Australians - What Are We? How Do We See Ourselves? How Do Others See Us?
Commonwealth Lecture, Australian National University
Monday 30 April 2007
by Malcolm Fraser
My remarks today will reflect on relationships with the United States and domestic issues which influence the fundamentals of Australia. There has in recent times been a major attack on traditionally accepted Australian values. This also impacts on our reputation in our region and in the wider world. This is particularly damaging because the Bush government is on the way out and, within the United States, those who have supported it strongly will, in the next Administration, be regarded as pariahs. This is also likely to apply to the current administration’s closest and most unquestioning allies.
Policies now applied suggest that the Rule of Law and due process for all people, regardless of influence, race, religion, colour or country of origin, is under threat. We used to believe that those in positions of political authority would respect and work to protect the rights of all Australian citizens. We now know that to be naïve and incorrect.
I would like to recall some changes that have taken place in the last half century.
The post war years were the beginning of a new age of enlightenment despite some serious backward steps. In spite of the difficulties and rigours of the Cold War and the dangers that that involved, much greater than anything we face today, it was an optimistic period. The United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were all established, collectively designed to establish a fairer and a more peaceful world. Colonialism would be outlawed. People would look after their own affairs. The techniques of modern economics gave hope to governments worldwide, that unemployment could be banished. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights came into being in 1948. Many Conventions were negotiated, designed to give legal force to its high aspirations, including the Refugee Convention which Menzies signed onto for Australia in 1954.
In Australia political parties did not play politics with race or religion. Political leaders of those years, both in Australia and in many overseas countries had experienced the depression of the 1930s and the terrors of the 2nd World War. They knew the world had to do better if civilization was to survive. They in effect established a new and more liberal age, a time of hope and optimism, a new enlightenment.
It was recognised that on sensitive matters of race and religion, those in authority had to give a lead and make decisions and that it could be unwise to ask for a popular vote. If the people of Melbourne had been asked if they wanted their city to become the biggest Greek city outside Greece, they would then have voted no. Now that it has happened they would overwhelmingly vote in favour of it.
If we had asked Australians in 1975/76 if they wanted to accept large numbers of Vietnamese and others from Indo-China, refugees from the war in which we had been an active participant, they would have said no. They would have been fearful of difference. The governments argued on ethical grounds that we had no option and broadly that was accepted.
In these years we did not have detention centres, which should more properly be called jails, because they have all the necessary attributes. Refugees were in the community, able to buy coffee, able to work. Because they seriously wanted a new home, they were not going to abscond. It was an open, liberal society. Multiculturalism came to be accepted.
Every migrant group that I have met has always placed Australia first, understands the necessity to abide by Australian laws and customs, but appreciates, I believe, the openness with which their old customs can still be celebrated. We really believed in strength through diversity and that the acceptance of diversity would bring Australians closer together.
What led to change? In the middle to late 1980s a debate was started about Asian immigration. At the same time a labour Minister for Immigration decided new boat people should be placed in what he called detention centres, in jails. The Liberal Opposition accepted that fundamental change. The harshness of our refugee regime begins from that point. It has been fine tuned and made significantly more inhumane in the years since.
Pauline Hanson came on the political stage. Many roundly condemned her for saying turn the boats back. When the current Government turned the boats back, it won the Tampa Election, a substantial change in attitude. An undeserved respectability was given to Pauline Hanson’s words.
We had forgotten that the right to free speech is not absolute. Without a sense of responsibility, of community, and of judgement, free speech can become divisive and destructive, as it has in relation to race.
One of the small reasons for change is that now opinion polls often drive policy. Both the Government and Opposition use their internal party pollsters on many issues to find out the basic views of Australians. Such polls can lead to extraordinary error, especially if the questions asked are ones about which there has been no public debate and which are therefore likely to attract an emotional and not a considered response. But all of this is not enough to justify or to explain the changed attitudes. Why have governments chosen to follow and not lead?
Political events in the Middle East and also Afghanistan were causing large numbers to flee. Upwards of 400,000 were arriving in Europe each year. 4, 5 or 6,000 came to Australia. At the time the Government was not doing well in the polls. It certainly needed an issue. The defence of Australia’s borders, proclamations about deciding who would come here or who would not, sought to arouse a chauvinistic response. Boat people were demonised as evil, as queue jumpers, as prostitutes, as drug peddlers, even as potential terrorists and as having no appropriate family values.
I don’t believe there was ever an explanation of the terrors from which these people fled, of Afghan families wanting a life for their female children knowing they would have none in a Taliban dominated Afghanistan. A father in such a family, if he had initiative and enterprise would do everything he could to get that family out of Afghanistan.
We sometimes forget the Tampa occurred before 9/11, much longer before the invasion of Iraq. The possibility of terrorists coming to Australia on refugee boats was only raised after 9/11. The terrible events in the United States of 9/11 occurred a couple of weeks after the SAS were placed on the Tampa. From these points on the politics of fear dominated the domestic environment.
What we do not know we often fear. What we do not understand we fear. People from a different religion we often fear. And what we fear becomes a threat. The politics of these issues was exploited by the Government and has bitten deeply into the Australian psyche.
This reminds me of the bitterness, even hatred, between Catholics and Protestants generated by Prime Minister Billy Hughes during the First World War. His actions over the conscription debates in attacking the Catholic Church and the Irish were irresponsible and scarred Australia for over 50 years. Catholics were accused of being disloyal to the Empire, of opposing the war against Germany, both of which were untrue. There were far too many who believed the unfounded allegations that came from Prime Minister Billy Hughes. Even in my lifetime I can recall people saying that Catholics are not true Australians because they owe their first loyalty to the Pope. That is not now said of Catholics but similar allegations are made against followers of Islam. The bitterness against Catholics was extreme and in some quarters has not entirely died.
Those in charge of our affairs today seem not to understand this experience. There have been suggestions that this next election will be the Muslim election, as a while ago it was the Tampa election. Too many in positions of influence have used language that creates a divide between the rest of the community and Islam. While the Pauline Hansons of this world cannot be easily contained, there is certainly a responsibility on government not to repeat the mistakes and the errors made by Prime Minister Billy Hughes.
The War against Terror is important, although it should not have been called a war because if terrorism is going to be overcome it will be overcome by wise policy, much better intelligence than we have had to this point and by good policing. But it is a threat and I do not want anyone to construe my remarks as denying that threat. Our strongest weapons against terrorism are our own principles and belief in liberty. We do not need to overthrow our principles. To the extent that we do, we give a weapon to the terrorist.
In your mind prepare two lists. One, what should you do to maintain a broad-based coalition in the fight against terrorism, of the kind open to President Bush after 9/11 and another list, what should you do if you wanted to reinvigorate the terrorist movement and drive the West towards a decades-long war against Islam.
On the first list I would have said to continue to act on our own principles, to maintain honest and open policies and to behave fairly to all people and to encourage strongly a peaceful resolution of problems between Israel and Palestine. Under current American policy that was never an option. The United States ran out of targets for its bombers in Afghanistan and then wanted a more emphatic demonstration of United States power and so it went to war in Iraq.
President Bush’s closest advisers, neo-Conservatives, foolishly believed that it was within America’s power to force political change in the Middle East and create a democratic Middle East in the process. Democracy imposed by force in Iraq would be followed by democracy in surrounding countries. It was from that point an aggressive war without analysis, thought or reason. The damage done to United States influence and prestige around the world has already been enormous and America still refuses to take the necessary steps without which an end to conflict will be impossible. An active, diplomatic engagement of all Iraq’s neighbours is critical to a final resolution of this unhappy conflict.
I am opposed to an arbitrary date being set for a full American withdrawal but only on condition that the diplomatic process is set in train. If it is not, continuing American military involvement will only lead to greater calamity, to greater disaster and to an even greater destruction of American reputation.
The war in Iraq has made it extraordinarily easy for fundamentalist groups to recruit would-be suicide bombers to fill the ranks of the terrorist armies. But it is not only from Iraq and from Islamic countries that such recruits can be drawn. The West’s attitude to Islam is now capable of being depicted as so antagonistic, so destructive and hypocritical that it is possible to raise recruits from countries such as the United Kingdom. When Prime Minister Blair says he has made Britain safe and the prosecution of the war in Iraq is fundamental to the preservation of British freedom, he shows how little he understands the consequences of his own action and the damage that war has done within Britain itself. It has also made it difficult for moderate Islamic Leaders to maintain their moderation, especially in the face of other breaches of principle by the West.
President Bush established Guantanamo Bay to enable the United States to put prisoners alleged to be terrorist beyond the reach of the American legal system, beyond the reach of the Geneva Conventions and beyond the reach of any element of international law. By executive decree, he established Military Tribunals which the United States Supreme Court struck down on the basis that the President had exceeded his powers. Congress passed a law establishing new Commissions, a law that has not yet been tested in the Supreme Court. It is certain, however, that that law could not apply to American citizens because the Rules of Evidence allow evidence that would not be accepted in the normal civil or military justice system in the United States and, for that matter, would not be acceptable under the Australian code.
The future of the Commissions probably rests on the judgment as to whether or not such laws can be passed in relation to non-citizens. Its Rules of Procedure are utterly inconsistent with the Rules of Procedure in the normal justice system of America or of Australia. The loose use of hearsay evidence and evidence obtained under harshly intrusive questioning is allowed. It is left to the President to define how far that intrusive questioning may go.
This is the system established to try David Hicks and other people from Guantanamo Bay. In my view it was a system designed to achieve a guilty verdict on the basis of evidence that would be totally unacceptable if applied to American citizens or to an Australian citizen within Australia. The circumstances surrounding the Hicks trial, if one can call it that, and the plea bargain support that view.
For around a year, perhaps for longer, David Hicks had been kept in solitary confinement, no access to the sky, to the outside, to other people, inadequate exercise, a lighting system controlled from without the cell and also, we are advised, temperature changes from extreme cold to heat, could be part of the regime.
There were attacks on Major Mori and his credibility and the way he was conducting the Defence, all undertaken by the Prosecution, even at one point implying that Major Mori could be charged. At the arraignment proceedings itself, Hicks’ civilian lawyers were barred from the process because they wouldn’t sign a blank cheque agreeing to rules for the conduct of Counsel, which the United States Department of Defence had not yet drafted.
These processes collectively were designed to put Hicks under intense mental pressure, perhaps for a very specific reason. While the United States Government, and for that matter the Australian Government, seemed to want, as Stephen Charles indicated, a guilty verdict, the evidence they had available, even after five years imprisonment, was weak and could not have been successful for a United States citizen in a civilian court or in a normal United States Court Martial.
Justice Susan Crawford, Head of the Military Tribunals, struck out the more serious charges, including the charge of murder. It was the more serious charges that were used by United States personnel, by the Government of Australia, by the United States Ambassador to Australia, to suggest that that Hicks was amongst the worst of the worst. Quite recently the Ambassador said that Hicks would kill Australians and Americans without blinking an eye. There was only one charge remaining, that of providing material support for terrorism. The maximum sentence for that offence is reported to be seven years. This charge was corruptly imported from the United States civil system, it was retrospective in its impact and the particular law, because of retrospectivity, would not meet normal judicial standards.
The United States authorities would not have wanted the weakness of their evidence publicly exposed, even in a fraudulent Military Tribunal. Even though cross-examination would have been extremely limited, it could still have exposed the secrecy by which evidence had been collected. The Defence would have exposed the fact that they were not properly advised of the evidence, of the means by which it was obtained, that it was in fact a very secret process, designed to achieve one verdict. If the process had gone to open court, each hour would have demonstrated that justice was not being served, that this was not a court of law. The best alternative for governments, with some semblance of their credibility preserved, was to have Hicks under such pressure that he would accept a plea bargain. This does explain the solitary confinement of over twelve months. It does explain the other pressures placed upon him, pressures which would have included the threat of continuing jail in Guantanamo Bay for twenty years or more. What person amongst us would not have accepted a plea bargain that achieved some element of freedom at the end of nine months?
This is made all the more evident in the final stages of the Tribunal process. Ten colonels had been flown in from around the United States to determine sentence, they determined the maximum allowed for that particular offence, seven years, only to find within fifteen minutes that they had been ordered to participate in a total and absolute farce. Within fifteen minutes they learnt that there had indeed been a plea bargain and the maximum sentence was nine months, less than many courts would give for a drunk-driving charge. They learnt that the plea bargain had been consummated in Washington, by-passing the Prosecution, by-passing the Tribunal and its Judge two weeks earlier. Whatever this process reveals, no sane person can call it an exercise of justice.
So David Hicks will be home by the end of the year, partially gagged. The gag order which was undermined by information provided to the British Government and subsequently published in his application to become a British citizen and subject to the same treatment as other British citizens formerly held in Guantanamo Bay.
And so this story comes to an end but at what a price. The main story is not David Hicks. The main story is a willingness of two allegedly democratic governments prepared to throw every legal principle out the window and establish a process that we would expect of tyrannical regimes. That our own democracies should be prepared to so abandon the Rule of Law for an expedient and, as I believe, evil purpose should greatly disturb all of us. But how many are concerned? Too many are not concerned because they believe that such a derogation of justice can only apply to people who are different, in some indefinable way.
Only the other day I was speaking with somebody who quite plainly believed that Hicks deserved anything that was meted out to him because he was what he was; the Rule of Law did not need to apply. For somebody who has done terrible things, why does he deserve justice? That denies the whole basis of our system, the necessity of a civilised society which cannot exist unless there is an open, predictable justice system that applies equally to every person.
David Hicks at the best was clearly a very foolish young man. He was terribly misguided and may well have done some terrible things. I do not know. But if our Government says he has had his day in court, he made a plea bargain, therefore he deserved what he got, it only emphasises its lack of commitment to the Rule of Law for all people.
If the Government believes it to be expedient, we now know that it is prepared to push the Rule of Law aside. That is a larger issue than the tragedy of David Hicks.
A number of Liberals have spoken out about these and similar issues in relation to asylum seekers or refugees, or people improperly treated in Department of Immigration detention centres. Too many have remained silent. Does silence connote acquiescence, acceptance or fear, being fearful of standing and saying what they know to be right? A Liberal who fails to recognise the central importance of these issues for the maintenance of a fair and just democracy, bears no resemblance to the Liberals of Menzies’ day and to the Party that Menzies founded.
We now have a growing number of people who appear not to matter to those in authority. Not only David Hicks, Cornelia Rau, Vivien Alvarez Solon. Not only our indigenous population whose problems seem low on the government’s agenda, but increasingly refugees or potential refugees. We know the government sought to excise all of Australia from our migration zone. In the process the government would have broken a promise made only last year to keep children out of detention. This time it was going to be detention in some offshore prison. Out of sight, and the government would have hoped, out of mind.
Because some members of the Liberal Party would not accept these changes and the Labour Party was prepared to oppose them, this particular legislation was withdrawn.
These are groups which, under current policies, have no adequate protection under the law. The administration has avowedly pursued policies designed to deny access to the law to increasingly large groups of people.
A civilised society is be judged by its adherence to the rule of law, to due process and the ease with which all people would have access to the law. It is judged by the way it treats minority groups. Australia would be judged badly. Today for a variety of reasons, but not least because the government has sought to set Muslims aside, discrimination and defamation against Muslims has been rising dramatically. Too many have taken the easy path and accepted the government's contentions that Muslims aren’t like us and therefore it doesn’t matter if discrimination occurs and if access to the law does not apply. We have forgotten that discrimination, once it starts, spreads. This situation is already leading to increased discrimination against Jews. If we do not arrest it, it will spread from minority to minority.
We would do well to heed the words of Israeli Professor Naomi Chazan in the recent Gandel Oration in Melbourne: “There is one standard and one standard for all, and the challenge that is posed by terrorism is how to defend the rights of those that we don’t agree with? ... How can we defend the rights, the basic human and civil rights, of those whose ideas we simply abhor? It is the system, the process, the courts, it is the measurement of justice that determines the nature of our civilisation.”
Our reputation as a successful multicultural society is threatened.
In other ways our legislators, both Government and Opposition, have transgressed. The new security laws, supported by both parties, diminish the rights of all Australians. I do not know of any other democracy that has legislated for the secret detention of people the authorities know to be innocent. You are not allowed to make a phone call. You cannot ring your wife or husband to say where you are. You just disappear. You are not allowed to ring a lawyer unless that is specifically conceded in the warrant for your detention. If you answer questions satisfactorily that’s fine. If you don’t, you can be prosecuted and go to jail for 5 years. There is a defence against that prosecution, if you can prove you never knew anything, it is not an offence, but how can you prove you did not know something if you don’t even know what they are talking about? We do not know how much these laws are used because the law itself prevents any public reporting or discussion.
There are many other things. We have control orders and preventative detention provisions reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa and which are almost certainly a serious error in the fight against terrorism. Both devices would forewarn any potential terrorist that a certain person has been blown. The cell or group would disappear. It would be better policy to continue surveillance, to collect evidence, hopefully to make a charge at a later point.
Some aspects of the Control Orders appear to be utterly ludicrous and counter to our national security interests. As I am advised, one Control Order prevented somebody ringing Bin Laden. If we seriously thought that person might have been able to ring bin Laden, we should have allowed him to do so, collect more evidence and perhaps pinpoint where Bin Laden was.
Last year there was been a report by a group, established by the government itself, to review the Anti-Terrorist Legislation. This review preceded and takes no account of later proposed changes to our refugee provisions.
The review emphasised that recent events have had a profound impact on Muslim and Arab Australians. The committee points out that there is a considerable increase in fear, a growing sense of alienation from the wider community and an increase of distrust of authority. These concerns are more likely to lead to an increase in terrorist activity rather than in a diminution of terrorist activity. The review committee strongly recommends that efforts be made by government to combat these concerns.
One of the themes of this speech involves the departures from the commonly accepted rule of law, which is the only real protection of civilised society. Another theme involves discrimination which so often flows out of departures from the Rule of Law. Unfortunately discrimination keeps spreading and is gaining a foothold in the wider Australian community. Such circumstances diminish Australian society.
Unfortunately, if economically people are reasonably well off, and if there is a belief that these issues don’t touch me, don’t touch my family or my friends then it is easy to conclude that these issues don’t matter too much. We should remember that as governments maintain support by playing on the politics of fear, so too they tend to exaggerate the fear and to expand the concerns of people.
This process leads to a further exaggeration of fear and to further alarmist reactions. If current polices led by the United States are to prevail, supported as the United States has been by Britain and Australia, then we run two risks. A decades long war against Islam with the possibility of extraordinary destruction throughout the world, and the possibility that our government will build within individual Australians a fear and concern of Islam that will take decades to eradicate.
Luxury
Phil Kendall, I think that as consumers people should be able to partake of whatever truths they are inclined to and to which they can afford. There are multiplicities of truths (and, admittedly, of lies) but it is usually possible to make a demarcation between facts and opinion. Judging from your comments you seem to be confusing the latter with the former. This is tedious but I suppose it cannot be helped.
All such material is a product and requiring of the labour of someone else. No-one is entitled to it but rather they ought to trade for it, in exchange for the fruits of their own labour. The question to me is not really of truth/lies but of quality. Lying is seldom necessary to skew something in the direction you prefer - like photography all you really need do is pick your angle. Quality journalism is a luxury (I don't believe in rights or entitlements) and as such it should be aspired to, in the way that all luxuries aspire to exellence. What people choose to consume and to believe is a matter of personal discretion. Some people have taste and others don't.
maritime metaphor - Wakeling
Subtitle: two ships passing in the night.
G'day Solomon Wakeling, and thank you for your short answer ("No,") to my question, namely Q: whether you are learning to report on the truth?
Then, there's your longer answer (a 'snip'):
[Journalism ethics: take a walk on the wild side]
I wonder how or who a seductive yet flawed pseudo-intellectual may influence in the groves of what academe, and to which purpose? Would it matter?
And what that might have to do with the price of fish... err, houses, say? (House prices doubled under the (self-titled) brilliant Howard/Costello economic management. We were sent to an illegal war on filthily premeditated lies; murder for oil. Ultimately, the greedastrophe threatens. Q: Why, Solomon, as a representative young'n, don't you give any appearance of even trying to save something, anything, from the bleak future we seem to face? Q: Is your world so comfortably rosy? A: When you can make a career-influencing choice to impress some female then: looks like it.)
Solomon:
[ibid.]
Order and equilibrium, eh? And harmless? With Iraqis dying like flies. Just who is protecting us from what truth, and why would we need any such protection? My own impression is that theAus, as one, if not the 'pack-leader' of venal MSM obfuscation, more often than not reports on anything but the truth (on murder for oil in Iraq, say); rather, it slyly corrupts of any whiff of the truth. How is that 'protection?' (Murdoch himself said that the then-proposed war stood to cut oil prices. Haw! More than doubled since...) Then there's the advertising ('retail therapy') and trivialisation ('foo-ball,' Hollywood/celebrity.) The mind reels at the disinformation.
Solomon, I'm supposing you stand behind your 'Journalism ethics' piece, after all a) you wrote it and b) you posted it, hmmm? I expect that there may be a few sheople® watching this wide-flat-screen WD channel. Sooo, since you're learning to target an audience, which one did you have in mind when you embarked upon your 'ethics' screed?
In particular, if you are wishing to sell something Solomon (i.e. yourself), wouldn't you wish to demonstrate how well you can communicate to the ultimate market, i.e. we, the sheople?
I'm reminded of James Bond: "I never joke about my work, 007!" - But what exactly is this, other than some sort'a (foolish? Sick?) joke: "Truth - and independence - are conditions that are earned."
Putting any and all 'bumpf'[1] aside, Solomon, I don't really think that you've answered my 3rd and most important Q: Whether voters need to or should know the truth?
To which I would add (assuming the 'right' answer, then as yet another reiteration; sorry but not too sorry) that if a) a properly functioning democracy requires the truth in order that voters may make sane choices, then b) is the (publicly financed) AusBC and SBS providing such truths? And if not, why not?
(I have heard the following theory: that (some? All?) employees in the AusBC and SBS see their time there as a stepping-stone into higher paid positions; that speaking 'truth to power' might destroy their proposed career path... perhaps you might care to comment, Solomon?)
Thanks in advance again & yours sincerely, etc.
-=*end*=-
Ref(s):
[1] Bumpf.
[blog about the UK Telegraph]
Journalism ethics: take a walk on the wild side
Phil Kendall, I am studying a bachelor Communication and Law, majoring in journalism. You ask if I am being taught to report the truth and I can honestly answer no. I am being taught to check my facts, grammar, spelling and legal situation and to write for an audience. A BA Comm gives student a broad education and gives an introduction to different areas in the professional communications industry, including public relations, advertising and even design, before going in depth in to an area of their major. It is a lot more pragmatic than people claim. There are subjects devoted to theory but they are by no means the emphasis, with post-modern theory forming a necessary but minimal element.
My future plans are an open question. Until very recently I had decided to abandon my communication degree in favour of straight law and was gearing all my efforts towards that end - I was working part-time in a law firm and volunteering 4 hours a week in a community legal centre, with monthly/bi-monthly shifts in another community legal centre. The reasons for my shifting decisions are complex and not really worth going in to in any detail in a public forum.
Originally I planned to study history rather than journalism but changed my mind to impress a girl (go figure) and because I thought it would make me more out-going. I lost the girl and have become a recluse, but nevertheless have had many adventures along the way.
I have attempted to publish two pieces of journalism in the Oz, without success. The purpose, nevertheless, was not aimed at getting published but rather in gauging their reaction to my work. I wrote in one Webdiary piece that Janet Albrechtsen had agreed to critique my work but this was not quite accurate. She had told me the process by which opinion pieces are published, told me that the ideal length was 700 words and that I could send my work to her for comments. There was never any mention of "critiquing" any particular piece of mine: this was shameless spin.
The version of Confronting Islam I tried to get published in The Australian was not the version that I posted on Webdiary but rather a more truncated, inflammatory piece of work. If anyone were to ask me if I thought it was worth publishing in a national newspaper my answer would be of course not. (It was written lazily and satirically, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing; I regret not making certain points clearer, that the US constitution holds nothing to be "self-evident" but rather that the US declaration of independence does, and that the two ideas fuse together in to normative notions of American constitutionalism. I also regret not having to cite Oliver Stone's Nixon as a source, but rather a source that I didn't actually use. Had I done this in a university assignment it would have bordered on academic misconduct, but, such is the privelege of the online world, where irony and play are permissable. My sources were quite clear in my comments prior to publishing the piece, for anyone who followed it. In retrospect I wish I had cited "Absinthe" as a reference.).
I say my work was not worth publishing in a national newspaper but I say that only in the abstract. My opinion of the news media - which had heavily influenced my desire to quit any journalistic ambitions entirely - was thoroughly degraded over a lengthy study of their content. I wrote to Miranda Devine to tell her that she was one of the reasons for my no longer wanting to be a journalist, because of her formula writing crap. I wanted to hurt her in the only way I could think how, by declaring my utter lack of faith.
My disillusion turned to iron with The Australian in June 2005 when they published a piece called "Monsters of the left make unseemly heroes", which, amongst other things, attacked Andy Warhol for producing portraits of Mao Tse-Tung that "did not fit the reality" of Maoist China. It was an utter, ignorant, literalist interpretation of Warhol that anyone familiar with the literature on him (I recommend Who is Andy Warhol? for the breadth of opinion contained in it, especially the portions dealing with the way Warhol undermined Castro through camp) would scoff at. Yet The Australian went right ahead and published it - worse still, the author, Richard Cohen, was from the Washington Post Writer's group, whatever the devil that is.
In this piece by Keith Windschuttle he criticises the National Gallery of Australia for purchasing one of Warhol's Mao portraits, despite the fact that Warhol was a vehement defender of Henry Ford style capitalism and, for purely commercial reasons, such a purchase was fiscally intelligent. Here is an article from the Oz that points out that Andy Warhol's work has the selling power second only to Pablo Picasso.
Here is a succinct summary of Andy Warhol's work produced in 30 seconds of research:
His work is about mass production and must be read in a certain context. It is true that he may easily be misinterpeted and his manner of speech, reminiscent of Oscar Wilde, puzzled and infuriated critics as much as it did enamour them. That some Maoists in Australia may have been pig-headed enough to misinterpet him (remember, alas, what Barthes said of the death of the author) is irrelevant. In 2005 a national newspaper with pretensions of being the defender of high culture ought, lest the devil himself tries to intervene, to be capable of a deeper assessment of such an influential artist. Its critique is essentially fascist - condemning that which it does not understand and focusing on the purely literal interpetation and comparing it to their particular world paradigm, to find it wanting. Stalin did it and now News Ltd does it. It does so riding on the back of the most seductive yet flawed pseudo-intellectual in the country, Keith Windschuttle, who is perhaps the most influential academic in the country.
The whole structure of the right-wing commentariat collapsed when it published that piece. It revealed itself as the most parochial, mass-produced, formulaic and thoughtless tripe imaginable, with the demands of the "market", whether real or imaginary, winning out over knowledge, research, and the Devil help us, the truth. Or at least an aspiration towards truth.
In the comments I compared my work to a piece by Andy Warhol, elevating low art, like the opinion pieces in the Oz, to high art, just as Warhol did with his Campbell's soup cans. Take me seriously for a moment. The structure and methodology of my work was purely biased, starting from a set premise, designed to indulge one audience and enrage another, built on convenient facts, ranting in style and malicious in its intent. I also tried to include a few seldom spoken truths, to demonstrate a touch of the artistry that does go in to this kind of work, even though its structure is fundamentally flawed. It can be half-convincing, at times, even though you know it is polemic. It does not operate to make large differences to a person's thought but rather, like advertising, can make small differences.
Media study often forgets fundamentals in its rush to politicise everything but one of the truths of newspapers in this country is that they are mass produced. I read a journal article recently about the way in which Hallmark tries to distance itself from the perception that it trades in mass produced and impersonal sentiment, promoting high art on a small proportion of its cards, to give the impression of quality, whilst the majority of their output is aimed lower. It tries to market itself as responding to human needs rather than as creating holidays for its own benefit (consider Mother's day and the kinds of pressures this puts on people - how did you respond to the corporate pull?) (See the work of Emily West). There are parallels in the new Nokia commercials that emphasise the emotions surrounding life. A lot of new advertising attempts at transcendentalism, and hides its mass produced nature. Nevertheless everyone gets the same Miranda Devine and it does not matter how rich you are, you cannot get a better Miranda. There was a time when mass production was seen as one of the "hallmarks" of capitalist success.
There were other motives; I wanted to transfer any resentment that might be felt towards Noel Hadjimichael, on to myself. It was a defence of Webdiarist Roslyn Ross, whom I felt was being treated like a witch-hunt. It was to dismantle the myth that Webdiary is biased (except in an inadvertent way, or because of the demands and preoccupations of the audience). I wanted to soften the reaction to Howard and the media and try and say what such figures seem to imply but never say, that they are tied to a particular audience, who are far more hostile and extreme than they are. They cannot say this because that would give the game away. As a creature that sits apart from the media-political complex, I am in a position to express that which is unexpressed. I have no purpose but to give the game away. The argument placed in the article is essentially that the media are not conviction writers, that they do not believe what they write, but that they are people too and they have their reasons. It was to express the uncomfortable thought that the people we support may in fact consider us to be their enemies.
I wanted, also, to play out a drama of cynicism, of a student who has lost faith in journalistic integrity and has been won over to the other side. I wanted to do that so that others need not. It is to create a narrative that others may see, live vicariously, and learn from. It is not that I want others to follow but rather that I want to demonstrate the pros and cons of taking this particular course. I understand the competitive pressures on students, who wish to enter a competitive field, and "Selling out" is almost an inevitable process. I wanted to pre-empt that, to show its effectiveness or ineffectiveness, to simply experiment and to explore.
In writing as I did, I hoped to prompt the proprietors of such an organisation as News Ltd to defend their independence and commitment to a multiplicity of views. I have seen a few, scarce traces of such a feeling in their comments. This is a tactic I developed when i was campaigning for a female high court justice. I wrote to the Attorney-General stating that for cynical, political reasons it might be of benefit to appoint a Jewish female to the post. I remember Ruddock coming out after the appointment to declare that he did not want anyone to doubt that "merit" was the only reason for the appointment. Now I am not a megalomaniac and do not think he was referring specifically to my comments, but rather towards a general sentiment of cynicism. Sometimes merely expressing things as they are can prompt people to better themselves.
I wanted to know, precisely, what this newspaper would think of me stating the situation as it is, and whether they would see the elements of satire in it, or whether they would treat it with a straight face. I wanted to record my sincere interpretation of a world in which those within the media and politics say things which they do not believe, for all manner of reasons, some of them completely justified, and see how people would respond to me. Like Warhol I wanted to draw out a facet of our world, enlarge and exagerate it to give it emphasis, then leave the interpretation to the unpredictable and heterogenous ocean of the public.
This is the response I received from Tom Switzer, opinion editor of The Australian:
Here is the response I received to my tendering of an article about the Heart Foundation, this year:
At first glance the use of the words "alas" is charming, as is the politeness with which I was rejected. Yet the similarity of responses is a touch troubling. It may even have been better had it been a mass-produced, computer-generated response, or even a mere cut and paste job. Yet the little discrepancies prove it was a personal - and yet bewilderingly machine-like - response. If we fear turning to robots this kind of careless professionalism will do nothing to quell that fear.
Yet the situation I describe here is not one that frightens me. I see it almost inevitable. The kinds of tactics that I see in the Right are equally prevalent in the Left (a fact commented on to me by the Hijabi I spoke to the other week) and in it I see our capitalist society operating as it must, flowering media to satisfy whatever markets exists, regardless of truth. My own ideas have been to view the study of communication through the prism of "National Security" and even in this propagation of untruths, inaccuracies and myths, our liberal-democratic society achieves its own kind of order and equilibrium. A blanket is thrown over us for our own protection. Though we are blind we are rendered harmless to ourselves and to others, by all the pretty soft musings of those who think like us and speak like us. Truth is, alas, something that we are protected from. We live in a world of censorship which is largely self-censorship. By definition, censorship means that "truths" escape and disturb us.
Yet, to throw blankets over people is not at all my intention. Yes, I deal in spin, yes I am unhorrified any longer by News Ltd, or any other bogey man's manufactured by the Left - but my longer ambitions are to live a truthful and coherent life. I think that requires, as a first step, to recognise the sea of lies in which we live. This is an ambition that is not quite so easy as you make it sound, as if reporting the truth were something natural and only prevented by deliberate manipulations. Truth - and independence - are conditions that are earned.
Such a comment is of course spin but it is nevertheless a lovely kind of spin.
dialectic - Wakeling
G'day Solomon Wakeling.
-=*=-
If my recall is correct, you are studying and/or wish to be a journalist - or something like that. If studying, can you tell us whether you are learning to report on the truth - as opposed, that is, to learning how to spin (aka slant) so-called 'news' for clients?
If my recall is correct, you tried to write an article which you hoped theAus would take up. Given that we suspect (Haw!) theAus of being a neoCon propaganda conduit, could you please explain why you would wish to have your work and name associated with such a propagandist rag, if that is what it actually is?
Apropos the AusBC (and SBS), how do you regard their performance, given that a) Tony ("Trust me!" - "I passionately believe") Blair is being forced to step down, and b) 'our' (fecklessly deceiving?) leader (equally as culpable as Blair in what I allege was/still is murder for oil in Iraq) is preparing to stand for yet another term, probably with another 'Karl Rove-ish' catchy election mantra like "We decide who comes here," or "Who do you trust?"
Would you care to opine on whether voters need to or should know the truth?
Thanks in advance & yours sincerely, Phil.
Oppression
Glancing at ABC's new comedy show Sideshow I was struck by the carelessness and insensitivity of the host Paul McDermott towards Islam. I was an admirer of his in the old ABC Good News Week days but he should know better. His opening in numerous, subtle ways conflated Hamas with Islam. I believe that free speech only exists in its exercise but this is a public broadcaster and it ought to be careful. I think comedy is an essential part of our national security policy, giving release to sentiment that is otherwise repressed, and giving us all a break from the comedy of horrors of the news media, yet if it is misguided then it can be complicit in the marginalisation of those who are already marginalised. It wasn't deliberate but it was poorly thought out and poorly expressed.
I think we ought not patronise Islam by treating its members as "victims", but there is a point at which criticism or mockery becomes gratuitous and without any sense of class. Islam is building a reputation as a religion that cannot take a joke, yet the kinds of jokers that we are normally subject to, with their guns and wars and bombs, tend to hide death behind their laughter.
I think the breakdown in relations between Muslims and non-Muslims has been a mutual failure, with a certain resentment dwelling up by non-Muslim Australians at a certain separatism and elitism suggested by Muslim people. Their is a certain sense in which more traditional Muslim people seemed to condescend to Australian culture, where by the holding on to their own culture seems always to be at the expense of adopting ours, rather than in co-operation with it. This is not something I personally feel, generally finding myself at home with Muslim people, but rather something I have observed in others.
Hyper-criticism of the media is, admittedly, a symptom of us ceasing to talk to one another. That does not mean we should not critique it but that we ought recognise the context of all of this, of a gaping hole in communication between different groups within our society. I read that Muslim women (who are, because of their dress, more conspicuous) feel like ambassadors for their faith and make extra efforts to be polite and kind.
This is something that has been forced upon them by an Australia that treats them as guests. It is oppressive to them - they ought have the right to be as bitchy as they like - however, all society is oppressive in some way. I am reminded of the work of Indigenous photographer Tania Major, where she points to the expectations of Indigenous women when compared to ordinary white women of the same class -they have to be prim, pretty and perfect, whilst white women are allowed to be raw and "primitive".
The comparison is not quite the same. One of my heroes in the Liberal party is Pru Goward and I remember distinctly when she declard that Hijabism is no more oppressive than high heels. If I could outlaw high heels, God help me, I would. I think women understand that they are designed to obstruct your ability to walk (or, heaven help you, run) but they often seem to miss the fact that if the bastards in the corporate world could, they would topple you over.
The expectations that Australian society places on Muslim people is a kind of oppression that has benefits, one that will, I expect, lead to the empowerment of Muslim people. Other religions have an essential desire to please within them, like Judaism and Christianity, and it has made them highly influential. The desire to please creates leaders, through academic and other successes. Seeking to be an ambassador to their faith is something that the view with pride.
Islam seems less eager to please and this is probably due to its history as a non-proseltysing religion with the purpose of settling internal disputes. It is inward rather than outward looking and this is probably one of the reasons it remains less influential, and why it attracts people who are alienated from the broader milieu. It is designed to strengthen internal ties whilst dismissing and mocking outsiders, seeing them generally as a threat to the stability of it as a unit. Most Judeo-Christian religions do this but in Islam it seems more extreme.
I would rather Muslim people overthrew all of their oppressors, both internal and external, but this is not the route towards empowerment, in the traditional areas of work, education and political influence. It is an ultra-comeptitive world and we should, ethically, not judge people for playing the game as it needs be played. Alienation is seldom liberating.
Oh, I do apologise
David R: "a completely untrue statement (nothing new there)."
Oh, thanks for that clarification, David. I just assumed that because I was submitting comments and they weren't appearing it was intentional on someone's part. Please accept my apologies.
David R: to repeat - we have no record of any unpublished comments from you whatsoever submitted since 26 April.
Censored
Jenny Hume: "That excludes of course Jay White, Geoff Pahoff, and C Parsons who seem to have deserted anyway of late."
We're being censored on a daily basis
David R: a completely untrue statement (nothing new there). The last post from any of these to be submitted and unpublished was from C Parsons on 26 April, and the one before that on 12 April, which is just slightly less than daily ...
How Howard is seen by an "Old Digger".
Under continued attack on Veterans by Howard's Ministers - this seems appropriate.
Written to the Canberra Times dated 15 August 2005 (id=101577)
I don't know "the old digger" personally or even if he is still alive. However I am sure I know how he would feel about the "Howard" Liberals covertly investigating Veterans for an excuse to invalidate their claims for a pension. But, perhaps they too will receive a "shiny medallion" signed by Howard in lieu of their entitlements.
"How do the Liberals get away with it".
I wonder what he would think of the draconian and unmandated Howard "working poor" policies of May 2007?
NE OUBLIE.
We Are What We Is.
Well said Ernest.
Do you remember that 'secret' free trade deal that we signed with the yanks? Well, apparently, it contained provisions that will make this kind of thing even easier.
Say goodbye to Hew Griffiths and say goodbye to the idea that Australian citizenship has any worth at all.
Vivian Solon, David Hicks, the Bali Nine and now Hew Griffiths. What a sinister and un-Australian government we have!!
Incitement to violence
Jenny, you take care. Good to see you have still got some fight left in you. I should make it clear that I do not think that Australian law as it currently stands is equipped to appropriately handle comments like those of Hilaly. I think revisions would need to be made to vilification and incitement towards violence laws in order to capture what he has said. Such laws are generally designed to protect minorities, with protection from minorities merely an after-thought, if present at all.
Even with the much maligned sedition laws, with their broad prohibition on encouraging violence within the community, I am not entirely sure our system is equipped to handle the problem of radical Islam in Australia. I don't think that Hilaly's public pronouncements on the rape of women should be legal in Australia, when you consider the grave consequences that may occur if other Muslims take his comments seriously.
I am not sure inflicting Hilaly back on Egypt is for the best, either. Egyptian women have fought hard and are fighting hard for their rights and they are not in need of a retrograde Sheik.
Customs
Jenny, you might enjoy Anne Applebaum's piece from the Washington Post on politeness and Islam. She argues that since Western travellers defer to Islamic customs whilst overseas, Muslims should do the same in Western countries, at least in certain professions. Such a course necessitates that people value politeness over religion, however, I think we can take comfort in the fact that Islam itself values politeness.
Freedom of religion is, of course, one of the hallmarks of Western liberal-democracy, and one of the few rights protected by our constitution, but nevertheless it will have limits. Freedom of religion ought not allow any particular group to impose itself on our public institutions. Muslim people must, and generally do, defer out-dated (and illegal) practices in Islam if they want to live in our society. Revocation of citizenship and deportation, as Waleed Aly has said, won't work when the Islamic extremists are "home-grown". The level of "foreigness" ought not be a measure of the extremity of religious conviction, but rather should be judged on its content.
I think that the problem of "Firebrand clerics" as the media has dubbed them ought to be dealt with by Australian criminal law, under incitement to violence legislation, or, alternately, under anti-vilification legislation like Hilaly's comments about women.
My university is, evidently, in the news. I can assure you that according to the grapevine there was indeed no gun, merely a threat to retrieve one later. The male in question is said to have over-turned a table and verbally harassed some girls, for who knows what reason. Students were relatively blasé and in good humour about the evacuation, but they nevertheless left the scene promptly and as directed. Students and staff offered one another lifts, for those of us waiting for the shuttle bus, and everything seemed to be handled professionally. There was, nevertheless, a rumour that the evacuation message did not occur until half an hour after the event. This I can neither confirm nor deny, having been utterly oblivious to its having occurred.
Thanks Solomon
Solomon, thanks for your comments and the link. I agree home grown extremists of whatever shade should be dealt with under Australian law, but I do think we should have the capacity to strip the Hilalys of their citizenship and deport them. If we are going to be hated for booting them out, I am sure we would also be hated for gaoling them once they cross the line.
Sorry I am tired now and do not have time to engage at length, much as I would like to. I have not seen the news but will check it out tonight.
Cheers. I am still not back on top health wise. But I follow what you write with interest without commenting.
The lady vanishes
I noticed that Fairfax's archives disappeared, too. It happened very recently. Thank you, Craig, for posting the link to Pandora. I often find myself going over older material that I and others have written. It helps me piece together my own history, which is, for various reasons, in pieces. The internet creates an illusion of an historical record but sooner or later the confines of 'virtual space' come in to play and material disappears off your search engine. Sometimes you cannot even find a reference to it.
Memory is unreliable, with moments of your past that are important seeming closer than they are, and moments that are grey or uninteresting seeming far away. I can imagine nightmare scenarios where the fluidity and multiplicity of the online publishing world could manipulate your sense of time and of history. Newspaper archives in the past were dated and unlikely to be tampered with. The internet as a piece of history is endlessly tampered with. Its very nature as a medium of communication is that it can be changed. It is an eternal soft copy. More likely than deliberate erasure of data is inadvertant erasure, with the demands of the various markets exerting pressure on the online world to behave as people expect that it should - endlessly, irrevocably, in the 'now'.
They say that the creation of the telephone left a hole in the historical record, as people gave up writing letters or sending telegrams. The internet promises an extraordinary historical record but fails to deliver. It notices everything but soon forgets. I wonder if, perhaps, it will induce a kind of mass Alzheimer's on the public. When all our many thoughts are recorded for us, memory ceases, from day-to-day, to be important. Which makes us vulnerable when our external, collective memory is deemed not to be a priority and erased.
I find in speech I talk from memory and make extraordinary errors. I remember the substance but not the detail. Unfortunately much substance lies hidden within the detail. I am accustomed to being able to check the detail with a moments notice, and, when I am not in such a position I struggle to keep my mouth shut before I can verify the traces of fact or fiction that swim in my memory.("You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is. You're a f----g child" - David Mamet's Glengarry Glenross).
Sometimes I adopt a conversational approach to a medium like this, which is sometimes appropriate, and sometimes not. In conversation we speak from memory and don't check our facts and sources. It is how rumours and myths are spread, and, is perfectly natural. The omnipresence of fact-checkers on the internet, eventually, enforces a kind of ultra-professionalism that would not be required in any professional environment where "leads" are brought up in a "Round-table approach" and then dealt with thoroughly afterwards. I think under this ultra-professionalism, coupled with mix of brutality and flattery of the criticism that follows anyone who ventures in to this territory, can induce a certain personal destruction.
From what I have observed from my distant vantage point, the Margo Kingston story is the one of personal destruction - but more profoundly, it is also one of self-revelation. All destruction is really revelation. The medium is connected closely to our own thought processed and it peels away artifice, manners and customs usually associated with the more "mediated" real world, which seeks to censor undesirable elements - coarse language, criminal behaviour, sex and sexism and allow us all to work in manufactured peace.
Multiculturalism itself is a kind of state-enforced censorship of our society and in opposition to freedom of expression. That does not make it wrong but it is, for the love of God, what it is. Censorship is not just about published material but more profoundly about behaviour. Anti-discrimination laws for the workforce, mean that a person's behaviour and their thoughts, may be divorced from one another. That which you feel becomes different from that which you openly say. It is at odds with psychology which often seems to view mere expression as having a positive effect. It is also at odds with the notion of freedom of association.
Malcolm Fraser seems part of the school that wants "harmony" and "tolerance" which are fine sounding words that mask a regime of censorship and moral intimidation. It requires that we be professionals when in a public environment, whether it be a school or a workplace. It intends to turn the desert of public life in to an oasis for minorities, whilst the private world may remain harsh.
I wonder if the emphasis by Muslim women on discrimination at work, is, at heart, because of a preference for the impersonal and rigid public world, in which they have rights, when compared to the private world, where friendships and associations may be harsh and unfriendly and where there is no over-riding regime to make people behave as they ought. I can still see a kind of isolation in that. Of course I cannot speak for anyone else, let alone people from a group of whom I cam clearly not a part, however I think even in general terms there is a desire by minorities merely to enforce standards of behaviour on to the world, rather than to want to engage with the sources of discrimination.
The law is, as I said so many years ago, a brute instrument. When minorities get their hands on such an instrument I think their reaction can often become one of triumphalist glee against their 'enemies'. Though, in truth, if we are to create a truly harmonious and tolerant society it is not going to be the law that engineers this but rather by communication, coexistense and mutual understanding - to recognise that we are not enemies, it only appears as if we are.
Fraser and principle
Craig Rowley, Malcolm Fraser says:
This comes from the man whose government encouraged the Indonesian military (read Indonesian government) to invade East Timor in 1975. In the resulting genocidal bloodbath, something like 200,000 East Timorese died. This policy was continued by the Hawke-Keating government that replaced Fraser’s in 1983, so I am not “playing politics” (whatever that term means) with the issue.
It would be refreshing if before mounting a lecture platform and giving yet another sermon on the unrighteousness of others, Fraser were to talk a bit from his own personal experience of the way the expediencies of the moment can lead governments to make totally unprincipled decisions, and how governmental fear (in this case of upsetting and antagonizing the Indonesians) can lead it to throw its basic principles of support for democracy and the rule of law out the window.
Fraser could definitely speak with authority on that.
Born from within
Craig, I can agree with Fraser on some things but not his views in regard to Islam and terrorism.
I don't think the likes of Osama bin Laden were having too many problems getting recruits for their terrorist activities long before the invasion of Afghanistan and the Iraq war. And it seems to me that no one here has come up with any real ideas as to what the Americans were supposed to have done about those training camps in Afghanistan and the Taliban after 9/11. Just let them be?
Had 9/11 been allowed to just pass without military intervention then I think it is naive to think that bin Laden would not have been even more emboldened to commit even greater atrocities. And it is too simplistic to say that the causes that drive the bin Ladens are the so called crimes of the West.
Whether people like to admit it or not, there is a fundamental clash of religions going on here and the society that many of the adherents of one seek to foster flies in the face of fundamental human rights as we in the West perceive them. Those young men in England were not disenfranchised out of work young men with no future in an alien society that rejected them. Quite the contrary. It was their fanatical and uncompromising beliefs that led them to reject the values of the very society that had given them the opportunities and freedoms they enjoyed, yet they set out to bring as much destruction to it as they could involving mass murder.
Having lived in a Muslim country with no contact with anyone outside of Muslim society for over a year I learnt 30 years ago just how rigid and uncompromising Islam is. As such it has no place in western society unless its adherents are prepared to set aside much of what it teaches because there is much in Islam that is simply incompatible with western values, freedoms, customs and laws. And if you chose to go and live in a foreign country then the onus is on you to adapt. Those who are refugees should as far as possible be resettled in countries with whose culture they have some affinity, not in those with which they are going to essentially be in conflict.
When people say you have to address the causes that lead people to become terrorists in order to fight terrorism, again I think they are being naive. Islamic terrorism is not going to go away no matter what the west does and no matter what the outcome is in Iraq or between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Why? Because religious fanaticism does not need a cause. It is born from within and fuelled from within. And Islam provides a very fertile womb.
And finally, I do not believe that talking to fanatics achieves anything. You have to as far as possible impede their activities if those activities are destructive to others, by whatever means are necessary. And seeing settlement of ME issues as the solution to Islamic terrorism is far far too simplistic.
Fanatic
Far far too simplistic is seeing no possible solution other than "fighting" forever in a clash of cultures.
Some solution focused ideas came out of conversations on the Bingo! thread and I'll pick those out to share here as time permits. There is no way I'll just take the far far too simplistic option of saying it's all down to "us" needing to fight a never ending religious war that's all the fault of "them", and in doing so jump on the bandwagon and get all jingoistic shouting yeah Go Bush!
All due to Bush, far too simplistic
Craig, but why not add, and it is far too simplistic to say that it is all down to "us" for that is the message that seems to me to prevail amongst the majority who post here at the moment. It is far too simplistic to lay all this at the feet of George Bush and dangerous to do so.
The message that comes through loud and clear here is that we are the ones at fault, we have created Islamic fundamentalism and fanaticism and so we have to peacefully work to confront it as it plots openly to destroy us and our way of life. Well I don't buy that for one minute simply because it won't work. Islamic fanaticism is uncompromising. It has no peaceful resolution except its own final victory. It cannot be reconciled with our values and way of life. It will only die when the majority of those affected by it stand up and are counted, and are prepared to fight against it if necessary.
Those mostly affected by it at the moment in Iraq are fellow Muslims as were fellow Christians in Ireland over many decades. If we want to see just how destructive Islamic fundamentalism can be then we only have to look at those thousands dying each month in Iraq, victims of it. But we too are also affected as we see many of our civil liberties eroded in order to combat the threat it can, has and will continue to pose. So we have to be vigilant and pro-active, not passive and reactive in dealing with it. That might mean that we have to look closely at our immigration policy.
In the past we imported Serb/Croat tensions, which broke out into violence and which simmer under the surface to this day. Do we want to import Shia/Sunni tensions by mass immigration, whether legal or illegal, of those warring sects into our society? Do we want to import fanaticism? We should think carefully about that.
France was not involved in the war in Iraq and opposed it vigorously, but it faces just as big a security threat as any other western nation from Islamic terrorism, and already has much social unrest amongst some of its large Muslim communities, fertile ground for radicalization. Do we want that in this country? Germany faces equal risk. As does Italy and Spain who have already quit Iraq. Quitting Iraq is not going to change anything.
You cannot engage with fanatics unless you are prepared to share their uncompromising views and vision, and structure your laws and society to suit them. And the more we accomodate Islam, the greater accomodation its more fundamentalist adherents over time will demand.
How long do you think a Christian priest would survive if he went over and railed against Islamic society in the way Hilaly does in Australia? That sort of thing would not be tolerated for one minute and he would no doubt be executed, hung from the end of a crane like that 16 year old girl In Iran, or flogged as those in Saudi Arabia who dare to go against the social laws as dictated by Islam. Why should we tolerate that man's views and utterances in this country? The more we tolerate them the more he is emboldened and the more young people will likely be influenced by him.
I think you will find the majority of Australians if polled would say that Hilaly should be stripped of his citizenship right now and deported. If we tolerate fanaticism in our midst then prepare for more of it. Hilaly is secure in the knowledge that our society does not allow that he be summarily imprisoned and then hung. But we can ensure we have the laws in place to strip him of his Australian citizenship and can deport him and the likes of him whenever we deem it in our security interests. If Howard wanted to win the next election I believe that deporting Hilaly now would buy him a lot of votes.
If Hilaly wants a restrictive Islamic society then he should go and live in one. There are plenty to chose from and he should take those who subscribe to his views with him.
Now since no one here seems to believe you combat Islamic fanaticsim with force, do you all agree that we should peacefully strip Hilaly of his citizenship and deport him, or do you think we just let him go on radicalizing more and more young Muslims until the inevitable chickens come home to roost. The problem is it is our children and grandchildren who will no doubt have to deal with those chickens. Not us.
As a Christian I can acknowledge that organised religion has a lot to answer for and the organized religion that poses the greatest long term threat to western society is Islam. We do have to take some of the blame for its radicalization but not all, not by a long shot. And the solution does not lie with just us. It was born from within and only from within can it be really defeated. Islam needs its own Reformation but that is not going to happen in our lifetime, if ever. So we on the outside can only fight against its more radical elements, using whatever means are necessary, both peaceful and with force if necessary. If that means deporting radicals from this country then bring it on I say before it is too late.
I am not an intolerant person. I have lived in a Muslim society for over a year and while doing so respected all its customs, dress code and restrictions on women. I studied its religion, read its Holy Book and its book of Laws, the Hadith. I doubt that many here have done likewise. I believe we have the right to expect the same on the part of Muslims who choose to live in this country. If they cannot do that then they should not be here. An understanding and respect for the Christian religion and traditions of our society should be just as much a requirement for citizenship as an understanding of our laws and history.
But all the professed atheists here will have a real problem with that won't they?
Frankly I believe Christianity should be taught in Islamic schools and Islam (and not just Islam) should be on the curriculum of Christian and State schools. If that were to happen we might have some chance of mutual acceptance and tolerance. But religion in schools these days is a no no. We may pay a high price for that secular correctness one day.
At the end of the day however if we want to retain the way of life that we enjoy, then there will be times, as there were in the past, that we will have to fight for it, literally.
Oh and by the way, I do not agree that we or the Americans should have gone into Iraq, as evil as Saddam Hussein was. But I do believe the Taliban had to be dealt with, simply because they were prepared to harbour Islamic fanatics and provide them with safe havens to pursue their destruction of western society.
Far too simplistic indeed
Why not add ... and it is far too simplistic to say that it is all down to "us"?
Because when you consider it thoroughly and cease using the far too simplistic formulations, Jenny, you'll find that "us" actually includes those you'd forever claim to be the uncompromising "them".
And besides, laying it all at the feet of Bush doesn't seem to me to be what anyone, let alone the majority here, are actually doing. Bush is blamed for the things (bad decisions) he should be blamed for - but that's not all things. Please, there's no need for the straw man.
Now, Jenny, I could go through a Fisking exercise on your 1,200 plus words, in which you turn the us-vs-them (good-vs-evil) metanarrative into a neat local "exclude them, eject them, exile them – they are evil" policy, but I'd really rather not.
Instead, I'd rather develop a better understanding of your point of view and so I've a few questions for you in two sets:
Set 1 - On your understanding of fanaticism
Set 2 - On your policy prescriptions
Not back in school Craig
Craig, I am not back in school and obliged to sit your exam and I do not intend to so oblige. But primarily because the questions are framed in such a way as to distort what I have said.
I set out my views. They are straight forward. I have not, as you seem to be suggesting, advocated a blanket policy of exile, exclude and reject them. But I do believe we should better screen those who want to come and live in this country. And those we do admit we should ensure receive the appropriate education to enable them to understand our values, culture and our religious beliefs, and to enable them to integrate into mainstream Australian society, rather than form exclusive groups on its fringe.
Nor have I advocated a blanket resort to violence in order to confront Islamic fanaticism, from whatever sect of Islam that it arises. But nor do I advocate appeasement and a weak response when that fanaticism is directed at us and our way of life. A weak response has just as much capacity to incite more of the same as does one of the use of force.
Do you really think Hilaly is an asset to our society? I do not and we would be far better off without him and any like him. Why should we tolerate his pushing hate and intolerance of our way of life as he does and continue to enjoy the privileges it affords him? Pushing hate can incite criminal acts. So do we just punish those who commit the acts and not those who inspired and/or incited them? I think not.
So yes, I have no problem with retrospective laws per se. They may well be necessary to deal with the Hilalys in our midst.
And while on the subject of retrospective legislation, I note that John Howard is now going to pass laws that will allow those who break UN sanctions to be tried for breach of those laws. That tells me that those AWB executives and any others who were involved in the kickback scandal are not going to be able to be tried because there were no laws existing to try them under at the time of their alleged offences. Well I think they should be brought before the court, even if that means passing the proposed laws retrospectively to enable that to happen.
But I assume you will disagree with that. So they will no doubt walk away and enjoy those millions of dollars they got when they left, courtesy of shareholders like me, not forgetting the damage done to their company and those wheat farmers whose life savings were invested in it. So I think where appropriate, retrospective laws should be able to be passed.
Laying it all at the feet of George Bush is not what is happening here? Well you could have fooled me. You may be a bit more objective but the general thrust of comments is pretty clear. That excludes of course Jay White, Geoff Pahoff, and C Parsons who seem to have deserted anyway of late.
Now I am not going to get into an online quarrel with you. For one thing I don't have the time nor currently the energy.
Not seeking to quarrel Jenny
Jenny, please accept my apology for asking you questions in a way that has come across as some kind of examiner's test.
When I look back and reflect on what I said I can see that I was, in part, writing in reaction to your initial "far far too simplistic" jibe.
I am genuinely interested in better understanding your point of view and that's why I've asked those questions.
It's your prerogative as to whether you answer them or not. It'd be great if you could perhaps take one at a time over time.
And If I were to narrow down to one question it would be: What do you understand of the psychological processes that come to play in a person's shift to "fanaticism"?
As I've said many a time before, the thing I most like about Webdiary is the opportunity to learn what a range of people think and why they say they think things are that way.
A difficult one Craig
Craig, it is that question that I have been giving a lot of thought to over the washing up! And I did think that and the question about retrospective legislation were valid. I have stated what I think about the latter.
As to what does go on in the mind of those who turn fanatical in their beliefs and then seek to impose them on others, I suspect it probably differs from individual to individual. I am sure there a lot of studies going on on that very issue right now. There are obvious and identifiable common denominators in countries like Iran, the Palestinian territories, and Iraq but what motivates a young Briton with everything to lose: family, job, future and his or her own life, to go down that path is hard to get a handle on. While they may claim sympathy for their fellow Muslims in those countries, I do not think it is as simple as that. If they were so concerned about their fellow Muslims, why are they so silent on the fact that the greatest victims of Islamic terrorism are in fact their fellow Muslims.
Young people like to feel they belong and that their lives have meaning. If they do not they will likely gravitate to a group that will accept them and satisfy that desire. If they gravitate to the wrong group then the outcome can be very bad, as we witnessed with those two young girls in Melbourne recently.
A young Muslim feeling isolated in a foreign country would I think more often than not seek solace through his mosque and religion. A church is the first place I would go under such circumstances.
There he/she might be easily influenced by a fanatical Imam pushing his own agenda, to go down the path of terrorism, to see the society in which he feels isolated or alienated as something to destroy. That is why I think the Hilalys of this world are more than just big mouths.
Some probably arrive at the decision to turn to fanaticism when they find they simply cannot accept the values and customs and way of life of the society in which they have chosen to live. Their beliefs will not allow them to integrate so they may see trying to change the order of things by whatever means as a means to an end. So they go off and train with the Taliban and once there they are easily indoctrinated.
The problem is that the greater the difference between people in terms of their religious beliefs, their culture and their customs, the harder it is for them to integrate. And why wouldn't that be so? We all cling to what is familiar and we are likely to cling harder if we are in an essentially very alien environment.
Language barrier is a great divider so I believe all non English speaking immigrants should be given whatever time and resources are necessary to help them master the language as quickly as possible. We need to be pro-active in reducing the isolation that people might feel by addressing such obvious issues. But that is still no guarantee that a person will not become a religious fanatic.
Suicide bombers are mostly young men from what I can see. We do not see a cross section of age groups as we saw in those who mass suicided at Jonestown. So young Muslim men in particular are clearly very vulnerable to being influenced by radical preachers and leaders. And of course some, like those who attend the Madrassas in Pakistan and elsewhere, are indoctrinated from a very early age - you know, the Koran chanting young children, hour after hour. It is not hard to indoctrinate very young minds, and once indoctrinated, they are very easily manipulated. So indoctrination no doubt plays a big part.
I cannot really answer your question with any authority. Nor even think clearly when I am tired. And yes, WD is a place to exchange ideas and try to see things as others might see them. I may come back to this and your other questions later.
BTW: I would be interested to hear whether you think those AWB executives should be called to account even it meant under retrospective legislation. It won't happen of course, not after such issue was made by Howard over the Hicks case on that very score. But should we rule out completely the notion of retrospective legislation?
Cheers for now.
AWB, Retrospectivity and Retribution
G'day Jenny, on AWB and retrospective application of the law, I take it you're talking about the new legislation planned by the Howard government:
Gee ... remember Jay White saying the scandal was a "beat up" and arguing over and over again that AWB wasn't "sanction busting"?
Jenny I'll have to spend some time considering your question and come back to it.
In general, I'm against calls for retroactive criminal law as I believe that putting a prohibition on retrospective law-making contributes to the stability and certainty of our justice system.
In the specific AWB case I see a need for me to review the facts and think through once again all the arguments for and against the retributive theory of punishment, because it seems to me that in making his recommendations Mr Cole had in mind strong deterrence - not retribution.
Howard, Downer and Vaile broke the law.
G'day Craig, I remember quite clearly the media reporting that the Cole inquiry recommended the prosecution of 11 AWB executives, isn't that correct?
Since when did the Cole "Royal Commission" require specially legislated laws to deal with crimes of which they have been judged and found guilty by a "Royal Commission"?
I also remember that Mr. Flugge, the gun-toting crook, warned Downer that if he (Flugge) was prosecuted, his Barrister would bring Downer to the stand and cross-examine him?
Since then, the matter was put on a "no" burner!
As a signatory to the UN, the federal government of Australia is responsible to see that Resolutions are enforced and, to fail to do so, is surely a crime of International proportions and ridicules the purpose of being a signatory at all.
Like the Howard government's continued breaches of the International Declaration of Human Rights.
What we are seeing here is the continued extreme criminal duplicity of the Howard "New Order".
We have watched our citizens prosecuted by foreign governments, especially America, who is even now judging another Australian for drug peddling in some country ostensibly NOT under their dictatorship.
To our disgrace, we sat by for five long years until Hicks finally caved in to the torture of the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay and the scheming of the Howard "New Order".
I refer also Craig to The Age article dated 29 November, 2006, by one Natasha Cica. And I selectively quote:
And now, Howard intends to "craft a suitable law" which will be claimed as NOT retrospective, and therefore, is his excuse [and only an excuse] for not prosecuting as the inquiry recommended.
It is a typical Howard insult to our intelligence that, he now claims unable to do anything because the criminal conspiracy of "providing material support to a Terrorist" is only retrospective in America where an Australian citizen could be so tried, tortured and punished.
But of course, while Howard, Downer and Ruddock were perfectly satisfied that Hicks would receive a "fair trial" under those conditions, the danger to them from the Cole inquiry has suddenly caused the need for a new [and not retrospective] set of laws. Fair dinkum.
IMHO the sad truth is Craig that, the "New Order" criminals will never be brought to justice unless Howard and his minions are removed from a position of authority which makes them unaccountable.
Howard does not allow open discussion - transparency - broad inquires and, most of all, referendums, but he now claims that he listens to the people! Fair dinkum.
I believe that the next election will be more of a referendum that Howard hates - for us to decide on Australia, it's people, it's honour and dignity, our future as a Nation and the resounding NO to the Howard "New Order"and their criminal acts protected by the world's biggest terrorist, the Bush Administration.
When we vote, let us remember all of the past practices of this U.S. sponsored "New Order" and consider our history of defending our country against exactly the Military/Corporate to whom Howard owes his allegiance.
Sorry Craig - I ramble - my Wife says that I am totally passionate in what I believe.
Cheers Ern G.
Bad business; "Blind" Boss
G'day Ern, it's ok to ramble on these topics. I think you'll find we share common ground on the AWB scandal. If you've time have a look at the post I co-authored with Richard Tonkin back in February 2006. It was called Follow the Big Money - Bad Business with Baghdad.
John Howard is known as The Boss within his circles. I reckon the way he runs his
firmgovernment, the way he covers for hisexecsCabinet reflects some of the bad business culture we saw in the AWB case.What I was trying to say earlier today is we've got to carefully consider the retrospective legislation question Jenny (G'day) has raised. It has implications beyond the AWB case. I'm not saying that the AWB execs or the DFAT bureaucrats (not to mention Ministers and their minders) who failed to ensure no sanction busting occurred should get away with this and avoid appropriate penalty. I just think, in line with so many more qualified to speak on things legal than I, that retrospectively applied legislation should be carefully considered, and reserved for certain extraordinary circumstances (like the Nuremberg laws) if at all. I'll pick this up in a reply comment to Jenny.
Retribution, and retrospectivity when it suits
Craig, I don't think it is a case of retribution, but rather accountability for wrongs knowingly committed, with appropriate penalty.
As I recall Cole recommended that the "eleven" he named should be investigated to see whether there had been any breach of existing laws. It would however seem from the proposed legislation that what laws did exist were inadequate and would not allow the obvious charges that should be laid, to be laid.
So they walk, and I am sure that suits the Government as I read where one said if he was charged he would talk. Can't have that can we?
But given the enormous damage that our reputation suffered, and the 50% plus fall in value of the shares of shareholders, a large number of whom were wheat growers hit by the worst drought in history, I think a case could in this instance be made for the legislation to be made retrospective. If people knew they were doing wrong, and they clearly did know, then they should be able to be charged, under retrospective legislation if necessary. But that is just my opinion and the legal profession and civil libertarians would no doubt go into a spin. And I can the see risks.
If the Northern Territory Government can pass retrospective legislation to overturn the ruling of the Court in order to retrospectively legalise its approval of the extension of that zinc mine (forget its name), thus walking over the interests of the indigenous people there, then what really is the difference? Retrospectivity seems not to be an issue if it is in the interests of a big mining company. Nice one, eh!
Just some passing thoughts.
Fairfaix Digital purged the archive
Fairfax Digital seems to have closed access to all the Webdiary material originally appearing on the .smh.com.au site.
So here's a link to the Bingo! post and comments in Pandora - Australia's Web Archive established initially by the National Library of Australia.
Making a big mistake
Mr Fraser is spot on:
And how long will it be before he could of used Australia in the example? Could be sooner rather than later should Costello make a big mistake and smirk whilst reaching for that dog whistle.