Bega Valley Shire Councillor Keith Hughes takes aim at seniors/youth

Bega Valley Traditional Archers Inc (BVTA) wishes to advise its members and many supporters that the Club does not concur with the comments attributed to Cr Keith Hughes, in the article “Hughes takes aim at Archery” [Bega District News, January 25, 2013]. 

BVTA is a not-for-profit community organisation that strives to ensure that archery is developed as an inclusive, respectful, responsible and safe sporting option for all residents of the Bega Valley.

BVTA does not believe that the Valley’s seniors are “less likely to be able to pull a bow back”, or that they are too “feeble” to engage in archery, as is Cr Hughes’ position.

Cr Hughes’ assertion that archery is an inappropriate sport for youth is nothing short of bizarre, and his statements suggesting that Council support for our Club’s recent application for Youth Week event funding would be somehow equivalent to taxpayers’ money subsidising acts of animal cruelty, is insulting, both to our Club and to the Valley’s youth.

Further, Cr Hughes’ assertion that BVTA is in the business of “inculcating” young people into a path of gun violence, is at best ill-informed, and at worst, evidence of a disassociation with reality that borders on the paranoid.

The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘Inculcate’ as “teaching or influencing persistently and repeatedly so as to implant or instil an idea, theory, attitude”, in other words, ‘brainwashing’. Cr Hughes’ addition of this colourful term to his already burgeoning arsenal of offensive verbal weaponry, demonstrates his ongoing commitment to subterfuge and offence by stealth.

Neither our Club nor its supporters are engaged in brainwashing, Cr Hughes, and we find it deeply offensive and of great concern that you would abuse your position as Councillor in order to attempt to attribute this dark intent to our activities.

It is statements such as those made by Councillor Hughes, in a full session of Council, that are marking-out a new genre of social and cultural intolerance in the Bega Valley, fostered by the Valley's few rabid-Green cultural bigots and self-styled guardians of social and moral welfare. Such people seek to mislead the community in order to foster a climate of fear and community hatred to advance their own agenda of intolerance, and such behaviour has no place in the Bega Valley.

Councillor Hughes’ position that “The sport of archery leads young people down a path toward an unsporting gun culture” bears all the hallmarks of so many forms of irational bigotry that seek to dehumanize a group within the community, to deny their humanity and their dignity.

The world’s leading anthropologists include the development of bow & arrow technologies among the four most important epochs in human development – the other three being the development of fire-making technologies, the development of language and the invention of the wheel. Since there is an undeniable link between fire and pyromania, cars and road fatalities, language and abuse, perhaps at some time in the future Cr Hughes will lobby against Council support for anything that involves matches, wheels or words. Certainly, Cr Hughes has amply demonstrated the damage words can do at the command of an irresponsible novice.

Bega Valley Traditional Archers Inc. is committed to the preservation of skills and cultural practices with historical significance reaching back to the dawn of human civilisation.  The illogical and offensive statements of demonstrated cultural bigots will not deter us from this endeavour.

Garry Mallard OAM

Secretary
Bega Valley Traditional Archers Inc

Hughes takes aim at archery
Friday, 25 January, 2013
By Ben Smyth
The Bega District News

THE sport of archery leads young people down a path toward an unsporting gun culture.

That was the view expressed by Cr Keith Hughes at last week’s Bega Valley Shire Council meeting during discussions over Youth Week and Seniors Week grants.

The Bega Valley Traditional Archers was one of nine groups whose applications for a grant to assist with Seniors Week activities were recommended for approval by council staff.

They had also applied for an additional grant for Youth Week activities, one of five community organisations in the Bega Valley to do so.

Cr Hughes spoke out against including the archery group in both instances.

His view that it was not a suitable activity for seniors as they “are less likely to be able to pull the bow back” and are “more feeble” drew shocked looks and exclamations of disbelief from several of his fellow councillors.

Cr Hughes then held to his assertion during discussion over the groups recommended for Youth Week grants, saying “it is even more inappropriate for youth than seniors”.

“I think it’s the start of inculcation to gun culture,” he said.

“Although I accept the Traditional Archers are well meaning and there’s a place for that, there are also examples not far from here of the inappropriate use of bows and arrows, leading to what I think is the inappropriate use of firearms.

“I don’t think that is something ratepayers’ money should be subsidising.”

Cr Hughes was the only dissenting vote on the Seniors Week grants, while both he and Cr Sharon Tapscott voted against the motion to approve all five applications for Youth Week grants.

Those receiving money for Seniors Week activities include the Bega Valley Traditional Archers, Imlay District Nursing Home, U3A Sapphire Coast ($500 each); Men’s Shed Merimbula ($145); Bermagui Senior Citizens Welfare Club ($320); Sapphire Coast Book Club ($200); Eden Community Access Centre ($375); Eden Men’s Shed ($350); and the Bega Senior Citizens Club ($420).

Youth Week grant recipients, who will each receive a $1000 grant, include Spiral Gallery, Auswide Projects, Candelo Arts Society, Theatre Onset and the Traditional Archers.
(ends)

GREEN: the Colour of Intolerance

The anti-hunting movement continues to assail responsible NSW taxpayers with intemperate and often highly offensive statements born of nothing more complicated than cultural intolerance.  While we may have come to expect this contemptible behaviour, albeit reluctantly, from ill-informed and bigoted extremists, I have to ask the question – is it acceptable from taxpayer subsidised political representatives?

The Greens have become the standard-bearers for cultural intolerance in Australia. Failure to agree with the Green point of view can result in victimisation, public ridicule, misrepresentation and grossly offensive abuse, not only under the seal of Parliamentary Privilege, but also in the media, on the internet and in Party propaganda.

NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge thinks nothing of referring to hunters as “weekend warriors” and “thrill killers”, terms that are highly offensive to people who strive, responsibly and in accordance with the law of the land, to preserve a cultural and to many a highly spiritual practice of many thousands of years standing.

Mr Shoebridge, his party and followers promote cultural hate statements in the community with impunity, and I have often wondered how long they would be permitted to do so if those statements targeted a more mainstream group – for example, the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church has been in the press for some years now, as the result of the actions of a small minority of ‘followers’ who have broken the law, ruining lives and even putting some lives at risk from associated substance abuse and suicide. Yet the absence of offensive tags such as “Christian perverts” or “Catholic rock-spiders” in Greens’ political rhetoric is noteworthy.

It seems that those who would apply derogatory epithets to hunters as a job-lot are more discriminating when it comes to the community’s sacred cows. Yet I wonder why, when, on the balance of evidence, the transgressions of Catholic Church representatives have been at least as numerous as those attributable to the most irresponsible ‘hunter’, and surely more heinous in nature.

The reason for the apparent double-standard is simple. Generally speaking, Greens are not hunters but some Greens are Catholic and so they are circumspect with regard to unreasonable and offensive generalisations. Of course the fact that any Party that set out to antagonise a section of the Community as large and as influential as the Catholic Church would very likely be committing electoral suicide must surely be counted a relevant inhibiting factor.

I must point out that I do not, for one instant, suggest that anyone should attack the Catholic Church as a whole for the sins of a very few individuals who may call themselves Catholic.  The detestable activities of these individuals are contrary to Christian doctrine and their actions must be judged as the actions of individuals.  But in the same way, surely the actions of those who use weapons irresponsibly should be judged as the actions of individuals and not cited opportunistically as justification for an all-encompassing cultural hate campaign aimed at demonising all firearms owners and hunters?

The practice of maligning or ‘vilifying’ hunters, based on their cultural beliefs and practices is widespread among anti-hunting lobby groups. Their aim in using descriptors such as “weekend warriors” and “thrill killers” is clearly to sway community opinion against hunters, as is the Greens’ habitual practice of associating hunters with drunkenness, recklessness, dangerous irresponsible behaviour and cruelty, and it is my belief that this strategy may have legal implications for the perpetrators under, of all things, Australian racial hatred laws.

Australia is obliged under international human rights law to prohibit incitement to racial hatred (Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). The Commonwealth, every state, and the ACT (but not the Northern Territory) make racial vilification at least ‘unlawful’, and at times a criminal offence. In such laws the words ‘racial’ and ‘race’ are used not for a pseudo-scientific purpose, but as shorthand for the many ways that a person’s own and perceived identity turns on personal attributes such as their physical appearance, where they were born and raised, their culture, and their traditions. As a result, ‘racial’ vilification laws protect against hateful conduct that occurs because of, for example, a person’s nationality, ethnicity and culture. [Simon Rice OAM, Director of Law Reform and Social Justice at the ANU College of Law.]

The advice above may not only have implications for Australian indigenous hunters, but also for the many people from foreign shores who now call Australia home and whose countries of origin may have longstanding or even ancient cultural hunting traditions. Bowhunting is perhaps the oldest traditional hunting practice still practiced today, and given Australia’s status as a “cultural melting-pot” I would be very surprised if a large percentage of bowhunters did not have some legitimate ‘cultural’ links to archery as a practical cultural necessity as opposed to a simple sport. For those of us who are unable to claim such a link, the definition of “ethnicity” may also be of interest. Many believe, erroneously, that ‘ethnicity’ means foreign. In fact the Oxford Dictionary defines ‘ethnicity’ as “traits, background, allegiance, or association.” Ergo, might it not be said that coming from a rural background and being allied with principles of feral animal management, in association with an Approved Hunting Organisation, hunting is in fact my ethnicity?

There is of course broad approval of Indigenous cultural hunting rights and practices amongst the Green and anti-hunting camps, despite the fact that even in the most skilled hands, traditional weapons cannot match the accuracy or efficiency and therefore the ‘humaneness’ of modern bows and riffles. The Greens’ and the anti-hunting lobby’s apparent double-standard on this count is not surprising. Intolerant dictatorial regimes throughout history have reserved the right to degrade and ridicule whomever they choose, without regard for principles of natural justice, let alone logic.

Greens and the anti-hunting lobby acknowledge the broader cultural significance of hunting, if only in the most disparaging of contexts. They habitually refer to a ‘guns culture’ invariably associating that culture with the most deplorable acts of cruelty and antisocial behaviour, regardless of whether the legal firearms owner uses her/his guns for legal or illegal purposes. Simply being “one of them” is sufficient cause for Greens to vilify, condemn and incite community hatred of hunters, their culture and practices.

Examples of the distain with which these people view firearms owners and hunters is evident nowhere more than in the online discussion forum, where the self-appointed guardians of community and cultural welfare can  register their prejudiced, bigoted and highly offensive statements in an instant and under cover of an assumed name.  A recent opinion piece appearing in the highly regarded e-journal “On Line Opinion” is just one example.

An article by David Leyonhjelm, entitled “Disarming the good-guys will not prevent massacres” put forth a reasoned argument against knee-jerk gun reform in the US and Australia. I say reasoned not because I necessarily agree with Mr Leyonhjelm’s arguments, but rather because they were considered arguments, conveyed with sincerity and respect, without resort to emotive rhetoric, recrimination or abuse. If only the same could be said of society’s social and moral guardians who made their intolerance known in On Line Opinion’s associated discussion forum all but a few of them under assumed names.

The first comment accuses Mr. Leyonhjelm of being a cowboy, eager to shoot it out on the streets of Dodge City. The second accuses him of being ‘delusional’ and concludes that he must therefore be American. Another respondent accuses gun owners of being uncivilised, and another accuses men of fearing impotence if their guns are taken away. And of course there are the all too predictable references to phallus worship and intellectual impairment, along with the pervasive bigotry that is manifest in the great weight of anti-American sentiment expressed in the forum.

These passive aggressive statements have become the proud pacifists’ weapon of choice in the bid to insight community hatred of responsible weapons owners and hunters. Unsatisfied with the opportunity to express a reasoned counter argument they invariably resort to accusing the holder of any pro-hunting/gun ownership view with all manner of crimes against nature and society. What’s more troubling is the fact that On Line Opinion is a journal contributed and subscribed to by credible social commentators, politicians, social reform advocates and people who consider themselves to be of some robust intellectual stature, some of whom clearly consider that their intemperate abuse and intolerance of other subscribers’ views is reasonable and wholly justified nonetheless.

It is for this reason that we must be circumspect when responding to these ill-tempered and clearly prejudiced people. The media knows a story when it sees one, and the media will always see the story in the headline “Liberal Democrats Officer in favour of gun ownership” before it sees the story in, “Aggressive bigoted outbursts by gun control supporters a growing phenomenon”.

If we hunters, as a group of conscientious Australian citizens, have one common objective over and above sustaining our right to practice our hunting culture responsibly and without persecution or ridicule, that objective must be never to descend to the level of the passive-aggressive, abusive, cultural bigots who assail us daily, wherever their collective soapbox may stand.

Anyway, I’ll get outa ya way now.