Sed probate spiritus

Erich Fromm on hope

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 17:12:48 -0500

To have faith means to dare, to think the unthinkable, yet to act within the limits of the realistically possible; it is the paradoxical hope to expect the Messiah every day, yet not to lose heart when he has not come at the appointed hour. This hope is not passive and it is not patient; on the contrary, it is impatient an active, looking for every possibility of action within the realm of real possibilities. Least of all it is passive as far as the growth and liberation of one’s own person are concerned….
The situation of mankind is too serious to permit us to listen to the demagogues - least of all demagogues who are attracted to destruction - or even to the leaders who use only their brains and whose hearts have hardened. Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality humans are endowed with - the love of life.

Erich Fromm (1973) The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, page 438

The carbon price legislation: Policy, process and politics

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 02:19:00 -0500

Today, at around lunchtime, the Cleaner Energy Future bills passed the Senate.

This is a very notable step for Australia, and although the policy is in many ways imperfect, something to be wholeheartedly welcomed.

It’s also a very significant political win for both Julia Gillard and the Labor Party and for The Greens, whose insistence that carbon needed to be priced this term was at the core of their negotiations with the ALP over support for the minor government.

In thinking about the meaning of this event, it’s worth separating out process, policy and politics. Of course, that’s a somewhat artificial separation, and the failure to address all three in a deft fashion has been probably the most important reason why the road to a carbon price has been such a rocky one.

It’s fashionable to dismiss the import of the committee process which led to the framing of the bill. But I’d like to suggest that an inclusive process, which sought to maximise the support for legislation from as many possible parties in the Parliament, forms a good model.

While releasing the parameters for the legislation prior to articulating its exact shape may have been unwise politically (at least in the short term), there is no doubt that it did lead to a more deliberative policy process. In particular, campaigning and communications efforts by non-parliamentary actors may prove helpful in broadening the package’s popular support, and the level of energy and policy activism around the issue must be welcome.

At a policy level, obviously it’s an imperfect compromise. But establishing the principle in legislation is a necessary step towards refining the model over time (remembering that the effects of climate change, as well as international action to mitigate it are both complex and stochastic). The symbolism of action from a nation such as Australia will also change the international game, and that’s obviously something which may bear much fruit.

The probability is also high that this reform will endure.

Finally, on the politics: much ink has been spilled, and will no doubt continue to be, over the implications for partisan politics. We need to think less about this, and more about what the ‘debate’ says about the power of unreason in public life, and sheer self-interest on the part of powerful actors. But I derive considerable hope from the fact that it’s been shown that amidst an unprecedented volume of noise, big things can still be done, and from the fact that it’s more than possible that reality may now prevail over irrationalism.

Elsewhere: Ben Eltham at New Matilda, Andrew Bartlett at The Drum and Bernard Keane at Crikey.

Living in Paul Keating's Australia: and loving it!

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 12:26:00 -0400

Tonight I went to Paul Keating’s book tour at the Brisbane Powerhouse.

There’s a real sense, as I argued recently at The Drum, that we still live in the John Howard era. But only because the evil angels of this country are continually conjured up by the straighteners and the fixers, the apostles of narrowness, of Whiteness, of backyard boredom.

And they are real.

But, we also, paradoxically, still live in Paul Keating’s Australia.

Perhaps that’s particularly evident from where I write; from a place adjacent to and over-written by the Brisbane River, a Powerhouse that when I was young, was a ruin, but now is a public space that breathes the air of creativity, of culture, of openness, of everyday democracy, that we ought all to want to see more of. It’s transcended arguments about “elites” to become a place where anyone, most anyone, can find something to stir the soul, to sit and watch the river circle back on itself, and to relax, and feel comfortable.

A post-industrial space, too, and there’s something significant in that.

Keating gestured, not just, I think, because he was in Brisbane, to the memory and legacy of ‘Red’ Ted Theodore. A visionary, Keating said, an expander. And Theodore lived not five minutes away from the Powerhouse on the bend of the river at New Farm. On Lower Bowen Terrace, and you don’t need to read his biographers to summon up, or conjure his ghost. You can read all about it (and Theodore, among other things, was a man of the mass media, the founder of The Women’s Weekly) in Vance Palmer’s wonderful Golconda Trilogy.

Rest from your labours, smoke your pipe, play with your daughter, make art on the expansive terrace of a Queenslander.

Eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure, eight hours of sleep. The right to live like that, to live time easily like that, was a result of struggle. The struggle of the workers, of the labour movement, of the Labor Party, of the toilers, and of the feminists who were so prominent in Brisbane’s early radical history.

The better angels of our nature, as a country, and of this place, this country, in particular, sang to us tonight.

There is no reason not to have hope, and to be filled with that hope, about the sort of country this land can be, a country that does justice to its Indigenous inhabitants, whose presence is so pervasive, a country that conjures creativity. That’s a certain vision, and it’s one for which people have fought, and the legacy of those battles is never so present as in the minds of Brisbanites who struggled against the dead cold hand of Joh Bjelke-Petersen to create - something just like this, a warm and pleasant November night where people of good will can gather together; unionists, artists, poets, people - gather together and listen to a vision. And take heed.

Because there were struggles in the 1970s, and 1980s too.

Let them not be forgotten.

NB: I’ll have more to say about what Paul Keating said tonight; but I think I want to speak to what the truth of the cultural moment, which was not possible outside a certain vision of the state as transformational, meant to me on this night.

Julian Assange, Andrew Bolt: celebrity, privilege and 'free speech'

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:38:00 -0400

Julian Assange, a little late to the party, penned an op/ed for Fairfax last week defending Andrew Bolt’s ‘right to free speech’.

It’s an odd piece of writing.

Assange asserts, all John Stuart Mill-like, that:

The best policy decisions result from robust and uninhibited debate.

Oh, really? It’s intriguing that Assange does not see fit to provide any concrete examples of parliamentary wisdom emerging through robust challenges to majoritarian opinion. If this sort of nineteenth century bourgeois liberalism is his credo, it’s signally interesting that, after defending parliamentary privilege (and wishing that totally privileged speech be extended to the rest of us), the sole actually existing Parliamentarian he names, unfavourably, is Barnaby Joyce.

He elaborates:

Democracy depends on the free flow of information and ideas. Opinions must be shared in ”a free and open encounter” because it is the competition between ideas that produces the truth. As Fredrick Siebert explained: ”The true and sound will survive. The false and unsound will be vanquished. Government should keep out of the battle and not weigh the odds in favor of one side or the other.”

He goes on to conclude:

Free speech must protect all speech, however offensive. Debates that offend the ”ordinary” or ”typical” Australian are precisely the debates we need. It is precisely when the majority shares a view that it needs to be challenged, because if it is wrong, then we are all imperiled.

But there’s been an elision here. Referring to the judgement in Eatock v. Bolt, Assange distorts the test of offensive and hateful speech Justice Mordecai Bromberg applied to Bolt’s columns. As I’ve previously pointed out, excerpting Bromberg J’s judgement, the judge considered the material effect on the self-identification, social inclusion, confidence and rights of Indigenous Australians likely to be harmed by Bolt’s discourse on “light-skinned Aborigines”.

It’s actually Andrew Bolt who wants to enforce a certain representation of the “ordinary” or “typical” Australian - one which is normatively White, unmarked by racial difference and concealing that racial difference in the name of “unity”.

In a very neat critique of Assange’s piece, Andrew Elder points out:

The idea that Aborigines are an inferior people, unfit for or incapable of participating fully in Australian society, puts the lie to Siebert’s wish. This is one of the most prevalent ideas in Australia. It is also false and unsound. No amount of patient engagement and disproving, nor frequent and exuberant demonstration of excellence by Aborigines, can eradicate this lantana-like idea.

Exactly.

What Assange is really defending is privilege, and not just parliamentary privilege. He’s defending the right of Andrew Bolt to disseminate a wish that Indigenous people disappear. This may or may not be the view of the “typical” or “ordinary” Australian (and I hope it is not), but it’s a majoritarian view in that it typifies, it is the ordinary form of how racial privilege and Indigenous dispossession manifest themselves in Australian public culture. And in Australian public policy, where lamentable things like the ‘Intervention’ hardly emerged from an interchange of robust and truthful debate, but rather from a frame where Indigenous people are re-colonised again and again, and dispossessed of their right to speak unless they echo the views of the “typical” or “ordinary Australian”.

All of Elder’s post rewards reading. It’s an acute and devastating critique of Julian Assange’s sloppy reasoning, and of the falsehood thatEatock v. Bolt was ever about ‘free speech’.

If Frederick Siebert can express a “wish”, I’d like to make one too: that people who have found themselves caught up in a cult of political celebrity around Julian Assange reflect on his actual speech, and its positioning.

In parsing an excerpt from Julian Assange’s memoir, Anna North at Jezebel reflects on Assange’s self-justification over the allegations made against him in Sweden. The crux of the matter is quickly reached:

Assange implies that his only crime was a failure to understand women’s complicated feelings. He was deluged with offers of sex yet confused by women’s expectations for a relationship - any man, since they’re all autistic, would make the same mistake.

North concludes:

…we know what he thinks happened emotionally: chicks got weird on him. And his assertion that he and all other men are simply incapable of understanding feelings neatly absolves him of any responsibility for this. Assange’s memoir doesn’t shed any light on the actual allegations made against him by A. and W. What it does do is further popularize the idea that women cry rape when their strange, unpredictable little hearts get broken. In so doing, it does everyone a great disservice.

Precisely.

Think back to the febrile defences of Assange when he was first confronted by these allegations. We were told that it was some weird Swedish thing, crazy feminist law which would never be countenanced in a “typical” and “ordinary” country like Australia. The “typical” and “ordinary” Australian rushed to absolve Assange of any responsibility to answer the allegations - it was all a CIA conspiracy, after all.

At the same time, with disturbing celerity, names were thrown around, all manner of accusations laid at the feet of or implied about the women who dared to speak back to Julian.

Julian Assange claims to be an apostle of free speech. But his speech acts, the discourse of the “normal” or “typical” or even the “offended”, are blind to the voice of the atypical - and in his world, that’s women. And Indigenous people. Famed for speaking truth to power, he actually speaks power rather than truth. It is, it would seem, his privilege.

And just like Andrew Bolt, his speech carries, even as he shuts his ears. It’s everywhere, precisely because it’s “normal” or “typical”.

Why Adam Bandt is mostly wrong on the Qantas dispute

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 02:53:00 -0400

There’s been a fair bit of discussion around the traps about Adam Bandt’s statement yesterday about what the government should have done, or left undone, with regard to the Qantas dispute. Some of Bandt’s post seems to echo criticism from journalists and the opposition of the Gillard government’s role, for instance by saying:

… And it should have entered the negotiating fray itself, helping bang heads together.

Leaving that aside, though I think there is an element of piling on Julia Gillard at work, Bandt makes a number of claims, one based on a factual error, and the other encompassing a confusing elision between claiming the “government shouldn’t be taking sides” (which the government itself has claimed not to be) and an apparent belief that a suspension of the bargaining period, as opposed to a termination, would somehow have resulted automatically in industrial victory for the unions. Or perhaps Bandt is making or implying an argument that it’s undesirable, generally, for ‘third parties’ to intervene in industrial disputes.

Let’s get a number of facts on the table, first:

(a) The government, represented at FWA on behalf of the Minister, Chris Evans, argued either for a termination of the bargaining period, or for a 90 day suspension. That’s clear from a reading of the decision by Guidice J, Watson SDP and Roe C, right at the outset. The government was actually being consistent with the thrust of its own Act, that such matters ought to be subject to judicial determination, and, like the other parties involved, was following normal industrial practice by envisaging a range of outcomes which the tribunal might give effect to. It’s important to recognise this, and as far as I can see, it’s been completely overlooked, because it is highly pertinent to the Tony Abbott line that the Minister should have used the powers available to him under section 431 of the Fair Work Act.

(b) Bandt says:

Ever since John Howard’s WorkChoices, the spirit of which still lives in the current legislation, many unions have sought to bargain for an outcome and avoid arbitration. Why? Because the outcomes you’re likely to get in an arbitration are widely thought to be less than what you might get in bargaining. Especially over matters that impinge on managerial prerogative. Like job security clauses, a key claim of the unions in the Qantas dispute, because they are concerned about ‘offshoring’ and contracting out of their work.

Partly, this is wrong, and partly, again, it’s confused. FWA gives greater scope for arbitration than WorkChoices in the case of low paid workers, in particular, and where both parties consent to conciliation and arbitration. It’s true that the provisions regarding the availability of arbitration to settle disputes are not substantially changed from WorkChoices (with a very important exception, which I’ll come to). But this gives the lie to his logic. How could unions have been seeking to avoid arbitration, when arbitration has not been a legal option except in exceptional circumstances such as would trigger the termination of a bargaining period? It doesn’t make any sense, and in fact, the whole thrust of the reforms since, arguably Paul Keating’s Industrial Relations Reform Act 1993, and certainly since the Peter Reith/Cheryl Kernot Workplace Relations Act 1996, has been to de-emphasise and radically restrict arbitration.

Certainly, from WorkChoices onwards, the choice has simply not been there for unions. So it’s hard to know what he’s saying here. That’s why various analysts of Australian industrial relations have characterised the system we had as ‘voluntary collective bargaining’. One of the most important changes ushered in by the Fair Work Act was to remove the right of management to refuse to negotiate with unions. So we have probably returned, not to a regime which offers a choice between conciliation and arbitration and bargaining, but to one of compulsory collective bargaining. The enhanced provisions for union recognition, and for good faith bargaining, are precisely what business has been screaming about. So I think Bandt’s claim that “the spirit of [WorkChoices] still lives in the current legislation” needs heavy qualification.

Under WorkChoices, the most likely outcome would have been freer rein for Qantas to pursue a naked strategy of de-unionisation. Peter Reith’s very vocal calls for ‘free collective bargaining’ are exposed for what they are by his references to Margaret Thatcher in the same breath.

What I suspect Bandt actually has in mind, and this is taking us closer to the crux of the matter, is the degree to which unions in strong bargaining positions have been able to influence (but not determine) managerial strategy through “job security clauses” and restrictions on contract labour, or agreements that contractors be paid the same as employees. Typically such agreements have been reached in labour intensive industries where time constraints (and penalties for non-completion) are a factor, and where competition is minimal. Construction is the obvious one, and mining is another.

But I’m unclear as to why Bandt thinks, or could be read as thinking, that issues regarding job security may go more in Qantas’ favour under arbitration. I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t fall within the scope or ambit of the dispute, because they are “employment matters” (and Australian industrial jurisprudence has always sought to wall off management prerogative). Certainly the Act envisages the distribution of labour between full time and other employees and the role of contractors as matters that can be subjects for an enterprise agreement. Another very significant change between WorkChoices and the FWA was the removal of the severe restrictions of matters on which parties could bargain. Given that there are few disputes in recent times which have reached the point of arbitration, I can’t see any reason on the face of it why there would be an assumption that job security clauses would not be matters on which FWA would make a determination.

It may be that he is thinking of the very strong line in the sand business is drawing in resisting these clauses, which is, again, one of the key planks of the anti-FWA campaign.

The assumption by some, such as Dr_Tad, who have seized on Bandt’s rather confused remarks (and he does a nice line in trying to be happy and shiny and appealing to everyone - “reach a negotiated outcome by supporting the whole of the airline, management and employees, with an eye to the country’s long-term interests”) that a suspension of the bargaining period would somehow lead to a victory for the unions seems to me to be highly questionable. Syndicalist sentiment aside, sometimes, sadly, the workers united are defeated. It’s not clear to me that the interests of pilots, baggage handlers and engineers are identical, nor that they would not become separable during a 90 day bargaining period (and let’s not forget, 42 days are potentially available under the FWA decision). But, more broadly, I’m unable to see:

(a) that the industrial muscle exists to produce an outcome favourable to workers’ desire to restrict the company in its pursuit of its strategy of offshoring, cost-shifting and outsourcing;

(b) how, in the absence of arbitration, Alan Joyce would be shifted from his stated intention to again lockout the workers. All he would have to do is endure negotiations for 90 days before the bargaining period recommenced, and there’s no legal lever to exert pressure on Qantas to negotiate on job security, which it’s made clear it does not want to do. With arbitration, there is. Or, at least, there potentially is. It needs to be remembered, and FWA took note of this, that Qantas could also, and probably would, lockout its workforce again on the resumption of a bargaining period. I doubt there’s much, if any willingness, on Qantas’ side to reach agreement on job security issues, which are what remain in the air, not pay.

In short, I don’t think Bandt has much warrant for saying this:

As it is, a Labor government has tipped its hand and sided with Qantas. Whatever Fair Work Australia decides, Qantas now knows the government will help it get to arbitration.

However, he is right about one thing. In a statement today, he writes:

“Now that the government has done what Qantas wanted and removed the workers’ capacity to protect Australian jobs, the government has a responsibility to outline how it will prevent Qantas from off-shoring its workforce.”

The first bit is wrong, for the reasons outlined above. The second is right, because it’s only through political rather than industrial action that a serious challenge can be posed to Qantas’ aim of effectively closing down its international operation in favour of joint ventures and subsidiaries which would offshore jobs and radically drive down labour costs.

“Job security clauses” would be a useful restraint on this form of aggressive management strategy, but the Australian industrial relations regime simply doesn’t empower workers to determine or even co-determine management strategy. Nor are the industrial interests of the various workers and unions identical with a political strategy to maintain airlines as providers of an essential public good (which is why, of course, Qantas should never have been sold in the first place). The specious rhetoric of Qantas management about competition and cost needs exposing for what it is (and one benefit, incidentally of arbitration is that it would allow the claims by unions that it has been cost-shifting to make its international operations appear unviable to be tested).

Similarly, we need a debate on whether or not we, like other countries, need to get back into the realm of owning airlines, precisely so that management thuggery can be curtailed and so that public goods can be provided publicly (and no one disputes the financial viability of Qantas’ competitors which are government owned). In other words, we need to resist the logic of the market and contain and constrain it through politics. We need to start reviving the idea central to the social democratic project of de-commodification, of progressively challenging and removing the inexorable logic of the market through collective action, including through action which seeks to utilise and reshape the institutions of the state.

That option exists, and it exists precisely because public suspicion of corporate behaviour and the excess involved in capitalism is fast reviving. It may well be that these hopes are incapable of fulfilment by the Australian political class. But it’s a disappointment that The Greens, in the persona of Adam Bandt, are chasing a rabbit down a bolthole by trying to score political points against the Labor government. Much more worthy of highlighting would be the mechanisms I mentioned in my post on Saturday which Bob Brown himself has sponsored, through amendments to the Qantas Act, which might usefully and fruitfully challenge corporate power.

By contrast, the argument that the bargaining period should be continued (and the Dr_Tad corollary that this would necessarily lead to victory for the unions) seems to me not making the perfect the enemy of the good, but the unachievable the enemy of the ambivalent. That ambivalence is best ended by continued political action around the central issues at stake here: the need to rein in and constrain aggressive market capitalism in the interests of workers and the public good.

Qantas dispute: How Joyce's actions could backfire

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 00:48:00 -0400

The actions of Qantas in locking out its workforce yesterday, led by CEO Alan Joyce who on Friday received a 71% increase in his remuneration, have huge potential to backfire.

Bernard Keane encapsulates Joyce’s strategy:

Alan Joyce’s logic is the elegant reasoning of a terrorist.

If the result of his massive disruption of the Australian transport system is the further shredding of the Qantas brand, which began under Geoff Dixon and which has accelerated rapidly under his Irish successor, and leads to further service cuts as Australians turns their back on the airline, that’s fine.

It will merely expedite his plans to offshore-by-stealth Qantas, wrecking the Australian-based operation while he sets about establishing lower-cost, more competitive foreign-based services.

To this end, a furious reaction against the airline for its act of malice toward Australian travellers is a price well worth paying; indeed, it may be part of the longer-term plan.

Joyce’s actions and motivations are almost a parody of the globalising logic that profits are all, workers, customers and any notion of public service or good nothing. And it’s in that quality of excess, in the gamble for high stakes, that his house of cards has the real potential to come tumbling down.

It shouldn’t escape notice that the Chair of the Qantas Board, Leigh Clifford, hails from Rio Tinto, a company long known for its overt deunionisation strategy. There is undoubtedly an element of union busting in all this, as well as a broader push from the more militant elements of the Australia corpocracy to smash the Fair Work Act. Peter Reith’s high profile interventions have to be seen in this context.

Hence, Qantas’ other play here, through keeping its cards close to its chest and failing to inform the government of the planned lockout (let alone passengers), was to force the government to bring the dispute before Fair Work Australia. Hence, too, Anthony Albanese’ fury.

But, as Bernard Keane also observes, there is real opportunity for the government.

There is no doubt that Qantas’ public relations offensive has failed. Essential Research found last week that 43% of respondents supported renationalisation of the airline, a large number blamed Qantas management rather than workers, and very large majorities opposed offshoring and thought Joyce’s remuneration too high.

The polling is not unambiguous, but there’s a plethora of pointers to how Joyce’s sneak attack has resonated, from a Facebook protest page which garnered almost 4000 likes in less than 24 hours, to the reaction on Twitter. The timing, coming on top of his huge pay rise on Friday, and the massive disruption and frustration caused to passengers on a Saturday afternoon, is so stupid as to beggar belief.

Joyce has exemplified the mindset of the 1% at a time when the Occupy X movement has successfully put systemic critique back on the agenda.

So, how does all this have the potential to backfire on Joyce?

First, it’s being discussed by many as the most spectacular example of management aggression since Patrick’s locked out its workers on the docks in 1998. Unlike the waterfront dispute, the impact on the public is much more palpable and much more direct.

Secondly, as Ben Schneiders correctly observes in the Sydney Morning Herald today, there is the potential for Fair Work Australia to arbitrate the dispute, a power now rarely used, and only available to the tribunal in the case of significant disruption to the national economy. The Minister, Chris Evans, could also make orders to both sides to cease industrial action, though that would be a last resort. The Fair Work Act emphasises bargaining in good faith, and it may well be that the tribunal will find that Qantas has not been. Then, there are legal questions over whether extending the lockout to employees who were not engaging in industrial action, and standing down others, is lawful.

Given that Qantas is seeking to put FWA on trial, and that the legislation is so closely identified with Julia Gillard, the arguments put by the Commonwealth will repay close watching. It would also be surprising if there were not pressure to tighten the provisions whereby management (unlike unions) does not have to give genuine notice of its intent to pursue industrial action. Qantas’ actions in grounding its fleet immediately, and alleging that the lockout would not begin on Monday, are specious in the extreme.

It’s crucial to remember that Joyce, far from pulling his fleet from the sky as a “response to union action”, has himself, according to the legal definition, taken industrial action.

More broadly, as Schneiders comments, there may be momentum for a broader use of the arbitration power, to protect the public interest.

Thirdly, Qantas faces some pointed questioning over its obligations under the Qantas Act which enabled privatisation. There are specific provisions, reflected in the airline’s own constitution, which require it to maintain its operations in Australia, and restrict it from flying internationally under another name. The unions have corresponded with Qantas about this, and the management line has been that subsidiaries are not bound. But Senate hearings have been examining legislation introduced by Nick Xenophon and Greens Leader Bob Brown which would close off this option. If such amendments were to be supported by the government, we would be in a very interesting place indeed.

And finally, as Bernard Keane writes:

Voters, it seems, just want their old Qantas back. In the view of Joyce and the Qantas board, they can’t get it back in the airline’s current form, not given continuing strong competition from government-subsidised foreign airlines and the high dollar. The only way to get the old Qantas back may indeed be to nationalise it and subsidise it, or to return to the days when competition from foreign airlines was even more tightly restricted than it is now.

And no one in federal politics is pushing those options. Well, not yet.

In a climate when the recklessness and contempt of corporate power reveals its naked face, the government would have little to lose, and much to gain, from reining it in. We shall see.

Alan Joyce is being crazy brave. So, too, should Julia Gillard be.

Update: Laura Tingle.

The impossibility of Tony Abbott

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 04:40:00 -0400

In my piece for The Drum the other day on how there is a sense in which we are still living in the Howard Era, I made this comment about Tony Abbott:

Tony Abbott promises a Howard restoration, flanked by spectral shadows – Bronwyn Bishop, Kevin Andrews and Philip Ruddock.

Abbott’s program, as has been repeatedly noted over the last little while, seems to consist solely of a desire to have as many elections as it takes to undo everything the ALP in office has done since 2007. It’s as if he wants to stand at the window of the Lodge with bell, book and candle and exorcise the spectre of Howard’s defeat, and damn the historical memory of Labor’s ascension.

Tony Abbott’s project is in fact oriented to the past rather than the future, and it seeks to reinstate the past by projectively erasing the present.

It’s in this sense that his dream is impossible, and that may well be his downfall.

It’s out of kilter with reality in more than one way. I alluded to the first in my piece, noting that the Abbott/Howard dream of compulsory Anglo suburban patriarchalism no longer reflects anything but a vanished and defensive norm, though it’s a norm which retains power to manifest itself in a retrogressive racial and social protectionism. The other sense in which Abbott’s project is incapable of realisation is in his failure to understand that it will prove impossible to turn back the clock. The Repealathon will never take place.

I also said this, in comments on the LP discussion of my Drum article:

Governments have to govern for minorities as well as majorities, which is something Tony Abbott does not understand. The notion that everyone will jump for joy, or simply acquiesce, if he tries to undo everything done by the current Labor government is an absurdity, and one which will be his undoing, if indeed he ever becomes PM.

It’s been customary to gesture to Kim Beazley’s futile promise of the repeal of the GST in 2001 in discussion of Abbott’s Repealism. But the more relevant analogy is with John Howard’s learning to live with Medicare, and indeed much of the legacy of the Hawke and Keating governments. Despite the fact that, in many instances, he undid much of it by stealth, he was intelligent and perceptive enough as a politician to realise that settled policy needed not to be overtly disturbed.

There is, of course, the fact that Medicare was extremely popular, while the carbon price is not. The NBN is, and the pokies pre-commitment pledge is probably a matter of indifference to most voters. It’s here, of course, that the hope of its architects that it will be seen in perspective after its introduction is salient. But, over and above that, the belief on which Tony Abbott is acting, that opposition is deep as well as broad, is a misprision. Ravings about ‘tyranny’, megaphoned through the media, are not identical with the views of most voters.

The Coalition would do well to reflect, here, on Tony Abbott’s own profoundly mediocre polling.

Finally, there are the many absurdities and inconsistencies in the ‘blood pledge’, ranging from the ludicrous nature of ‘savings’ which would be necessary in budgetary terms to the dangers of trying to govern from opposition (which is the actual effect of Abbott’s warnings to business), among others that can be cited. An Abbott government with no other program than reaction, and a petulant demand for an early double dissolution, is and will be deeply unappealing. Nor is it at all unlikely that Coalitionistas enamoured of a return to the ministerial benches would be prepared to chance throwing such comfortable accommodations away in pursuit of the ‘blood pledge’.

In truth, though, the media cycle, here spiralling into the future and making the topic of the present something that may never occur, may have done Tony Abbott no favours. And the likelihood is not at all insignificant that all this frenzied and febrile discussion may prove to have been moot, as a Labor leadership change would fundamentally alter all political calculations.

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo.

Still living in the Howard era?

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 01:13:30 -0400

I have a piece published at The Drum today which suggests that we, in many respects, appear still to be living in Howardia.

Occupy Australia and the Antipodean "bubble"

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:20:00 -0400

After the Occupy Melbourne event was forcibly (and it appears, disproportionately violently) cleared by the Victorian Police at the instance of Melbourne Mayor Robert Doyle, Dr_Tad has been reflecting at Left Flank on some of the criticism of the actions in Australia by “ostensibly progressive bloggers”. He focuses in particular on Grog’s Gamut and Possum Commitatus.

As Kim observed in her previous post on the Occupy X movement, much of the critique is predictable and unsophisticated.

That seems to be the case in respect of this “ostensibly progressive” critique too. It’s a wonkish critique, and rests on two foundations: first, the comparison of American and Australian economic and social statistics (forgetting that the Occupy X movement has also taken flight in the UK, and is in many ways paralleled by social uprisings in countries such as Spain and Greece). Secondly, there’s the perennial ‘what do these people want?’ cry. Protests, it would seem, ought to be focused on a particular issue and a ‘demand’ translatable into policy terms, rather than take the form of a social movement.

As Dr_Tad indicates, the US comparison is neither here nor there in many ways, and in any case the sunny side up stats disguise alarming levels of comparative inequality. (Ask not what the unemployment rate is, but how the unemployed subsist, and how low the wages and high the living costs of many of the employed are.)

In many many ways, the thrust of this argument is a Labor Right one, one particular to the Canberra political class, which also blinds itself to the economic causes of much of the right wing unrest.

What the movement actually goes to is the sense of elite domination of politics and life. Here, Dr_Tad astutely cites a number of essentially liberal observers:

US foreign policy realist Stephen Walt, hardly a fringe radical, describes well the factors that have led to the rapid spread of occupations despite the differing conditions in various countries. He lists: (1) Economic globalisation causing growing inequality between and within countries, (2) new technologies allowing much more rapid spread of information, and (3) the “incompetence and/or corruption of governing elites … and the tendency of governments to do too much to protect wealthy and powerful interests and not enough to help ordinary people”. Paraphrasing a colleague, he adds that, “the present combination of economic inequality and political gridlock is fatal to the proper functioning of democratic orders”.

He goes on to quote Nouriel Roubini:

Any economic model that does not properly address inequality will eventually face a crisis of legitimacy. Unless the relative economic roles of the market and the state are rebalanced, the protests of 2011 will become more severe, with social and political instability eventually harming long-term economic growth and welfare.

The model of organisation and dialogue involved in these actions, about which Greg Jericho is so flippant and dismissive, is in fact a necessary form of social ordering, democratic in and of itself, in that it does not presume to stipulate a form of social ordering dignified or given by the state or ought not so to presume. How the 99% seeks to counter the rule of the 1% is an open question, and ought to remain so.

The question remains, though, why Occupy Australia can be dismissed in such a fashion. (It’s related to an analogous question about the level of intensity - I don’t say size - of the movement in Australia compared to those in the US and the UK and elsewhere, which Jericho and Possum gesture to, but misframe.)

As well as being a wonkish Labor right argument, the Jericho/Possum critique resembles Leibniz’ argument in form. Yes, there are social evils. But such evils are amenable to limited redress. But there must always be inequality because in some way it is functional to the greater good. So, in effect, we live in the best of all possible worlds, and a wonkish tweak here or there might sometimes be necessary to ensure social mobility, but we have no ground for critiquing the underlying structure which produces and reproduces that inequality. (Or rather, it is something to which the observer must blind herself).

This is the essence of what I have called Gillardism as the philosophy of the Labor party. That phenomenon, the reduction of the political philosophy of the labour movement to a kind of ameliorative social liberalism (which is not so liberal when it comes to those who must suffer social inclusion by diktat - Indigenous people, poor people in Western Sydney subjected to ‘income management) in itself would repay much more thought. What has gone wrong with the Labor Party has a lot more to do with this than Julia Gillard’s personal style or whatever.

The question for me, then, is why the Jericho/Possum Labor Leibnizism resonates. And there is no doubt that it does. Why is Australia a “bubble”, seemingly insulated from the winds of change blowing throughout the world? I hesitate to do more than sketch an answer. But it’s a question that must be posed.

I think, in teasing this out, we need to consider:

(a) the specificity of Australia as a social formation, one which in many, many ways, as has been argued, represents the export of particular class fractions on 19th century Europe, making it very distinct from its antecedents and “always already modern”, remembering that class struggles in Europe had a history and a social trajectory going back many centuries;

(b) the particular social utopian imaginary of Australia as a settler society constituted by dispossession;

I think those three things go a long way to accounting for the fact that the waves of change and upheaval, which are very significant indeed, wash over these shores only as ripples on the beach.

In the trajectory of Australian social democracy (a concept that if mentioned in the ALP, before the early to mid 80s, would have met with derision - the right were “democratic socialists”) it’s the full stop of having given up any transformational ambition and conceded the field to (neo)liberalism that is significant.

I don’t think it’s just “Hawke & Keating” though. The real shift happened when the ACTU, (then) CPA, the intellectual reformist left and much of the SL gave up just at the point that Australia Reconstructed appeared on the scene. Even Kelty’s restructuring of unionism still had reference to the idea of the labour movement as such and as a transformational one.

But the point I am getting at is that we circle back around, culturally, to the idea that we are some sort of workers’ paradise in the South Pacific. Gillard’s social liberal rhetoric, and all the statistical mystification beloved of the sorts of people Dr_Tad takes aim at, exemplifies this. I wonder whether we are not also going back a century with the mad obsession with borders and contamination.

We are all Deakinite liberals or Sir Samuel Griffith paying a polite visit to Trades Hall now?

History doesn’t move in a straight line. It has backwaters and reverse currents, too. We’re stuck in one.

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo.

Matthew Condon on Brisbane: Topography and inequality

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:08:55 -0400

From Matt Condon’s Brisbane (2010:157-158)

Later, thinking about the arrival of Bowen… made me think of the governor up on the hill in the big house, and my grandmother in its shadow, in a wooden worker’s cottage held off the ground by stumps and joints salvaged from railway tracks. I thought of commandant and convict. Governor and subject. Parliamentarian and constituent. I thought of how, in this hilly city, the toffs always had the finest land on the ridges, and the workers sufficed with the gullies. The moneyed and powerful had views. The rest looked at each other in the hill folds. Even in Toowong Cemetery, the gentry have the high points, and the poor are interred in the gullies.

Matthew Condon on Brisbane: Time and melancholy

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 21:22:59 -0400

From Matt Condon’s Brisbane (2010:49)

I look down at my son, he with the same thick, tawny, tousled hair I had as a boy. Is it another Brisbane disposition, this melancholy for the past, this obsession with the passage of time, and the strangely sentimental, almost medieval, view of life in a seasonal way, in a subtropical place that disregards the clock of traditional seasons? It has all come full circle, I think, looking at my boy. I begin to sense, as you might see the after-image of a fork of lightning across the sky, the ghostly blue outlines of ancient eggs.

Goldsworthy's Adelaide and Condon's Brisbane: first notes

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 08:33:00 -0400

Since I was born in Adelaide, but of Queenslander parents, and have lived almost all my life in Brisbane, I was rather intrigued to read the respective cities’ portraits in the UNSW Press series of books on Australian cities.

I plan to write a review of both, but just having finished Matt Condon’s Brisbane, I thought I’d keep some of my thoughts fresh by reinscribing a comment I just made on a post I made on the Kerryn Goldsworthy’s Facebook wall, where I’d written in praise of her Adelaide.

I thought Condon nicely captured the sense of impermanence about the place, the notion that it always promises more than it delivers, and our very strange relation to time, memory and history.

I must confess the passage on the 1974 flood (which I also remember - Matt Condon’s 6 years older than me) and the idea that the built environment is sort of uneasily plonked on the natural, and always in danger of sinking into it was difficult to read in light of the ongoing trauma of what happened here in January.

One of the biggest differences that struck me with your book was that Brisbane really had no ‘founders’ and no reason for being other than the infliction of suffering and cruelty. There’s also an interesting parallel with the penumbra of ambiguity that surrounds the painting you write about and the bizarre story of Cumbrae-Stewart and the complete uncertainty of where Oxley landed, which no one ever bothered to clear up. And also the way Gouger and Cumbrae-Stewart were sort of spat out by their cities, though C-S is a much much less attractive character.

And then there’s the co-existence in time of Don Dunstan and Joh Bjelke-Petersen, which also speaks to the fact that South Australia is so much caught up in Adelaide whereas conservative political power has been imposed on Brisbane, and as Condon argues, deformed it, from the outside.

I was a little disappointed that Captain Logan’s ghost didn’t make it in. You wrote of some of Adelaide’s. In Brisbane, as Condon rightly suggests, ghosts are inescapable.

Me in The Drum on the plaintiffs' motives in Eatock v. Bolt

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 05:01:00 -0400

After writing on the case of Bolt v. Eatock in a couple of posts, I had the good fortune to speak to one of the plaintiffs about their motivations in taking the case.

To me, one of the most significant facts of the reaction to Justice Bromberg’s decision has been the sheer disconnection between so much of the commentary and the facts of the case (which is also a deep irony).

Missing, in particular, has been any real appreciation of the motives of the plaintiffs, as opposed to a panoply of projection, speculation and adjudication on what they ought to have done.

My piece in The Drum today tries to remedy that.

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo.

On liberals

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 05:01:00 -0400

David Runciman’s LRB piece on ‘Blue Labour’ is interesting for all sorts of reasons, but this snippet is a delicious quote:

…liberals never put up a fight: all they do is talk about individuals, with their rights and responsibilities, their choices and their freedoms, without noticing that individuals are like confetti in the face of the whirlwind power of money.

Mel Campbell on #Qanda and the tweet stream

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 22:41:00 -0400

From today’s Crikey:

The Twitter commentariat is possibly the worst thing about Q&A. What began as a well-meant gesture of inclusiveness has deteriorated into a scramble to be zingy enough for one’s tweet to be displayed onscreen. Snark is the enemy of intellectual rigour because it refuses to engage with an idea, preferring to reject it through mockery. It’s quite possible to watch Q&A without properly listening to it, concentrating instead on collecting retweets for your asinine gags about the panellists and questioners. Perhaps the most dispiriting thing about Q&A’s tweetstream is the moronic objectification of the participants. Disagreeing with someone’s opinions or politics means dismissing them as fat, ugly, badly groomed or otherwise disgusting. Meanwhile, anyone who comes across as halfway reasonable or persuasive is declared to be “hot”, a “crush” or a “babe”. It’s as if our culture is so libidinised that people find it impossible to admire or dispute someone’s ideas in intellectual terms.

Response to Dr_Tad: On Bolt, the left and the courts

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 23:49:00 -0400

I’ve been a little surprised over recent days to read a range of responses from the left to the decision in Eatock v. Bolt, which essentially seem to me to be arguing that recourse to the courts is some sort of counsel of despair or a sign of political failure.

At the outset, I’d note that there is an argument to be made that victories secured through the courts can be ephemeral ones, and can indeed reflect an underlying political weakness. The paradigm case of this argument is the use of the courts in the United States to achieve various sexual and reproductive freedoms under the guise of rights, particularly a right to privacy. But I don’t think that the situation in Australia, and specifically with respect to the issues surrounding Eatock v. Bolt, is directly analogous. It’s also just an argument, and there are legitimate counter-arguments to be made.

We should, for instance, observe that the rhetoric and effects of rights claims prosecuted through the courts can be quite different in different types of struggles. The civil rights cases of the 1950s and 60s in the US are often taken as a type for the use of law in achieving political and social freedoms, but it’s a somewhat distinct form of equality being claimed. That is to say, there are differential forms of rights claims for civic and social equality in the case of race, and for control of reproductive freedoms in the case of gender, and the recognition of the legitimacy of same-sex attracted subjects in the case of sexuality.

The latter, it seems to me, and I may make this argument on another occasion, is most directly analogous to the political claims embodied in Eatock v. Bolt, but I think to go down that line of argument is, for the moment, unnecessary in countering the left pessimism about the use of courts.

But I would like to underline the fact that there are various forms of political claims which can be embodied in legal rights claims, and that this ought to complicate any discussion of the efficacy of rights claims on one hand and recourse to the courts in political struggles on the other.

So, to Dr_Tad’s post at Left Flank, ‘Premature celebration? The Bolt case & the Left’s missing critique of the state’.

I’m not going to make a point by point rebuttal or critique of Dr_Tad’s arguments, but rather circle in on what I think are some of their underlying predicates. I’ll do it by making three points.

But before I go there, I’d just note that I think that there is a missing reflection on what “the Left” means in this context. David Marr, for instance, is not to my mind “the left”. There’s a begging of the question of agency here, and agency surfaces in the argument as a key node of concern or worry, because it’s quite unclear to me who the agents are in this mode of writing (and Dr_Tad seems to distinguish between the Indigenous peoples and communities engaged in struggle, and some other more amorphous left collective subject, which I am not at all sure actually exists). In other words, there is a disjuncture - and a most crucial one - between the rhetorical form of the post (“the left should…”) and questions of agency and speaking position. Some spectre hovers here, and I am not quite sure of its name.

1. Antinomies of the law

I think some of the apprehensions about supposedly possible applications of the law are really strange. If a critique of the state of Israel, for instance, is susceptible to being interpreted as anti-Semitic, then I think it probably is not an adequate political critique. That is, if it actually is reasonably susceptible to such an interpretation, not just labeled as such. The actual judgement by Bromberg J is quite precise: simply, you should take care not to tell lies.

The plethora of slippery slope warnings appear to me to be a very odd scaffolding built upon a narrow piece of ground. And, as I argued in response to Jonathan Holmes, it is not unusual to have professional practice subject to judicial review. If journalism is a profession, then it ought also to be, on questions of fact (and Bromberg J was careful to avoid adjudicating on questions of value). None of this is to argue that the courts are the repository of all wisdom, but I don’t think you need to argue that.

As I said above, there are separable issues about the relation between law, social change and political activism. But, strangely, I don’t think these problematics are actually the ones under examination in this ‘critique’. They certainly are not encompassed by the repetition or invocation of slogans such as “bosses’ courts”, and despite the care Dr_Tad takes to avoid that species of reductionism, I think his view reduces to something almost identical.

2. The missing critique of the state

Any left analysis which assumes that the state is a unified social formation is itself a failure to critique. Dr_Tad may not like my reference to Nicos Poulantzas, but that’s not an argument. The logic of the state, overall, is the reproduction of a capitalist social form. But that reproduction is not an obvious task, and nor, short of a mythical revolution (which still would not overcome the problem of state logic), is a failure to engage with the state a viable politics. In fact, Dr_Tad and his comrades do so all the time. So I am again left puzzled as to why an anti-statist rhetoric surfaces just at this moment.

Following Michel Foucault as well as Poulantzas, the state is a terrain of struggle. Note that it is not the only terrain of struggle, but it is a central one, and I wonder why Dr_Tad thinks anyone is saying it is the only one. Again, I think there’s apprehension at work here, and a binary either/or logic, and much of that takes the form of a work of mourning for a missing revolutionary subject, and a certain pessimism which works to reinscribe and harden the necessarily and properly porous boundary between state and the social.

3. Agency and fear

The question of agency seems to me to be a site of anxiety. All Dr_Tad’s caveats should be read carefully, but it does appear to me that there’s almost a mirroring of the perception that the plaintiffs in Eatock v. Bolt are somehow disconnected from the grass roots, an elite, taking on themselves the privilege to determine strategy and adopting some sort of mantle of representation which is somehow illusory. That, of course, is false. I do not say this is conscious, but I think there’s a discourse at work here which really requires a quite rigorous deconstruction.

I would also observe that the plaintiffs are, for the most part, yet to speak themselves fully on their motivations, and I think that calls for respect and an absence of inference.

I have been talking to a lot of people over recent days and it is very clear to me that this action enjoyed and enjoys very wide and deep support within Indigenous communities, and is very far from being disconnected to wider struggles. I would raise again at this juncture the lesson that came from the Mabo activism of the early 1990s: that the non-Indigenous left must defer to Indigenous people themselves in their self-determination of political paths. That was a difficult lesson to learn (and Frank Brennan is interesting to read on this), and I know myself that is true, having been involved, with many Murri people, in the Land Rights struggles of the late 1980s and early 1990s in Brisbane. It is a lesson that must constantly be re-learnt.

I think, and again I underline the fact that I do not question, not for a second, the good faith of Dr_Tad and others writing in this vein, there is a disturbing element of stipulating for Indigenous people what form their agency must take. Those of us who are clothed in racial privilege have an absolute and unavoidable obligation to reflect on that, and that obligation must be shouldered. For me, the absence of any actually existing non-Indigenous radical left (outside blog posts!) is a site of anxiety in this discourse, as is the pessimism and fear that generates. Much of the fear inscribed here - organised around a trope of unintended consequences - goes precisely to that anxiety.

I would observe, in closing, that I also think that there has been a radically premature foreclosure of the effects of this decision, which we simply do not know at this stage. This is manifesting itself in a view that Andrew Bolt’s crusade of martyrdom will only heighten his influence and the hegemony of the racial discourse which he incarnates. I’m not so sure about that, no not at all. There’s an element of excess in the Boltback which I suspect may backfire.

That also goes, I think, to an underlying political pessimism, which I really do believe people should reflect on. Some of the justified fear (pace Margaret Simons) is actually in the heart of the journalistic machine.

Elsewhere: I disagree with aspects of the analysis, but I’d join with Dr_Tad in recommending Guy Rundle’s piece in Crikey.

"The time is out of joint": Derrida discerning spirits

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:26:00 -0400

What does not happen in this anachrony! Perhaps the time, “time itself”, precisely always “our time”, the epoch and the world shared among us, ours every day, nowadays, the present as our present. Especially when “things are not going well” among us, precisely: when “things are going badly”, when it’s not working, when things are bad. But with the other, is not this disjuncture, this dis-adjustment of the “it’s going badly” necessary for the good, or at least the just to be announced? Is not disjuncture the very possibility of the other? How to distinguish between two disadjustments, between the disjuncture of the unjust and the one that opens up the infinite asymmetry of the relation to the other, that is to say, the place for justice?

- Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx

"It would be necessary to learn spirits"

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:20:21 -0400

“What happens with two, and between all the “twos” one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost. So it would be necessary to learn spirits.

…The time of the “learning to live”, a time without tutelary present, would amount to this… to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the company, the conversation, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly. But with them.”

- Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx

Andrew Bolt, racial vilification and 'freedom of speech'

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 06:41:00 -0400

“Magna est veritas et praevalet”: Great is Truth, and Mighty Above All Things.

I welcome the decision of Justice Bromberg in Eatock v Bolt, delivered in the Federal Court in Melbourne today. It is, to my mind, a just decision, and not just in law.

Predictably, of course, the decision has not been welcomed by many (and in this context it is very much worth reading the statement of one of the plaintiffs, Dr Anita Heiss). The noise machine has veritably exploded in angry fury, with absurd and risible claims being made that “it is now illegal to discuss racial identification”, to pick just one of the stupidities being touted in the lamentable revival of the hoary and false notion of ‘political correctness’.

Such claims do violence to the judgement, the text of which can be found here.

On Twitter, @Robcorr responded:

Nonsense. The case was lost because Andrew Bolt imputed that some people are too fair-skinned to be genuine Aboriginal people, that those people choose to falsely identify as Aboriginal for personal gain, and that fair-skinned Aboriginal people were likely to be “offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated”.

The entirety of his note should be read, but the conclusion demands citation:

So, what does this mean for free speech? Will it, as Chicken Little Dodd suggests, “silence debate on irksome and uncomfortable topics”?
No.

What it will do is require journalists to conduct proper research, to present their arguments based on facts, and to tell the truth.

Andrew Bolt, also predictably, is presenting himself in the guise of some sort of martyr of free speech.

He can be nothing of the kind, because free speech is not at issue here, and nor are martyrs normally found among the privileged.

And that precise privilege, which Bolt precisely seeks to exercise almost as of right, is precisely the actual issue here.

Free speech, as the judgement in fact indicates, must be speech that is accountable to truth. That is to say, it is not the same concept as ‘freedom of expression’ (one that more properly belongs to artistic domains) or indeed ‘freedom of opinion’. Free speech ought to be both in service to the truth, and oriented to its discovery. That requires, as a very minimum condition of possibility of exercising such a right, a willingness to ground one’s views in ascertainable and verifiable fact.

Michel Foucault, in his short book Fearless Speech, points out that one of the concept’s earliest instantiations, the Greek idea of parrhesia, had its correlate in a proper noun: Parrhesiastes. ‘Free speech’ is a practice engaged in by ‘one who speaks the truth’.

I do not intend to canvass the whole gamut of reactions which gesture to the liberal or bourgeois notion of free speech, a notion people have indeed struggled and even died for (but not the sort of people who write columns in the Herald Sun). No doubt the names of Voltaire and J. S. Mill are going to be tossed around in coming days by people who have probably never read them.

I want to make three very specific points, before moving back to some general ones:

1. The Federal Court found that Andrew Bolt vilified specific named individuals on the basis of untruths, which he ought to have known or through his ‘research’, have been able to discover were untruths. It’s argued that they should more properly have taken action against him for defamation, in that he damaged their reputations on the basis of falsehoods.

2. But, very correctly, they chose rather not to personalise the issues, but to highlight the fact that Bolt’s discourse vilified them insofar as they are Indigenous Australians and identify as such, and had a broader effect of harm on Indigenous people.

3. That is true, and that effect is real. Bolt’s position of privilege derives not just from the fact that there is no attempt on the part of his monopolistic megaphone mouthpieces to counter any of his claims by the remotest vestige of ‘balance’ or accountability to fact. It also derives from the fact that his claims have the effect of offering permission to hold the views he espouses, and indeed empowering others to persist in them and reproduce them. These ‘opinions’ are not just abstract ones, but have actual effects in producing and reproducing social and racial inequality, and in fostering vilification of a whole host of unnamed and unprominent Australians, which not incidentally, silences them.

That, folks, is privilege, and it’s racial privilege, and it’s precisely how racial privilege works in a post-colonial society. It’s a daily, nay, a minute by minute re-enactment of the original Dispossession.

And it is vile.

Vile too was the way in which at least one of the plaintiffs, Larissa Behrendt, it could be reasonably inferred, was subjected to a vicious campaign in the press because she joined in taking this action.

Let me just make two other general points, which go to the risible idea of ’political correctness’, and its correlate, which is the claim that people’s opinions are being silenced or prohibited:

1. This is related to another furphy, that Andrew Bolt “has been found to be a racist”. I, myself, care very little what his private views are, because they simply don’t matter. Nor do I see it as being remotely useful to try to discover or speculate on what they are. Andrew Bolt is very far from being an original thinker, and his opinions are very far from being interesting. The only point here is that he has massive access to public speech, to a point where the vilification the Court found he had been engaged in can be excused, argued away, or made the subject of ridiculous defences in the name of ‘freedom of speech’.

It is in the public effects of this discourse, and in particular the effects such discourses have in reproducing and in fact increasing the force and pervasiveness of racial tropes which do immense harm, for which he - and those who defend him - must be accountable.

2. Opinion is worthless unless it is groundable in fact, oriented towards a search for truth, and accountable to reason. Hence, there is no surprise, either, that Andrew Bolt is one of Australia’s most prominent ‘climate change skeptics’. In truth, none of these opinions, which it is Andrew Bolt’s business to shore up, are worth a penny.

I refrain from discussing Bolt’s opinions themselves, because their real effects are to be found in the way they reinforce received opinion.

The only point of holding such opinions is to shore up the threatened and endlessly collapsing boundaries of discourses such as that of race thus to re-enact Dispossession, precisely because such discourses can only function in opposition to truth, and always run the risk of collapsing because of their untruth.

Australian racism is one such truthless discourse. Those who articulate it, and those who contribute to its daily reproduction and its woefully pernicious effects, are far from fearless truth speakers. They are the opposite of the figure of the Parrhesiastes. They are, in fact, fearful cowards who persist in the realm of lies, and will do almost anything to avoid accountability to reason.

[I haven’t commented here on the substance of the controversy, in part because I refuse to engage in debate with Andrew Bolt’s ‘opinion’. But I think it is salient to note that his mode of opinionating (I will not say: argument) suggests that the question of identification is somehow an easy one, one that is subject purely to personal choice, and one where it is surprising, transgressive and terrible that anyone should ‘choose’ not to identify as hegemonically white. Both the claim that choice is key, and the implicit but necessarily related claim that to be white is desirable above all things, are absolutely central to the way racism is constituted, and the way it works, in this country. Bolt appears to want a situation where not-to-be-white is invisible and to simultaneously blind himself to the visibility of not-being-white. And he cannot understand why anyone, offered his false choice (which he himself instantly disables) would want to be visible, or would be rendered visible by others.]

Andrew Bolt can hold whatever opinion he chooses. On the basis of his writing in the two columns which were the subject of the judgement in Eatock, however, he seems to be blind to truth. And to excuse himself from an accountability to truth and to the ethical and legal claims of racial civility negates any right he might otherwise enjoy to defend that opinion on grounds of its relation to truth.

Update: Cross-posted at the blog of the Overland Literary Journal.

Facebook, the Ticker, Mark Zuckerberg and oversharing

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 22:42:00 -0400

Farhad Manjoo at Slate, via tigtog at Hoyden About Town:

For as much as he’s invested in sharing, though, Zuckerberg seems clueless about the motivation behind the act. Why do you share a story, video, or photo? Because you want your friends to see it. And why do you want your friends to see it? Because you think they’ll get a kick out of it. I know this sounds obvious, but it’s somehow eluded Zuckerberg that sharing is fundamentally about choosing. You experience a huge number of things every day, but you choose to tell your friends about only a fraction of them, because most of what you do isn’t worth mentioning. Now Zuckerberg wants to lower the bar. “One thing that we’ve heard over and over again is that people have things that they want to share, but they don’t want to annoy their friends by putting boring stuff in their news feeds,” he said during his keynote. To me, this doesn’t sound like a problem that needs solving. If Facebook users aren’t sharing stuff because they worry it will bore their friends, good! Thank you, people of Facebook, for your restraint in choosing not to bore me.

But Zuckerberg couldn’t let this undersharing stand. “Our solution was to create a new place that’s lighter-weight where you can see lighter-weight stuff—that’s how we came up with Ticker.” If you translate “lighter-weight” to boring, you’ll understand what Zuckerberg is saying: Facebook now has a place on its site reserved especially for boring updates.

Tigtog encapsulates the point elegantly, when she writes, “Sharing is fundamentally about choosing what not to share.” And Pavlov’s Cat put it nicely in an FB status this morning:

… thinking and thinking about the cognitive dissonance that must exist in people’s minds between the FB privacy panics, on the one hand, and the impulse, on the other, to tell all to the intertubes. The test is, if you don’t want the world to see it, don’t even let it get as far as the keyboard. Much less the Post button.

I fully accept, of course, that many people have very legitimate concerns about the privacy of what they write on Facebook. I also abhor the fact that Facebook repeatedly fails to respect those concerns, and its general mode of proceeding where ‘amazing changes’ suddenly appear with no notice to users.

(Or are foreshadowed with the most meaningless and vacuous marketing speak that could be imagined: See this, for example.)

All this goes to the fact that the media of social communications are capitalist. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, as capitalists, fear competition (even if this fear is more part of the disposition proper to being a capitalist than anything real). Google+ comes along. FB’s response is entirely predictable, but must also be an open secret.

(Google+, incidentally, is clunky, not user friendly, and seems to me to be much worse than FB in encouraging spammers and marketing bots to ‘follow you’, and I don’t see a way to effectively prevent that, or to keep the feed from being cluttered by various types of stuff in which I have no interest whatever. That may be me as a user, but it ought nevertheless to be easy.

I would actually like there to be a government provided social media infrastructure. In Australia, this could be part of the NBN. Social media ought actually to be a public domain, because it fulfills a useful and probably, now, necessary social function. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone in government sees that.)

But I do think we’re seeing something broader here. These FB panics come and go. They settle down, people find ways around them. (And it’s possible to block the Ticker, if like me, you find it visually unappealing and I’m sure someone will write a script to prevent posts being an input to it, if they haven’t already. That would respond to some very legitimate concerns.)

One symptom is that often the FB privacy panics are false alarms.

What I would like to suggest is that they’re reflecting something bigger.

Sadly, I think Mark Zuckerberg may be right. In one way. That is: the “default setting” in our culture is to let it all hang out.

It’s as if there is a de-civilising process, and the Super-Ego is a rare beast. Some social theorists talk about a ‘thin subjectivity’ in late capitalism, where the process of becoming-subject is rather more one of subjectification, and the ego tosses and turns on the seas of desire and gratification, endlessly deferred because the desires and their fulfillment offered by late capitalism are false.

I would add to that the observation that, in the absence of a subjectivity shaped in a basic relation of reciprocal trust, the danger that one’s self becomes something akin to a species of automatic writing is heightened. The disinhibation brought about by drugs (alcohol being an obvious one) becomes more generalised.

Hence, I think two parts of the fear of the Ticker:

(a) the apprehension that one may do and say all manner of things that shouldn’t be seen;

(b) the actual lack of reciprocal trust that others will manage and alter their settings to ensure a desired level of privacy, despite the fact that reciprocal trust is proper to actual ‘friendship’.

Now, I want to emphasise yet again, for fear of misunderstanding, that I share many of the most legitimate concerns about FB and privacy. I just think it is worth diagnosing some of its structural features, and some of the ghosting that overlays and overcodes those legitimate concerns.

By the way, on the issue of reciprocity, tigtog, whom I’ve cited a number of times, has some useful and practical suggestions.

Another good idea is to do periodic Friend culls. When I realised last year I was friends with a violin (and a violin I didn’t even know personally), I did a big one.

I was also concerned that my FB page had become the site for hipsters one-upping each other, in manner of Twitter, and/or voracious political discussions. Neither were things I wanted to encourage or host in a space I regard as personal. I was loathe to be ‘friends’ with commercial entities, when I had no idea who actually secreted themselves behind ‘the brand’.

One paradoxical result of Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘deeping of emotional intensity’ might be that people have *fewer* FB friends.

Another choice is to use one’s Facebook page only as a bit of a placeholder for using the platform for private messages, gaming, or whatever. I know some people who do that, and it’s a a choice I very much respect.

Overall, though, I think people might like to consider the broader set of issues. Having been blogging in several prominent spaces since 2004, I’m acutely conscious of my internetty self-presentation. It poses risks to me, but it also brings significant gains. But I’ve often reflected on the nostrum, common in any context where FOI is at play, that you shouldn’t write an email that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the paper. Following Pavlov’s Cat, adopting a judicious and nuanced set of restraints on one’s impulses is *a good thing*.

And there is always the delete button! Particularly useful after one of those lamentable nights of Drunk Facebooking!

Update: It seems the latest ‘fix’ to privacy settings doing the rounds of FB is a hoax, or charitably, well-intentioned but wrong. Ask the Computer Lady has the real deal on how to make your privacy settings as robust as possible.