ANIMAL RIGHTS FAILURE IN CALIFORNIA

Proposed California laws to ban dogs from competitively hunting wild jackrabbits and to force zoos to expand acreage for elephants died this week in legislative committees. The two measures were among many torpedoed Thursday by legislative appropriations committees, which marked their final hurdle before reaching the Assembly and Senate floors....

Assembly Bill 2110 would have banned the sport of live field coursing in which greyhounds, whippets, salukis and other sighthounds compete in capturing and killing wild jackrabbits in rural fields. Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, proposed AB 2110 after watching TV footage of a Solano County event in which competing dogs played tug of war over a jackrabbit carcass.

Hundreds of Californians took sides on AB 2110, fueling a passionate fight that Hancock claims lawmakers were reluctant to jump into. "Frankly, I have to say the fact that it was controversial killed it," Hancock said. "There was controversy created by people who wouldn't acknowledge that (field coursing) has nothing to with traditional hunting." Hancock's bill would have banned competitions, but it would not have prohibited dogs from hunting jackrabbits outside the sport.

Lesley Brabyn, a leader in the fight against AB 2110, said live field coursers were falsely targeted as cruel or inhumane. Brabyn argued that live field coursing is expressly permitted by state law and is an important element in breeding because it allows owners to identify the most exceptional sighthounds. The sport hunts only wild jackrabbits in their natural habitat; it mirrors real-life chases by predators; and 90 percent of the jackrabbits chased by sighthounds escape unharmed, Brabyn said. "We felt listened to," she said of legislative debate over AB 2110. "It renewed my faith in the legislative process."

Separate legislation targeting zoo habitat for elephants also was derailed. Assembly Bill 3027, known as the Elephant Protection Act, would have required zoos to set aside at least five acres of usable habitat for every three elephants, plus an additional half-acre for each additional elephant. The measure by Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, D-Van Nuys, would have affected circuses by banning the use of steel-tipped bullhooks and chains to herd or restrain the pachyderms. "I don't think we have an inherent right to see elephants," Levine said. "If we can't give them the care and respect they deserve, if we can't afford that, then we shouldn't have the privilege of seeing them."

The American Zoo and Aquarium Association charged that the bill sets arbitrary acreage requirements for zoo elephants that are not supported by science. "We believe that these changes are another attempt by animal-rights activists to effectively ban elephants from zoos today and then ban other species, such as giraffes, lions and penguins, from zoos tomorrow," the organization said in a statement while AB 3027 was under debate.

Levine said he has given up on his elephant proposal for this year, but added, "If the zoos and circuses think I'm going to go away on this issue, they're sadly mistaken."

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INCORRECT RUSSIA

It is almost midnight at the Three Monkeys and the manager is worried. The most popular gay club in Moscow should be heaving by this time, Ivan Timchenko says. But the bar is almost empty, the dancefloor deserted. Barbed wire has been strung around the exterior, extra bouncers have been drafted in and the barmen have been issued with electric batons.

Russia's homosexual community is under siege. It should have been preparing to celebrate the 13th anniversary today of the lifting of a Soviet-era legal ban on homosexual relations between men. Instead, plans to mark the occasion with the first gay parade in Russia have sparked a violent backlash from religious and nationalist groups, and the controvery is polarising the country's fledgling gay community.

The controversy began last year when Nikolai Alekseyev, a gay rights activist, announced plans to stage a parade. "We want to give hope to gays and lesbians in the regions, who have no influence on politics," he told The Times. "These people do not feel free, natural or normal. They think they are mistakes of nature."

His proposal triggered a chorus of outrage from Russian Orthodox, Muslim and Jewish leaders. Talgat Tadzhuddin, the Chief Mufti, said: "If they come out on to the streets anyway, they should be flogged." Mikhail Dudko, of the Orthodox Church, denounced the idea as the "propaganda of sin", and one bishop likened homosexuality to leprosy. The furore spilt on to the streets this month, when angry crowds protested outside the Three Monkeys and another club that was playing host to a gay night.

Skinheads and elderly women holding icons and crosses chanted, "Death to pederasts!" and "Russia for Russians!", and several of the clubs' guests were attacked. Moscow city authorities have since turned down the application for the parade, saying that it could provoke riots. Inna Svyatenko, the head of the security committee of the Moscow City Duma, said: "It wasn't long ago that homosexual relations were illegal. There is still no single generation that has grown up without this way of thinking."

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A later report:

Russian police, militant Orthodox Christians and neo-fascists broke up a first ever gay rights march in Moscow overnight, but the homosexuals said their short-lived protest as a "great victory". Activists led by 28-year-old Nikolai Alexeyev had planned to lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier - a symbol of the World War Two struggle against fascism, and one of Russia's most sacred places. But police closed the gates to the park where the eternal flame burns under the Kremlin walls, and a heavy scrum of women singing hymns and shaven-headed nationalists tried to charge into the gay activists as the march arrived.

"This is a great victory, an absolute victory - look at what's happening," Alexeyev said as he was dragged, bent almost double, away from the gates by two policemen. City authorities had banned the march, which they called an "outrage to society", while religious leaders from all major faiths condemned it. Interfax news agency reported police had detained around 100 people after the clashes.

Even some rival gay activists said the march risked inflaming Russia's widespread intolerance of homosexuality, and wished Alexeyev had chosen a less direct way to protest against discrimination and homophobia. Homosexuality was decriminalised in Russia in 1993, and although some gay clubs exist in big cities, same-sex couples almost never make a public display of their affections.

A gay German member of parliament who attended the rally, Volker Beck, was punched in the face. Mr Beck, a leader of the Greens party and a prominent gay rights leader, was shown in German TV getting hit in the face. "I was attacked," Mr Beck told German television. "It was a stone and a fist. It shows we're not safe in this country. The security forces did not protect us but instead prevented us from retreating. We were left without any protection."

The marchers, who seemed to number about 40 although an exact count was impossible in the mob, were outnumbered at least twofold by men and women carrying Russian Orthodox icons and chanting "Moscow is not Sodom". "We must stop them at this first stage, or they'll come and corrupt our children," said Kirill Bolgarin, 24, who had come to protest despite the pouring rain. His friend Andrei, 25, interrupted, and gestured at the eternal flame. "We are Russians. We are Orthodox. These soldiers died so we could live like Russians, not so these people could come here and tell us what to do," he said.

Alexeyev had invited gay activists from all across Europe to the march, the culmination of three days of events that were a first Russian attempt to hold a Gay Pride festival like those in Western cities. "We came here to lay flowers at this anti-fascist memorial, but the mayor is so terrified of us that he took the step of ordering the gates closed," said Peter Tatchell from the British gay rights group OutRage. "As soon as we arrived we were set upon by fascist gangs and police. Today is a great shame for Russia because a peaceful protest has been suppressed."

Later, when police had formed a line between the two sides, a group of skinheads - young Russian nationalists who have grown in number in recent years and have been behind a series of attacks on foreign students - rushed towards the gay activists. Their faces masked, they threw flares as they ran, but OMON riot police stopped them and dragged them to waiting buses. Passers-by on the pavement outside parliament, which is on one of the capital's main streets, looked on in disbelief. "I think it is a sexual abnormality, but if these gays want to do it, they should," said Robert Antonov, 35. "Why shouldn't they do what they like? They are people too."



Australia: Churches successfully defend religious education

She is the woman behind an emerging force in Queensland politics, with access to thousands of Christian followers throughout the state and a formidable record of bending government policy to her agenda. From an office in Springwood, Logan City, Carolyn Cormack led a campaign that in less than a month saw the State Government back down on proposed changes to religious education in schools. With access to more than 3000 churches, from mainstream to charismatic organisations, the Australian Christian Lobby's Queensland chief of staff encouraged parishioners to protest against the changes. In less than a week, more than 9000 signatures were recorded on a petition and dozens of letters were sent to local members throughout the state. Weeks later the proposals were shelved.

Mrs Cormack is loath to boast about the group's success, politely thanking Premier Peter Beattie for his "common sense". But she is determined the Christian voice will be heard at the next state election. Issues such as gay marriage and same-sex adoption would be fought vigorously by the group and they want to see Bibles near every hospital bed. For the first time, the ACL is planning to create a score card on the State Government's performance to hand out to Christian voters before the 2007 election.

Premier Peter Beattie was wise to heed the power of the religious lobby, Griffith University politics and public policy lecturer Paul Williams said. "They are not a flash-in-the-pan type force, and their impact will be more widespread than single-issue groups," Dr Williams said. He said the influence of the religious lobby could mean the difference in several seats, especially outside Brisbane.

In August, ACL will host its state conference to focus on how to make the most of the influence of the Christian vote at the next election. And when campaigning starts, the group will seek to organise forums for candidates to meet with Christians ahead of the poll. It is a move Dr Williams describes as a return to old-fashioned politics with candidates having to engage with lobby group members and explain where they stand on issues. Mrs Cormack said the group was open minded and would offer no special favours for Family First candidates.

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The price of politically correct silence about Australian blacks

As the national soul-searching about the plight of remote Aboriginal Australia mounts and the curtains of censorship are pushed back, shocked voices can be heard wondering how we reached this point and what the blueprint for a constructive future may be. But one looks in vain for a precise, coherent road map from the federal Government, which has abolished the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, only to find it has no one left to blame for the disaster unfolding in central and northern Australia. This deep policy uncertainty dawns even as the consequences of decades of underfunding become more evident and the demographic explosion in remote Australia places ever sharper pressures on strained social services.

The laws and measures enacted to change the landscape have fallen short. A generation's worth of land rights in the Northern Territory has failed to revolutionise the outlying indigenous communities: little has changed in the Aboriginal ghetto townships across the scrub or desert, which remain underdeveloped and largely excluded from the national economy. Native title has proved to be a glacial triumph of legal processes, while indigenous self-determination is a fantasy of desperate contradictions.

The bitter truth is lying in the street, for those with open eyes to see and with access to remote Australia's well-guarded shadow world: many of our indigenous fellow citizens are trapped in a cycle of violence, economic dependency, ill-health, and sexual and substance abuse. Bizarre pathologies proliferate, although unheard of until now outside dark science-fiction dystopias. Attempts at genuine reform, which might endanger the present system's beneficiaries, are quickly snuffed out.

The vital key to this system has long been a culture of secrecy about the real conditions, buttressed by silences and by double standards. It is a secrecy, a strategy of euphemism, that covers the private world, the economic and the social space. These secrets are kept, and the minimising lies and evasions peddled, by white and Aborigine, by politicians and bureaucrats, by administrators and their subjects. Thus a pervasive silence is maintained by public servants and community workers, who have long since abandoned their reformist dreams and know they will be sacked at once by their Aboriginal "employers" if they speak out about any of the linked syndromes of the bush: violence, drug and grog-running, sexual abuse and predation, the failure of educational institutions, the constant, corrupting effects of welfare and haphazard work-for-the-dole schemes.

Secrecy is at also at the Aboriginal heart of dysfunctional communities: battered women and abused children do not dare to speak out; senior indigenous leaders are obliged to shield and protect their relations; mothers persuade their daughters-in-law to keep a code of silence about the sufferings that husbands inflict.

Superimposed on top of this local discretion is the elegant muffling filter of the legal system: police cannot gather evidence from victims who fear to testify, while magistrates often pass light sentences in order to spare offenders the pain of incarceration far from their land.

These different forms of silence and half-truth, which all reinforce each other, have long combined to make an accurate description of the state of things in remote Aboriginal Australia almost impossible. Hence the vital importance of the past two weeks of candour and tight media focus. This climate of truth-telling, virtually forced on the Australian political and intellectual class by the revelations of the Alice Springs crown prosecutor about infant abuse, has led to an outpouring of dark testimony that only hints at the broad, continent-wide pattern.

But there is a need for the newly precise and merciless depiction of the world of remote Australia to go further. Three critical elements in the interlock of silence have not yet been given due public attention, and progress towards a sustainable life in the Aboriginal centre and north depends on frank acknowledgment of these shaping factors.

First, there is a temptation to blame the indigenous perpetrators of violence in isolation from the enabling class of welfare and service delivery bureaucrats around them. The manifest incompetence of many of the administrators of remote Aboriginal Australia needs to be exposed and a form of proper accountability designed. Many of the more troubled communities can only attract poor-quality white staff, who could barely hold down a job in the cities.

The corrupt shopkeeper, the drug-running mechanic, the carpetbagging itinerant dress-seller: these are all stock figures in the Western Desert and the Kimberley. There is a storekeeper in the north well known for illegal kava supply in return for child sex, and there are tight family cabals of non-Aboriginal administrative staff in the centre who run communities as private empires. The case for a highly trained cadre of remote area civil servants and for volunteer specialist teams, organised on disaster relief lines, seems unassailable.

The systematic nature of the violence in many Aboriginal communities is still not grasped by outsiders, nor can the conspiracy of crushed silence and fear that accompanies it be well gauged. Shame and terror keep women, girl and boy victims from speaking out. Consider the views of one of the most respected council clerks in remote Australia, speaking this week of the tide of sex crimes in his community: "There's no control and no responsibility. It's a beautiful system designed by the Aboriginal men to protect the Aboriginal men. They've got the white people sorted out: if you even mention anything, you're fired instantly and will never get another job in the Aboriginal industry again. They will continue to get away with it until the courts get serious, and even then no one will step forward to testify; it's like a death sentence. There's no way in a million years anyone is going to go public on all this."

But one can guess at what's happening in the shadows all across the continent. In one community in the Tanami Desert, the women have now banned their sons from going out into the bush with senior men for protracted initiation camps; the reasons, dear reader, can be left to your imagination. And in a small north Kimberley community, there have been six child suicides in the past year. So grave has the problem of sexual violence become that young Kimberley women often measure the extent of their man's affection by the number of beatings they receive, and calibrate the love in their world by the bruises on their skin.

A glance around a remote community or town camp is enough to tell the tale: women sport a baffling array of bandages and splints, while the drone of the flying doctor plane, swooping in for another emergency evacuation, is a regular sound on balmy evenings in the far desert. Police detachments are the natural first counter to these concealed undercurrents of violence: but without realistic deterrence through heavy sentencing, even a police post in every community and outstation will not be enough to guarantee the safety of the remote population.

Most important, in this realm of secrets, free access is the key to truth. Many of the horrors now spread across remote Australia grew in the darkness of the permit system. There are vast swaths of Aboriginal land that go unvisited by the normal array of travelling callers, let alone by journalists; and there is a striking correlation between the levels of violence in a community and the tightness of its closure.

Without any doubt, the most bizarre and horrific corner of central Australia is the grandly named Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, a scatter of outstations and run-down communities torn apart by petrol-sniffing and overseen by a purpose-built little white capital with nice, neat homes. The South Australian Opposition spokesman for Aboriginal affairs, Mitch Williams, this week called for the APY Lands to be thrown open to the public, and at once received a strict dressing-down from the local Land Council general manager, Ken Newman: "Basically, it's private property."

Permits for press visits to this bleak world are scarcely ever forthcoming, while white staff members are forbidden from speaking freely to the media. Who, then, can lay out the weird facts of life on the lands: the plague-like curse of petrol-sniffing, the drug dealing networks, the obesity and the malnutrition, the peculiar messianic cults that sweep through like storm-season cloud-fronts?

Permits have long since been the chosen instrument of power and self-aggrandisement for the white gatekeepers of the remote world, who relish the control the system gives them. The substantial desert settlement of Yuendumu is in the grip of Warlpiri Media, an organisation that will only admit journalists into its territory if they are safely guided and their stories are check-censored before publication or broadcast. No wonder, then, that a frank appraisal of Yuendumu's endless economic and social travails has yet to appear.

Access control limits knowledge, dovetails elegantly with the culture of secret-keeping, and allows for blatant manipulation of the media. But as with all empires of unreason, the permit system is falling apart under the weight of its own illogic. This week the community of Wadeye (Port Keats), anarchic home to 3000 Aboriginal people, refused The Australian a permit on the same day it hosted "safer" media visitors to inspect damaged housing. And suddenly the truth was out: the permit system is today being used not to protect sensitive cultural sites and practices, but to manage and control the news in a crude and blatant fashion.

There is a direct link between the gang warfare tearing apart Wadeye and the lack of in-depth media coverage: this Aboriginal township has been the showpiece of a vast, failed governmental social experiment over the past three years, and that systematic failure has largely gone unreported because it suits the local council staff and their federal and territory masters to keep it under wraps, and keep out unwelcome media eyes.

New federal Aboriginal Affairs Minister Mal Brough will hold a high-profile national summit on indigenous community violence next month. But it is the culture of secrecy that lies behind, and underpins, the violence. The summit will be much more than a meeting of concerned officials. It will be a test of Australia's moral temper and our willingness to stop the tide of illicit violence disfiguring the remote world. Sometimes the truth is painful; its denial is worse.

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