Stupid is

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by Economics, Environment • Tags: ,

My mobile phone has been gradually failing in recent months as a result of a piece of stupidity. I would charge it and then only be able to make a couple of phone calls before the battery gave out. At the end it would only last part of a phone call, me speaking faster and faster to try to finish the call before it ran out, rather in the way you drive faster and faster to reach a service station before petrol runs out. What’s that, whose stupidity? Well, mine I’m afraid. I was leaning over a sheep water trough one day with the phone in my top pocket when it fell, splash, into the water. Dried it off, thank goodness still working, won’t do that again. Next day, kersplash, same trough. Still working but with odd behaviour (time, for example, always half an hour behind, except daylight saving when it was one and a half hours behind), and of course the failing battery.

Anyway, got to the stage where I reluctantly (still got a Beta video player in a cupboard, still have my old hockey shirts from 1960) decided I had to get it fixed or replaced. I wasn’t optimistic about the former, and was resigned to the latter, but I was still surprised. “Can I get a new battery for this” I said. The girl took a look, rather in the way a teenager looks at a vinyl record, sneering, and said “But that’s two years old, don’t think there will be a battery for that any more”. Turned out there was, but it cost more than a new phone (go figure), so I agreed to a new phone. While I waited I looked at the batteries they did have available – every one different for every brand of phone. When I got it home I discovered the old charger wouldn’t fit the new phone, quite a different design.

Look, I know that capitalism, unfettered by any kind of regulation or public benefit is the only possible way to organise human society. Been told it over and over again, and that’s just by the Labor Party. And if you had any doubts then the oil spill in the Gulf would certainly change your mind. But you’d think, wouldn’t you, that these giant corporations, wanting to demonstrate what good citizens they were, would take a bit of time talking to each other and doing a bit of rationalisation. I mean these phones cause damage in obtaining the rare elements that go into their manufacture (and the energy used), and cause more damage when they are dumped into landfill, as their heavy metals leach out. Wouldn’t it make sense to have a common design for basic elements like batteries and chargers, so they were interchangeable? Wouldn’t it make sense to ensure that phones could last a lot longer than 2 years before being dumped for a new fashion, a new gimmick?

Do none of these people (talking about you Ziggy “100 million people in Oz” Switkowski) understand that we have to cut down on the ever expanding flood of demand and waste if we are not going to drown the planet in CO2 and malignant chemicals? Could they not start making money by repairing rather than discarding and replacing? It isn’t that long ago that any appliance could be mended. Now just about none of them can be.

How stupid is that?

Well it’s one for the money

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by Climate Change, Environment, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , ,

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, advances in science, and increases in the numbers of people trained in science, were causing much needed improvements in the way we live in our environment. Some research before the war, by amateurs and museum and university professionals, but it was after the war when universities and CSIRO exploded into life that Australian ecology boomed. Behaviour and ecology of individual species was studied, related to evolutionary and taxonomic relationships; and surveys established species distribution and ecosystem composition. Big undertaking to work out the biogeography and ecology of a continent, but done, slowly and steadily over the last 60 years, by the scientific community of Australia, building on previous work, checking each other’s results, repeating studies in other areas or on related species, adding new pieces to puzzles.

Because this period saw a marked increase in population and development in Australia, ecologists also examined the effects of these changes. Looked at land clearing, run-off into the Reef, fire, hunting, fishing, climate change, feral animals, weeds, agriculture, mining, pollution, forestry, tourism. By 2000 a very solid body of science, based on the work of tens of thousands of scientists, told us the environmental problems we faced, and actions needed. For most parts of Australia, and most groups of organisms, it was quite clear what needed doing to prevent extinctions and ecosystem damage, to conserve as much of the Australian environment as could be conserved after 200 years of unchecked development (and a lot of rich people).

Oh some ecologists might think one factor was important in conserving a species, others might put more emphasis on another. There might be different interpretations of how much threat a particular species was under, or about how much habitat would enable a population to survive. But the broad thrust of what needed to be done, if we didn’t want the Australian environment and most of its species to go down the tubes, was agreed in the science community. With that strong foundation of knowledge we made progress in Environmental Impact Statements; setting aside wilderness areas and national parks on land and sea; changes to farming procedures; stopping some development; putting conditions on mining and manufacturing industries; increasing water flow in rivers; setting catch and harvesting limits; identifying and protecting particular threatened species.

Didn’t suit people who wanted another 200 years of unchecked development to make themselves richer. Didn’t suit them at all. Costs increased to prevent toxic chemicals leaking. Stands of rare woodland saved from bulldozers. Water extraction from rivers restricted, no-fishing zones created, fewer houses built on sand dunes, maybe a price put on carbon. Whatever the region, or the species concerned, there would be a clear response from science to describe the situation and the conservation measures needed. Inevitably if developers, of whatever kind, had to restrict their behaviour then they had to restrict their profits, a bit. At last the real costs of development were being recognised and charged to those who stood to benefit most from destroying some environmental asset. Decisions were being made not by the developer, or by politicians with a pro-developer ideology, but by impartial and objective scientists, just telling it like it was.

Oh there were ways around it. If you needed an EIS that wouldn’t get in the way then you bought a consulting firm that would make sure it didn’t. Politicians (prompted by lobbyists, former politicians who had made a lot of money outside of politics) who relied on your donations would overrule the interests of any pesky endangered species who were getting in the way of money money money. Media proprietors would run campaigns to stop the interests of creepy crawlies being put above those of humans. Union members, promised jobs jobs jobs, would run those greenies out of town. A doddle really, once you got into the swing of the thing.

But always a cloud on the horizon of the blue sky developer’s day. You might get approval to knock down the last koala tree, pump the Murray dry, catch the last blue fin tuna, flatten all the sand dunes, warm the planet, but, like a Greek chorus, these pesky scientists would keep saying it wasn’t right, was causing damage, species being lost, rivers killed, planets destroyed. Just wouldn’t shut up about it. Because they were seen as being both independent and objective, and because you were seen, oh so unfairly, as being only interested in money and not the well-being of the planet your grandchildren would inherit, this chorus was gradually having political effects. Making politicians wonder if the loss of votes from a concerned public was really compensated for by donations from unconcerned developers.

What to do, what to do? Long term strategy, get your friends in the media and politics to launch an all out attack on Science itself. Keep denigrating scientists, stealing emails, pursuing them in court, publishing articles denying everything they say. Scientists trusted like nurses? They will rank lower than used car salesmen after this campaign, and if that means destroying 500 years of scientific advances in the process, well, what then? But going to take some time to completely discredit all science, and in the mean time there are sand dunes that want bulldozing, rivers to impound, fish to catch, forests to clear, coal to burn. Short term tactic needed – set a scientist to catch a scientist.

In any profession there are loners – people, often but not always retired, who feel aggrieved not having achieved due recognition; feuds never forgiven nor forgotten; people hungry for more money than pensions provide; people with extreme political ideology in either direction; people with professional and personal links to people in business enterprises; people with a bee-in-the-bonnet quirky theory never accepted by mainstream science. All of them are available for hire if the new price is right. Probably even if it isn’t – often not money but fame and recognition is wanted, and will be achieved. Their task will be to say loudly and often that there are plenty of trees, water in rivers, fish; or that pollution and CO2 are not problems. Name an issue on which 999 scientists agree and there will be one who will swear black is white, up is down, and, if necessary, that the moon is made of green cheese and Americans never landed on it.

Now you and I would think, being rational people, that when someone, with links to, say, the forestry industry, told us that the forests were fine, while 999 scientists without such links told us they weren’t, the one would simply be ignored, perhaps even laughed at. But in the days of he said-she said journalism his singular yea-saying will be given equal status with the 999 nay-sayers. He will be interviewed on tv breakfast shows, invited on to panel discussions, invited to produce op-ed pieces for newspapers. Indeed the fact that he is so far outside the mainstream, way up a dry river without a canoe, is a sign of wonderful quirky maverick behaviour, not irrelevance. A character, in short, who dares challenge mainstream science. With this media identity he will then be given serious scientist status – invited to address industry groups, political rallies, parliamentary committees. His credentials and ideas will be unchallenged in these venues, because he is already famous for being famous, and because his ideas (and ideology) gell so nicely with those on the committee who believe that nothing, nothing at all, should impede, in the slightest, industry, mining, forestry, development, fisheries. Since one man is willing to say there is no problem the development-at-any-cost politicians, and their corporate friends, can claim that there is no unanimous scientific objection to cutting down the last tree, catching the last fish, burning the last piece of coal.

Jackpot.

Cross-posted at ABC Unleashed.

Essentially destructive

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by politics • Tags: , , , , , , ,

And off we go again. Doesn’t seem like five minutes since I was handing out how-to-vote pamphlets in the Boorowa Schoolyard in 2007, not much more than ten minutes since I was doing the same at Gunning in 2004, and yet, here we go again, another election campaign. Already the silliness has begun. As the announcement was made Tony Abbott said Gillard was running to the polls before she had established her leadership credentials. Had she postponed until October it would have been because she was running scared of facing the people. Abbott also said “this election is not about glib slogans”, repeating it so often it became a glib slogan (like “big new tax”). And he said that “I expect this to be a filthy campaign from the Labor Party”, showing once again that what is said in an election campaign stays in an election campaign, with Tony obviously having no memory at all of Liberal election campaigns of the last 14 years.

It’s a looking glass world in an election campaign where words splinter, break, lose all connection with ordinary meanings in the everyday world. Where phrases are chosen from focus groups and repeated more often than a certain advert for spectacles, Julia Gillard of course with “looking forward” and “hard work”, and Tony Abbott with whatever glib slogans his focus groups throw up, probably something about pink batts and the simple lie about debt levels forcing up interest rates. There will be glib references to recent history, but nothing with a time depth of more than a few weeks (Rudd’s overthrow referred to but not that of Malcolm Turnbull), and certainly nothing from the Liberals about the consequences of 11 years of Howard government, or from Labor about their abject failure on climate change.

All of it, for five long weeks (or one long week five times) will have the feel of being in a preschool with small children clamoring for glittering prizes, all the time calling out “Pick me miss, pick me, I’ve been good, they were the naughty ones, pick me.” And jolting the arm of their neighbour to make them spill something or knock something over. Remember the old saying “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”, said by Churchill, no great democrat himself, and usually used when a government has done something appalling and wants to blame the voters for it. Well, how about “Democracy, the best system of all except for true democracy”?

The current democracy we have, corporate controlled, media-driven, spin-doctor and focus-group inspired really isn’t much of an attempt at democracy. We need a true democracy where facts are checked, journalists pursue real stories, political advertising is limited and must be truthful. One where politicians really debate the issues, not present sound grabs, and one where they say what they really think, really intend. One where a platform is a genuine prescription for action, not one that can be negated by non-core promises or changed circumstances. And one where the health of the environment is first on the list of things to do, not last, where not putting a price on carbon is a political death wish, not some kind of populist race to the bottom.

Don’t want much, do I? What do you want from an election campaign?

Once I caught a fish alive

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by Environment, Media, politics • Tags: , , ,

I once drove a land cruiser over some fencing wire hidden in long grass, and while trying to unwrap it from the axles, avoiding the hot engine, my normally easy going self erupted to the extent that a friend, sitting in the vehicle, said that she hadn’t realised I could swear. The other day came one of those television news stories that makes my blood boil and my normally placid anti-violent self want to erupt into a storm of rage so strong that the person on the tv would be very glad they were long way away from this normally tranquil hill.

It was a fishing story. There on the tv, being praised by the presenter, was a man who had spent 7 hours hauling in a giant blue fin tuna, perhaps, gosh, a record size, and jumped up and down on the deck of the ship in excitement while the magnificent animal, exhausted from the torture and bleeding from wounds where a gaffe had been brutally hacked into its sides, its eyes looking around in desperation and fear, wondering why this was being done to it, gasped desperately for oxygen and died from asphyxiation, a long way from home. How did it come to be the case that such brutality remains a symbol of masculinity; where is it written that doing things to a fish that would, probably, get you put in jail if you did them to a dog, gets you applause and fame and a brief spot on the local television news?

These last few weeks have seen the dirty politics of the international pro-whaling nations at work again. And the jailing and trial and conviction of someone trying to stop the whaling, while outside the court angry faced Japanese “ultra-nationalist” groups (there used to be another name for these people) demanded that he be hung drawn and quartered for daring to suggest that the Japanese people stopped driving explosive harpoon heads into the sides of beautiful and highly intelligent whales and dragging them aboard death ships to be butchered while still alive.

And, as always, July marks the month when yelling macho men run down a Spanish street with magnificent bulls, terrified by the noise and crowds, which are destined to be slaughtered, cruelly, after being harassed to exhaustion, by other macho men, as a crowd of onlookers roars their approval as sharp weapons are thrust into the bull’s body.

A hundred years ago members of the British aristocracy were still slaughtering tigers in India and lions in Africa. We now see the photographs of the cocky young men, hunting rifle under one arm, the other jauntily at an angle, hand on hip, and one foot triumphantly resting on a slaughtered tiger, as relics of barbarism from another age. But killing great game fish (or even small non-game fish) is just as barbaric in 2010, and until we stop glorifying it, allowing it to happen even, we are in a weak position when lecturing other nations like Japan and Spain about their own barbarities.

And I can go back to only swearing at the television when Tony Abbott is on, launching himself into the water like a great fish.

The big off button

by Media • Tags: , , ,

It’s had a fair run. Been given every chance, pretty much open slather in fact. Has used the freedom for ill not good. Mortally damaged our society. Time to end it, totally turn off television.

Started out so well, young Tell. Full of dreams and good intentions, using words like communication, and education, and culture (art, great music, history, great plays). Oh, and a little entertainment, of course, all work and no play making Jack a dull boy, but television’s purpose would be public education, a university open to all. The commercial channels would divide the population between them, each aiming at some different but equal sized demographic, proceed to screen diverse educational programs, and we would have the best educated, best informed population on the planet – the perfect democracy. There would be advertisements, to cover running costs and provide a decent return on investment, but television owners used broadcast spectrum owned by the public, and for this privilege were expected to make a return in public benefit.

Went all right for a while. News bulletins treated the news seriously, weather reports likewise; current affairs was for grown-ups; there were rules about Australian content. If what was on one channel wasn’t your cup of tea there would be something on another. Advertisements were limited in number and frequency and intruded little. Politics was analysed in current affairs programs, political advertising had standards of timing and balance and truth. There was gentle and innocent light entertainment – quiz shows, variety shows, singers, comedians.

There were social effects. Picture theatres took a hit. Children stayed inside more than they once did. Conversely people, in the early days when there were few sets, visited each other’s homes to watch Perry Mason (also very gentle, in a time when schoolyard games involved nothing more violent than “British Bulldog” or marbles, and nor did television). They also saw Australian plays and series and heard, eventually, Australian accents. They became more aware of the world as news vision began to arrive quicker. There was an unwritten contract between channels (unspoken motto – first do no harm) and viewers – we’ll show you good material, you watch the adverts. The country benefited.

It all changed when television proprietors suddenly realised that their license to print money was producing only millions not billions. Contract and motto were thrown out of windows, and the owners, who weren’t going to take it any more, began printing money like it was coming into style. Advertising massively increased, and they needed to increase viewers to keep up that saturation. No longer complementary providers of different products, but fierce competitors. The more competition you have the more the competitors become identical (not three commercial tv networks but one network three times) all after the same demographic with the most eyeballs. The measure of success no longer quality of programming and public interest, but profit levels, the result of increasing advertising revenue and decreasing costs. An unseemly rush, helter skelter, to the bottom of the barrel of television programming, to the cheapest products of appeal to the largest number of viewers (and uncritical viewers, ideal responders to the advertising blitz), and lo and behold there was reality tv waiting for them.

Two cheap and nasty forms of it, both very damaging to society, but, hey hey, the business of business is to make money, right? One is the old ambulance-chaser style journalism, done with a television camera. Hospitals, police forces, customs, firemen, crash investigators have all invited cameras along. Just two objectives (apart from the cheapness): to make the viewer’s flesh crawl (oooh, look at that, glad that’s not my operation, car crash, fire) and to prey on the human misery that ensues (close-ups of tears, angry faces, shouting, fear). The networks have learned that schadenfreude sells. And re-uniting family members, home makeovers, even garden shows can be managed to ensure tears.

The other big moneyspinner is reality competition. Did it begin with Survivor, Weakest Link, Big Brother, American Idol? Doesn’t matter, the formula was established and persists – start with a group of people (a mixture of personalities, personal narratives, some appealing to, some hated by, the audience). Produce vicious competition by winner take all (no prize for second). Stoke up competition with additional twists and surprises and punishments. Remove members of the group one by one as they “fail” by some measure, the removal protracted and humiliating to ensure the most misery possible. Repeat weekly. Such a successful formula that it has been extended from “talent” competitions into cooking shows, marriage, raising children, relationships, quiz shows, house renovating, weight loss – you name an area where you think, surely, the media won’t intrude into THAT, and you have identified the next reality show with ever escalating doses of misery.

Can’t understand growing levels of bullying and violence in schools and on the streets? Look at the massive increase in shows that promote psychological (and sometimes physical) violence, deliberate mental cruelty, and lack of empathy as a winning characteristic. Consider the endless parade of crime on tv news – no context, no statistics, no indication that many crimes are the result of personal or family conflicts – at any moment, even in “quiet leafy suburbs” your home may be broken into, robbed, trashed, family members beaten, murdered; be afraid, be very afraid, tomorrow it may be you – perhaps vigilantism beckons? Look at the glamourisation of real crime in “award winning” tv series, the massive numbers of vicious murders in drama series. Promotion of violence extends to televised football games, where smashed bodies are a sign of manhood, and on-field fights encouraged as letting off steam. Sportsmen commit violence against women, or drunken fights in night clubs? Quickly forgiven and back on tv sports shows.

So how do we get rid of this monster? Well our approach to cigarettes, a similarly insidious creeping cause of cancer in our society, is a useful model. Get rid of station promotion. Insist on prominent warning labels on screen (“Warning, the programs you are watching will be damaging to your psyche”) and graphic images of its social effects. Then insist on plain packaging, anonymous presenters in overalls, plain backgrounds, no mood music. Insist that stores keep televisions unobtrusively in a back room, not to be sold to anyone under 65. Progressively de-technologise, get rid of 3D, then digital, then flat screens, then colour, then have just a test pattern showing most of day. On a date to be announced we have a “turn off television day”. Dressed in dinner suit, a solemn announcer (Kim Gyngell perhaps?) will announce – “this is the death of television”. Will press a button on a plain wooden desk and screens all over the country will go dark, except for a bright spot in the middle which will slowly fade. Street parties will spontaneously erupt all over the country as the population rejoices in its freedom.

And in a gradual return to an Australia where children didn’t viciously bully each other and stab each other in schoolyards.

Fly me to the …

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by Climate Change, Media, politics • Tags: , , ,

A couple of astronomical things tickled my fancy recently. First was the arrival back, after a long day’s journey into night, of the Japanese space ship that had journeyed to the asteroid belt, landed, astonishingly, on an asteroid, taken a sample of dirt, set sail again for Earth, and arrived back, by parachute, in the Australian desert. Television news managed, as always with science stories, to get this all wrong, persisting in saying the capsule had “crash-landed” even while showing pictures of its parachute, and persisting in saying it would reveal the “origins of the universe” when of course it was all about the origins of the solar system.

Anyway, the sight of that capsule lying in the desert gave me a warm fuzzy feeling – I mean mostly, as a species, we are pretty rubbish, let’s face it, but every so often we excel ourselves. “Hah”, we can say to the chimps, still investigating sticks and stone tools, “bet you couldn’t get a spaceship to the asteroids and back”. If only we could excel ourselves a bit more often.

Next example isn’t for 5 years. The softly landing capsule roughly coincided with the second anniversary of Pluto losing its status as a planet and becoming just another rock in the Kuiper belt (sort of like the asteroid belt except outside the solar system, not in the middle of it). Never mind, it is still important enough to have a space mission aimed at it about 5 trillion kilometres away. When “New Horizons” flies by Pluto in 2015 we will, astonishingly, be able to see close up photos of the surface of an object that is so far away even the most powerful telescopes can make out nothing of what it is like from here. If there was no other reason for making sure you were still alive in 2015, the prospect of these images would be reason enough for me. And I will again dip my lid to the best and brightest of Homo sapiens.

But in this brave new world that has such creatures in it, why on Earth can’t we do a better job of all these minor problems of stopping greenhouse gas production, preventing war, sorting out hunger and disease for 90% of the planet’s inhabitants, getting decent television news bulletins, getting rid of Steve Fielding from the Senate?

I mean, none of that stuff is rocket science, is it?

Blowing in the wind

by Atheism, Climate Change, Education, Environment, Evolution, Media • Tags: , , , , , , ,

Science, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, these days, it seems.

If you had asked me a few years ago the answer was absolutely clear. No, not the technology, that’s just the side effect, a little bonus, cream on top.

The real importance of science, for the last 500 years, was as the one aspect of human endeavor that constantly advanced, constantly improved, built on previous work, earlier understanding, didn’t take a backward step. Each scientist stood on the shoulders of giants, as Newton said.

Up until the Renaissance humans had taken one step forward and two steps back in their understanding of the world around them. Some glimmering of understanding about the nature of the real world would be smashed down again by religion or war or cynical politicians or charlatans. But once the scientific method of hypothesis, experiment, modified hypothesis, became established by people focussed on investigating the real world instead of accepting the imaginary world of wishful thinking, the human race never looked back. Or not for long anyway.

The age and structure of the universe was established; the form and relationships of different chemical elements; the development of life on earth (and the place of Homo sapiens in that development); the history and geology and climatology of the Earth; the anatomy and physiology and psychology of the human (and other animals) body. All of this was a long way from superstition, and folk medicine, and mythology, and religion, and the last vestiges of those early and primitive beliefs were gradually being swept away as the twentieth century came to an end. At last the human race was on the move into the twenty first century, after 500 years of steady advance, with a clear vision of reality unencumbered by the past detritus of failed human beliefs.

A scary prospect, it seems, for some people. Couldn’t be allowed to happen. And suddenly all the junk thought from past millenia (with some additions) was back in the mix, spurred on by politicians and religious leaders and the media. Suddenly there were miracles, and magic remedies (homeopathy just the most egregious), and prayer, and creationism, climate change denialism, belief in ghosts and the afterlife, and heaven and hell, and mysterious forces, and supernatural beings, and faith healing, and magnets and crystals, and human domination over nature, and witches, and spirituality, all flooding back into human society and culture like an oil leak flooding into the Gulf. Just as poisonous to the human condition as oil is to seabirds.

Need a big clean up effort, both of them. Need decent science education in schools again, free of the baneful influence of religious followers. And we need a media that again accepts the scientific method and its findings, and refuses to give air time or column inches or internet bandwidth to charlatans, and religious leaders, and the deliberate deceptions of the anti-science self-proclaimed mystics and healers, and the no-nothingism of those determined to let the corporations destroy the planet. Big task to clear all this rubbish out, but once it is gone science can again get on with the task of illuminating the real world. And after the damage that has been done by the charlatans and con men and crooks in the last few years we have lost time to make up, urgently. The answers have been blowing in the wind of nonsense and lies for a decade now.

You with me?

Cross-posted at Huffington Post

Tar baby

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , ,

“New allegations of racism in sport”. One of those headlines that write themselves while subeditors have a day off (like “Offshore oil well massively leaks oil” or “Billionaire miners hate paying tax”). So rather than just have a day off myself, while the keyboard does the writing of the usual cliches, let’s have a look at the meaning behind the latest examples of racism in society, oops, sport. In particular let’s look at the reaction to the nastiness that those three former footballers spouted, rather than the nastiness itself.

The first thing to note, and I am sure you will be as surprised by this as I was, is that no racist remarks are apparently ever made by actual, you know, racists. And conversely, of course, it follows that no racist ever makes racist remarks. Confused? I am. Both groups, it seems, need to do some thinking about which club they belong to and if they find that the club they should be in is happy to accept them perhaps that isn’t a club they want to join. The friends of one of the footballers used the “I’m not racist, some of my best friends are blacks” routine on his behalf. The other one used, on his own behalf, apparently unable to find friends, the equally old “I’m not a racist I’m just an idiot”. And then, apparently willing to leave no cliche unturned, followed it with “It was just a joke”, and then the tried and true “If anyone was offended I apologise to them” routine, clearly offended at the idea that anyone could be offended by some good old fashioned remarks about cannibals, and blacks being invisible at night. It was good to hear these golden oldies could still raise some laughs on the night they were delivered. What a great audience. And then the third one was said to be “devastated” by, um, you know, what HE had said, and he wasn’t a racist either, had a “good record” it was said..

The sports journalists came out in support. These people of course are as likely to criticise their sportsmen mates as financial journalists are to criticise their banking mates. Sure enough, here was one of the boys saying that the after dinner speaker was not a racist, just an idiot. An idiot for saying these things? Well, no, an idiot, apparently, for not realising that in these days of “political correctness” you couldn’t get away with saying these things. I mean, these were just jokes, right, who could possibly object to that unless they were politically correct, and these days the pc crowd have taken over so sportsmen needed to sharpen up and not say racist things in public, or at least not where they might be recorded or heard by one of those dark-skinned people who might unaccountably take offense. And so it goes, smoothed over, explained away, nothing to see here, who could possibly think there was such a thing as racism in sport or anywhere else in Australian society. Until the next time.

Time we acknowledged that saying racist things is racism by racists. What else could it be? Why would you pile abuse, or ridicule, on players of various ethnic groups otherwise? Why would this stuff come pouring out of your mouth unless that’s the way you felt? Where else has it come from except your brain, your thoughts, your prejudices? And once it does pour out, like the oil spilling out into the Gulf, it kills what it touches. Racism in a speech or a team warm-up legitimises racism, makes the audience think it is ok for them to repeat similar sentiments, damages those it is aimed at just a little bit more. And society will continue to struggle to get out of a racist past like a pelican struggles to escape the clinging oil from the BP well. Or Brer Rabbit the tar baby.

If you hear racist remarks or “jokes”, don’t laugh, nervously, tell the speaker you don’t like it. Sports journalists need to do the same – wash the offender’s mouth out with detergent perhaps.

It’s not ok. It never was ok.