Weird stuff
THERE was a time when Greg Withers, husband of new Premier Anna Bligh and Queensland’s first “first bloke”, went by the name of Greg Francis. The year was 1987 and Mr Withers and Ms Bligh were expecting their first child but were keen to avoid what the two referred to at the time as “patriarchal tyranny”.
She had no great desire to name her child after her father, so the couple chose the name Francis, after Anna’s mother but with a different spelling. Joe Francis is now 20 and a film student at Griffith University. When Joe was born in 1987, in the twilight of the morally conservative Bjelke-Petersen regime, the only other option to putting the father’s name on the birth certificate was to put “father unknown”, which the two deemed too extreme. So Mr Withers changed his name by deed poll before Joe’s birth, and afterwards he reverted to being Greg Withers again.So, she refused to take her husbands name in marriage and then refused to allow her son to take her surname when born. I wonder if she just hated her father or all men? If she forced her ‘husband’ to change his name by deed poll just to satisfy this weird convoluted thinking then I don’t like her. If her husband did it voluntarily then I don’t like either of them. And she is now leader of one of Australia’s leading states.
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Kev
I would have thought that what Anna Bligh does in terms of naming her kids is nobody’s business but hers.
Maybe you should meet her before you decide whether you like her or not.
I have and I do. She was the best Education minister in my time with Education Queensland, (1968 – 2005). The only one that came close was Jack Pizzey – and he died before he could be anointed as Premier. Then we got Jo BP, and he was fond of phoning Regional Directors if he didn’t like teacher transfers – kind of a rehearsal for the corruption that Fitzgerald laid bare many years later.
Now she is a public figure her record is public. Anybody who goes through the laborious routine to stage manage the surname of a child that she did is, in my opinion, weird. These values will be apparent in other matters and they are not my values.
I never met a lot of people who I have a opinion about but their public record is sufficient base for such opinions.
She has been an integral part of the ALP for 12 years that in it’s time in office has ignored infrastructure to our disadvantage and where her biography records glowing reports of infrastructure work it is all reactive.
She may have had no pull in this area previously and time may prove she is honestly trying to recover form Beattie’s inactivity but I’ll reserve my opinion until she has more points on the board.
The alternate analysis is that the Queensland State forced two parents who were in agreement with each other to jump through hoops to indulge their whims. It is indeed weird but in the grand scheme of Weirdness, it has a pretty low rating; perhaps banal.
I’ll use that same term to describe Anna and Greg’s whim as well.
The entire western world thought that way not just Queensland. In most cases Bureaucracy presumes a woman will know the father and enter his name thus giving the child legal entity. Nothing strange or radical there unless you consider it politically incorrect to do so.
I’d hate to be a descendant trying to do a genealogical survey of the family and I trust young Joe is of a similar political persuasion otherwise friends might question Mother Bligh; father Withers; surname Francis.
Banal yes.
Unnecessarily complicated? I think so
I’m sorry Kev, but that is just a crock – they obviously felt strongly enough about the issue to take some action – and I think their entitled to do that, just as their son is right now entitled to change his name if he so chooses. Iceland (part of the ‘Western World’ has a very different way of naming, you might like to check it out.
As for legal entity – since when does a child need the fathers name to be a legal entity? That is positively medieval. My children bear my name – by the conscious choice of my wife and myself, but her family has no one yet to carry on the family name. In some traditions it has been accepted for a male child to be given the family name of the mother simply to stop that name from dying out, and other families adopt names of convenience – foremost among these are the Royal Family – Windsor is NOT their family name but I don’t hear any outcries about their jiggling of names.
As a previous commenter suggested, if you are relying on that little piece of salacious gossip to present a picture of the new Premier of Queensland then I suspect that any further analysis will be equally facile.
Not the entire Western world, but enough of it and I take your meaning anyway.
Unnecessarily complicated? There’s no ‘think’ about it, it is absolutely so.
I work a lot with the concept of identity though, and the notion that somebodies surname should be given any weight in determining the identity of the father, or legal status, is pretty absurd, despite the tradition. That certainly colours my opinion of governments pretending that just because Anna Bligh names her kid Joe Withers doesn’t mean Anna didn’t engage in sweaty monkey love with Mike the Milkman.
That was a hypothetical :- )
Maybe all this indicates is that this is a person who knows what she wants, and figures out a way of getting it despite the red tape – not a bad thing in a politician. Surely the weirdness lies in the previous statute which was changed before her second son Oliver was born.
Incidentially, the much more newsworthy item in this morning’s broadsheet in my opinion was the story about Natasha Stott-Despoja’s legislation on paid maternity leave.
This would have a major positive impact on the lives of many families, and might even make economic sense based on overseas experience (it encourages staff retention which in the long run reduces costs to the employer and improves productivity). Currently, the USA and Australia are amongst the minority of developed countries who don’t offer this.
Pity the Oz had to present it in the context of her baby-handling skills.
Seems to me a sign of a social engineer and one who favours rhetoric over substance. Both party’s have failed to stop the expanding curriculum and weed out the politicly motivated apostles in the teaching profession.
Education not indoctrination!
She sounds like a right proper shithead.
“And she is now leader of one of Australia’s leading states.”
Well she’s the premier for a while – a leader, probably not.
Queensland is a leading state?
I don’t think so.
Lots of your compatriots don’t share your opinion. They’re still moving up here in droves.
It’s just the same old story, by moving there they raise the IQ of both states.