Tag: Herald Sun

Racism – Australia and Malaysia


I’ve often heard friends and acquaintances relate stories of prejudices they experience in relation to race and ethnicity. Many bemoan the fact that despite having lived in Australia for years, they are still viewed as foreigners.

So the observation by the famous brain surgeon Dr Charlie Teo that Australia still demonstrates streaks of racism (see Herald Sun story below), probably strikes a chord with many. I think many of my contemporaries, from either Malaysia or Singapore, would quietly nod in agreement.

Yet many of my contemporaries themselves unfortunately, demonstrate even more explicit racism than the forms I have encountered (yes I have encountered them) here in Australia.

In Malaysia it was common practice for both the dominant races – Malays and Chinese – to look down on Indians and belittle them. Indians are viewed as confused, convoluted and untrustworthy in the sense that they say something and do something else. “Keling Account” means messy account keeping. “Black Skin” is often used to denigrate them as outsiders of a community. Many Chinese in Malaysia hardly step into an Indian eatery on their own. Even now, I often cringe when people I like make racist jokes against Indians.

Malaysian Chinese are often the guilty ones in maltreating foreigners such as Indonesian maids. I know of church leaders whose wives mistreat them, and “respectable” community leaders think nothing of dishing out the worst working conditions. Working 18 hour days, sleeping in small dirty corners, eating meagre food out of dirty utensils, total lack of personal freedom – these were common working conditions.

A recent news story on The Age tends to suggest this terrible treatment of maids is still going on in Malaysia – see second story below.

I guess it isn’t a problem with Australia as much as it is a problem with humanity.

 

Racism very much alive in Australia, says Dr Charles Teo

  • by: Stephen Drill, Henry Budd
  • From: Herald Sun
  • January 18, 2012 9:19PM

Dr Charlie Teo speaks out on racism – FULL VERSION

Listen to the FULL nine minutes thirty interview with Dr Charlie Teo where he discusses some of his experiences being Australian.

PlayDr Charlie Teo speaks out on racismListen to the key moments of the Dr Charlie Teo interview where he discusses some of his experiences being Australian.

Dr Charles Teo says it’s wrong to deny that there’s racism in Australia. Herald Sun

UPDATE 12.19pm: RACISM still plagues Australia and migrants are being victimised, one of Australia’s most respected neurosurgeons says.

Dr Charles Teo, the son of Chinese immigrants, who prolonged the life of Jane McGrath and has saved the lives of hundreds of Australians, said it was wrong to deny there was racism.

At a launch of Australia Day Council celebrations yesterday, Dr Teo said that racism was still “very much alive in Australia”.

“I don’t quite like it when I hear politicians reassuring the Indians that there’s no racism in Australia. That’s bull—–,” he said.

What do you think of Prof Teo’s comments? Tell us below

Former premier Jeff Kennett, former Australian Medical Association president Dr Mukesh Haikerwal, singer Kamahl and ex-police commissioner Christine Nixon have all said that racism exists.

Results: Inconvenient truth

Thanks for voting!

Do you agree with Dr Charles Teo that racism is still alive in Australia?

  • Yes 82.8% (5337 votes)
  • No 17.2% (1109 votes)

Total votes: 6446

But Premier Ted Baillieu said he did not think Australia was a racist country.

“I don’t deny, and I don’t think anyone would deny, that there are in any community people with racist attitudes,” Mr Baillieu said.

“My message to them is that Victoria has a very, very proud record of defending our multicultural base and promoting that multicultural community.

“We will not tolerate any form of discrimination.”

Dr Teo said his daughter had been a victim of racism.

“My daughter was just saying to me the other day, very sadly, she doesn’t like Australia Day because she has in the past dressed up, got into the spirit of things, put a sticker on her face, worn the green and gold and been told by drunk Australians to go home because she looks Chinese,” he said.

“That’s so sad, because you can’t get more Australian than my daughter.”

He knew of an Indian neurosurgeon who had come to Australia to study for three months who was spat on in the street and told to “go home”.

But Dr Teo, who holds the Order of Australia, said migrants also had a responsibility to integrate into Australian society.

Mr Kennett said that racism occurred among children, but he taught his own grandchildren to be tolerant of other races.

“I think there always will be elements of racism and it is often manifest itself in different ways,” he said.

Kamahl, who came to Australia from Sri Lanka in 1953, said: “Of course there are bad apples, people who are racist … Educated minds and educated hearts are required to stop racism.”

Melbourne was gripped by a wave of racist assaults on Indian students in 2009, which has been blamed for a drop in the number of students from that country enrolling here this year.

Dr Haikerwal, victim of a vicious bashing in 2008, said Australia was overall a welcoming society, but racism did exist.

He was in “the wrong place at the wrong time” when he was attacked, but Indian students were racist targets.

“Attacks shouldn’t happen against guests of our nation,” he said.

Former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon said all Australians had come from other countries.

“There is racism particularly against our own Aboriginal people and it always surprises me since we’ve all come from other places,” she said.

With Gemma Jones and Ashley Gardiner

drills@heraldsun.com.au

 

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Maid in Malaysia: a story of beatings, abuse

Lindsay Murdoch

January 18, 2012

Cambodian maid Orn Eak, 28, with her son Ho Bora, 5. Orn Eak was abused for almost two years by her Malaysian employer.

BEATEN, starved and treated as a slave in a Kuala Lumpur apartment, Cambodian maid Orn Eak says a one-metre snake ended her almost-two-year nightmare in Malaysia.

”When the snake crawled into my employer’s apartment she blamed me and kicked me out,” says Orn Eak, 28, one of thousands of Cambodian domestic workers who have been exploited and abused in Malaysia. ”I got the blame for everything, including the death of my employer’s elderly mother,” she says.

Orn Eak’s body is covered in scars from beatings by a Kuala Lumpur woman who employed her through a Cambodia employment agency in early 2010. Single with a five-year-old son, Orn Eak says she joined 30,000 other young Cambodian women and girls working as maids in Malaysia because her mother was struggling to survive in their village in Kompong Thom province.

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In Kuala Lumpur, Orn Eak had no days off and worked from dawn into the early hours of the next morning caring for her employer’s disabled mother. She says she was frequently beaten and often hungry.

The mistreatment worsened after the old woman died in hospital. ”I missed my son and mother very much, but I knew I had to keep working for them,” she says.

But her mother, Ee Tha, 55, says she received only two payments in almost two years from her daughter’s Malaysian employer totalling $US270 ($A262). The employer deducted Orn Eak’s flight home from her salary, which was supposed to be $US180 a month.

When Orn Eak arrived back in Phnom Penh in November a woman picked her up at the airport and took her to the employment agency.

”I told the story about the snake to a director … Five men came into the room and beat me … they pushed my head into a glass door and kicked me on the ground,” she says.

Ee Tha received a message to come to Phnom Penh to take her daughter home.

”When I saw that my daughter’s face and body were cut and bruised my heart dropped,” Ee Tha says. After Ee Tha refused to leave the employment agency’s office with her daughter until she was given the money she was owed, a director finally handed over $1200 – meaning Orn Eak earned only $1470 for nearly two years’ work, half what had been promised.

Social workers have verified her claims of abuse. Nine Cambodian domestic workers died in Malaysia in 2011, according to human rights organisations.

Malaysian opposition MP Charles Santiago has accused the Malaysian government and police of ”totally disrespecting” laws by conducting only cursory investigations into the deaths.

Human Rights Watch says common abuses include excessive work hours with no rest days, lack of food and irregular or non-payment of salaries.

Many have reported sexual abuse, restrictions of movements and bans on contact with other maids.

A Cambodian government ban on sending maids to Malaysia has been ignored by unscrupulous recruitment agencies.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/world/maid-in-malaysia-a-story-of-beatings-abuse-20120117-1q4ml.html#ixzz1jrg9i7ts

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Father Bob and the Witch Hijacker


If a Christian minister goes into an occult proceeding and starts to maybe pray and proclaim the gospel, my guess is that Christian minister is likely to be labeled a evangelical fanatic, behaving stupidly and unreasonably. There would likely be outrage from some quarters, or at least some “tsk, tsk” hissing around.

Yet when a witch doctor takes over a wedding ceremony in a church, it hardly makes the news. Is there bias reporting against Christianity? You bet.

See here:

 

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Father Bob Maguire angry over witch hijacking wedding ceremony

• by: Aleks Devic

• From: Herald Sun

• January 17, 2012 12:00AM

A WITCH who went to jail for dragging a policeman 190m with her car has hijacked a wedding ceremony being performed by the reverend Father Bob Maguire.

Father Maguire said he felt like the “devil took over me” when Eilish De Avalon conducted a Pagan Handfasting Ceremony at a Brighton Catholic church.

Father Maguire said he had warned the woman to tone back her scripts for the January 7 wedding but was “taken for a ride” on the day.

Ms Avalon, who was jailed for two months last June after pleading guilty to recklessly causing serious injury, dangerous driving, driving while suspended and using a mobile phone while driving, yesterday confirmed to the Herald Sun it was the first time she had performed the ceremony in a church, but declined to speak further.

Handfasting ceremonies are performed for same-sex couples, opposite gender couples and for multiple partners.

The bride and groom’s hands are tied during the ceremony and vows are usually taken for a year and a day.

At the end of some services, the couple jump over a broomstick.

Father Maguire said he was fuming about the ceremony conducted after his official religious ceremony at St James Church Brighton.

He was also further angered that Ms De Avalon, 40, posted on Facebook: “History in the making this morning in when I conduct a Pagan Handfasting Ceremony in a Catholic church with the support of Fr Bob.”

Fr Maguire said: “She is using me as an endorsement to blow her own trumpet. She took an opportunistic advantage of the parish.

“I was taken for a ride and blindsided. Once in the saddle she took over the place. It was like the devil got a hold of me.

“I’ve never had an experience like that in my 50 years (with the church).”

Bishop Les Tomlinson, Vicar-General of the Archdiocese of Melbourne, said the matter would be looked into and described the service as “peculiar” and regrettable.

“Such a person is not welcomed in the Catholic Church to interfere with liturgy,” he said.

Ms De Avalon was pulled over by police in Geelong in February 2010 after police saw her talking on a mobile phone. She drove off with a policeman’s arm pinned in her car window.

The car came to a stop only when the badly injured policeman was able to pull the keys from the ignition.

devica@heraldsun.com.au

 

 

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Glenn Milne’s Piece The Australian Withdrew


This was the piece The Australian withdrew, because it was apparently untrue:

THE real import of the alleged brothel creeping scandal surrounding Craig Thomson has been missed. And it is this: key factions and unions within the Labor movement are now openly indifferent to the fate of either Julia Gillard or the federal government. They simply don’t care any more.

Gillard has now lost all authority within the broader Labor movement. By their actions in the Thomson saga they have signalled a judgment that she cannot win the next election. Settling internal scores and power struggles is therefore now more important than whatever happens to a lame-duck PM who can’t haul her primary voting numbers out of the pathetically fatal mid 20s.

The Mafia-style dirt-covered shovel — code for digging your own grave — dumped on Friday at 3.30am on the doorstop of Kathy Jackson, the union official who had the courage to refer Thomson’s activities to the police, may as well have been delivered to the Lodge. For Gillard it is now that bad. She is simply regarded as collateral damage and large sections in the Labor movement are uninterested about whether she’s terminally wounded or not as they go about their internal bloodletting. It is about to get worse as elements of the Australian Workers’ Union seek to settle up with Thomson’s accusers by demonstrating that Gillard herself was implicated, albeit unknowingly, in a major union fraud of her own before she entered parliament.

On Friday, Michael Smith of 2UE contacted me to check the veracity of material in a statutory declaration drawn up by Bob Kernohan, the former president of the AWU, and dealing with the relationship between Gillard and Bruce Wilson, which I outline below.

On Saturday, Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph columnist Andrew Bolt wrote on his blog: “On Monday, I’m tipping, a witness with a statutory declaration will come forward and implicate Julia Gillard directly in another scandal involving the misuse of union funds. Gillard herself is not accused of any misbehaviour at all. I do not make that claim, and do not hold that belief. But her judgment — and that of at least one of her ministers — will come under severe question. She will seem compromised. It could be the last straw for Gillard’s leadership.”

Big call. But I do have a good deal of knowledge regarding Bolt’s claims. On Sunday November 11, 2007, just days before the November 24 election I interviewed Gillard, then deputy leader of the opposition, in my capacity as political editor for News Limited‘s Sunday newspapers. The interview concerned the embezzlement of union funds — not disputed — and later the subject of a court conviction by a former boyfriend of Gillard, Bruce Wilson. I had researched the piece for months. It was the most heavily lawyered article I have ever been involved in writing. The story said that as a solicitor acting on instructions, she set up an association later used by her lover to defraud the AWU. But she has strenuously denied ever knowing what the association’s bank accounts were used for.

Gillard, then in her early 30s, was a lawyer with Melbourne-based Labor firm Slater & Gordon. At the time of the fraud she acted for the AWU. She met Wilson, then the West Australian AWU secretary, while representing the union in the Industrial Relations Commission. Wilson later moved to Melbourne to become Victorian secretary of the union.

“These matters happened between 12 and 15 years ago,” Gillard told me. “I was young and naive. I was in a relationship, which I ended, and obviously it was all very distressing. I am by no means the first person to find out that someone close turns out to be different to what you had believed them to be. It’s an ordinary human error.

“I was obviously hurt, when I was later falsely accused publicly of wrongdoing. I didn’t do anything wrong and to have false allegations in the media was distressing.”

What the lawyers would not allow to be reported was the fact that Gillard shared a home in Fitzroy bought by Wilson using the embezzled funds. There is or was no suggestion Gillard knew about the origin of the money. We now await the issue to which Bolt refers.

If it comes, and if it is powerful as Bolt suggests, it will be further evidence that the Victorian Right represented by the AWU is involved in a life and death struggle with the Right as represented by the Hospital Services Union. Thomson was a senior official of the HSU for 20 years before entering parliament via the seat of Dobell.

The HSU split several years ago into two factions. Thomson was supported by Jeff Jackson, Kathy Jackson’s former husband. This so-called old guard was the support base for Victorian right-wing power boss, David Feeney. Feeney is now looking for a parliamentary seat because Gillard’s abysmal numbers have made his third Senate spot vulnerable.

A defeat for the old guard by way of a successful prosecution of Thomson by police, would leave Feeney powerless and without a base or a seat.

Jackson himself has been accused of using union money on escorts with enemies of the Victorian HSU boss releasing bank statements showing payments to the same Sydney brothel where federal MP Thomson’s credit card was allegedly used. Jackson has denied the claims. Ultimately at issue here could be the succession to Gillard, and I’ll explain why.

When Kathy Jackson called in the wallopers, the stakes were high. Because a federal defeat for Thomson and his allies would enhance the power base of Victoria’s two other factional king makers, Bill Shorten and Stephen Conroy who are both aligned with the new guard in the HSU. And we all know what Shorten’s ultimate ambition is.

What a tangled web we weave especially when you consider Thomson is married to Zoe Arnold, a former Transport Workers Union official and adviser to former NSW Health Minister Reba Meagher. Alex Williamson, daughter of HSU national president Mike Williamson, is an adviser to Gillard. And, of course, as mentioned, Kathy Jackson, who blew the whistle on Thomson, was married to former Victorian state HSU secretary Jeff Jackson.

Truly the NSW Disease has arrived in Canberra.

Meanwhile amid all this interbred internecine manoeuvring Gillard attempts to adopt the high ground, attacking shadow attorney-general George Brandis for intervening in the course of justice. On Thursday morning Gillard attacked Brandis for speaking to NSW Police Minister Michael Gallacher at a time when the allegations against Thomson were being assessed by NSW Police. Unfortunately she got her facts wrong because the NSW police only announced they were conducting an assessment four days after Brandis spoke to Gallacher and in fact only got Brandis’s dossier three days after he spoke to Gallacher.

A small point but one that indicates the pressure is beginning to show on Gillard as she desperately searches for points of deflection. During the same press conference she also vainly tried to defend Thomson’s decision not to make a statement to the parliament on the facts. We all know why; if he lies he’s finished as an MP and Gillard is washed up as Prime Minister. Gillard and Thomson are shackled together just as surely as two First Fleet convicts.

Oh, and here’s a small postscript on which to end. On September 7 at the Wyong Christian School at 2pm there will be the opening of a new hall built with funds from Gillard’s time overseeing the Building the Education Revolution. Thomson is scheduled to attend as the local member. My gut instinct is that both he and the Prime Minister will be otherwise engaged.

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Mod-Com – Cause of Hypocrisy?


The problem of disconnect between what we know is the right thing to do, and actually doing the right thing and living a life that reflects that knowledge, is a perennial one. We all struggle with it, down from the trivia minutiae such as having that sausage roll for breakfast instead of my oat and muesli cereal, to living our lives in acknowledgment of the true boss – God himself.

For too long, we have allowed the otherwise (often) neutral nature of the finer things in life, to sprout red horns, grow a red tail and reach out for that long fork. Look at the below article – Dominique Strauss-Kahn knew what was right and was in a position to influence the world to push his very just cause. Perhaps in his case it was immoral and illegal response to his lust which triggered his downfall, and not his love for money or what it can bring.

With the other examples of this article however, the finger can rest easily on the mod-com’s of this life as the cause of their betrayal. If we focus on and extol the virtues of finer things in life and the way it makes our life easier, richer and more comfortable we can lose sense of what is right in the wider perspective of things.  Why drive a small cheap Korean import when you can drive a huge, expensive and luxurious German machine? Never mind that all the extra resources expended to produce and own this luxury are actually wasted in the sense that it is hard to see how they advance the cause of humanity – it exudes beauty, elegance and harmony… and all that.

It is true of course that beauty and pleasures are good things and they can give us glimpses of heaven but to what extent do we pursue them? At what cost?

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(from Herald Sun site, Andrew Bolt’s blog pages)

THERE are great moral causes, and then there are the men who rush to lead them. Take Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

He is a socialist. In fact, he’s such a socialist that he was tipped only a fortnight ago to become France’s next president, as the Socialist Party’s candidate.

Socialism, I’m told, is the cause you sign up for if you want to take from the rich and give and give again to the poor. If you want to stop the workers from being exploited by the powerful. If you hate racists and really worry about asylum seekers.

So how does Strauss-Kahn end up being charged in New York with the rape of a maid who’d come to the US as an asylum seeker?

And while he pleads not guilty to the rape, how does this prominent socialist explain the scene of the alleged crime in his room at a $3000-a-night hotel?

Still, at least he believes now in giving away his tax-free salary of $420,000, since he this week resigned as head of the International Monetary Fund.

That a socialist could find himself on this salary, in that room, charged with the rape of such a woman will surprise no one, in a way. We’ve lost that moral sense or expectation of having actions matched to words, lifestyle to cause.

Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in the global warming crusade — the first religious movement led entirely by shameless hypocrites.

Only this week came yet another example, with the Herald Sun reporting that just two of the Gillard Government‘s Cabinet ministers drive fuel-efficient hybrid cars, despite wanting to foist on the rest of us a ruinous plan to cut our emissions.

Even Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Climate Change Minister Greg Combet prefer gas guzzlers.

But so habituated are we now to sanctimonious spin that I doubt this shocked a single Australian.

We’re forced to swallow far worse almost daily. There’s Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery, boasting he’d written his latest book almost entirely on gassy aeroplanes.

There’s global warming alarmist Al Gore crying shame at mankind’s terrible environmental footprint from a desk in one of his five homes.

There’s actor Jeremy Irons announcing he’s become a green campaigner who wants us to live less decadently, although he himself owns seven houses and a castle painted pink.

It’s such a bizarre disconnect. True, the popes of the 15th and 16th centuries could be scandalously corrupt, with a mistress in every Vatican bed. But at least most tried to hide it, demonstrating that hypocrisy is indeed the homage vice pays to virtue.

Now we rarely demand even a pretence.

Take Sir Richard Brazen, the Virgin entrepreneur, who preached global warming to students at Gold Coast’s Bond University — and then choppered out in his private helicopter.

Or take Strauss-Kahn, the socialist. Please.

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Inapt Words from “Prayercentral.net”


Choosing the right words to say at the right time is a virtue encouraged and praised by the Scriptures (Prov 25:11, 15:23). The converse is also true. We need to consider or have a basis for, what we say especially in the present age where both the spoken or written word can be recorded, broadcast and disseminated widely and quickly.

Which brings me to the below prayer notes, which someone kindly forwarded to me this morning. Tress and I have been watching the news of the Japan earthquake through the long weekend, on several channels – Sky, CNN, BBC, Fox and of course our very own Nine and Seven. I was on my laptop quite a bit yesterday and I intermittently jumped on BBC, New York Times and our own Herald Sun, The Age and The Australian websites. I also checked on Malaysiakini site now and then, which also had pretty up-to-date coverage of the quake, tsunami and nuclear plant tragedies in Japan.

Not one of the above sources mentioned anything about breakdown in authority and security, or about injustice or corruption. Japan is a first world/developed country. Corruption and social unrest attributable to political upheavals or despotic behaviour are traits you almost never associate with Japan. In fact the contrary is true and the images I see on the media are of an orderly – unbelievably orderly – management of the crises. Many experts are differentiating Chernobyl from Fukushima in the way each dealt/is dealing with the nuclear plant crisis. Fukushima is almost an embodiment of preparedness, discipline and orderly execution of emergency measures. The early administration of iodine to minimise the effect of radiation is a case in point. The damage we see is due largely to the tsunami and not the earthquakes as Japanese construction is probably leading the world in earthquake-proof features.

So what is it that “prayercentral.net” knows which many of us don’t, which made it write the way it did? If the basis of this writing is unsubstantiated waffle it is very likely based on prejudice – that just because this is an Asian disaster, the elements of injustice, corruption, breakdown in authority and security all abound. If this is the case, then “prayercentral.net” needs prayer itself. Lots of it.

What the Japanese need now is prayer, no one doubts that. What they also need are apt words which show mercy, compassion and love. Not rebuke and warnings. I hope “prayercentral.net” either explains itself or amend this piece.

Here’s the link and the text of what’s there now:

http://prayers.prayercentral.net/?page_id=5&target=Japanese+brothers+and+sisters&pronoun=group&cat=86

Break the Power of Corruption in Japanese brothers and sisters

Scripture: Woe to those who enact evil statutes, And to those who constantly record unjust decisions, so as to deprive the needy of justice, And rob the poor of My people of their rights… -Isaiah 10:1

Prayer: Lord, You are the great judge over all the earth, watching the wicked and the good. You see the deeds and the intentions of the heart. Only You, Lord are worthy to sit on the throne of judgment.

Lord, in every crisis there is a breakdown of authority, and security. I know You hate injustice and corruption, so I bring to Your attention the corruption in Japanese brothers and sisters during this crisis, and I ask Lord, that You would hear the cries of the weak and powerless, and break the power of corruption in this place.

Lord, for the good of the people, I ask that You would swiftly judge acts of corruption today. Give no place for the wicked to think they have escaped. Leave no room for looters and others to steal away what has been provided for the needy. Make an example today Lord of someone, so that others may see and fear.

Vindicate the weak and the poor, and break the power of wickedness that oppresses them. In Jesus name, amen.

Let us know you prayed…

Regards,Ian

Sent from my iPigeon

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Prophetic Word? Danger! Danger!


I have often doubted the modern day prophet, who whips up a sense of “wow” and excitement in a congregation, by their “prophetic word”. They’re often visiting speakers or just some de facto leaders of the wider church community who’d be visiting and given a cameo appearance during which some prophetic word would be dispensed to create a little excitement.
         Maybe they think the service has been a little dull, things have become all too predictable and regular so a prophetic word would be pulled out to add a bit of spice to proceedings.
         In our church, the pattern has taken this form. The “prophet” would call out individuals or small groups of individuals, and say individual 1 would go into some pastoral kind of ministry individual 2 would go into some prayer ministries, and so on. The opus moderandi works for groups too. Thankfully it hasn’t happened too often – I can remember no more than half a dozen occurrences over the past 3 years we’ve been in this church.
         With Nalliah’s spectacular miss, my doubt has been affirmed. Perhaps I can now change my name, unashamedly, to Thomas.
         Following my short and disrespectful previous entry, I received some “track backs” which lead me to some entries in some other blogs. These included the “Catch the Fire” blog.
         Maybe it is to lend credence, or maybe it is simply to maintain the momentum to Nalliah’s stab. Several others’ proclamations of similar “visions” were published. These included a Kenneth Copeland and a Karen Hetherington. They were called “confirmation” or “affirmation”. I’ve heard this principle before. Apparently when 2 or more independent persons heard or saw the same thing it was confirmation that the word was indeed prophetic, the flock can be at peace and be confident that the word would “come to pass”.
         Well, Danny, Kenneth and Karen all saw the same thing. Well they said they did. They said they saw John Howard and Peter Costello there, for the coalition’s 5th term. Rudd apparently came on strong in Karen’s vision but faded away, leaving John and Peter at the helm. Lo and behold – come to pass it spectacularly did not.
         John Howard has most probably lost his own seat and would retire from politics, never again to attract a crowd during his morning walks. Peter Costello looked dejected and demoralised when he gave a press conference yesterday, saying he would not be seeking to inherit leadership of the Liberal Party to lead the opposition. He seemed a little bitter, even. Maybe he genuinely believed the Nalliah mob and now regrets not being more aggressive in seeking to ask Howard to step aside to let him lead the election campaign. Therein lies my biggest reason for viewing these demonstrations of spiritual irresponsibility with anger and contempt.
         I don’t know if these self appointed prophets realise the sort of impact and potential destruction they wreak on the targets/subjects. When you tell someone you had a word from God that that person would undergo some experience or become something or undertake some tasks, how do you think that someone would behave subsequently? Does the behaviour not become affected at all?
         We all get ideas – sometimes they come in the form of visions in our minds. Depending on the company we have been keeping, the books we have been reading, the movies we have been watching, the news item which have been airing on the radio or television or simply on what we have been thinking about, these ideas and images linger and perhaps morph. Perhaps our consumption of stimulants also affects this.
         How can we be so presumptuous that these visions in our minds are necessarily messages from God to be dispensed to the recipients so readily? If I have been thinking about someone in church and I think perhaps that person should think about doing something, surely it is a huge jump – maybe even a whacky one – and highly presumptuous to say what I think is God’s message for that person? That surely is only my opinion. Several others may share that opinion. It is still only an opinion. It may be a commonly shared opinion. It doesn’t become a message from God – a “prophetic word” – just because we shared the opinion and we are all committed Christians.
         See what the Herald Sun newspaper got out of Danny Nalliah early November:
“If you have a party dominated by a secular Left-wing ideology, how could they then accomplish a morally sound agenda, which is Judeo-Christian-based?” Mr Nalliah said. (Herald Sun, 9 November 2007)
         Danny wanted a government which would deliver a “morally sound agenda”. I have no quarrel with that. I want the same thing. I don’t however, make presumptuous conclusions which equate what I want (which is a personal wish) to a prophetic word (which is God’s plan). Admittedly he is most probably a more godly man than me. That still doesn’t qualify his opinion for a prophecy.
         I think these gaffes are borne out a desire to entertain ourselves. Some of us think the gospel as presented in the Bible is perhaps too dull and unexciting we need to somehow spice it up to make it and the church more entertaining. Maybe they think that if you preach the same old message of God’s love and Jesus’ death and resurrection over a period of time it looses its attraction.
         Sprinkle some “prophetic words” however and things get a little more interesting. I mean it’s like the casino isn’t it? I say the little silver ball would fall on number 36 and it did, wow – that’s exciting! I say Joe Blog would have ministry “x” and he did – wow that’s exciting!
         The problem of course is that Joe may alter his life dramatically. And if the basis for this wasn’t God’s word but the opinion of ordinary men wrongly elevated to a “prophetic word” due to some delusions on the part of such ordinary men, it is a highly irresponsible and even reckless behaviour which should be censured. It harms that brother/sister and brings disrepute to the Kingdom of God.

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