Reminds me of "Animal Farm".

 George Brandis ordered expensive bottles of Australian wine while dining with an undisclosed number of British arts representatives in London in April. Photograph: Alan Porritt/AAP Image

Shalailah Medhora

Monday 29 December 2014 13.35 AEST

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The attorney general, George Brandis, spent $1,100 of public money on a dinner during an official visit to London, freedom of information documents requested by Labor show.

Fairfax media reported that Brandis, who is also the arts minister, ordered expensive bottles of Australian wine while dining with an undisclosed number of British arts representatives at the Massimo restaurant on 4 April.

The dinner cost £627 ($1,119), of which £228 ($407) was spent on alcohol, the documents show.

Brandis’s office could not be contacted for comment, but earlier defended the cost of the meal to Fairfax.

“It’s usual practice for senior cabinet ministers to host dinners for important stakeholders within their portfolios,” a spokesman said. “On this occasion the attorney general and minister for arts hosted key UK senior arts representatives.”

Labor’s spokesman on waste, Pat Conroy, said on his Facebook page the amount spent was “obscene”, especially as it came just weeks before the tough federal budget in which the government introduced cuts to public spending.

 Labor’s spokesman on waste, Pat Conroy, blasted George Brandis’ meal on his Facebook page. Photograph: Facebook

“To spend over $400 of taxpayers’ money on wine is unpardonable, especially at the same time as the government is making people pay more at the doctors and petrol pump,” he told Fairfax.

Brandis paid back nearly $1,700 shortly after coming to office for claiming parliamentary expenses to travel to the 2011 wedding of radio host Michael Smith.

In February, Senate estimates revealed that Brandis spent $15,000 of taxpayers’ money on building a new bookshelf in his ministerial office.

In January 2012, London’s Daily Telegraph gave Massimo a scathing review, saying “such paeans to marble-sanitised vulgarity may be perfect for lobbyists to entertain their prey” but its “mix of the flashy and the desultory had nothing to offer the set-menu diner other than outrageous drinks prices ... confused service and sullen mediocrity”.

Magi and Civil Disobedience

"Many Christians are still unsure about Civil Disobedience," writes Craig Greenfield. "That's why this Christmas season we need to learn wisdom and discernment from some of the first people who sought to worship Jesus: a trio of spiritual gurus from Asia. They were the first of many in the New Testament to refuse to obey the ruling authorities."

Greenfield points out that the Magi (popularly but wrongly identified as three in number, because of the gifts cited), after they had paid homage to the infant Christ, were "warned in a dream not to go back to Herod" and "returned to their country by another route" (Matthew 2.8, 12).

"God told them not to obey the ruling authority", he continues. "This was during a time when disobeying the King was a capital offence, punishable by death. It is the first recorded act of civil disobedience in the New Testament.

"Take a moment to reflect on the fact that obeying the King, whose word was the law of the land, would have meant the death of an infant. Later, it meant the death of hundreds of children.

"The law is not our ultimate moral guide. … Slavery was lawful. The holocaust was legal. Segregation was legally sanctioned. Simply put, the law does not dictate our ethics. God does. So it should not surprise us that the One we follow was executed as a criminal, and that there will be times we are called to break unjust laws.

"As St Augustine said, 'An unjust law is no law at all.' Christians cannot fulfill their role in life without coming into conflict with the world system."

The god who has gone

In Infinitely Demanding, Simon Critchley says:

Anarchy should not seek to mirror the archic sovereignty that it undermines. That is, it should not seek to set itself up as the new hegemonic principle of political organisation, but remain the negation of totality and not the affirmation of a new totality…

In our terms, anarchy is the creation of interstitial distance within the state, the continual questioning from below of any attempt to establish order from above.

Replacing ‘anarchy’ with ‘Christianity,’ what we get is a community that gathers around an absence – the god who has gone – and uses this to continually critique any attempt to reestablish order from above, to reinstate some new god.

Subverting the norm - thanks Drew Sumrall

What do the powers claim to establish?

It is important to remember, that, in order for the powers to retain power there must be an implicit altruistic motive.

In other words, the powers are powerful not simply because they are powerful (holding the most weapons, etc.), as this doesn’t work, for ‘the masses’ can at any point overthrow them (or at the very least, create chaos). 

The powers are powerful precisely because they claim to bring peace and justice.

The battle is thus ideological.

Therefore the key to undermining the powers is demanding what they claim to proffer society, taking the discourse of power more seriously than the powers.

I.e. subverting the norm means radically accepting its ideological presuppositions.

Practising Transgression (thanks Pete Rollins)

Previously I’ve written about how ideology doesn’t merely offer us an explicit set of practices that are acceptable and unacceptable, but also an implicit constellation of acceptable ways to do unacceptable practices.

Ideology doesn’t simply police the borders between the law and transgression, but also offers up ways of transgressing what is acceptable to the law. An ideology thus does not only create the distinction between the category of orthodox and heretic (or sacred and profane), but also offers up ways of being a heretic (profane) that are allowed by the authorities (the sacred).

An interesting example of this can be seen in a recent campaign by the Australian group Love Makes a Way. In protest against the imprisonment of children seeking asylum, various religious leaders in Adelaide engaged in an illegal sit-in at the electoral office of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. For a time this protest was allowed, but eventually the police were called in to remove them.

What we witness here is the slide from an acceptable form of transgressive protest to an unacceptable one.

Initially the act was tolerated. Indeed, if they had simply entered, made a statement, then left this would have been an acceptable transgression allowed by the authorities. It would also have been largely ineffective in making change. But there came a point when the transgression of the protestors was no longer acceptable to the authorities and the police started making arrests.

This wasn’t the first time Love Makes a Way had engaged in such activities. Previously some religious leaders who had been arrested were charged and brought to court. Yet this only caused embarrassment to the Government, for the media covered the story and citizens started to ask difficult questions concerning the unjust policy. In addition, the protestors were acquitted and the Judge commended them for their stance (another serious embarrassment to the Government).

Of course ideological systems quickly adjust to such acts. Hence, those who place themselves in the camp of resistance need to constantly adjust their strategy. In the above example the police quickly learned that they should quietly release the next batch of protestors rather than put them through the courts.

The point here is that ideological systems operate with a subterranean network of transgressive practices, practices that are needed for the smooth running of the system itself. A Government might, for example, champion human rights, freedom and justice, while implicitly engaging in torture, the creation of Black Hole prisons and imprisonment without recourse to the legal system. These subterranean activities are needed by the system to manage a crisis within that system, but the abusive practices cannot be named.

Effective protest involves bringing these unspoken truths to the surface, confronting the system with its own disavowed truth. This can only happen when dissidents refuse to play into the perverse system of acceptable protest (protest endorsed by the system it attacks) and instead find ways of bringing those things into the light of day. Yet, with each move dissidents make, the system will attempt to compensate, adjust, and normalize. Hence new ways of transgressing the norm must be found.

Believe?

Peter Rollins’ Insurrection: To Believe is Human; To Doubt, Divine. In Chapter Four, “I Don’t Have to Believe; My Pastor Does That for Me,” Rollins observes the ways in which church leaders often ‘believe on behalf of the community,’ ostensibly freeing the community to doubt and disbelieve but actually serving to shelter the community from what he calls the true ‘trauma of the Crucifixion’ (Insurrection, 65) – the loss of ‘all the supports that would protect us from a direct confrontation with the world and with ourselves’ (110). This means that, when a pastor confesses doubts and disbelief, a crisis often ensues; ‘Not because the congregation now doubts, but because the pastor’s belief provided a protective psychological dam that held back their doubt’ (66).

Excerpt from The Monthly re the carbon tax

Let’s be clear: this is the single biggest reason power prices have skyrocketed. According to the federal treasury, 51% of your electricity bill goes towards “network charges”. The carbon tax, despite relentless propaganda to the contrary, is small beer, comprising just 9%. The rest of your bill is carved up between those companies that actually generate your electricity (20%) and the retailers who package it up and sell it to you (20%). The Renewable Energy Target is such a small cost impost, the treasury’s analysis doesn’t even include it; the Australian Energy Market Commission says it makes up around 5%. 
Thanks to the networks’ infrastructure binge, we now pay some of the highest prices in the developed world. The impact has been felt most keenly in New South Wales and Queensland, where the networks are government owned and network charges have accounted for two thirds of the price increases. 
For a Coalition intent on destroying the carbon tax, the price hikes have been a gift – “proof” that the carbon tax is as ruinous as they predicted. Chris Dunstan, from the Institute for Sustainable Futures, thinks that what the networks have done over the past five years may actually be the secret to Tony Abbott’s success. “If electricity prices hadn’t doubled,” he says, “the carbon tax would not have been anything like the issue it was.”