Janet Albrechtsen, men's clubs, the right to be a religious loon and the soft left liberal mindset

(Above: a hardened dinkum Aussie sorts out a soft left liberal mindset).

The cherry tree out the back has lost its bright red blossoms, and the squawking parrots have moved on. We're only blessed with their jibber jabber a couple of weeks a year - and is it wrong, too nativist of me - to prefer these brightly colored baubles to the fiendish Indian mynah birds and their wretched cries of alarm each time I step into the backyard?

Am I going slightly Cronulla?

Never mind, we always have a different kind of squawking to relieve the tedium, and today it's the turn of Janet Albrechtsen, in Dos and don'ts of discrimination.

Now the first half of her column is spent railing against UN consultant James Anaya blowing in for a few days to do a report on the Northern Territory and then blowing out again, making all the loons on the pond jump about in startled indignation, as if he wasn't saying what had already been said by a large number of dissidents not entirely happy with the way the NT intervention has unfolded.

Never mind, away she goes and has tremendous fun, and that in turn allows her to carp against Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma and his report, and ex-GG Bill Deane cringing each time he hears the "intervention" word.

All well and good, as Dame Slap mounts three cheers for Sue Gordon, and even manages a hooray for Jenny Macklin, indigenous affairs minister.

Then she gets down to the nub of it, to the heart of the problem, to the heart of darkness. And wouldn't you know it, it's the fault of ... well you guessed it:

Whether the issue is solemn or trivial, the wider soft-left liberal mindset is equally unable to comprehend any kind of complexity where there is the slightest hint of discrimination.

Oh you simple minded, soft cock liberals and your stupid mindset, completely incapable of understanding any kind of complexity.

Men’s clubs are inherently evil - “a relic of earlier times”, according to Julia Gillard. The Deputy Prime Minister has publicly taunted them for not accepting Governor-General Quentin Bryce as a member. Last week, when Bryce was made an honorary member of Lyceum, the exclusive women-only club in Melbourne, the sisterhood had nothing to say about relics.

Well actually dear Dame Slap, the Lyceum is a relic, established in 1912 and directly modelled on the lyceum clubs of England. And poor old Federal Sex Discrimination Elizabeth Broderick got a wrap over the knuckles by at least one commentariat columnist for this remark:

Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, who holds the position Ms Bryce occupied in the early 1990s, has also weighed into the debate, declaring it is "not smart" for any institution that claims to reflect a city's elite to lock out half of the population. (here).

But how can you win an argument if you aren't allowed a sweeping assertion about the sisterhood?

While I was looking around on the subject of Lyceum Clubs - they now seem to flourish more in the colonies than mother England - I stumbled across a quaint piece here in the NZ Illustrated Magazine, as held in the NZ national library:

All over the civilized world, unions of various kinds are being formed; and at last it is one's pleasant duty to tell of a woman's club, which, though conducted on advanced lines, is not intended as a club for the dissection of man and his alleged meannesses (sic). Nor is it a club to further the introduction of a female parliament.

Phew, for a moment there I thought we were talking revolution, but it was of course a way for women (in this case especially artistic, university and scientfically inclined women) to carve out a space away from the actual (as well as alleged) meannesses of the male kind. It now feels incredibly quaint, not to mention colonial, but back to Dame Slap:

Now here’s a really thorny one. How to respond to recent reports in Britain where local municipal swimming pools have banned swimmers during certain hours unless they comply with a “modest” code of dress required by Islamic custom: women covered neck to ankle and men covered navel to knees. A “relic of earlier times” or culturally appropriate discrimination?

Well actually that's no more tricky than responding to the notion that somehow men's and women's only clubs aren't relics from quaint Victorian times, with no better or more likely home than in Melbourne in these modern times.

My suggestion? Where the pools are municipal, which is to say funded by taxpayer dollars, they should conform to current community standards, and not indulge in any kind of censorship required by any religion. What are current community standards? Well that's a bit chewy, but I think we're mainly arguing about whether thongs should be limited to the pages of The Punch or Bondi beach.

Of course following Dame Slap's standards, a private pool funded by private money can impose any standard it might like. So include me out, but feel free to impose whatever dress standard you like in your quaint relic of earlier times.

Which brings us to her now standard whine about religious schools:

And what about religious schools? Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls has called for a review of the exemptions under the state’s Equal Opportunity Act that allow schools to hire on the basis of religious faith. That’s discrimination. It is also a basic exercise of the right to religious freedom. Will the Left’s legal crusader, Hulls, defend that right by using his Charter of Human Rights? Probably not.

Well I'm sure Albrechtsen is very happy for taxpayer dollars to go to the support of educational establishments promoting the beliefs of the Exclusive Brethren, Scientology and fundamentalist Islam, or any other cuckoo philosophy that can round up enough cash for bricks and mortar and enough kids for indoctrination. Thereby earning themselves nice kickbacks as part of the funding of the private school industry.

But again where's the inconsistency in suggesting that if taxpayers' dollars are involved then such schools should not be exempted from requirements placed on other schools, including the exemption involving the right to hire on the basis of religious faith. Allowing a creationist school to hire science teachers on the basis of a belief in creationism will see us heading down the US road to religious lunacy sooner than trying to tell the time with a broken two bob watch.

Of course there's a way around this, if you're a school and a tribe intent on maintaining your righteous vision of the world. Give up sucking on the teat of the taxpayer, go off and live apart and teach how you will in your private enterprise. There's a few towns in the north of South Australia ailing a little who could do with your presence.

Dame Slap's first comment got it right:

There is no intellectual inconsistency on men’s clubs and religious schools. The separation of sexes involved in Men’s clubs serves no valuable function, while reinforcing socially harmful attitudes (a trait shared by private schools and religious schools, incidentally).

But by then Albrechtsen had bolted, the horse was well and truly out of the stable, and righteous indignation knew no bounds:

Intellectually inconsistent carping about men-only clubs and religious schools pales into insignificance compared with the hollow morality of those who preach about discrimination in indigenous communities. Consider the sad irony that those hailed as protectors of human rights and seekers of social justice continue to give succour to an outdated mindset that has demonstrably failed our youngest and most disadvantaged citizens. Fortunately, it is a sign more sensible times have prevailed when these misguided people are increasingly relegated to the fringes of meaningful debate while ever small children suffer abuse and neglect.

Well I guess I could marvel at the sad irony of those hailed as devotees of small government, asserters of the rights of individuals and haters of paternalistic, patrician big government dominance and interference in the rights of citizens would demonstrably fail to care about the individual rights of Australian citizens, but I guess I'd just be adding to the hot air quotient of the week, based on the insistent desire to treat every issue as an ideological outing.

If there's a soft left liberal mindset, then just as surely there's a hardened right wing ratbag mind set.

As for the rights of commentariat columnists? Send in the troops I say, that'll sort them out, and the first one to write a line like "soft-left liberal mindset", put 'em up against a wall and shoot them. That'll soon teach them about subtlety and nuance and the way to understand complexity when it comes to a particular view of the world.