Tag Archives: kevin rudd

Some Say

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , , ,

Journalists with secret sources a cornerstone of our democracy eh? Not so sure. Oh, I know that “I will never reveal the names of my sources” is the Hippocratic Oath of Journalism. And yes, yes, I know all about Watergate. But still, surprisingly, I have me doubts.

Seems hardly an Australian media political story these days, and reflected from there into Twitter, which doesn’t include “senior government sources” “senior ministers” “a number of backbenchers” “Labor insiders” “political observers” “a former power broker”, down to that deepest of Deep Throats the ubiquitous “Some” who frequently appears “saying” things, as a source of stories inevitably damaging to the government.

Now journalists defend this anonymity by arguing that it is an essential part of their trade to protect identity of sources otherwise no whistleblower would ever come forward. In this narrative (for it is just a narrative like all journalism these days) these intrepid journalists find honest insiders willing to lift the lid on some terrible political wrong-doing hidden behind closed doors, and the public must be kept informed.

But it is impossible to think of such a story in recent years. Instead the “whistle blowing” the “leaks from insiders” all have a single theme and purpose – to “reveal” and exacerbate whatever personal tensions exist within the Labor government. Either because it suits the agenda of a media proprietor, or of the Opposition, or of someone who wants to retrieve a Field Marshall’s baton from a knapsack in which, they believe, it was prematurely stored.

That is, this kind of Leak Journalism is not aimed at the public interest but at private interests in the Great Game of politics. The identity of informants, where they do actually exist (and I suggest some are, like the dead body in World War 2 Operation Mincemeat, not real people at all) , is not being protected because of the value of their information to the public, but to hide the nasty political games they are actually playing.

What’s more their anonymity has become a way of journalists inflating the apparent value of sources, of effortlessly increasing them in both numbers and rank to give a totally false impression of the meaning of a story. Pretending that the journalist has 50 whistleblowers, instead of one whistleblower 50 times. And a way of hiding secret agendas, political and business. And of disguising the informant who is a member of a think tanks, pushing a nasty neoconservative economic agenda on behalf of paymasters. And of pretending that “inside information” from the Labor Party isn’t in fact coming from a cunning Liberal troublemaker. And so on.

The media has been completely happy with fake whistleblowers, helping them, for example, to churn out endless fake “Rudd challenge” stories with no more effort than pushing a programmed function key on a keyboard. But the media have treated with contempt those ultimate real whistleblowers Assange and Manning. Their stories needed investigation, work, writing, and, more scarily, would actually involve speaking truth to power. A function once primary for journalists but no longer.

Anyway, think it is time for a change to this “secret informant” business. Some say all informants’ identities should be made public, in the interests of transparency, unless there is an extremely good reason for not doing so.

What do you say?

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.

Own Goaaaaaaal!

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

Yesterday in Australia we saw the media in full blown raw and uncut uncamouflaged action as they thought they were witnessing the successful culmination of another year’s hard work in unseating a female Prime Minister. And one reason for their campaign was out in the open, thanks to the magic of twitter.

From the moment the starter’s gun (in the unpredicted form of Wiley E. Crean) went off the journalists were in heaven. Finally they had an actual football match, er, sorry, leadership challenge, in the flesh, to report. It was as if one of those loony tunes evangelists, after years of predicting the end of the world at dates calculated by adding random numbers from hymn books, was suddenly told that a rather large asteroid was heading straight at Earth and would be hitting in a couple of hours.

Off they went, these gangs of football hooligans, sorry, journalists, must stop doing that, to roam parliament house looking for a spot of bovver, er, sorry, looking for some solid news to illuminate the story for the public.

And sure enough, these hard-headed, experienced journalists were soon coming up with real nuggets of KFC, sorry, gold. One bumped into a couple of Rudd supporters who said their man had the numbers. Others were reporting a scorecard produced by Sky which had Gillard narrowly ahead (was it 52-38, I forget) but with “9 undecided”, numbers which seemed to have been generated by a water diviner passing a stick over a list of caucus names.

Others, seeking, perhaps much more scientific psephology were quoting bookies’ odds. Again, I forget the exact figures, but they had Rudd as unbackable as Phar Lapp, and Gillard less likely to win than the Australian cricket team was to win the fourth test in India. The reporters were delighted to report that Kevin Rudd, finally arriving in parliament, was writing things down on a bit of paper. Who knew what, but, obviously, obviously, he was number-crunching, ticking off names as his supporters, water-boarding recalcitrants in the APH car park, advised him through a Protective Services style ear piece, that another former Gillard supporter, poor deluded fool, had come in from the cold.

Still others, uninterested in the boring facts and figures, and searching for human faces to put on the number-crunching faceless men, peered breathlessly down distant corridors where, Swiss clock-like, Stephen Smith was going in this door and out another, while Anthony Albanese moved in another, as different journos reported. Another had several Gillard supporters, probably ashen-faced, in the PM’s Berlin bunker, sorry, Office. Another had “twenty” Rudd supporters in with Kevin. Great heavens, were they holding the 9 undecideds hostage? Still, this “story” was rather spoilt by another intrepid reporter who managed to peep into Rudd’s office and realised that if there were 20 supporters in there they must be very small people indeed.

Anyway, after a lot of this kind of nonsense some journalists bleated, sorry, tweeted, that the Federal Police had, while, surprisingly perhaps, not having kettled the journos, had blocked off their access to the PM’s office and surrounds. And so the main fun was over.

Into the chamber where the next enthralling quarter of football, sorry, politics, was to be played. What were the team line-ups? Great heavens, the coaches were talking to the substitute players, now what? Wow, game on, great tactic from the West Abbott Albions, and totally unexpected, this’ll catch out the Red Devils, a non confidence motion. Wait, what, oh, has to be an SSO first, um, right, dunno much about football, but whatever works. Oh look, the Red Devil subs are playing with the Albion, it’s all over for Full Forward Gillard, she’s lost. What? A technicality means she hasn’t? Boo the umpire, shouldn’t be a woman, hey don’t know nothing about football. What? Game over? But they lost the no confidence … What? There wasn’t? Silly game.

Quick off to the change rooms, see the biffo of the second half.

What? No biffo? No contest? Red Devil wins again without even trying?

How to explain this to the public? Oh, easy, just like we’ve been explaining it last three years. The contest was real, Rudd had the numbers, Abbott wins, Gillard loses. Can just recycle all those earlier fantasy football columns, right? Right.

Who’s for the pub?

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?

Charade

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

My apologies for yet another lacuna in what should be a regular stream of blog posts. Sick again (and this blog now more resembles a series of House than a series of West Wing!) although only flu this time. Which seems to be going around, I caught it on twitter, apparently.

Any way, while suffering from “just the flu”, wrapped in blanket, huddled on the lounge, sneezing and coughing, I watched some DVDs. One, for about the fifth or sixth time in my life, was of that ultimate comfort food movie “Charade”. I originally saw it as a new movie, just out (a staggering 49 years ago. It was made fifty years ago, a fact, like so many fifty-year anniversaries including the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Beach Boys, and my starting university, I find impossible to believe. Why it was only yesterday … But yesterday’s gone, back to the story). It starred of course, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and some lesser lights, a marvellous pairing. After a silly beginning (I mean, who is going to believe that the husband has really left Hepburn for another woman? Yeah, right) it turns into this terrific kind of murder-crime-mystery-game, where the murder and crime are just kinda cartoony and incidental. Both the hero and villain (yes, ok, Walter Matthau is in the movie too. And George Kennedy. And a young James Coburn) change identities, in opposite directions, as the movie progresses. Grant has 5 different identities, if I didn’t lose count, each one perfectly believable, and the transitions logically explained. Even the glittering prize, the stolen money, is hidden in a quite different identity (no, I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it). And the wonderful, insanely addictive theme (yes, Mancini of course), also suggests shape-shifting identity in the way that a piece by Bach does. So there you are, if you haven’t seen it, get hold of it, do. Oh, it has the odd clumsy moment that reminds you it was indeed made half a century (gulp) ago, but just drift along in the stream with it and you will be rewarded.

Apart from taking my mind off the viruses, identity changed since the last flu outbreak my immune system adjusted to by the inexorable force of evolution, seeing Charade again made me think of modern politics. Once upon a time, says Old Man Watermelon (just keeps rollin’ along), you knew where you were with politicians, what you saw was what you got. Think of the presidents from Roosevelt right up to and including Bush 1. Agree or disagree with them, allow for their secret activities (especially Nixon of course), but you knew what they were. Take Eisenhower’s mask off and underneath he was Eisenhower. Ditto the others. Same with British and Australian politicians up to about the same time.

But starting with Blair and Clinton we saw the new “Third Way” (Blair) or triangulation. Billed as seeking an intermediate path between left and right extremes, this approach led to even more identity changing than Cary Grant. Both Blair and Clinton tried to be all things to all people, shifting identity depending on the audience, and consequently were nothing to anybody. GW Bush was both a compassionate conservative and a gung ho warrior, Obama was an agent of progressive change and a saviour of the big banks (as are they all, secretly, hiding that identity). In Australia first Rudd and then Gillard followed the same recipe. In Britain Cameron and Clegg seemed to morph into each other, separated only by tie colour, as they sold the most conservative government since Thatcher as being soft and caring. In the current US election year Romney went all the way to the Tea Party and beyond in portraying himself as the worst right wing bastard in the Republican Party (against stiff competition) while pretending he had never been a relatively progressive governor of Massachusetts, and now, having won the nomination, is sliding back again. Obama, one day launching predator drones to kill mostly innocent poor people, the next is talking health care to save other innocent poor people. In Russia, spared by the Russian equivalent of Diebold from having to do much to win elections, Putin and Medvedev don’t bother changing personalities, but actually change personnel as they waltz through the decades taking it in turns at top and second top jobs. At least this is an honest version of what happens elsewhere.

The US, Russia, UK and Australia, just like China and North Korea are not going to change much as President Tweedledums and Prime Minister Tweedledees revolve through the top jobs. But in Europe at least the chance of change, the chance of choice, seems to be at least partly active in the Mediterranean fringe of democracy. The removal of Berlusconi and Sarkozy from their respective countries seems to have had some impact in changing the identities of those countries. Greece recently had an opportunity to make a change but squibbed at the last minute and finished back at the place where they had begun. The danger for all those countries in financial trouble is that they have become places in which there is government of the banks, by the banks and for the banks. In fact it would be easier if the “financial markets” simply allocated banker technocrat leaders to each country. I guess they have been doing that for years anyway.

Hiding it under multiple disguises like the characters in Charade. Hiding the money trail as cleverly as the ex-husband hid the loot. But, in the end the bankers are revealed as the ones in charge in every country these days.

And democracy is the charade.

That’s Entertainment

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

Long long ago, as the oldest of my Watermelon friends may just remember, there used to be talent competitions in community and media. At Eisteddfords performers performed, judges judged, winners grinned, losers were praised and encouraged, audiences applauded loudly in appreciation.

Then the geniuses who produce tv programs decided this was all wrong. In the same way as they changed motor sport broadcasts from reporting winners to reporting crashes, they changed talent shows from having the winners being the entertainment to having the losers providing it.

In order to do this the losers would be increasingly humiliated, disparaged, brought into public contempt, driven to despair, driven, if at all possible, to tears, a human car crash. As long as every possible human emotion could be wrung from the losers, the actual “winners” of a competition were essentially irrelevant.

As time has gone by networks have competed against each other to make the humiliation of losers more extreme and more protracted in each successive show. The public demand for such spectacles is, it seems, as strong now as when the Roman public were given opportunity, thumbs up or down, to decide on life and death in the arena. Not so much circuses that marked entertainment, and decline, of the Roman Empire, but loser shows.

And so it is with us, as ritual psychological disembowelling becomes the standard tv entertainment in all “reality” and “talent” shows that fill broadcast hours on all networks.

But that left all the political stuff that the networks had some kind of public obligation to report. People would, after all, probably want to know who was going to govern them after an election. But it was all so boring, like an old-fashioned Eisteddford. Grinning winners about to form government, losers with stiff upper lips ready to form a “loyal opposition”. “Loyal Opposition” indeed, what sort of television did that make?

Hard to stump tv executives for long. If politics wouldn’t come to reality tv, then reality tv would have to come to politics, or, more exactly be brought into politics. And so it began.

Began with the destabilisation of an existing leader. Unflattering photos, odd pieces of film, some past “scandal” uncovered, carefully edited bits of an interview played again and again. Then we might find a disgruntled and very junior member of the party to make a criticism, anonymously of course, and describe this as “voices”. A former leader may be called on to prove they are still relevant by voicing an opinion, pretending to inside knowledge they no longer have. Opposing politicians may be asked for their objective views on the leadership of the other party.

Then in stage two we go into full scale rumour creation, where two people having coffee are photographed through a long range lens in sinister fashion; where an innocent glance is scrutinised by “body language experts”; where some policy debate (a good thing, right?) is turned into a signal of raging dissent and rebellion. Phoney opinion polls are sought and presented in the most damaging light possible. “Numbers” are said to be counted. Soon all this has an effect. The party decides the instability created by the media has to stop (believing that firm action will end it, ha ha) and there is a change of leadership. The media will milk this for all it is worth, close up images of tears on faces (family gathered around, hopefully also with tears), interviews where questions are asked not for answers but for emotional response, families of defeated leaders followed to school or shops hoping for angry reactions.

And then suddenly all that good television is over. Time to start again, and the whole cycle is repeated with new leader, the political party discovering, belatedly, that changing leader doesn’t stop instability (a media creation in fact), the instability having nothing to do with who the actual leader is, but merely being the signal for the media to begin a new round of destabilisation. Sometimes, and this is a bonus, the media may decide to bring a former expelled contestant (sorry, leader) back into the Big Brother (sorry, Parliament) House, and the twist will be that they may be able to gain full reinstatement, deposing the one who deposed them. Human emotion in spades. Hours, days, weeks of good television.

Neither the contestants (sorry politicians) themselves, nor the viewing audience (sorry, voters) have any more control over this process than the contestants and viewers of Survivor or Greatest Race or Beauty and the Geek or the X Factor. All are puppets, manipulated at the whims of directors and producers.

A lot of contestants and politicians, will be damaged mentally and professionally in the process, and democracy itself is the Biggest Loser. But Hey.

That’s Entertainment.

You may say I’m a dreamer

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

Imagine how different the last four years would have been if the mainstream media had enthusiastically supported the idea of providing a massive increase in school infrastructure, and a big boost to insulating homes to reduce energy costs? If they had got behind the programs, explained their purposes, published anecdotes about happy customers. Imagine if they had explained the seriousness of the GFC in simple terms and the reasons for providing a stimulus. Imagine if they had ignored the phony “protests” of the mining billionaires and explained to the public the reasons for the mining tax and its benefits.

Imagine how different the last year would have been if the mainstream media had got behind the idea of putting a price on carbon. Explained to the public in a series of documentaries, morning shows, talkback radio, the reality of global warming, the measures beginning around the world, the urgency, the need for us to play a part, the benefits of doing so. Imagine if they had promoted the health benefits of plain packaging of cigarettes and the tax on alcopops. Imagine if they had gone into bat against the self-interest of the clubs, and explained the damage of problem gambling and examined the situation in WA. Imagine if they had seriously hammered the cattle industry on animal cruelty and the need to halt exports until resolved.

Imagine if they had been positive about the great breakthrough that having a female prime minister represented. Imagine if they had written positive stories about her rise from humble beginnings and her intelligence, hard work, charm, warmth. Her ability to work with colleagues and independents, the enormous raft of legislation that has been passed in spite of the opposition tactics against a minority government.

Imagine if they had been positive about how well the Labor-Green coalition was working, and compared it to Liberal-National coalitions of the past. Imagine if they had run positive stories about the independents Windsor and Oakeshott and Wilkie, praised their strength of character and independence of mind under great pressure.

Imagine if they had ignored most or all of the foolish publicity stunts by Tony Abbott. If they had seriously examined the policies being pushed by the opposition. Imagine if they had paid attention to the unprecedented damage that opposition tactics were doing to our parliamentary democracy. Imagine if they had turned the spotlight on Tony Abbott Action Man and found out what kind of a person he really is. And the rest of his front bench.

Wonder why they didn’t do any of those things.

Wonder why they did precisely the opposite.

Punch and Judy

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , , ,

The News of the World scandal is major news everywhere except in the pages of the rest of the Murdoch press. Fair enough, I mean I think it comes under the heading of “dog bites man” “News Limited behaves unethically towards little people”, but I suppose having direct evidence that NOTW (and certainly others) were willing to damage the lives of families of murdered schoolgirls, terrorism victims, dead soldier’s families, all in the name of profit makes it a bit more newsworthy.

Also much has been made of the effect this affair will have on Murdoch’s bids for massively increasing his tv influence in Britain (BSkyB) and Australia (Australia TV, where astonishingly the govt is considering awarding him the contract to project Australia’s image abroad over the claims of its own national broadcaster the ABC). And much has been made of his direct influence on the political life of the UK through contacts with politicians, and the former NOTW editor being Cameron’s press secretary for example. Much has been noted about his use of newspapers to attack those who did not toe the Murdoch line, and to push for things he wanted (the Iraq War) and against those he does not (climate change). Consequently he has had a major, the major, influence on politics in the US, UK and Australia for a generation. With all due respect to the unpleasant press lords of the past, no one has ever had the obvious overt influence that Murdoch has had.

As bad as all that is, and it is very bad indeed, it seems, like phone hacking, to be only the small visible part of the iceberg. And it is the rest of the iceberg that is going to go on floating in the political shipping lanes, whatever the outcomes of turning NOTW into the Sun on Sunday, and the bids for BSkyB and OZTV.

A gangster moving into a patch has a template for how to proceed. You simply make an example, brutally, of some existing drug dealer, pimp, loan shark, protection racketeer, in order to encourage the others. From the time the mangled body is found your wish is their command as you take over the joint.

In Australia in 1972 the Murdoch Press, tiny as it then was, threw its support behind Gough Whitlam to see the first left-wing government elected in Australia in 23 years. The rest of the media had continued to resist (the Fairfax Press for example has famously never ever supported electing a left-wing government in its 200 years of publication) and it was Murdoch who had achieved the impossible. That was the first part of the lesson. Two years later the Murdoch Press turned on the Whitlam government, and its unrelenting and ferocious attacks led to an early election, where Whitlam just hung on, and then to the unprecedented and previously unthinkable event when the governor-general dismissed the government re-elected just a year earlier and appointed the Opposition leader into the highly advantageous caretaker position for the subsequent election. During that period the Murdoch Press attacks intensified in ferocity and the 1975 election saw a big win for the conservatives. All subsequent Labor leaders had been given a clear message – I can make you or, more likely, I can break you.

As a result they have all, either covertly or overtly (for example Kevin Rudd in 2007) sought Murdoch’s approval before seeking the approval of the voters. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a fly on the wall (a wall, perhaps, with a large photo of Whitlam on parliament house steps while the proclamation of his dismissal was read) during those agonising encounters where the small tribal chiefs met the Roman Emperor, I think I would have been so noisily sick as to attract attention and a fly swat. But I reckon the pattern would have been endlessly repeated. Murdoch telling the Labor leader what he would and wouldn’t permit from the items in the party policy document, the Labor leader ostentatiously crossing things out with a big red pen. Most times there wouldn’t have been as much left in as in a letter home from a British soldier in World War 1.

After a year or two of this, just as the newspaper editors instinctively knew what was wanted and didn’t need direct instruction, the Labor Party had removed so much that Murdoch didn’t like that they had become indistinguishable from the conservatives. Job done. Job also done in America and Britain. Oh there might be a few rough edges, new issues that arose, where a quick phone call, or a little chat behind closed doors, would quickly set out the new marching orders. But mostly it became true that no matter what party was in power in the three countries of greatest Murdoch influence the policies would match the ultraconservative neoconservative procorporate, antienvironment antiunion, antiregulation drown-government-in-bathtub views of Rupert.

No matter what happens on the surface in the next few weeks, this behind-the-scenes operation of the political puppets will continue. No matter what the people want (and those wants have in any case been carefully massaged by Murdoch over the last 50 years) the script of the political process always plays out the same way.

You thought Punch and Judy had free will?

Apples for the teachers

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

Heard both another politician and Rupert Murdoch calling for “educational reform” the other day and shuddered. It will always turn out to be not reform in the sense of making things better for children and teachers, the sort of thing us ordinary mortals mean when we talk about reform. Instead it will turn out to be based on the reform caller’s own school experience (little Latin and less Greek) which will have equipped them to be an education expert; or on some right-wing ideology hell-bent on turning schools into factories (profit-generating-factories) for producing good consumers and workers. Out will come gimmicks like NAPLAN, My School website, performance pay, vouchers, none of which will do anything except make our education system, once pretty damn good, worse and worse.

We might instead, if we were serious about actual, you know, reform, turn to other countries to assess their experiences in order to see which things have failed (all the list above) and what really works. Which brings me to Finland. That surprised you didn’t it? Top of the international education league tables for most of a decade. Students clamouring to get into university teacher courses. Massive numbers of applications for every teaching job. How do they do it?

All teachers have to have a Master’s degree, so teaching is equivalent in prestige to law and medicine. The highest-flying youngsters then started flocking to the profession because of its new-found prestige. Schooling is free (including free university education) and compulsory for all. No selection of pupils for individual schools. No school uniforms, and informal relations between students and teachers. No inspections of teachers (“They are academics and well-trained, so we trust them”), no national testing of pupils. Class sizes small (maximum 20 in first 2 years of high school for example). Pupils transfer to either an academic or a vocational school at the age of 16 after nine years of compulsory schooling.

The only part I disagree with is that because it is illegal to charge fees in the Finnish education system, even those schools that are run privately take their funding from the state. Hmmm!

But generally speaking the key seems to be to raise the prestige and training of teachers and then trust them to get on with the job.

Actually a prescription for success in most work places I suppose.

Time for the ideologues to back away from education. Julia and Kevin could visit Finland (as many education ministers from around the world are doing, most recently England’s Education minister) to see for themselves how the Finns have done it. Mind you they would want to be quiet and listen. I have a feeling in my chalk that the Finns would be stunned and disgusted by the “reforms” to education undertaken here in recent years by both sides of politics.

Flashman in the pulpit

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

Use of the human body (and illness) as metaphor isn’t new. Probably dates back to the moment when the first proto-hominid jumped out of a tree on the edge of the savannah, landed in the grass and said “That was one giant leap for mankind”.

Still, at the risk of seeming even more of a valetudinarian than I do already, I think there will be a lot more mining of medical metaphors on the old Watermelon blog before we extract the cannula and give them a rest.

Occurred to me that having what I have and receiving the treatment I am receiving is like being bullied. The old lymph cells have been bullying my body and now the nasty chemical cocktail I sit down to imbibe every 3 weeks is bullying me too. The latter though with the best possible intentions, rather in the way that a boy receiving a caning would be told that it was hurting the headmaster more than it did him.

Lot of bullying about these days. Bob Brown called the Press on bullying the Greens the other day, and immediately the other journalists all began bullying him even more for daring to suggest they were bullies. The radio and print shock jocks are of course nothing but a pack of bullies roaming at will. Heard one of them on a breakfast TV show the other day bullying Rob Oakeshott (not to his face of course) outraged, still, that the independents had supported, continued to support, in spite of all the shock jock bullying, the Trotskyite government led by Gillard. Shock jock-style bullies infest opinion threads on blogs everywhere, bullying the rest of us to ensure the planet warms up by at least 6 degrees.

There are bullies roaming school playgrounds, corporations bully their workers, mining companies and tobacco companies bully the government, police bully demonstrators, agnostics bully atheists, politicians bully refugees, creationists bully evolutionists, game show hosts bully contestants, gun owners bully non-gun owners, monarchists bully republicans, bloggers bully other bloggers, libertarians bully everybody.

Terrorists are the ultimate bullies with bombs. The IRA were at it again the other day – c’mon guys, really? – but there seem to be mad bombers everywhere determined to use terror to bully their way towards making the rest of the world agree with whatever it is they think they think. Using a wide definition indeed of “think”.

Which brings me naturally to religion. Natural home for bullies it seems. You join a religion and it comes with a kind of bully pulpit, a bully pass which not only allows, no encourages, you to bully anyone who isn’t religious, but all those who don’t belong to whatever splinter group of whatever religious myth you follow. If you can’t bully everyone else into doing what you think they should be doing you can at least bully them into not doing things you don’t want to do and don’t want them to do either. Especially women.

The other day, end of the world as it happened, some madman, with media echo chamber in tow, was bullying his followers so that they gave up jobs, gave him money, got rid of possessions, slaughtered pets, in some cases apparently tried to suicide and kill children, bullied them into believing that whatever madness was going on in his brain was real.

There are politicians too who seem determined to bully the real world into shape (Barnaby, Nick, looking at you). Bully the scientists first, especially climate scientists, taking a big stick the other day to Flannery and Steffen who had once again apparently failed to come up with the correct answer for how the real world works (c’mon guys, how many times does it take till we make you understand that the planet isn’t waming and if it was who cares). Some cardinal adopts the same approach. Apparently if you speak loud enough, carry a big enough sick, the conservative politicians, and their friends in high corporate places, believe, you can force the world to do your bidding. CO2 will stop being a greenhouse gas, the ice caps will cease to melt, the storms will turn into gentle breezes. But all the conservative politicians (on both “sides”of the mainstream political fence), adopt a bullying tone and manner towards any aspect of modern life with which they disagree. Poor people, schools, hospitals, refugees, workers, women, Aborigines are all bullied these days. No discussion of issues, just a hectoring of anyone who holds a contrary view on anything.

Which brings us, inevitably, to that Flashman-in-chief Rupert Murdoch. Story the other day, alongside ones about the Pope being a catholic, swallows flying south, and Queen Anne being dead, that “Rupert Murdoch has let it be known within his organisation that Australia needs change in Canberra and his editors were simply doing his bidding”. So all 21 million of us are going to be bullied by one man until we do what he wants and vote for Tony Abbott. Perhaps just enthrone him in a secret News Limited conclave, white smoke announcing that the new PM has been chosen. America has also been well and truly bullied by Murdoch and his Fox bully boys, which gave us George W Bush and the Iraq war, and, of course, no action on climate change. We were bullied into John Howard (himself a very able deputy bullier) and bullied into keeping him there for 100 years until Kevin Rudd dropped in on Flashman in New York in 2007 and handed over his lunch money, no argument.

They say that if you stand up to bullies they eventually see the error of their ways, take off the headlock, and hand back your lunch money with interest. Only, I think, if you have a current affairs camera team and bullying reporter in tow. Quite how you stop someone who owns 70% of the media outlets in a country bullying us all into submission I don’t know. All together now.