Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

"In 1975 as in 1964 I thought I had some things to say that many people believed, and that putting all this together in a book might encourage them. In the mid-1960s they had to speak up. In the mid-1970s they had to remember. I think that hundreds of thousands of Australians now have convictions about lack of leadership in Australia in general and the Howard years in particular. There should be a continued discussion well beyond the trivialities of parliamentary question time and the revolving news cycles. I hope this book will help concentration on what might really be going wrong with Australia and how, as it turned out after the mid-sixties and the mid-seventies, we might again get the chance to set things right." Donald Horne on his 2001 book Looking for leadership.

"We, the undersigned, believe that the Government’s policies abuse the human rights of the weak and needy, and contravene several international treaties to which Australia is a party. The policies are anathema to the concepts of basic decency and a fair go. We therefore call on you to ensure that Australia's refugee policy adheres, in all respects, to the terms of the international treaties to which our nation is a signatory and to provide permanent protection to all refugees." Tampa Anniversary Remembrance Committee's open letter to the Prime Minister

"As everyone working in the media knows, unless the defamation is beyond dispute, media organisations are often willing to gamble on the notion that the other party will blink first. It's only when you get them to the courthouse steps that they'll often back down. It's a policy which can cut both ways. Sometimes plaintiffs get settlements they don't really deserve because the lawyers figure it's cheaper to avoid the gamble of court. At other times, plaintiffs feel obliged to back down because their pockets aren't deep enough." Catharine Lumby

"There is no need to despair about the changes to cross-media ownership proposed by the Howard government. Whilst media diversity is a good thing for democracy, we are living in a time that is saturated with diversity of opinion, and problems in the future are likely to be caused by over-diversity, rather than a lack of diversity. The greatest challenge for democracy in the next century is for us to actively seek out opposing points of view, rather than simply trying to confirm our own existing beliefs.": Solomon Wakeling

Margo will be out of contact for the next few days in meetings and discussions with advisors to move forward on the longer term plans for Webdiary, including travelling interstate, and will not be able to respond personally to messages, questions or comments. In most cases, Hamish, Kerri or I will be able to deal, but if things really do need Margo to look at them personally, they may have to wait until Monday. Thanks for your patience if this affects you. Meantime, here's some updates on what's happening. David Roffey, GM Webdiary

"The Government will grant increased powers to law enforcement and security agencies to enhance their capacity to prevent attacks. Importantly, control orders will be available to our law enforcement agencies in circumstances where a person might pose a risk to the community but cannot be contained or detained under existing legislation." Prime Minister John Howard

"I did not trust what I heard before T2 and did not get tricked into tying up money in what was talked up then. More tempted this time? Not on your life. With Telstra's track record and the turmoil turned up in the rush to T3 you'd have to question whether you'd tip a toe in the water, let alone make a plunge. I wonder what the Treasurer is thinking today. Terrible timing? Terrific timing? Time to try some other tack?" Craig Rowley

G'day. Here is the transcript of the discussion between Fran Kelly, Glenn Milne and I which started to explore the multi-faceted and fundamental ethical issues confronting journalists in the wake of the Brogden matter. It aired last Friday on RN Breakfast. Thank you to the mysterious Webdiarist who transcribed the audio.

"Recently Australia's Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson, gave his qualified support for Intelligent Design (ID) to be taught in school science classes alongside neo-Darwinian evolutionary origins theory. The debate that has been occurring in the U.S. looks set to come to Australia. The fundamental question seems to be - is Christian doctrine forcing its way into the science classroom at the expense of scientific teaching? But is this the appropriate question? Ignoring those who contribute nothing more than mindless disparagement of religion, there are interesting ethical issues underlying this controversy." Phil Uebergang

G'day all you journos. I offer the position of Webdiary journalist for one year, all up payment $50,000 for an all-up payment to you of $50,000. In return, you get the freedom to showcase the best you can do as a journalist, with support from Webdiary experts, researchers, designers and all sorts of other talented Webdiarists. In other words, you would be the director of your work from beginning to end, including choice of headline! You'd report to me, of course, and we'd be answerable to each other and to Webdiarists for your work published on Webdiary. I'd take care of the legals. All applications will be totally confidential to me. I will email or speak with applicants if I am interested in their expression of interest, queries, jokes or other correspondence. If you'd like to engage in some preliminary banter, contact me here. Only I will read emails at this address.

"If New Orleans is starting to look like a Third World landscape, it is because this IS a strip of the Third World in America’s own backyard. Mississippi, with over 20% of its people living in poverty, is one of the poorest states in the Union. While many of the wealthy have been able to slip out under their own power, the poor have been left to fend for themselves. George W Bush’s response has been described as pathetic and cowardly; it is My Pet Goat II. It is now emerging that Federal funding to repair and improve levees and other emergency services was cut because of priority given to the Iraq war." Stephen Smith

"Most media groups are extremely loathe to print corrections. They're by nature defensive, partly because they don't want to undermine confidence in them, partly because there's effectively no accountability for their breach, and partly because they fear getting bogged down with complaints from relentlessly partisan players. Who do you complain to? What's the process for resolution? Suggest setting up and publicising a process for accountability, and everyone runs a mile. Apart from defamation law, we're not used to accountability, and we don't like it... As ethical questions have been raised and debated on Webdiary, I've realised that ethics - when laid on the table for open discussion between writer and reader - can be a tool of empowerment, not constraint, and a confidence builder, not destroyer." Margo Kingston in Remote Control: New Media, New Ethics

"The idea expressed by Sir Robert Peel in 1829 that police are not merely tools of government but rather are the people's police endures in Australia today, as does the theory of constabulary independence. The idea that police exercise a degree of independence in operational matters rests on the belief by judicial authorities that police in democratic societies should not be subject to arbitrary and capricious interference by the executive. While the theory is contested, the common and statute law has bestowed a degree of discretion and operational independence on police." Colleen Lewis

"Margo Kingston has a unique position in Australian journalism. She's one of our most senior reporters but over the last three years her focus has been a weblog on public affairs - Webdiary. Until last week, Webdiary was the property of Fairfax but no longer. After spending most of her career at the company, Margo Kingston is unplugged. We find out why she left and what she plans for Webdiary." ABC Radio National's 'Media Report'.

"Modern election campaigns involve research, preparation and long term planning that have created the sense of a ‘permanent campaign’. As part of this shift to constant and centralised campaigning, in office, governments are increasingly drawing on incumbency advantages to boost their re-election prospects. This includes increasing benefits such as postal, printing and communication allowances, electoral databases, media advisers, government communications units, and MPs’ office equipment and staff. But in particular, government advertising has been taken to new and extraordinary levels by the Howard government since it came to office in 1996." Sally Young

After the entrance of the Corby affair onto the national media and collective interest, which is still being played out in the appeals courts in Indonesia, it would be almost inexcusable for anyone not to know the severity of the sentences that could be handed (and usually are handed) out in Asia for drug smuggling offences. ... Thus when the story of the Bali Nine came out, caught with heroin, I immediately thought of the stupidity of running drugs through Asia, and the fact that they deserve whatever they get when found guilty.

"My own family is not untypical these days, and is a kind of New Zealand story: we are Pakeha, Maori, Asian, even African American. Some of us have been here 1000 years, some 150, some are newly arrived. But we can't remember which because we are together, we love each other, and we love where we live. We are all New Zealanders. And when people, as in this election, start Maori bashing, and Asian bashing, and treaty bashing, and Muslim bashing, and bashing single mums and so on: they're bashing my family, and they're bashing my friends, and my neighbours, and my society. They are bashing New Zealand and I won't have it." Sam Neill

There has been a view among political reporters that the private can be separated from the political. It’s the same as the view – once dominant and still prevalent - among sports reporters that what happens on tour stays on tour. As various cases of the past two or three years have shown in sport, that’s not really tenable. Perhaps it was the remorseful recognition that they had failed which prompted Sydney’s media to respond with the throttles wide open when they were upstaged from Canberra. It’s a question worth further examination because our democracy depends not only on the behaviour of politicians. The media have a proper role, too.

"The Islamic leader’s summit was established to make the very tentative first step in greater co-operation between federal authorities and the various Muslim communities. With thirteen hand-picked Islamic leaders showing up (Sheikh al Din Hilaly was a noticeable absentee), this small goal was achieved... The summit was a PR coup for all concerned but when it comes to the Muslims, especially young Muslims, living in Preston, Auburn, and Lakemba nothing much has changed. When it comes to feelings of resentment on Australia’s ‘Arab street’, the dramatic upsurge in dog whistle politics and feral journalism during the last two weeks has widened the divide in Australian society." Iain Lygo

"Australia's harsh measures of keeping people locked up 'forever' have permanently damaged hundreds of people and broken their trust in what Australia has to offer and the confidence in a belief in their own ability to engage with and in society on the deepest level of their being. Demand for life-long psychiatric and psycho-social support services for the long-term detainees was not a part of the Georgiou deals. Just like Australia ignores life-long support for those in the Aboriginal community whose broken personal cultures and lifestyles - damage entirely due to the encroachment of white culture in their regional areas and its violent superimposition on Aboriginal culture - have driven them into alcoholism, Australia ignores that the policies themselves are to blame for the fact that we owe it to the political prisoners of Howard's attempt to win the 2001 election to have a full program of restorative justice, no matter what it costs to the budget." Jack H Smit

When I was in high school our high school German teacher, Siegfried Ramler, who had been an interpreter at the Nuremburg trials got hold of films of the Holocaust and showed them to the student body. It was memorable alright; to this day I can still see portions of it playing in my head. His point, the world should never again have such terrible events and he wanted all of us to be aware of what a misguided leader can do to his own people and other people. It has stayed with me since the moment I saw it along with the lesson that the danger can come from anywhere, but particularly from within one's own society, as happened to Germany of the 1930s and 1940s.

"I understand that Fairfax has received a number of complaints from people who contributed to my former WebDiary on the Fairfax website. Those complaints relate to an email sent to those contributors directing them to my new Webdiary. I wish to inform everyone that Fairfax was not responsible for sending those emails, which were sent on my behalf solely for information purposes." Margo Kingston

"Excewz moy, but as a Fusheries Offica, I thenk ewe hev too mini mini cockles in that fushin’ vissal. Yes, indeed our lives changed when two passenger planes were hijacked and driven into the World Trade Center towers in 2001. But did any of us envisage that this new interest in 'border security' would lead to an explosion in so-called “reality” television shows?" Polly Bush

Who reads other discussion forums? Those who have sought good political conversation will know they are very rare. Well mannered inclusive unmoderated political and social internet discussion forums that actively seek to accommodate all views on the spectrum are like thylacine. We hope they are out there but does anyone have a screenshot? Those who understand the quality and rarity of Webdiary recognise that it is impossible to achieve without some form of moderation.

It's difficult when you live here in Adelaide to comprehend how much of a nexus to southern hemispheric activities our insignificant little city has become, and was possibly planned to be since the end of the Second World War. In 1947, in his novel following his theories of geosynchronous orbit and satellite-based communications, Arthur C. Clark presumed that Britain would be the supreme extraplanetary power because of her control of Woomera. According to U.S. Homeland Security Consultant Scott Bates, Adelaide was mooted as the centre of humanity's nuclear-winter survival outpost at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

"I hope that it will not be too late for Hicks, when our Senate resumes in September, for it to propose an appropriate opposition parties and independents’ consensus motion calling for due judicial process for Hicks either in an Australian or US civil court,  and registering a Senate view that the US military “court” does not meet that standard of procedural justice. Even if such a motion does not get the numbers to pass – and who knows, it might if more than one Coalition Senators abstains or absents himself/herself from the vote -  the very act of the Australian Senate voting on such a motion would send a powerful message in Canberra and Washington." Tony Kevin

"To be critical of globalism does not require an anti-globalisation stance, despite what some would have us believe (including the Howard Government). They'll go on pointing out that it's 'just trade' (which is really just the frame they prefer because it makes any opponent appear 'protectionist'), they'll carp on about inevitability (debunked yet again in John Ralston Saul's The Collapse of Globalism), and they'll smirk and say that it's nothing new (and we may ask: So what? Does that make critique of it taboo?)." Craig Rowley

Recently, my understanding of the nature of Webdiary and that of Fairfax suddenly and dramatically diverged, and as a result I ended my relationship with smh.com.au.

Webdiarists, please feel free to ask any questions you like about what happened and why in comments to this statement. I will answer all bona fide questions unless I am unable to do so due to legal considerations arising from the termination of my contract to write for, edit and publish Webdiary for smh.com.au for three years.

To suddenly uproot and take Club Chaos on the road to find a new home would be a mammoth challenge, and while many in the Club Chaos community seemingly embraced a Taking It To The Streets (TITTS) approach to life, whether the crowd would commute with the Pub’s relocation was always going to be risky.

Plus, the creation of a new kickarse pub meant the crowd would have to gather in temporary digs as the new and improved Club was built.

Yet Kingo had a dream - a field of dreams - that whispered, "if you build it, they will come".

"You just have to have an opinion and a desire to contribute its complimentary strengths to the constructive Webdiary mix. Nobody else on this planet can express the unique ideas in your head - claiming to know what you think, or aspire to, or mean, or believe, or hate, or are frightened by - except you. So long as you follow Margo’s house rules you are warmly welcome to do so. Share your ideas with the front bar crowd and you’ll soon learn why those who have been returning to drink here again and again for years are so loyal to the generous, tenacious, optimistic and bighearted publican leaning on the counter behind the bar."