Talk:Carmen Lawrence

message: Whatever you think of Lawrence, the arguments im reading above for leaving more than a cursory mention of The Easton Affair seem purely partisan.Before the scandal hit, Carmen Lawrence was seen as a major rising star of the ALP and there was talk of her being the nation's first female PM. The Easton Affair effectively torpedoed her political career and by the time she shook it off she had a permanent stain that condemned her to a supporting role for the forseeable future. It doesn't need to be paragraphs of text, but there needs to be more about it, explaining the impact on her career. 70.189.213.149 16:20, 23 May 2007 UTC
:If you think the above is partisan, then you have fallen victim to the straw man argument. We all agree that the Easton affair is important and the material here should be expanded. What was under dispute is nothing more than these two sentences:
:"Lawrence has previously suggested that issues of memory and its function will be the subject of a paper or study she may undertake. (ABC News, 7:30 Report, 23/7/99)."
:"The release of cabinet documents following the expiry of confidentiality limits may reveal the nature of proceedings at the time of Lawrence's premiership. (Refer Enid Campbell UWA Law Review et al.)"
:One party to the dispute insists on characterising the removal of these sentences as censorship of the Easton affair, but that does not make it so. Hesperian 23:56, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I wasn't talking about the wall of text above, I was making my own comment unrelated to it. 70.189.213.149 16:11, 30 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Easton affair info needs to be added, right now we have one like about the affair without then explaining what happened. It could have been a dispute over the price of bread for all this tells us. Not to mention the fact that as it stands it basically tells us of negative allegations about Richard Court and nothing about Lawrence. 70.189.213.149 09:22, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  This really needs more on The Easton Affair. 

message: Article needs a bit of clean up to bring it up to standard as per other politcians articles (sections..etc) - will look at starting shortly. --Mikecraig 03:04, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Have started, will look at other similar articles for other bits to be added/fixed --Mikecraig 00:49, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Cleanup

message: *I don't want to bang on ad nauseam about this, but I'll just put on the record here what I've said elsewhere. This is for the benefit of anyone who scopes this page; casual readers, other editors, administrators, whoever: I dislike Carmen Lawrence. I have never made a secret of it. I've laid it out in my declared blog in unmistakeable terms. If I'm pushing a secret anti-Lawrence agenda here, I'm using a very inefficient method. 
*This article was obviously going nowhere until I gave it a kick a few weeks ago. It was in a deadlocked and lousy state and the only thing its condition did was bring attention to the controversies surrounding Lawrence. The deadlock was due to certain persons using up all the available Wiki-energy by trying to turn the article into a platform for attacking Lawrence. One actually, eventually, admits in the last part of the first section of this talk page to trolling in order to goad Hesperian. It's also obvious that this article's history file and its talk page are infested with the results of one-off attack-edits by Lawrence-haters and various sockpuppets thereof. 
*Carmen Lawrence was a Premier of Western Australia. To me, a Western Australian, that is notability enough. Many things happened during the years that she was in Parliament and I do not doubt or deny that good and useful things are among them. I want to see this article three times the length it is now and stuffed with useful and well-sourced material for the benefit of people who would like to use Wikipedia to assist in the study of the history of W.A. There are some very trivial (alright, in my opinion) figures of US politics, for example, who have much more impressive articles. Whatever I think of their morals or competence, all of the Premiers of W.A. should have articles on this site that are worthy of Featured Article status. I'm not interested in trying to use them to propagandise to the people who read them. Let the balanced facts speak for themselves. I've also got enough sense to recognise that in the very long run my earnestly-held opinions may be proven utterly wrong. After all, quite a few people have got me wrong on this and related matters. Retarius | Talk 06:30, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it goes without saying that if you have expressed such strong opinions in the public arena on a subject, and it is the opinion of others that your editing on the area fails to reflect a neutral point of view and wanders into ownership, which effectively prevents others from correcting excesses or being heard, that you should by right leave the editing of these things to others who are able to deal with the consequences of their editing without having to worry about conflict of interest. I have particularly strong opinions, and have expressed them elsewhere, on four particular topics (none of which are political, by the way) which I scrupulously avoid for the most part, beyond simple monitoring of the topics for cruft, vandalism and such. Failure to do so is simply asking for trouble (not to mention topic bans and other such remedies). Orderinchaos 13:17, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Sadly, I suspect such advice is water off a duck's back to Retarius, but he does need to understand that there are by necessity going to be limitations to his contributions here.  Policies like conflict of interest are going to be forever thrown at him while he contributes to articles in which he holds strong and public views.  His contributions will always, under the terms of our policies be liable for extra scrutiny and possible quick reversion with minimal justification.  Ultimately the editing privilege may be removed if his contributions become disruptive.  Retarius, hats off to you for declaring your bias, but please do read that policy from top to bottom to understand where we're coming from.   And do at least consider the advice above [from OIC]. Moondyne 14:42, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The only problem with the above advice from OIC is that he doesn't declare his own views re the subject or specify why he thinks I'm trying to slant this article. I ask this question: Why has he deliberately removed a legitimate link to a legitimate article on two occasions? His remarks are merely reducible to one thing: He refuses to accept that I am acting in good faith. You can throw around as many links to acronyms as you like, but in plain English, he is calling me a liar. Well, here's a suggestion: submit this article for review by three genuinely uninvolved foreign editors who haven't got a clue who these people are. Let's see who they think is coatracking. If you want to revert this article to where it was before I touched it be my guest. I'm sure Andrew Bolt and his friends will be delighted to see it. Retarius | Talk 06:23, 27 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Conflict of interest implies, by its very nature, a strong interest (and of course by interest I do not mean "I am interested in..."). I do not have any abiding outside interests which would require me to declare one, although I have some outside interests on non-political topics which I deliberately avoid for that very reason. Much of my work has been defending articles about figures from both sides of politics from partisan or loaded contributions, in many cases against users who went on to be banned or indefinitely blocked. I have not "deliberately removed" anything - I strongly believe in Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, if properly enforced, as being the only real way of ensuring things here do not become unstuck. As a student of politics I really do wish to see Wikipedia produce a resource that we can use to disprove those who say Wikipedia cannot be a reliable resource for students in this area. We need to ensure everything we do as editors makes it more so, and that nothing we do hinders it from becoming more so. Orderinchaos 09:37, 27 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: This is a very fine statement of principle, and I'd like to thank Orderinchaos for making it. Retarius | Talk 09:15, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  A message from Retarius 

message: Something more needs to be said about the Easton Royal Commission.  The first paragraph is fine, but the second should make mention of her "I cannot recall" reply.  Basically her defence is that she cannot remember what was said at the Cabinet meeting prior to the tabling of the petition.  The Petition, let us remember, wasn't merely a local member action, but was seen as a means of damaging Richard Court when the ALP was looking down the barrel of an electoral loss.  The lame "I cannot recall" line damaged her in the eyes of eastern staters, and lead to her being the butt of jokes on Full Frontal.  It was this that derailed her political career, otherwise she may have replaced Beazley as ALP Leader instead of Simon Crean.  It was the poor response more than the official findings of Sir Kenneth Marks which irrepairably damaged her credibility.  I find that ironic since it was her ability to maintain her demure and master questioners (like Alan Carpenter) which contributed to her popularity in the first place.  Some mention of the unconvincing "I cannot recall" should be included.  To be honest, I think McGinty was the one who made the biggest goose of himself in that affair.  He went around saying how "Carmen is innocent" and that it was only Cabinet confidentiality that prevented him from proving it, but once he was on the witness stand and under oath, he admitted that it may have been mentioned.  Still his emabarrasing role is outside of this article.
Some mention should be made of the fact that the Joondalup Railway was a Dowding Government initiative.  It is only hinted at in the article.  I think that was one of the reasons why Dowding was able to squeak over the line (although not in terms of seats) and Lawrence lost.  He gave a positive reason for returning his government, whereas Lawrence wouldn't, or couldn't.
Finally, I do think it should be mentioned that she was leading a minority government by the time of the 1993 election.  She tried to oust 3 Ministers, long serving MPs, including Geoff Carr the Police Minister.  But she mishandled it, and all 3 just resigned from the Party and sat on the cross benches.  They did promise to support her on motions of confidence, which was how she survived as Premier until the end.  But some mention should be made of this, as it demonstrates she wasn't as brilliant a politician as she is sometimes made out to be.  There is plenty more I could say about her.  Like the fact she tried, with some success, to present herself as not being a politician, even though she was an active party to the backstabbing of Dowding (genuinally backstabbing as he was at a Premier's conference at the time), to her expert handling of the media, more particularly one to one interviews particularly with Alan Carpenter.  But I think one extra line on the Easton Affair, mentioning her botched sacking of those Ministers and how she took credit for the work of the Dowding Government on the Joondalup Railway should be sufficient.  Basically Lawrence came close to making it to the very top, but her rise was aided by her being able to sweep things under the carpet, and some of them eventually caught up with her before she could really make it.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.174.12.177 (talk) 00:22, 7 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Need More Information 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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