Category Archives: My war with The Australian

The Australian – with its smug, exhaust-breathing, free-market, right-wing-catholic, warmongering, denialist, neocon orthodoxy, its near-monopoly ruthlessly exploited to effect regime change, coupled with insane but apparently sincere beliefs that its own coverage is balanced but that it is besieged by an omnipotent left-wing elite – makes me mad. I’ve been writing letters to them for a while. They publish 5-10% of them, but not if I seriously challenge their modus operandi, the “invisible hand”, or Janet Albrechtsen. So I thought I’d put them all here, lightly edited for context.

WikiLeaks hyperbole

The plain facts of the ill-advised and naive decision by some WikiLeaks Party members to meet with Bashar al-Assad speak for themselves. Therefore, there is no excuse for the hyperbole and misrepresentation of the event in The Australian’s editorial (“Assad’s WikiLeaks fan club”, 1/1).

As was almost universally reported elsewhere, the group’s explicit aim, however clumsily executed, was to express solidarity with the Syrian people, not the regime as the editorial repeatedly asserts. In fact, they were highly critical of the regime, and made it clear that their opposition to Western military intervention is not out of sympathy for the regime but out of fear of the consequences for the country’s people. For those with short memories, this was a hotly debated issue in the shadow of Iraq and is still far from clear-cut.

WikiLeaks itself did not know or approve of the meeting, also contrary to the editorial’s implication.

Traditional journalism’s hostility towards WikiLeaks is no secret, despite or perhaps because of the fact that they have exposed some of governments’ darkest secrets. Whatever the merits of that view, this type of self-serving, dishonest analysis is exactly what drives the public to seek out new forms of media.

Echo

The Australian’s editorial (“Workplace reform must be on the 2014 agenda”, 31/12) demolishes the absurd socialist notion that workers’ wages should be enough to support their families, because that would mean some of them may become unemployed, and thus unable to support their families. Worse, penalty rates make it hard to get a table in restaurants at the weekend.

This argument is made even more convincing by quotations from authorities on the subject – two of The Australian’s own in-house columnists. Is there an echo in here?

Look it up

Andrew Phillips (The Australian, 31/12) applies the word “hypocrisy” to Malcolm Fraser because, along with the rest of the world 35 years ago, he preferred Robert Mugabe’s popular party to Ian Smith’s white minority regime in Rhodesia, and like most other people, now criticises Mugabe’s despotism. In my dictionary, that is no more nor less than a consistent opposition to tyranny.

A year of contradiction

It has been a good year for modern conservatives. With the Murdoch Press and in particular The Australian completing its slow transformation from a grumpy, cruel but fair conservative masthead to a ruthless ideological manipulator of truth,  it has been easy for neoliberal ideology to seep into daily discourse, and from there into government across the country. But the sheer ubiquity of neoliberalism has brought its internal contradictions into sharp focus: 

This year, conservatives have insisted that free speech is so overarching that it includes a right to racially vilify, yet sought to crucify whistleblowers like Assange and Snowden and academics like Jake Lynch and Larissa Behrendt whose speech offended them, and to neuter what little of the media they cannot control, like the ABC.

This year, conservatives have claimed to despise elites, yet sided with the powerful. They freed global money to circulate, yet fortified borders against human movement. They opposed democratic state action even to soften harsh markets, yet thumped their chests for imperial wars and Orwellian surveillance. They upheld rights to property, but not to drinking water.

This year, conservatives have mouthed Enlightenment values like reason and personal autonomy, yet have rejected science and decried secularism. They have denied equal rights because of religious dogma. Of the three pillars of democracy, they have commandeered liberty for the purpose of commerce and even claim to have invented it, but discarded equality and fraternity.

Modern conservatism is a Frankenstein’s monster: radical-authoritarian, theocrat-capitalist, anarcho-imperialist. Traditional conservatives were consistent at least in holding that things were better in the old days. As far as conservatism goes, I’m inclined to agree.

High Court on marriage equality

Geoffrey Luck (The Australian, “Rush to judgment has hidden agenda”, 27/12) need not fear sinister intent in the High Court’s discussion  of “something they were not asked to consider” in the process of ruling on the ACT’s gay marriage law. Discussion in passing of broader issues surrounding the question at hand is a centuries-old common-law tradition known as “obiter dicta”, intended to illuminate a court’s reasoning and provide guidance for future decisions.

What does smack of disingenuousness is that an experienced journalist like Mr Luck would pretend to be unaware of this. It seems he is laying the groundwork for accusations of “judicial activism” if and when the Court makes a ruling which offends his personal views.

David Flint (The Australian, 28/12) would import into Australia the “originalism” favoured by the US Republican Right, insisting that the Court should interpret our Constitution in terms of the subjective understandings of its “founders” (a US term for framers). His assertion that the people “approved” these understandings is a furphy, as the Constitution was established by an act of British Parliament. But on this basis he objects to the Court’s gender-neutral definition of marriage, and insists a referendum is needed to establish gay marriage.

Professor Flint would be well aware that the historical guesswork of originalism was rejected long ago in this country, in favour of a rigorous focus on the text of the Constitution itself. Its authors wrote in deliberately broad terms to allow not only for the range of views which existed at the time, but also for those they could not foresee; they did not expect the nation to be frozen in time in 1901. If the courts took Flint’s approach, a jury would still consist only of propertied males, and the Constitutional “race power” would still be used to prevent Asian immigration.

The Constitution gives plenary power to the Commonwealth to legislate on marriage, without caveats regarding gender or anything else. Thus, what legal marriage means today is for the Australian people to decide through their elected representatives. Even the Government concedes it has the power to legislate on same-sex marriage, and in fact this is exactly what Howard did in 2004 when he banned it by inserting gender requirements into the Marriage Act. No referendum was needed then, and none is needed to change it back.

What is needed is the political ticker to stare down a noisy, zealous minority who fear the diversity the rest of us celebrate.

A word from one religion to another

As a man of religion, Archbishop Denis Hart is well-placed to understand the thought processes behind the free-market fundamentalism which has dominated economic policy in the Angloshere for decades (The Australian, “By making economy more personal, money will serve us and not rule”, 23/12).

With their mystical belief in the “Invisible Hand” – but not in the quite visible society of humans – neoliberals eschew modern mathematical knowledge which shows, not surprisingly, that just letting economies run on their own may result in academically satisfying equilibria, but is unlikely to produce optimal outcomes for humans.

Rather, these supply-side disciples prefer the folksy wisdom of their 18th century Messiah, Adam Smith – but only selected parts of it, for Smith himself advocated progressive taxation, public education and government infrasructure, all heresy to the modern young radical conservative. It seems that like most religious extremists, neoliberals have little regard for their own holy texts.

Yet Merv Bendle (Letters, 24/12) plays Scrooge to Hart’s Ghost of Christmases Past, giving a “Bah! Humbug!” to the latter’s plea to put people before markets. In the process, Bendle makes some extraordinary claims, denying the existence of any successful managed economies in terms of both production and distribution of wealth (ignoring the many affluent European social democracies), and equating non-market economies with poverty (overlooking the many laissez-faire disaster zones in the developing world).

Research shows that what wealthy nations have in common includes transparent democracy, high education levels, natural resources, and less edifying things like colonial history. Their choice of economic system has little if any relevance.

None the less, Bendle concludes that the Catholic Church should throw its weight behind free-market capitalism. There is a very good reason why this will never happen, and why in the poorest parts of the world the opposite has occurred: the market notoriously fails to justly distribute wealth and in many poor countries is the cause of shocking inequality. Particularly with a Latin American incumbent in Rome, the Church is unlikely to join the neo-liberal cheer squad.

Brandis breathes his own exhaust

Of course both parties make political appointments, but some are more political than others. In terms of extremity, putting a first-order public ideologue like Tim Wilson in charge of the Human Rights Commission is equivalent to, say, handing the reins of the ABC to John Pilger.

Yet George Brandis (The Australian, 23/13) blithely tries to persuade us of Wilson’s independence, citing disagreements they have had over social and law-and-order issues. These are no more than a manifestation of the ongoing schism in the Liberal Party between its libertarian and conservative wings.

If Brandis expects the electorate to swallow this flimsy argument, then either he has been breathing his own exhaust for too long, else he takes us for fools.

Former Human Rights Commissioner Brian Burdekin (The Australian, 21/12) reminds Wilson that human rights are “not a matter of competing philosophies”. Unfortunately, in the neo-conservative world in which Mr Wilson has hitherto made his living, including the oil and tobacco funded IPA, they are just that: rights which bolster that ideology, such as private property or freedom of trade, are given special priority and are accorded a status of “natural” rights which precede social organisation. Others, such as education or health, are seen as social fictions and therefore dispensable.

The neocon aphorism that “rights are not what the government gives but what it cannot take away” has a nice ring to it, but it is mystical nonsense. There are no rights in the jungle. In reality, all rights are social constructions that have social value but come with a social cost of enforcement. We choose them according to our values and they are universal if we say they are. This is validly expressed through international law, however “perverted” Mr Wilson may find it.

I join Mr Burdekin in wishing Mr Wilson well in his new job, but my advice is blunter: when you go to work, leave your talk of “positive rights and negative rights”, and the rest of your ideology, at the door.

Frozen in time

Christian lobbyist Lyle Shelton (“No mandate for change”, The Australian, 18/9) is wrong to say that any Constitutional challenge to marriage legislation would be about “what marriage meant in 1901”. The High Court has never viewed the Constitution, or the nation, as frozen in time. In its decisions on subjects that have changed substantially in meaning since Federation, such as race, political rights, corporations, external affairs, and even juries, the contemporary meaning has rightly always been preferred.

There are many thinking Christians in this country who are able to reconcile their personal view of homosexuality with their membership of a secular democracy, and thus do not insist, as Shelton does, that public law should reflect their private dogma.

Obvious answer

Judith Sloane (“Leaning Left by association”, The Australian, 17/9) may have intended to be rhetorical by asking “When did associations representing qualified professionals become public advocates of progressive causes?”. But the answer is rather obvious: when those objectives are in the interests of their members, or accord with their values. Sloane may find it amusing, for example, that doctors organise for peace; but doctors who have treated battlefield casualties may not see the joke.

Despite the efforts of the anti-union brigade, freedom of association is still at the base of our democracy. Sloane is therefore not prevented from forming her own rival professional associations which, say, oppose social progress, or support market libertarianism, or whatever she chooses – if she can find anyone to join.

Crisis: forces of denial force denial of crisis!

Graham LLoyd (“We got it wrong on warming, says IPCC”, The Australian, 16/9) misrepresents rumoured minor revisions of the extent of AGW as some kind of denialist victory. His main source for the rumours about an upcoming IPCC report is Matt Ridley who, Lloyd omits to mention, is a well-known climate-denier writing for another Murdoch masthead.

Lloyd selectively quotes climatologist Judith Curry in such a way as to suggest she shares Ridley’s views. This is not the case. Curry’s views differ from those of most of her colleagues only in so far as she believes it can be constructive to engage with denialism. That Lloyd has used her name to add gravitas to his article demonstrates the folly of her approach.

Lloyd breathlessly reports that “the IPCC was forced to deny it was locked in crisis talks”. Decoding this tortured phrase merely tells us that despite the ongoing denialist sideshow, there is no crisis for climate science.