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Paths to adulthood
The recent discussion about misogyny in schools raises important issues. Abuse and sexual harassment of female teachers and students are unacceptable, schools must teach respectful relationships, and the influence of the online manosphere on some young men is deeply concerning.
But I am uncomfortable with a debate that increasingly portrays boys primarily as potential perpetrators. Boys are children too, growing up, establishing their identities and learning about relationships, sexuality and adulthood. The majority should not be made to feel responsible for the reprehensible behaviour of a minority simply because they share their sex.
Matt Canavan is entitled to ask whether existing programs are effective and they should be properly evaluated. Where he goes wrong is in blaming the “feminisation” of education. Equally, teaching respectful relationships should not become an exercise in teaching boys what is wrong with being male.
The manosphere offers some young males belonging, certainty and validation. We should counter it with positive models of masculinity: kindness, courage, responsibility, self-control and respect.
Girls deserve to grow up free from harassment and violence. Boys deserve to grow up knowing that being male does not make them perpetrators. These objectives are not contradictory.
Ann Urch, Sandhurst
Value of example
Your correspondent (Letters, 4/9) suggests encouraging high-profile young men to spend time in schools, mentoring male students and modelling respectful relationships as one tool in our (sadly still lacking) armoury. Don’t underestimate the lasting power of this: in my daughter’s prep year, Collingwood footballers visited her (Clifton Hill) primary school, to talk about ″good citizenship″. At 41, she still remembers that visit and (for good or ill) at that moment became a fervent Magpies fan in a till-then-pure Tigers family!
Laurine Hurley, Northcote
Uses of statues
Who needs statues? Our government wants advice on whether an obscene amount of our money should be spent on repairing or replacing defaced or destroyed statues? How about using a compactor to reduce them to rubble so it can be used to fill potholes? Alternatively, spend the money adding a decent classroom to a local state school?
Barbara Speed, Montmorency
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Two points of view
Whether by design or happenstance, the placement of Shell’s half-page advertisement directly beneath Nick O’Malley’s disturbing account (5/9) of our climate trajectory was a powerful reminder of cause and consequence: a news story headed “We broke our covenant with the future”, followed by a fossil fuel company’s self-congratulatory “125 years of powering progress”. If this is progress, count me out.
David Fox, Beaumaris
Bring Keating back on
Is it too late to bench Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles and bring on Paul Keating?
Barry Toll, Pipers Creek
Censors working overtime
It’s a bit rich of Pauline Hanson to post on social media (“Conservatives, Hanson set to oppose social media reform”, 5/9) that Australia should move away from government censorship when only this year, among other things, she has threatened to ban the ABC and The Guardian from One Nation press conferences and even to abolish the SBS and significantly reduce both the funding and role of the ABC.
For Pauline Hanson, it’s censorship when it suits.
Peter Randles, Pascoe Vale South
Limits on speech
The Coalition and One Nation support of free speech clearly doesn’t include discussing climate in the classroom.
Peter Baddeley, Portland
Antisocial media
Columnist Waleed Aly (Comment, 4/9) absolutely nails the issues involving social media. He makes the point that problems are not just about individual rights and harms, but to the damage being done to society as a whole. You only have to consider recent increases in youth crime, bad behaviour and misogyny in schools and the skewing of voting patterns in supposed democracies. These changes have not just arisen in a vacuum – they are largely the result of the deleterious effects of social media with its insidious algorithms. Unchecked, it is destroying our social fabric. It should be labelled antisocial media.
Courtney Pern, East Malvern
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Smoking a health issue
It is disappointing to see the Coalition trying to outdo One Nation in reducing the price of cigarettes.
A key reason for Australia having one of the lowest smoking rates in the world was the bipartisan approach by both the Coalition and Labor to significantly increase the excise on tobacco products. While the increase in excise was no doubt a reason for the significant increase in the illegal tobacco trade, it would be naive to believe that simply cutting the price of legal tobacco products will have any significant effect on the illegal trade as illegal tobacco products will still be cheaper than the legal variety. It is also likely to have the unwanted side effect of increasing smoking rates.
Smoking should still primarily be treated as a health issue and the end result of any policy should be that smoking rates continue to decline or at least do not increase. What is needed is a bipartisan approach at both a federal and state level to tackle the issue. This needs to tackle the illegal tobacco trade and may include a review of the excise on tobacco.
James Proctor, Brown Hill
Curb smokes outlets
It is hard to imagine that anyone would believe that lowering the price of legal cigarettes and allowing vapes is the answer to reducing the involvement of organised crime in the trade.
Where is the evidence that shows cheaper legal cigarettes wouldn’t also increase smoking rates? And what would the cost of increased smoking have on our health system? Will the tobacco companies pay for that? Perhaps what is needed is less accessibility to all tobacco. Do we really need every supermarket and corner shop selling cigarettes?
Rosemary Marcon, Hawthorn
AI’s false benefits
If we distil artificial intelligence waffle to reality, we might conclude it does nothing that humans can’t do, trained accordingly, just very much quicker. AI does not need, for its existence, to train millions of humans, pay them, house or office them, and thus produces a prodigious output at little operational cost.
Whether AI adds significantly to countries’ real productivity is questionable. Some yes, but in reality? It certainly provides monumental profit to its owners and interests, the profit coming disproportionately from producing extreme unemployment. But increasing long-term productivity in reality? Sounds like a giant con to me. With one-sided benefits only.
Just ponder an Australia with one million otherwise productive workers out of work not paying taxes, $100 billion gone, plus another $50 billion to support them with welfare. That’s what AI will do for us. Who benefits? Is that what we want?
Campbell Laughlin, Berwick
Some flesh wound
US Vice President JD Vance not calling the current US-Iran conflict a war is somewhat like the knight in the Monty Python sketch saying, “Tis but a flesh wound.″
Les Aisen, Elsternwick
The throes of ineptness
When is the AFL going to tackle the problem of boundary umpires not being able to throw the ball in correctly?
Richard Sykes, Bell Park
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