instability and bad governing.  All Tony Abbott almost needs to do is sit back, Steven Bradbury style.  The saying is true for a reason:

“Oppositions don’t win government, governments lose it.”

I think it’s possible for the Labor party to recover after the spill on Monday, but it will take lots of charisma, grace, strength and focus on policy and practicality.  I honestly don’t believe Julia can pull that off, but Kevin perhaps could.  And they MUST stop publicly bashing members of their own party.

The weird thing about this public in-fighting is that Julia and her supporters are violently going at Kevin in the media and his side hasn’t attacked her once.  He is coming off much better in all this.  He is talking about his achievements and her public record, not attacking her personally.  It’s a bad, childish look.

Kevin looks more like a leader than Julia.  Kevin has done more damage to Tony Abbott in the last few days than Julia has in the last 20 months.  If only we had better speech writers that could have some consistency across the board, but Julia does not come off as a strong leader with vision in my opinion.  I don’t hate her, but I certainly don’t think she’s a good leader.  I know she has got some things done, but I still think with her as leader, Labor will lose the net election.  Whenever that is!

The galaxy polls at the moment are strongly showing public favour for Kevin at the moment.  But huge margins.  This means that for the Labor party to win at the next election, they really need Kevin at the helm.  It looks almost impossible for Julia to beat Tony Abbott at the next election.  So the Labor caucus need to make a decision, how will they vote?  Who they’d rather work under, or who will help them win the next election?  Ideally you don’t want to have to make a choice like that at all, but it seems that Kevin has less support than Julia in the Labor caucus because of his leadership style.  But if she can’t win, it’s a moot point.

Another significant point is that I honestly believe Kevin would not be challenging the leadership if he’d been treated properly.  He truly loved his job as Foreign Minister.  He loved it and he was good at it.  If he’d been treated well by his party he would have stayed there forever.  The problem is that he was being publicly attacked and Julia didn’t step up and defend him, or do anything but ignore it.  Given the strong public attack on Kevin from the front bench lately, he had no choice but to resign and either leave, or challenge.  He wasn’t really left with another political option!

A huge problem I have with Julia & Wayne’s attacks on Kevin is their disgusting attack on his character.  They’re calling him an egotistical maniac who can’t work with anyone.  So… you put him in charge of our relations with the rest of the world by making him Foreign Minister?!  If you thought he was such an awful and impossible guy, why the hell did you put him on the front bench and send him to be our representative to the rest of the world?!  This baffles me.

I also think the Kevin has learned from his past mistakes.  I’m not saying he’s some sort of perfect leader, but the biggest criticism from his colleagues was his autocratic leadership style.  He made all the decisions himself and didn’t work collaboratively.  I like that he has promised (yes, actually promised) not to do that this time around if he is re-elected leader.  He has promised to let the caucus choose the front bench.  This is a huge thing, and I think it shows that he knows he must change, and that the government needs to be party led and more cohesive than it was under his pervious leadership.

There aren’t too many Labor members standing up for Kevin in public, however I understand that.  If they declare their allegiance to Kevin (which a few have) and he loses the spill on Monday, they might lose their jobs!  And they’ll be seen to be disloyal.  This is why I agree with Kevin, that the spill on Monday needs to be by secret ballot so as to ensure people can vote for who they actually want to and not out of fear of losing their position.

Or we could just compromise and have this (photo) as our leader.

Words cannot describe how excited I am about THIS.

Annabel Crabb has a new show about to start called ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ which is truly my idea of tv heaven.  It combines two of my loves, cooking and politics.

Here is a 30 second teaser:

Here is the blurb from the website:

A half-hour entertainment series that serves up a delectable combination of political discussion and good food. Each week one of Australia’s most respected political commentators – Annabel Crabb – takes a plate and leads us into the homes and hearts of some of our most notable and engaging politicians. She sits down and talks food, recipes and carbon tax with MPs from both sides of the fence. 

Food and politics are never separated for long. The best plots are hatched over lunch. The best stories are told over dinner. In Canberra, dinner bookings are an anthropological study in themselves. If you go for a walk around Manuka or Kingston during a sitting week, you see a graphic illustration of the capital’s power shifts. Why is that minister sharing noodles with that factional opponent? What is that disenfranchised bunch of back benchers plotting? And the best way to get to know a politician is to break bread with one.

Kitchen Cabinet will deliver a refreshing human touch, as we watch our politicians drop their guard and go about their daily life at home.

Seriously, I CAN’T WAIT FOR THIS SHOW!!!  Is it just me?

This might be the best book I’ve ever read.

Truly hilarious.

It’s available for free to read HERE.

A few weeks ago my brother preached for the first time.  It was seriously amazing.  I’m not just being biased.  I was completely blown away by how clever, funny, wise, well structured and biblically sound it was.

HERE is the link to our church’s podcasts, get the one by ‘Luke Orrin’.

HERE is a very interesting blog post from Mark Sayers.

Here is an excerpt of the 10 questions he asks:

1: The almost overwhelming consensus in the West is that Church needs to change. But what if Church is not the problem what if we are? In the past people were part of the church because of their sense of devotion, their expectations of Church were much lower. What if we are looking for Church to give us the transcendence that we are meant to find in God?

2: The contemporary christian scene has now fragmented into movements. I know people who were in the new reformed camp but who are now in the emergent camp, and people who have made the move in the opposite direction. I know people who grew up Eastern Orthodox and are now at Pentecostal churches, and Pentecostals who have become Eastern Orthodox. What is the way that we move and change affiliations and tribes telling us? Maybe beneath the theology, and practice something else is going on? Why are we always on the move?

3: Why did the Church flatline across the Western World around 1963-1968? Why such a specific time frame? What happened?

4: What if we as the Church has been so focussed on the way that the enlightenment has captured our minds that we missed the way that romanticism has captured our hearts. How do you communicate the gospel in such a new emotional landscape?

5: What if the sexual climate of the West tells us more about our view of the universe than it does about our sex drives?

6: What if the American author Jack Kerouac in 1947 created a new form of being a half-Christian half-unbeliever that would come to dominate the way contemporary Christians fifty years later would live out their faiths? What if his book On the Road was the genesis of the life script of young adults today?

7: Maybe young adults across the western world are leaving church because we embraced the idea of the seeker? The problem being that in the Western imagination seekers never stop seeking?

8: Everyone in the West sees their life as a journey. What if life is not a journey? What if by seeing life as an individual journey we are preventing ourselves participating in God’s grand narrative of salvation?

9: Why did the 9/11 hijackers spend their last months on this earth smoking dope, binging on donuts, drinking in night clubs, sleeping with prostitutes and buying porn? What does it tell us that men who were so committed to a radical and violent vision of Islam and who despised the culture of the West found themselves so conflicted when it came to behaviour?

10: Why do so many young Christians who profess to follow Christ seem by their actions to be more disciples of Nietzsche, anxiously spending their waking hours attempting to carve out lives of meaning?

It happened.  The students came back.  It was inevitable.  Whilst it was an exhausting day, it was a good one.  I’m really looking forward to getting in to this year.  It was nice doing some intro stuff, but now it starts!

This year I have 8, 9, 10 Maths, 9 English and 12 Psychology.

I truly love my job and I’m so blessed to be in my school.

BRING IT ON!

Sigh…

I adore this country.  We are so lucky.  But we are so far from perfect and being without problems.  I am wordlessly grateful to live in this country, but I hate the racism and simplistic idiocy that goes with Australia Day.  I cannot put my argument better than just posting this  status from a friend on Facebook:

“F*&K this!!! Why the F*&K are people putting up these messages questioning the greatness of this F*&king brilliant land of ours?  If you don’t like Australia just the way it is, then F*&K OFF OUTTA HERE!!! This is the best country in the world.”

My response: “Seriously [redacted name].  Don’t say s*&t like that.  It’s simplistic and ridiculous.  No one is questioning the amazingness of living in a place like this.  But there are many things that are problematic with our country.  We are not perfect.  I am grateful I live in such an amazing place which I truly appreciate, but we are far from perfect.”

I didn’t know how to write more without getting into a debate which I clearly can’t win.  Sigh…

I’ve done a few home recordings in the last year and HERE they are.

I’m just playing the ukulele and singing.

Although one of the songs is a song I recorded years and years ago that I remixed using garageband.  Just mucking around really.

Enjoy!  Although if you don’t enjoy, please don’t tell me and ruin my self esteem…

I am seriously looking forward to this year!  I’m going to be teaching awesome subjects, all of which I really want to teach.  I’ll have:

8 Maths

9 Maths

10 Maths

9 English

12 Psychology

I can’t wait!  My life is pretty great.