Tag Archives: john howard

Field of dreams

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by Education, politics • Tags: , , , , , , ,

Odd moment during the recent announcement and garbled discussion of education reforms in Australia. Chief Minister of the ACT, Katy Gallagher, was asked by parochial reporters, essentially, “what’s in it for Canberra?”

She said, perhaps bemused by the stupid question, that because most if not all Canberra students were already receiving support above what was being proposed, there actually wasn’t anything “in it” for the ACT.

In hunter-gatherer societies all children are educated equally – it would be suicidal for the society to do anything else. Same with the early agricultural societies. In both cases gifted individuals may specialise in particular areas of expertise later, but all will be educated.

We lost this equality of opportunity as the accumulation of wealth by a few created a situation where better education could be purchased, and that has remained the case, and been strengthened, ever since.

Indeed in Australia the Right, themselves, one and all, the products of the best education money could buy, decided they could do better as old boys (or girls) than merely denoting a few tax deductible dollars to the alma mater. They could, they realised, get their name up on the honour roll by getting the people of Australia to pay big bucks to schools already overflowing with swimming pools and polo ponies and acres of rolling playing fields. And they could lock in such payments permanently with a clever mathematical formula which achieved bias while appearing objective. A simple formula, always applied by conservatives, and always effective = The Rich get Richer. Genius eh?

So, it’s time for a reversal of fortunes. A simple formula = To each according to his needs. Identify the poorest public schools, give them more money to build up their resources to the level of the richer public schools. And then, whisper who dare, onwards to the levels of the private schools. Oh, sorry, getting a bit carried away there. Never mind, let’s get all students onto as level a playing field, playing fields, as possible. Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of class war.

But wait, there’s more. The other conservative legacy also affects equality of educational opportunity – religion. Separation of church and state? Yeah, whatever, but separation of church and school just as important. Yet John Howard unleashed the dogs of sectarianism. Loony tunes religious schools proliferated. Students taught curriculums in which garbage like creationism can be included, because religious freedom. “The more religion, the lower the quality of education” – write that on the blackboard 100 times Mr Howard

But worse is that schooling, meant to broaden horizons, introduce new ideas, allow children to mix widely, teach the ability to think and evaluate, to see a world beyond the walls of their home, has been narrowed. Religious fanatics have been allowed to carry out home-schooling in bulk. Allowed to make sure that no child raised in the closed little worlds of religious fundamentalism is allowed to discover that there is another real world outside.

So, equality of opportunity for all students? Absolutely, stuff of dreams. But understand that it involves more than just money. I have a dream of getting all students onto the playing field of secular education.

What’s in it for Australia? Only the next generation.

Ding Dong Battle

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by politics • Tags: , ,

In 1974, when Edward Heath had lost office, and there began to be talk of Thatcher taking over as Conservative Leader, my [very] English Aunt, Midlands family background of miners and factory workers, and memories fresh of Thatcher’s dirty work as Education minister, robbing poor school children of their milk, said to me “If that woman ever becomes Prime Minister I’m emigrating to Australia”.

Well, sadly Maggie did, but Ruby didn’t. People don’t of course, even though it is such a common reaction to approaching political storms (“if John Howard wins”, “if George Bush wins”). People like my Aunt don’t anyway, too emotionally rooted in family and community. Too costly to physically and economically uproot. Too loyal, I guess, right down to their bootstraps, to the country of their birth. So they stay, as the political storm clouds gather once more, and batten down what hatches they can.

Bit different when the Gucci Shoe is on the other foot. The mere whiff of what laughingly passes for a Blairite/Keatingesque/Obamacrat/Hollandaise “only-a-few-miles-right-of-centre-social-democrat-party” in the offing, and the Rich are, well, offing. Depardieuing to some less taxing place. And not just individuals – whole companies, corporations, faced with, say, a mining tax increase, threaten to dig up all the Australian iron ore, bury it again in, say, Myanmar, and dig it up again to sell to China, from a new head office in a tax haven.

But the poor stay behind, and watch as swine like Thatcher graduate from stealing milk from children to stealing mines from miners, factories from communities, houses and services from families, and set free the dogs of banks and financiers to ravage the economy. Oh, they try to fight back, some ding dong battles, but the power of the state, riot police on flying monkeys, is never so starkly on display as when it is being used by the rich, for the rich, against the poor.

Nor is the power of the media more starkly displayed than in these circumstances, when Rupert’s Unlimited News Bugles consolidate the gains made by the corporate and public order shock troops (while using some themselves to smash print unions), and convince the suddenly out of work and homeless that they will never have it so good again unless they vote the “bosses’ party” in again, or a “worker’s party” that has absolutely indistinguishable policies, because “socialism” is so nineteenth century. Like laissez-faire capitalism, I guess.

And then, when the Great Leader has trashed her (or his) own country, spread the disease to others, cosied up to even more obnoxious foreign dictators who stop at nothing until the jackboots are stamping on faces, and helicopters are flying out to sea, and, retired or been, finally too extreme even for his (or her) colleagues, shunted out, the Trumpets of the Free Press move in to start rewriting history even as the removalist vans are passing each other at the entrance to 10 Downing St.

And, when the Angel Gabriel’s trumpets sound to summon the old, cold, warrior to Valhalla, the Press write effusive, white-washed eulogies as if preparing for sainthood application, and any suggestion that history, real history, should be referred to, is shouted down with that old saviour of horrid right wing leaders (though not, apparently, those of the left), “Don’t speak ill of the dead”. And even the public broadcaster, in the face of widespread demand from people trying to fight back, refuse to play a very appropriate song from Wizard of Oz. Well, bugger that for a game of soldiers, a game of battleships – there’s a Class War going on all over the word, and it’s the Class of ’79 that’s winning it. Time to join the battle.

I wish my Aunt had come to Australia, unexpectedly turned up on my doorstep, rung my bell, ” Ding Dong”. Escaped from the stealer of milk, winner of battles, Boadicea risen again to fly in a Harrier Jump Jet. Mind you, with the advent of John Howard I think Ruby would have been packing her bags again in 1996 for Blighty, sure, and rightly, that Oz was also in for rule by a potential milk stealer and armchair warrior.

And with Tony Abbott now looming in Australia like a Wicked Wizard from the East, I think it might be time to pack my bags and join her. Well, except for David Cameron already at the other end stealing hospital services from old ladies, and old gentlemen, and taxing their homes, completing Thatcher’s work.

Where has that Yellow Brick Road gone?

Happily-ever-aftering

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , , , ,

Twitter provides so much inspiration for blogging (and vice versa) that you could, given an infinite amount of time and pep pills and typewriter ribbon, blog all day and all night. I thought today I would illustrate some of this, picking up on a number of stories and blogging briefly about them.

Here is the first:

Shoky Joky (@IH8SHOKJOKS)
25/03/13 9:03 AM
#AmAgenda – Fifield says “we never saw anything like a challenge to John Howard”. That’s just a lie which @Kieran_Gilbert accepted. #MSMfail

There are dozens of similar tweets just in my timeline every day, and I don’t want to talk about individuals here, this exchange could represent any Opposition member talking to any journalist. But let’s consider what is going on.

For the benefit of my younger readers (those born after 2007), here is some of John Howard’s political history. From 1983-1993 he was engaged in a life and death acrimonious struggle with Andrew Peacock for Liberal Party Opposition Leadership during the first ten years of Hawke-Keating.

They undermined each other and exchanged places after leadership coups several times, the battle ending only when Peacock lost the 1990 election and resigned but not before supporting John Hewson as his successor and blocking Howard from regaining leadership.

After Hewson lost in 1993, the almost comedy team of Downer and Costello took over after deposing Hewson in another bitter coup. Downer eventually resigned in 1995 and Howard got a triple bypass and, Lazarus-like, rose again. With a deal done with Costello that he would accept the Deputy Leadership if Howard agreed to step down within a reasonable period.

It never happened, Costello became more and more aggrieved, was more and more publicly at odds with Howard and determined to replace him. The bad blood between them was obvious, and much remarked on (and the exact parallels with the Hawke-Keating relationship). By 2007 it was also becoming obvious Howard could lose the election, and some of his most senior ministers went to him (in an exact parallel to what would later happen to Rudd) demanding that he resign and hand over to Costello. He refused and went on to lose of course.

Now all of this has happened just in the last 30 years. The bitter Costello challenge of Howard is within the last ten years. This is recent Australian political history. You might not remember the precise sequence involved in Howard-Peacock and so on, but if you have any involvement in Australian politics you would have to know the substance of it.

In short, in 30 years Howard was “challenged” over and over again. The only difference between Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello, and Howard and Rudd, was that Howard was able to tough out the later challenges (as he had failed to do in the earlier ones) whereas both Hawke and Rudd succumbed to their’s.

And yet here we have an Opposition member apparently flat-out denying the reality of history, never happened, Howard was never challenged, (implying only Labor has challenges). And he in turn is allowed to rewrite history because his statement goes unchallenged. We have, it seems, always been at war with Oceania.

I repeat, this is merely a single example of something that happens daily now. I don’t know whether the Opposition deliberately lies or has fooled itself into its own alternative history reality of a King Howard who lived where:
“The rain may never fall till after sundown.
By eight, the morning fog must disappear.
In short, there’s simply not, a more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here in Camelot”

And happily-ever-aftering we go.

On the other hand I don’t know whether Australian journalists are operating under instructions never to question even the most blatant untruths; whether they are personally disinclined to; or whether knowledge of Australian political history is no longer a requirement for employment in Australian political journalism. Those who forget political history are doomed to report it badly.

Whatever the reasons, this turning of journalism into merely a matter of holding a microphone for a politician to speak into is extraordinarily damaging to Australian democracy (and elsewhere, much the same seems to be true of the US and UK). The average punter doesn’t retain political memories in the way us political tragics do. Just as he or she doesn’t have expertise in, say, medicine, or plumbing, or car engines, or climate change, and trusts specialists to provide it, so they trust experts to provide background, context, for politics.

If they are told, confidently, that John Howard was never challenged, by someone whose statement itself is unchallenged, then they are likely to accept it as true. History has been successfully rewritten, and, being so, will successfully alter the mindset of the voter to accept that leadership disputes have only taken place in the last year, and only ever take place in an inherently unstable Labor Party. A message that fits with all the similar messages, based on other rewritten histories, already implanted.

Media organisations used to have Fact Checkers, a role which seems to have largely disappeared these days. But in a broader sense the public once saw the media as a whole as a Giant Fact Checker responsible, on their behalf, for keeping the bastards honest. That role has been totally abandoned it seems and now the bastards have no constraints on their dishonesty.

It seems to be increasingly falling to the Social Media, Twitter and Blogs, to take over that vacant media fact checker role. Australia still won’t be Camelot, but we’ll be happier with our politics after that happens.

Or perhaps I am wrong. Check me.

Yes Prime Minister

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

I wrote the original version of this piece in July 2011, at a time when Julia Gillard had been PM (and won an election in her own right) for less than a year. Now as we approach three years, and the next election, I thought it was time (also prompted by the excellent recent post by Rodney Lever on the same topic) to re-evaluate, see if my view had changed. And to spell out in more detail my reasoning. See what you think.

In the last 70 years (a period which neatly uses the war years as the start of modern Australia, and allows me to consider only prime ministers serving in my lifetime) Australia has had 13 prime ministers (excluding the temporary Mr Forde, Mr McEwan) just as both the US and UK have had 13 leaders each. You would have to say by any objective measure, and ignoring sniping by people like me, we have been by and large very lucky and very well served by our baker’s dozen. We have avoided having any real dunces (unlike the US with Ford, Reagan, Bush and Bush) or crooks (Nixon). Our 13 also exceed the average quality of 13 British PMs (who avoid the US highs and lows) over that period.

I have, in the past, tried to separate out tops and bottoms. But this would be invidious among a continuous spectrum, and besides I find my opinion alters over time (Fraser up and Keating down for example). So let’s try to assess them over a range of qualities (not including IQ which I reckon averages high and pretty even).

OK, how might we judge the best of these thirteen? Lack of ideology; flexibility of mind; ability to relate to people; difficulty of political circumstances faced; ability to work with colleagues; concern for ordinary people; concern for minorities and the powerless; awareness of the big picture; ability to embody some aspect of the country; hard-working; willingness to take expert advice; someone I can imagine having an intelligent conversation with; someone I could imagine having a beer with; someone who can achieve outcomes; someone who can stand up to vested interests.

Applying those filters quickly begins to whittle down the big thirteen. McMahon, Holt disappear immediately, lightweights who were barely up to ministerial level, let alone PM. The next seven go for different reasons. Rudd and Gorton because of inability to work with colleagues; Howard because of his narrow-minded stubborn ideology; Keating because of his obsession for free markets and against environment; Fraser because of the unprincipled way he seized power, all go out in the first round. Then it gets hard Whitlam and Chifley are reluctantly, because of the magnificent achievements of both, eliminated in the second round. Chifley because of the miner’s strike. Whitlam because his best days were the duumvirate with Lance Barnard. After that he saw himself as the Emperor leaving his cabinet to do their thing, which after 23 years they were mostly not up to in the face of the Murdoch onslaught.

Which leaves just four in the grand final of Australia’s Got Prime Ministerial Talent – Curtin, Menzies, Hawke and Gillard. Now any of those would be a Winner you could argue for, give a standing ovation to, and I reckon you, my fellow judges, might easily disagree with me. Curtin is there because he seems by any measure one of the most decent, and  was the only one faced with stopping Australia being invaded in wartime in face of the self-interest of UK and US. Menzies, not because I think much of him (or his over-rated wit), but because you simply can’t ignore 18 years in The job. Hawke, again not because I think much of him but because, in contrast to Whitlam, he put together an extraordinarily good team, arguably the best in Australian history, and kept the public and media onside 

But, drumroll, my Winner is, on the basis of consistent performance overall – Julia Gillard. Yes, I know, I was surprised too. I fed all the data back into my PM “Difference Engine” (the very latest from Mr Babbage), and waited while the cogs whirred and spun, differences calculated, levers pushed for carries. Yes, it was still Julia by a nose. Do the calculations yourself (and get Ms Lovelace to double check, be analytical) I am sure you will agree.

So, what did the print-out show? That she’s really the only one who has had to deal with complex minority rule (Curtin did briefly in simpler circumstances). That she has had to deal with an Opposition determined to smash parliamentary conventions, and also in extraordinarily unprincipled moves force out two members of parliament to try to destroy the majority.

She has had other problems shared with other PMs, for example family difficulties (eg Hawke, Chifley), a persistent rival (again Hawke, plus Howard, Gorton), virulent press opposition (Whitlam, Keating, but I’ll come back to this), difficult world financial circumstances (Keating, Hawke, Rudd, Chifley), but no one else has faced them all simultaneously. Nor carried them off while remaining calm and pleasant and working well with all her colleagues except her predecessor and several of his supporters, and succeed in passing record amounts of legislation, much of great importance (carbon price, NBN). A number of them have given fine speeches, but none perhaps as significant as Gillard’s now world famous “misogyny speech”, the response to the constant nasty misogyny from the Opposition, outraged that a woman dared to be in charge.

Oh, look, I am no longer the starry-eyed boy who has political heroes like I once did (Jim Cairns, JFK). Julia Gillard is no Chifley or Whitlam in terms of Labor values. Her lack of interest in environmental matters is stunning. Her approach to asylum seekers leaves Fraser gasping. Her hard line on unemployed and single parents would have had her thrown out of Chifley’s cabinet. Her unconscionable pursuit of the Religious Right, in such matters as same sex marriage and school chaplains must have Whitlam and Hawke shaking heads. And so on and so on. Some of that has been forced on her by circumstances, some seems to be flaws in her thinking. But then all of them have had flaws of various kinds. If there is to be the perfect PM we haven’t quite found him or her yet.

So, best PM in 70 years, but there is another unique feature that distinguishes Ms Gillard from all her predecessors. No, not the size of her ear lobes, her hair colour, her clothes, her voice, her glasses. Give in? She has been subject to more personal abuse, vilification, hatred, death threats, than all of her predecessors put together.

At the same time she has been subject to the most one-sided unfair media coverage and constant virulent media attacks we have ever seen. The move by John Howard to not merely “neutralise” the ABC, but move it so far to the Right as to be able to run in harness with News Ltd has been decisive. As has the role of other media barons, their tame shock jocks, and their supportive “think tanks”. Not a government decision goes damningly uncritised, not a move is fairly reported, not a motive nastily unquestioned, not a fake leadership challenge left unturned. At the same time, the most incompetent, secretive, and low target Opposition in our history, has been not only left unchallenged, unquestioned, but praised in glowing terms, given dream runs, soft interviews, prominent soapboxes, on media outlets.

Both media and Opposition are determined to remove a vaguely left wing government and replace it with a hard right one which will undo all the advances Gillard has made and turn Australia into a ground as fertile for big business profit as America. If they succeed, and I reckon the chances are they will, then the baker’s dozen will end with her, a unique sequence come to an end. If Tony Abbott seizes the top job, then we will have not only taken on Tea Party politics from America, but their roller coaster leadership sequence in which some excellent, or at least above average, Presidents, can be succeeded by real dickheads, people who struggle to read a children’s book about a pet goat.

Anyway, over to you. Have I gilded the lily, overegged the pudding?

Steering the ABC Titanic

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

Every now and then, often enough that the phrase is probably encoded as a single keystroke on ABC keyboards, someone from the ABC (Australia’s national public broadcaster, very similar to the BBC) will say “We get allegations of bias from both the Left and the Right so we must be very well-balanced”.

This specious, self-serving narrative has been increasing in frequency over the last three years in parallel with the increasing observations, by those of us on the Left, of the undeniable lurch to the Right that the ABC has made.

Sometimes this narrative might be accompanied by the observation that both a Labor Prime Minister (Keating) and a Liberal (conservative) one (Howard) in recent years have complained about the ABC. And indeed this is a valid observation in the 1990s (and previously) and tells you something important about what was going on. In both cases the objection was that the ABC was a public broadcaster was, without fear or favour, willing to speak truth to power. And since prime ministers of both parties rely totally on fear and favours to govern, and have absolutely no interest in their power being challenged, both hated the scrutiny by the ABC. The commercial networks of course, also greatly interested in favours and power, had absolutely no interest in rocking a conservative government boat too much.

And what sin did ABC journalists and presenters commit in those far-off, almost mythical times? Why, they asked questions of prime ministers and government ministers, of whichever party was in power. Asked questions! And sometimes, and my younger readers will hardly credit this, they would ask a follow-up question when the minister evaded a question the first time! Sometimes even repeat a question, quote a fact or two. If there is anything governments hate it is having their evasions and secrets and fact-free actions exposed to all the world like an Emperor’s new clothes.

So that is the first point. In my observations over many years the only bias in ABC programming was daring to ask questions that governments didn’t want asked, and being so presumptuous as to not accept answers governments wanted accepted. It could be suggested that conservative governments, with their born-to-rule mentality, resent questioning even more than left-wing governments do, and are more likely to see the asking of a question itself as evidence of bias, but neither kind of government is fond of scrutiny.

And so to the second point. The actual actions by Keating and Howard in relation to their anger were quite different. Keating kept on muttering away about how outrageous it all was, or would front a journalist at a function (or in a late night phone call) and set them straight about the error of their ways. But he did this to commercial and ABC journalists alike. No fear or favour there. And no consequences either.

No such ineffective inaction for Howard, who knew the importance of stopping the questioning. “We will decide what questions are asked and the circumstances in which they are answered”, I guess. No mucking around. Appoint members of the ABC Board who were not merely right-wing but culture warriors certain to be sympathetic to Howard’s agenda – not just one or two, but the whole Board. Then appoint a Chairman who in addition to that ideological qualification was also a close personal friend of John Howard’s. Appoint Managing Directors who had the right stuff and then they in turn would appoint senior managers who were politically correct for the new conservative times, and they in turn would appoint reporters and presenters with the right attitudes (often, I understand, from commercial media networks in all three cases). In the meantime shift one presenter, a particularly persistent question asker sideways, and have the Board ensure that there were no mistakes. Pretty soon the thing runs itself, although if evidence of recalcitrance emerges or might emerge, issue instructions, and, if that fails, issue reprimands of staff and apologies to the offended conservatives.

As well as getting the right personnel in place, start playing with the way the organisation does news and current affairs, long its great strength and glory. Add new current affairsprograms designed to be venues on which opinionators can spout forth in prime time. They have to be opinionators, not the “experts” who once appeared on the ABC, because reality has a well-known left-wing bias. And they will be almost all from the far right of the political belief spectrum – preferably the worst former conservative ministers and political staffers and the members of far right thing tanks (see my earlier post here). You justify this by saying you have to get these people on to “balance” the ABC. But since these programs didn’t exist before, the presence of so many right-wing opinionators completely unbalances the ABC, since the rest of the organisation is largely uninvolved in anything to do with politics and current affairs. This torrent of right-wing ideology pouring out of talking heads day after day, all over radio and tv outlets and the new online venue, unchallenged by any fact-checking (because fact-checking has been successfully framed as “bias”), has in itself shifted the ABC a long way to the Right. But wait, there’s more.

ABC News was always the jewel in the crown, the most trusted source of independent objective news in the country. Can’t have that. With a Labor government elected in 2007 it wasn’t enough just to have conservatism rampant in current affairs, the news itself needed to be massaged so that the public would both get the “right” news in the right form, but know the right way to think about it. So, almost un-noticed, the style of ABC News began to change. Instead of just reporting, factually with some information about content, say a Cabinet reshuffle, a policy change, a Prime Ministerial speech, no news bulletin could proceed without a cross to “our political reporter in Canberra” who would massage the news with his or her own ideological prejudices. It would turn out, inevitably, that the reshuffle was a sign of chaos in the government, that the policy change was a backflip, that the speech was shrill or strained. All said with the kind of sorrowful air that precedes a beating from a Thwackum or a Squeers. I can’t remember a single major government action in the last three years presented as simple news without it being massaged to be a negative for the government by a clearly right-wing reporter. Once upon a time this kind of “news interpretation” was left to radio shock jocks or commercial tv breakfast shows and would have been thought outrageous on an ABC news bulletin. Now it is taken for granted as the way one “does news”.

As is the more subtle manipulations involved in the choice of film clip or photo to illustrate a piece, the headlines and captions used, the terminology used (eg “carbon tax”) as derived from the conservative framing, the way the Prime Minister is referred to, the choice of which bits of an event to broadcast, the constant promotion of Opposition stunts, the carefully framed pictures of crowds and their reactions. There is the ubiquitous, apparently obligatory use of the phrase “Tony Abbott says”, “The Opposition said today” to begin items about something the government has done or announced, with or without a later brief comment from the minister concerned. There is even a constant use of Opposition members to comment on some internal Labor Party matter – a promotion, a retirement, a policy debate – which they could not possibly know anything about (the reverse process doesn’t happen). And there is the complete failure of ABC journalists to think or act in any independent matter at all. They no longer it seems do any research or work on their own questions, they simply ask a question that has been framed by the Opposition. Or, even more insidiously, as it has been framed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd publications. Members of whom also regular appear on the ABC to offer spin and interpretations, with any sense that there should be a line drawn between the ABC and its rivals totally gone.

Which brings us back to the proposition we began with about “criticism from left and right = Balance QED”. In spite of all that I have outlined above, the ABC still gets hammered by shock jock columnists and politicians of the stripe of Eric Abetz. In their eyes though the ABC can never be far right enough. If the totality of ABC programming consisted of someone from a Right Wing think tank reading press releases from Menzies House all day they would complain that the sound wasn’t turned up loud enough, or the set was the wrong shade of blue. They get outraged when the ABC dares to mention climate change for example (the stacked Board having insisted that the ABC run, in prime time, the appalling “Great Global Warming Swindle”), or might be perceived as doing something positive about refugees or same-sex marriage. No matter how many right-wing commentators spout their ideology, no matter how the news is massaged, it will never be enough for Eric and friends, in fact they won’t notice.

Conversely when I complain about right-wing bias it is because of what I have outlined above. I am not suggesting that every right-wing opinionator be replaced by a member of Socialist Alliance or Greenpeace, or that news bulletins be vetted by the prime minister’s office. I am suggesting that the obvious sources of bias be removed. That experts once again replace ideologues, that news bulletins contain, well, simply news, that unflattering photos and headlines are not deliberately chosen. The former board members and chairman have now been replaced by a much more neutral group, and this is a good start (although we need a mechanism to ensure that the blatant Howard Board stacking can never occur again). But it is going to take as long to turn the ABC Titanic around as it took to steer it towards the ice pack in the first place. Most of the young people on the staff now have had no experience of what a neutral, professional, objective ABC would actually be like. If I am asking for neutrality, and the Right is asking for even further movement right, it suggests not that the ship is balanced but that it is listing a long way to the right already.

With an Abbott government installed by the media the ABC is going to hit an iceberg and sink totally. We need to change its course before it is too late.

[Once again, apologies to my international readers for parochialism, but I suspect many of the points raised here will ring a bell with concerns about media in other countries]

Wearing uniform, wrapped in flag

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

The recent move of Julian Assange to the Ecuadorian Embassy to try to avoid extradition to Sweden and then hypothetically to the US, has been treated by the world’s media like a diplomatic episode of Big Brother. With the announcement that Ecuador may have granted him diplomatic immunity the attention shifted to how he could be got to the airport, and the media drooled as they contemplated OJ Simpson-style car chases for evening news bulletins, or SAS raids on the Embassy. All in all, the attention paid to Julian Assange since his arrest in Britain nearly 2 years ago, and in particular these last few weeks, has vastly exceeded the interest by the media in the original extraordinary effort by Wikileaks in releasing information on the gross wrong-doing of governments around the world.

Why is it so?

Remember the Iraq War, where the Americans discovered you could avoid all of that Vietnam War media unpleasantness by “embedding” journalists with military units? The journalist saw what he/she was allowed to see, reported what the unit concerned allowed to be reported, and in general identified as closely with their unit as if they had been enlisted military personnel themselves bound in loyalty to their group. Journalists got terrific human interest warm and fuzzy entertaining stories about “our troops”, the military got to totally control the message and avoid bad stuff getting out. Win-Win, at least for the winners.

From that point on journalists have become more generally “embedded” in the government/corporate/military world everywhere. Same logic on both sides. Journalists get easy “press release” stories to meet voracious demands of their bosses, the military industrial complex, and government, gets to control what the public is allowed to know and see. Win-Win, except for the public.

With Wikileaks Julian Assange tried to smash that cosy model. “Here is what is really going on behind the curtain” he was saying. This is the stuff the media isn’t reporting, and the government doesn’t want you to know. Here it is, masses of it.

Did journalists welcome this astonishing achievement with open arms? Not on your Bernstein. They shuffled their feet in an embarrassed sort of way for a while and then pretended nothing had happened. It was, after all, as if it had been suggested they give away operational plans for their military unit, had betrayed their boys. That “their boys” in this case were people they should have been speaking truth to power to was completely forgotten, by these journalists embedded with their rulers.

I didn’t predict this reaction. I’m sure Julian Assange didn’t. I’m equally sure no one again will try to go against the embedded media culture.

Back to sex scandals Mr Bean car chases. Woo Hoo.

Royal Progress

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by politics • Tags: , , , , , ,

There are Australian people who express the kind of adoration for the royal family of Britain (and of Denmark more recently) that others reserve for footballers and celebrities and religious leaders. When I see or hear one of these mad people, trotted out by the media every time there is the faintest whiff of a Republic in the eucalypt-scented air, I wonder about their powers of logic, just as I do when I hear a creationist or climate change denier.

As best I understand it, at the very moment in 1066 that William of Normandy planted his flag in the corpse of the last Anglo Saxon King of part of England, god infused his DNA with a quality of royalness. So, from that moment to now and well into the 21st century (assuming young Willie manages to put a bit of DNA into Kate), a thousand years later, anyone having a bit of that DNA passed on through, what, 50 generations, gets to be the monarch of Britain and to be worshipped by ordinary people without the DNA. I’m sure you can see a flaw or two in the proposition. In the first place, leaving aside the whole god-royal DNA thingy which might just have a tiny problem or two, whatever the merits of William’s DNA, his offspring had only half of it, their offspring a quarter, and as soon as ten generations we are down to les than one thousandth of the essence of William. I will leave it to you to work out where we are after 50 generations.

But even that calculation of course makes the assumption that old Normandy Bill passed on his genetic makeup in an unbroken line down to our own dear queen and beyond. Anyone with even a smattering of recollection of the British Monarch-based history universally taught in Australia when I was a lad will recall the odd hiccup along that smooth unbroken line of succession. For most of the 1000 years the one who became king was the one not with the most William DNA but the one with the big battalions, and bigger sword. There are interlopers, and sidetracks, and dead ends, and usurpers to such a tangled web we weave that the chances of even the slightest bit of royal William the Conqueror’s DNA remaining are zero, zilch, non-existent, less than none. Remember, even in recent times, that our dear queen is a fluke, not meant to hold the royal sceptre, get the sacred oil put on her head. That if she had a brother her life would have been like that of sister Maggie, since lacking a y chromosome stops the royalness of the DNA becoming realised. Similarly her dad wasn’t meant to have a crown, being the younger brother and all, and only first sons get the full benefit of royal DNA. But then old Eddie fell for a scarlet woman, and since a woman who isn’t a virgin can’t act as a receptacle for royal DNA because having had intercourse with a non-royal pollutes her uterus (a belief still held by some breeders of sheep and cattle), old Eddie had to pass on his royalness to Bertie, via a secret handshake, and take his woman, and their rather unfortunate political allegiances, away from the land that William once conquered for Normandy.

The queen’s great grandmother of course, she who passed on, as well as royal DNA, an unfortunate gene that wiped out potential royals by making them bleed to death, only became queen as a result of the unfortunate and barren circumstances of her two predecessors. And their predecessors were only royal by a fluke after sailing in from distant Hanover. And all that only takes us back some 250 years. So I suppose the question for monarchists is, if you really think you are worshipping the current holder of a bit of DNA derived from chance events (Harold of course being bloody unlucky, really, to be dead) in the eleventh century on the south coast of England, how do you imagine that DNA got to young William?

But maybe you haven’t thought through the DNA stuff. Fine. Do you think instead that there has been some kind of legal and constitutional passing on of the kingship like an extended torch relay? That, you know, “the king is dead, long live the king” and so on. Again, I hate to remind you, same problem as the DNA. Remember (of just a few moments) “my horse my horse, my kingdom” etc, crown found on the battlefield, dead princes in tower, Mary dying before she could kill Lizzie, the ride to Scotland to announce that there was a kingship of England going if the king of Scotland wanted it, James driven out by a Dutchman, the phone call to the Elector of Hanover, you remember all that? So sure, the winning king each time rewrote the rule books to ensure that everything was now, in retrospect, legal and above board, and the succession had passed on properly, but we all know that is bullshit, yes?

So given all the extra-legal shenanigans of crown passing-on at times (and I haven’t even mentioned the gaggle of royal consorts from all over Europe, including H8′s six attempts to find a suitable batch of DNA to mix with his) what current monarchists seem to be saying is this. George 6, nice enough fellow, not sharpest knife in the drawer and never seen as foreman material, but scrubbed up all right when the stammer was gone. Pity no son, but you can’t have everything, and not being pro-Nazi a big plus. So King George, hands to QE2, hands to C3 (no, you don’t get a vote, wanna have your royal cake and eat it too?), hands to W5, hands to baby bump. There, that’s a proper legal succession with not too much dilution of Bertie’s blood eh?

But if this is the structure of the monarchist world, then what the hell is it about? Of 30 million people, was Bertie Wooster (sorry G6) really the one you’d choose to be the boss of your country if you had your druthers? QE2, ok, mostly harmless, but put her in a room with a thousand of her exact female peers and I bet you wouldn’t pick her out. And then C3. I mean, he’s um, well, nutty, not to put too fine a point on it. If he’s applying for a job with you as office boy against a field of three, do you think you’d give it to him? Of 60 million people, is he really the best and the brightest?

And then William. Nice enough lad it seems, but if he had swapped identities with a fellow student at St Andrews, would you have been any the wiser? Helicopter pilot, great, uniquely for a royal heir he has a trade, but is he capable of anything but driving a helicopter and impregnating fair lady?

So here’s this bunch of imperfectly ordinary, at times dysfunctional, extended family whose only claims to fame is inherited wealth, the ability to say nothing at length, and, somewhere on their persons, a tattooed royal barcode ready to be scanned when earlier lives draw peacefully to close.

Sorry, but what the hell is it about this system that brings apparently normal people to tears and hero worship? Why on earth would you want this gaggle of unemployable people given the job of heading up not just one country but many including some on other side of world. What the hell do you imagine the advantage is of worshipping this crew rather than electing, every five years, someone with talent and wit, from among your fellow citizens, to do the job, such as it is?

Am I missing something here?

It couldn’t be, could it, that monarchists still believe in that other aspect of kingship that old Billy passed down to his heirs, that the way to rule people was to put the fear of god into them. That kings were not merely a man among other men, primus inter pares, but were in fact god’s representative on earth, ready to make a preliminary judgement on whether people had been naughty or nice before they even got to the pearly gates. That kings could heal people with a touch or kill people with a gesture, and god was behind them all the way. That behind every good king was a good, or a bad, depending, god. That getting a crown wasn’t just like getting the ultimate Boy Scout badge for kingship, but, held over a head by a priest, was a signal to god that here was a new God Rep, ready to be sworn in to the heavenly gang. That the holy oil with which the priest anointed kings was, like the biscuit thingy at mass, actually a real thing with real powers. I mean our modern monarchists, in Australia, in the year 2012, couldn’t actually still believe in the divine right of kings.

Could they?

Note – This post was inspired by a challenge from Matt da Silva on completing a post on royalty at his blog.

I have had other goes at this family of Saxe-Coburg-Gothas and their Australian cheerleaders on this blog
here
and here
and at last here

And Justices for all

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by politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Look forget about the Monarchists for a moment. The ones with flags and funny hats and collections of Charles and Diana commemorative mugs; the ones who camp out for two days on the street to possibly catch a glimpse of a gloved hand waving from a speeding limousine; the ones who spontaneously sing “god save the queen” or are in tears at the thought that they have been in the same public space as a person of royal blood. Forget them, I say (and yes, I know it’s not easy), and let’s look at the question of Australian “head of state” in a different way.

Oridinary intelligent thoughtful people (ie not monarchists) can still sometimes remain opposed to the idea of a “republic” in Australia. They will say “would you rather have the Queen or George W Bush?” and I admit that it is a fair question (more widely they will refer to the presidents of African or South American banana republics, suggesting that we are better off with the queen in, now that bananas are cheap again, a banana monarchy). Even more generally they will say “well, we have to have a head of state, so it might as well be the Queen, because elected presidents have too much power” (essentially the argument John Howard used to win the unloseable referendum on the republic). And so the combination of mad-brained monarchists and the apparently rational “we have to have a head of state might as well be the queen” middle-of-the-roaders, dooms us to another thousand years of the French-Scottish-German British Monarchy.

Look from time to time (not a lot of time) I mull over this issue when there is some media eruption over the sacred nature of the monarchy and how when people marry into it they (usually, except Fergie) acquire the magic DNA during a kiss on the balcony and become imbued with royalness themselves. I think of trying to explain to people that they are confused between the presidential style of executive government (US, Russia, France, China effectively, and, yes indeed, South American countries) and the Westminster style (Britain, Japan, Australia, Ireland, India). In the former the President holds the dual roles of head of government and head of state so an election sees the instant transfer of the embodiment of the state and its continuity to the winner of the election. In the latter the prime minister is there at the whim of parliament, and can be overthrown at any moment by a vote of no confidence in parliament or party room. In these countries then the continuity of the state, the person who hands the keys to the prime ministerial residence to the new leader, and who meets other leaders of countries as the symbolic embodiment of their own country, has to be represented by someone independent of the normal election cycle. Sometimes this is a monarch (Britain, Japan), sometimes a person elected to the role (Ireland, India) – and only to the role, taking absolutely no part, and there being no mechanism to take part, in the political issues and battles of the day.

But I tend to get tired about half way through that explanation and give up. If people don’t understand that there is absolutely no proposal by anyone to swich from Westminster govt to presidential govt in Australia then there is no way of reaching them.

But during the recent royal visit, as the Queen wandered around curing sickness by touching people or merely by being seen by them, I had a blinding epiphany. Why do we need a head of state at all? Or rather, to be more precise, why do we need a head of state who lives in govt house and puts the queen up in her spare bedroom and sits in the head of state box at Olympic Games? It is always confusing things (remember the arguments about arch-monarchist Howard going to the Games in Sydney). Essentially these days the PM accompanies the GG to any occasion where “Australia” is meeting “some other country”. The last time the GG played any role in sorting out a dispute in the actual political process and government of Australia was 1975 when unelected John Kerr so spectacularly injected himself into politics and corrupted our democracy for a decade.

Otherwise the GGs constitutional role has been restricted to making a batch of scones and handing a pen to the incoming PM to sign the pathetic oath of office (in which they essentially just promise to be PM). Then they all have a glass of best bubbly and stand around making small talk for 5 minutes before the PM goes off and does some real work. If we really do need someone to do that then there are any number of candidates around the country. Little old ladies, little old men, living in small country towns could be slipped a few dollars for scone mix every three years and the new PM and ministers could drop in to sign a stat dec to say they are going to be nice to poor people and not wreck the joint. I am referring of course to Justices of the Peace. Pick one at random out of a hat or a computer, ask for a volunteer. They don’t have much else to do except witness documents for the peasantry, they could easily do the same for the new government.

If there was some kind of constitutional crisis – and it is hard to picture what it might be, other than some even more complex variant on the last hung election – then I reckon any country JP could set the two opposing leaders down in the front parlour with a glass of home brew and bang their heads together until common sense prevailed. If it didn’t (and I only say this given the nature of the current Opposition Leader) then a committee composed of the Speaker of the House, the President of the Senate, and the Clerk of the House could be called in like a football review tribunal to make a final decision.

There you go. No foreign Queen. No Governor General. No elected President getting uppity. And a huge saving of money.

Some of which a grateful nation could send my way.

Miracle Play

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by politics • Tags: , , , , , , ,

News the other day, though not really news I suppose, of the teams of American and Australian (and presumably other) special forces troops operating a “kill or capture” program in Afghanistan. One such American team for example was responsible for killing bin Laden (capture apparently never considered as serious option).

But the teams wander around consulting a list. Bit like the Wild West wanted posters in a compact form I guess. Then they either arrive by helicopter in middle of night and kick doors down, or they call in air strikes, or missiles from drones. Kaboom, cross another off the list.

Except, “oh, sorry, same name different fellow eh, who knew?” Or, “what do you mean the one who gave us the name was a business rival?” Or “family members in the house at midnight. All dead? Shouldn’t have been there. Gotta expect collateral damage. Do our best to avoid civilian casualties. Yada yada.” Or “Wedding party? They have weddings? Who knew?” “Why do they hate us? Buggered if I know, think they hate our freedoms and way of life. Yes, that must be it.”

Reading and hearing this stuff gives you the feeling you get from first reading Slaughterhouse Five or Catch 22 – an overwhelming sense of sadness and despair.

These same “mistakes”, same conversations, could easily have been discussed among the Roman troops occupying Britain or Germany. Among any of the European troops occupying Africa, Asia, South America in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. German troops occupying France in WW2. Japanese occupying SE Asia. French and Americans occupying Vietnam. Russians occupying Afghanistan. And so it goes. On and on, over and over.

No imperial country ever learns from history. All believe that occupying soldiers will eventually be loved by the people of the occupied country if only you can kill enough of them. And destroy their houses and farms and cities. Great minds, the best and the brightest, put a lot of thought into coming up with plans like this. Not one of these great minds (obviously no Einsteins among them), in the last two millenia, ever seems to have had enough nous to carry out a thought experiment. Not even complicated, goes like this:

“Let me imagine that I live in country A, minding my own business, raising my family, tending a farm, creating art, working in a factory. suddenly country B invades my country. The incoming soldiers are from a different ethnic group, religion, culture, society. They proceed to throw out the government, justice system, all social structures, and administer the country themselves, in the process beginning to appropriate raw materials and factories for their own purposes. You don’t take too much notice, never having been much interested in politics.

But then my brother and all his family are wiped out when his house is blown up by a bomb dropped by a plane. Missed the local resistance leader’s house by just “that much”. Then two of your cousins are killed by a missile from a drone as they try to repair their broken down car on a country road. Then while you are at market one night in the city, soldiers break into your house at midnight, rape your wife, then shoot her, your children, and aged father who lives with you as they lie on the floor tied up, then set fire to the house and shoot all your farm animals. They have done this because a neighbour who has always wanted to take over your farm told them you were a resistance leader.

So you take your gun into the hills and join the resistance, vowing revenge. You kill some soldiers in an ambush. In their revenge the other troops call in a bombing raid on your village and then charge in killing every single person, men, women and children. More men from the surrounding area, relatives of the dead villagers, join the resistance group. And so it goes. Even when the occupiers manage to kill a real resistance leader he is replaced by an eager volunteer the same day – the plans for resistance are not even delayed.

There you are – a general story but substitute the name of any country and any occupying country and the script is the same. Yet not one of the planners ever seems capable of conducting that thought experiment to see how they would react in the same situation. Not one seems capable of running the script through to its inevitable end – the occupiers leave (the occupied have nowhere else to go) sooner or later. And so here we are again, running the same Miracle Play through its stylised script, the actors all knowing their roles, the ending certain, in Afghanistan.

What’s that saying about people who don’t know history?

Shades of the prison house

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by politics • Tags: , , , , ,

Yee Haw (spelling?!) – after 6 months, my final treatment today. Still some nasty tests at end of September, but I hope no one will mention the bone marrow in the meantime – three weeks with no medical procedures, first weeks since February, and I intend to enjoy it. With all due respect to the lovely nurses, treatment is not dissimilar (I’m guessing) to being in prison.

Didn’t manage to post today (I am not a left-handed poster sadly) but did do some tweeting.

However I was thinking about David Hicks (one of only 2 Australians held in Guantanamo Bay). There were Ruddock and Downer, again, sneering at Hicks, and defending, again, the Australian govt helping the Americans keep him there, and happy with the military tribunal system where Hicks in desperation after 7 years pleaded guilty to a nonsense retrospective charge, to get released.

But why, I wondered, yet again, were our conservatives so determined to severely punish Hicks, why did they hate him so much?

Think for a moment about their treatment of refugees. The most fundamental principle was that these people must remain anonymous, unseen, unheard, not individuals. The media and the public were kept away, in order for the government to keep treating them inhumanely they had to be perceived as non-human, an anonymous faceless mass of threats to the country.

Conversely when they were hot to trot on following cowboy George into Afghanistan and Iraq, and hype up the terrorist threat to keep people scared and voting conservative they needed not just a faceless enemy (though also useful) but an identified one. Who was the enemy in “1984″, Emmanuel something? Same idea, here was David Hicks, ordinary Aussie from Adelaide, a TERRORIST (he wasn’t), must be, in Guantanamo Bay, therefore must be. So anyone could be, we were all under threat, doubt it, there was picture of Hicks with rocket launcher, still in a terrorist prison, be afraid, very afraid.

And it worked, kept re-electing Howard, silly young Hicks, without even knowing it. If he hadn’t existed it would have been necessary to invent him. Which they did.

Makes me ashamed to be Australian. And sad.