the mobius strip

The Devonshire St tunnel has its own climate, warm and humid from the daily mass of breathing bodies.

Pushing against the morning crowd of students and office workers, you get an overwhelming urge to bleat. The faces, the fashion, and the endless tramping feet blur into each other like a colour wheel spinning into white.

By afternoon the pace slows, the colours return, and buskers begin to fill the empty space with music. The song of a woman dressed in black echoes in the air, accompanied by the occasional tinkle of coins tossed into a bronze bowl.

Behind her, the walls are haunted by the ghosts of bad high-school murals, covered in graffiti and grime. It seems unlikely they will ever be replaced. The unfortunate artists, now in their thirties, probably walk the long way to the bus stop just to avoid looking at their handiwork.

People avoid looking at everything here. The walk from Broadway to Chalmers St is full of gazes to avert, offers to refuse, advertising to ignore. By the time you emerge into natural light its a miracle if you can see beyond your own fingertips.

Pete Fitsimmons has the hands of a construction worker, the beard of a Sadhu, and a spot selling the Big Issue at the top of the tunnel.

As the sun dips low over Central Station, he rolls a cigarette and tells adventure stories. “I took the boat to sea in a hurricane, and once I tried to climb a mountain without any equipment in the middle of the night.”

Pete wanted to sail to Athens to watch the Olympics. Instead his boat was impounded, leaving him without a home. After a month on the streets, the housing commission helped him into a place on Pitt St. “I’m really glad that I’ve stabilised, and that I’m not carrying a sleeping bag and dirty clothes around”.

“It’s like the front in Gallipoli - the enemy’s out there and they’re just going to keep firing at you so you never stick your head up over the top. You just try and live however you can on the stuff that comes into the trenches.”

“As long as I’ve got a packet of cigarettes I’m okay, ’cos all I’m going to do is sit down, deconstruct everything, have a smoke, and it’ll be alright.”

originally published on Nomadology

Q: Do you think a good journalist needs to be sceptical of authority?

A: Are you questioning my objectivity?

Sydney Morning Herald journalist David Marr caused a kafuffle in 2004 when he commented at the ACIJ’s George Munster forum that journalists naturally belonged to “a soft leftie kind of culture”. The forum was aired, as usual, on Radio National’s ‘Big Ideas’ program.

Marr’s comments were seized on by columnists like Paddy McGuinness as proof, not only of his personal bias, but the ABC’s: “the Herald is a commercial enterprise and no one is compelled to buy it or pay for it. It is what he reflects about the ABC that is the problem. …the Left team expects its propaganda to be financed by the taxpayer… Marr stands as an indictment of the ABC and the kind of journalism it breeds.”

Marr was not discussing journalists’ political opinions, but rather the underlying “culture” of journalism as “inquiry sceptical of authority”. “I mean, that’s just the world out of which journalists come. If they don’t come out of that world, they really can’t be reporters. I mean, if you’re not sceptical of authority, find another job…And that is kind of a soft leftie kind of culture.”

McGuinness was outraged: “What arrogance and bias is wrapped up in the assertion that only the “soft Left” is sceptical of authority!”

“This assumes that authority is anything and anyone whom the Left holds in opprobrium.”

McGuinness said that journalists like Marr are much more enthusiastic in their scepticism of John Howard than of, for example, the ACTU. He also referred to a history of support amongst the left for the authoritarian governments of Castro and Stalin.

Commentators from both the left and the right are fond of accusing the media of systemic bias. A survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center released this year showed that while US journalists are not predominately liberal, they are more liberal than the public at large. Only 9 percent of the 673 journalists interviewed described themselves as conservative, compared to 38 percent of the general public:

“Question: How would you describe your political thinking? Would you say you are very liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, very conservative, or libertarian?

Very liberal 5%
Liberal 26%
Moderate 49%
Conservative 8%
Very conservative 1%
Libertarian 2%
Don’t know 1%
Refused 7%”

This is the first evidence I have come across that journalists are to the left of the general population (or, more accurately, that they consider themselves to be more ‘liberal’ or moderate). The interesting question is why. Is Marr right? Is there some kind of inherent link between the characteristics of a good journalist and a ‘soft left’ philosophy? I think this depends on which political spectrum the journalist is on the ‘left’ of.

In McGuinness’ piece, he argues that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are now “devoid of real content”, other than as “a hangover of musty old ideological notions”. This idea is not a new one, and it put me in mind of a project called the ‘political compass’ – an attempt to update the old left-right spectrum for more complex times:

“On the standard left-right scale, how do you distinguish leftists like Stalin and Gandhi? It’s not sufficient to say that Stalin was simply more left than Gandhi. There are fundamental political differences between them that the old categories on their own can’t explain. Similarly, we generally describe social reactionaries as ‘right-wingers’, yet that leaves left-wing reactionaries like Robert Mugabe and Pol Pot off the hook.”

On the political compass, a ‘libertarian-authoritarian’ scale is added to the economic left-right scale to make a two-dimensional chart that takes both social and economic philosophy into account (click on ‘analysis’ and then ‘view the analysis’ to see the chart - unless you want to take the test first!).

Because most people describe the ‘top’ of the authoritarian scale as ‘right’, it is easy to see why Marr might have described journalistic culture as ’soft left’.

I would argue that the philosophy (if not always the practice) of journalism is profoundly anti-authoritarian. Free media is the first thing to be banned by authoritarian governments, and journalists are rarely applauded by their peers for ‘comforting the powerful and afflicting the powerless’. But where does scepticism of authority come from? University degrees? Observation of the behaviour of authority figures during the practice of their profession? Possibly. It could also come from an underlying political belief, such as the belief that power corrupts, or that power should not be concentrated in the hands of the few.

In ‘The Crowded Theater’, Douglas McCollam, a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review, writes:

“Reporters often seem perplexed by the venomous attacks directed at them. They have a hard time seeing that it is not so much the idea of bias that infuriates their critics as the refusal to admit any bias at all. That line is getting increasingly hard to toe, so I’ll suggest an alternative that most reporters, of whatever political camp, might find acceptable: go ahead and admit an obvious bias — a bias against power. It is a presumption in keeping with the profession’s tradition of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Some may still call it liberal, and to the extent that it is suspicious of the status quo, they would be right in a way. But I am advocating admitting to an active suspicion of concentrated financial and political influence and those who stand to benefit from it, not the promotion of any particular ideology, cause, or agenda. This stance puts journalists directly in the crosshairs of any ruling cadre, which is just where they should be.”

The exhortation to be suspicious of of ‘concentrated financial and political influence’ provides some clues about where ‘journalistic culture’ might find itself on the economic spectrum. Every economic system contains the potential for the concentration and abuse of economic power – on the left this is usually in the hands of state bureaucrats, on the right in the hands of large corporations.

In a socialist country, a reporter following McCollam’s advice will probably spend a lot of time uncovering corruption and economic inefficiency, and may therefore find herself labelled as anti-socialist. In a free-market country, she will find herself investigating monopolies, political donations, and inequality, and may find herself labelled anti-capitalist.

The constant scrutiny of ‘concentrated financial and political influence’ could end up influencing a journalist’s political beliefs. By observing the abuse of power, she might end up in favour of polices to curb it - and these policies may well be towards the other end of the economic spectrum in which she finds herself.

Conversely, a philosophy that is at odds with the status quo may provide a strong incentive for journalists to have a ‘bias against power’ in the first place. How well could a passionate socialist critique Castro? How effectively could a passionate free-marketeer scrutinise the Fortune 500 companies?

Of course, journalists often do report in ways that conflict with their personal biases - in many cases they even overcompensate for them in attempt to attain that elusive ‘objectivity’. But I suspect that the best in-depth investigative reporting is driven by a bias against the status quo.

References

Paddy McGuinness, ‘Prejudice mars objective approach’ The Australian, March 18, 2005

Annenberg Public Policy Center Survey on Partisan Bias, Accuracy and Press Freedom, May 24 2005

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

‘The Crowded Theater’, Douglas McCollam, Columbia Journalism Review, 2005 issue 4

If you thought last year’s nuclear ‘debate’ was a little lopsided, you might want to check out the latest edition of Signature:

On wednesday the world’s six largest polluters will meet in Sydney at the first Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate summit to discuss the role of new technologies in curbing climate change. Nuclear power is likely to be promoted as a potential solution to the world’s greenhouse problems.

The once unpopular nuclear energy industry enjoyed a media revival last year, thanks to a number of prominent politicians calling for a renewed ‘debate’ on the issue.

This month, Signature enters the fray.

MARNI CORDELL speaks with Shadow Minister for Industry and Resources, Martin Ferguson about his push to overturn the ALP’s ‘no new mines’ position.

MIRIAM LYONS investigates one of the longest running PR campaigns in history: the push to sell nuclear power as ‘clean and green’.

And EVE VINCENT reports on the Federal Government’s radical Radioactive Waste Management Bill.

In our photo story the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta celebrate their success in stopping a national radioactive waste dump from being built on their country.

www.spinach7.com/signature 

As property developers slash & burn their way through Sydney’s cultural undergrowth, a few hardy artisans are hanging in by the skin of their collective teeth.

For the latest battle story check out this email from the friendly folks at the wedding circle (an artist-run space in chippendale):

…At approximately 545pm, as the sun was gently easing into its setting position, 8 members of our community were cajouling and comingling in front of the wedding circle when out of nowhere a camera flash alerted us to two ordinance rangers, clad in flurorescent vests and steely gray janitor suits, who sprung out from behind a tree demanding ID and taking our photograph. We quickly moved inside but were soon greeted by two constables from Redfern who demanded ID and refused to provide information about why we were photographed and what we were being infringed for. Eventually we were told that we had committed three offences: 1) Gathering on the footpath 2) Sitting on the road and 3) drinking alcohol on the street. For the record, there were no bottles of alcohol present, three of us had a glass containing a liquid amber substance (i think it was apple cider) and we were sitting on the steps of the wedding circle and the gutter having pleasant conversation and enjoying the ambience of a late saturday afternoon!!!! As the sole resident of the premises I am now being fined $330! We reckon this is outrageous (and great material for a new contemporary musical called “RANGER DANGER” ) Plans are afoot to hold a local community devonshire tea and scones to talk about “What is the world comming to” kind of discussion and prepare our case for the courts. We reckon a petition would be a good thing to express outrage at this heavy handed and totally irrational application of “THE LAW”. Crikeys, if ya can’t hang out the front of yer house chattin to yer neighbours, what the….

If you would like to know more or want to tell us what you think then you can email me and I will keep you posted on plans for devonshire tea day and the like. Reclaim the Streets, anyone…??

thanks once again to everyone who made our day especially fun! WE ARE HAVING ONE AGAIN NEXT SATURDAY 11AM so please come and gather ye at thee footpath……

STOP PRESS: There seems to be a heavy scent of law enforcement crackdown wafting pungently into the area. Infiltration of plain clothes police officers and detectives into warehouse parties and artist run spaces has increased in recent months. If you start feeling a little intimidated, then you know that its working… Remember: If you see something unusual, tell someone…. (it’s called government sponsored creative expression)

Or you can check out the story Brushed Aside on the cover of the latest City Hub, and read my rambling explorations through the artist-run spaces of Chippendale:

One by one, warehouses that were once home to artists and musicians have been converted to the cult of polished floorboards & bubble-glass window fittings. But despite endless rent hikes, dodgy landlords, and the constant threat of eviction, a band of determined heretics keep fighting for the right to take up space…

Earlier this year I mentioned that I was keeping an eye on Ruddock’s plans for defamation law reform. So I put quitea lot of research into All rights Reserved, an article published in New Matilda last week.

Australia’s states and territories are on the brink of achieving the holy grail of law reform: uniform defamation laws. But Attorney General Philip Ruddock says he may still override the states if he doesn’t think their model is ‘in the national interest’.

…as Ruddock’s spokesperson said: “the Attorney General has given way on a lot of issues that were very close to his heart”. The fact that corporate defamation is one of the final sticking points says a lot about Ruddock’s definition of the ‘national interest’.

Just a quick plug. My article ‘Taxing times for outspoken charities’ has just been published on New Matilda - if you’re interested in the freedom of NGOs to criticise the government and stay financially viable at the same time, then it might be worth a read.

I’m planning on doing a follow-up story on some of the wider implications of this issue for the community sector as a whole. I’ve interviewed a few people who think its time for the NGO sector to re-think the whole strategy of trying to create change through government:

“It’s time to step back from that strategy and reengage with broader community, create change from the ground up.”
“Because this government has made it abundantly clear that they’re not interested in listening to groups that represent the marginalised people in the community”

- Sarah Maddison, one of the authors of the Silencing Dissent report released by the Australia Institute last year.

If you’re not a New Matilda subscriber you can get a free one-month trial subscription by sending your name & contact details in an email to trialsubscription (at) newmatilda.com

My article onRumour & Reality in Timor has just been published on New Matilda. You’ll need to be a subscriber to check it out. Or you can sign up for a free one-month subscription. When the copyright returns to me in ninety days I’ll post a longer version here. Email me if you would like more info on the background to this story: miriam(at)tsd.net.au

The largest logging company in Australia is suing 20 environmentalists for over 6 million dollars, alleging that their campaigns and protests have defamed the company and damaged its business interests.

On the 13th December 2004 Gunns Ltd, which exports over 5 million tonnes of woodchips a year and has a net worth of $1.278 billion, filed a 216-page writ in the Victorian Supreme court. The 20 defendants targeted in the lawsuit include Greens Senator Bob Brown, environmental group The Wildnerness Society, and a number of individual community activists.

If Gunns succeeds it could set a precedent limiting the legal bounds of political protest in Australia. Activists and NGOs who carry out actions such as blockades, boycotts, and shareholder campaigns could all wind up paying heavy damages. “The implications are enormous. If Gunns is successful, it would echo through all the legal systems of the English-speaking world. It would mean that criticizing a corporation could land you in bankruptcy” said defendant Bob Brown.

“Nobody on the Gunns 20 that I know of has any intention of being intimidated” says Alec Marr, national campaign director for The Wilderness Society and the lead defendant in the case. But at least one of the defendants says the lawsuit has already made her “think twice” about speaking out. “It’s designed to quieten us down”, said Tasmanian grandmother Lou Geraghty.

In the U.S. lawsuits designed to silence public debate have been named ‘SLAPPs’ – Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation’. SLAPP cases are so widespread that most states in the U.S. have introduced anti-SLAPP legislation, awarding punitive damages against corporations found to have sued with the intent of punishing or preventing opposing points of view. No such law exists in Australia.

Gunns chairman John Gay says that the company is not trying to silence its critics but rather draw the line between legitimate protest and what he believes is unlawful sabotage or ‘corporate vilification’. “Gunns Limited and the majority of Tasmanians are sick and tired of the misleading information being peddled about
our industry and our state” says Gay.

While Gunns is alleging a diverse range of offences, including trespass, damage to property, and endangerment of employees’ health and safety, the most costly part of the suit is aimed at speech, not action. A claim that environmentalists pressured Japanese purchasers to stop buying Gunns woodchips accounts for $2.05 million of the $6.3 million in requested damages. The writ accuses green groups of threatening Gunns’ customers with ‘adverse publicity, consumer boycotts and direct action.’

Corporate defamation cases are rare in Australia, but the issue of whether corporations have the same rights to protect their reputations as individuals is now the subject of debate between the states and the federal government. After the Attorney-General Philip Ruddock proposed a uniform federal defamation law last year, the states cooperated to draft their own version. Ruddock has criticised the states’ model because it does not allow corporations to sue for defamation, and has warned that he will press ahead with his own national law if this issue is not addressed by the states.

No court date has been set for Gunns v Marr and others yet, but the first hearing will probably take place later this year. It is likely that the case will drag on for years. An organisation called ‘Friends of Gunns 20’ has been set up to help coordinate the defence and raise funds for the legal costs, which will be substantial.

Quotes and info lifted from:

Darby, Andrew, ‘Lawyers, Gunns and Forests’, Sydney Morning Herald, 27.01.05

Duffy, Michael, ‘Under the Gunns’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25.03.05

Friends of Gunns 20 website

The Law Report, Radio National, 25.01.05

Ferguson, Adam, ‘With lawyers, Gunns and money threatening Tasmania’s Green movement, even free speech may be on the endangered list’, The Big Issue

Price, Tom, ‘Fighting the Big Gunns in Tasmania’, Corporate Watch, 14.03.05

When the tsunami struck Indonesia on the 26th December, Aceh had been closed to foreign journalists for two years. Two days after the disaster the Indonesian government opened the province to international media, with some strict conditions. Jakarta-based foreign journalists were allowed to go straight to Aceh upon obtaining a permit, but others had to first submit an application which could take up to two weeks to process. All foreigners were required to register with the government before entering Aceh so their movements could be monitored.

On December 29th Michael Lev from the Chicago Tribune was among the first journalists to arrive in the town of Meulaboh in Aceh. After reporting for only 40 minutes, Lev and his Indonesian translator Handewi Pramesti became the first journalists to be arrested after the tsunami. The two men were detained by Indonesia’s special force Kopassus for a total of 28 hours, and were flown to Medan before they were released. It is unclear what rule or regulation the journalists breached, if any. Lev said “we were never explicitly given a reason for being held, other than the fact that the military didn’t want us in Meulaboh, and didn’t want to let us go.”

If Lev had waited another two weeks he could have taken his captors on the road with him. On January 11th Budi Atmadi, chief of relief operations, announced that all foreign journalists travelling outside Meulaboh or the capital Banda Aceh must seek accompaniment by a military escort.

Indonesian media law is complex and contradictory. Recent legal reforms have introduced some protections for free expression, but most of the Soeharto-era laws are still in force – including sections that punish criticism of public officials with heavy jail terms. In Aceh this situation became even more restrictive when the government introduced martial law after peace talks broke down in 2003. Under martial law the local military commander was given the authority to censor, ban or close publications. Indonesian journalists were required to obtain a license to report in Aceh, and some were harassed, arrested, or physically assaulted for critical coverage.

Because martial law is still in force, it is difficult to understand the real balance of power between the provincial administration, the military, and Jakarta-based officials such as the chief of relief operations. Inconsistent enforcement means that journalists don’t really know what they can get away with. Michael Lev was first told that he was to be deported, but was then released by a military intelligence officer. “The whole situation was handled informally and arbitrarily by high-ranking generals” said Lev.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters without Borders, and the International Federation of Journalists have taken up the case of Michael Lev and Handewi Pramesti and publicised the incident through their networks. These groups, together with other organisations such as ARTICLE19 and Human Rights Watch, have lobbied the Indonesian government to drop all restrictions on reporting in Aceh. They have also urged the United Nations and other international bodies to put pressure on the Indonesian government to respect freedom of expression. Although the permit system and military escorts have not been dropped, the groups’ efforts may have had some influence. Media organisations have been ruled out of the upcoming ‘purge’ on April 27th, when foreign NGOs will have to pass a controversial government ‘screening’ process to be allowed to stay in the province.

Sources

Reporters without Borders, ‘Army steps up restrictions on foreign journalists in Aceh’, 27.01.05

CPJ Press Release, ‘Two journalists detained by military; three others prevented from reporting’, 14.01.05

Lev, Michael, Asia Pacific Media Network, ‘Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent detained, removed from Aceh city’, 14.01.05

Siboro & Saraswati, the Jakarta Post, ‘Government to screen foreign NGOs in Aceh’, 22.03.05

Aceh Kita, ‘Indonesia to limit foreign humanitarian organizations in Aceh’

‘As we know, there are no known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’

Donald Rumsfield

He was friendly, cheerful, funny, and he drove very fast. His cabful of maudlin, tipsy, disappointed voters spent the entire ride arguing with him, yet he still dubbed us his “favourite customers of the night” as we finally came to a screeching stop on Vulture St. The man (I’ll call him Joe) seemed to have a mortgage on a quarter-acre block somewhere in downtown Middle Australia. He liked Latham, thought the switch from Crean was a good idea, but praised Howard’s ‘steady hand at the helm’ like there was no tomorrow. Unfortunately, at that stage we were quite ready to believe that the non-appearance of Sunday 10th was a distinct possibility, even after several post-election pick-me-ups.

Joe described Iraq as “a very complex issue.” According to Joe, not even the CIA could be 100% sure that biological weapons definitely aren’t there. So the fact that such weapons are easy to hide justifies the invasion of Iraq - in order to not find them. I’m not sure if it was swerving through Brisbane’s back streets that made me dizzy or the attempt to think of all the countries we ought to be invading because of the weapons we don’t know they don’t have.

Joe then pointed out that Iraq was just a side issue to the real agenda of “surrounding and containing Iran…which is a fundamentalist Muslim theocracy.” You have to wonder what activists bother with conspiracy theories for, when people like Joe have already predicted and rubber-stamped their wildest speculations. In response to my question about whether you could ever successfully ‘surround and contain’ terrorism, his response was “we’ve got to do something. If they (the politicians) did nothing, and then we got bombed, we’d string them up the nearest flagpole.”

And then came the parting shot: “you see, while I’m driving this cab around all day, I listen to ABC radio. So I know everything that’s going on.”

Ouch. Somewhere in the back of my head, my faith in humanity has been hiding behind a comfortable and flawed assumption. It goes something like this – Liberal voters are either: a) very rich, b) totally uninterested in politics, or c) getting their limited news from News Ltd or Channel 9. As the cab drove off into an all-too-real October 10th, I was tempted to take a pen & write it down – not that one may smile and smile and be a villain (amply illustrated during the acceptance speech), but that one may listen to balanced, in-depth news and still vote for the government. Egad. No doubt Alston would be shocked.

2B cont

The end of history is bunk. The world, we are informed, has once again been divided between those who are with us, and those who are against us. But who are we, and what exactly are we fighting for?

Asked what he thought of Western civilisation, Mahatma Gandhi once said, ‘ I think it would be a good idea’. Substitute ‘free trade’ for ‘civilisation’ and my answer is much the same. Western governments have been nurturing the idea of free trade like a delicate child for the last couple of centuries, but they are now beginning to realise that they have been raising a cuckoo.

The global economy, having given birth to free trade, appears to be suffering from post-natal depression. The collapse of Enron, the frantic round of write-downs amongst America’s corporate superstars, the stubborn failure of third-world economies to prove economists correct by flourishing on a diet of currency flotation, spending cut-backs, and privatization. However, in the current political climate, it is very difficult to argue against free trade without arousing the suspicion that you are hiding anthrax in your closet. Fortunately, I intend to do no such thing.

In the flexing of intellectual and economic muscle that constitutes the contemporary debate on free trade, champions for and against tend to be well defined and easy to find. There is the ‘rabble’ on the streets (whether marching through them or sleeping on them) who are against. And there are the bastions of freedom and light (this phrase sponsored by the Bush Corporation), who are in favour. The rabble believe that free trade is an uncontrolled gorgon trampling its way over human rights, equality, & economic justice. The bastions believe that free trade is essential to securing the prosperity of just about everyone, including the rich, the rabble, and even the rabble’s favourite poster-people - 3rd world Nike workers.

Until recently the governments of the West - and much of the rest - have usually come down on the side of the bastions. Eager to prove their economic credentials to the powers that be (whether they be the IMF, Moody’s, or the superstar corporations), our governments having been putting themselves on a low - fat diet of privatisation, cost cutting and tariff-dropping. Now, however, they (and an increasing number of their citizenry) are starting to suspect that there must be other, more reliable methods for attaining that elusive ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ equation.

At its heart free trade has always been a fairly reasonable, logical idea. Unfortunately, like many popular ideas (such as ‘democracy’, or ‘equality’), it has been the subject of severe semantic drift. Free trade has been fought for, fought against, fought over, exploited, oversimplified, complexified and obfuscated to the point that it is more an intellectual battlefield than a phrase.

My argument is simple. The practical application of policies that claim to promote free trade have, more often than not, resulted in an increase in poverty, economic inequality, and environmental and social problems. (NB - that is not my argument. If you want to argue about that, check out the links on the right & go find someone better educated to pick a fight with.) If you agree that this is the case, then you have two options: argue that free trade is f*cked and work to bring it down; or conclude that the people writing those policies have fundamentally misinterpreted the underlying concept. Just for variety, I’m going to opt for the second. And that means redefining free trade from first principles.

This is the first instalment of an article/essay that I’ve been meaning to write for a while. Please bear with me - it may take some time.

Hmm. After reading this again I’m starting to think it’s a little too strident. I might need to tone it down a little. It’s sounding like one of those opinionated lefty american columnists…

27.06.03 - Victims hearing in Cailaco. serious crimes:

“This is what they did to my hands. They put stones between my fingers, and then they took two hands, and crushed them, like this. They broke my fingers. I still can’t use them properly.” His hands were shaking so much he could no longer hold the microphone. One of the women from the local truth & reconciliation branch brought a glass of water, and held the mic for him. The other victims had started their stories with context, ‘I was at my house and the TNI (Indonesian army) came at midnight…’, ‘It was 1999 and the militia came to Cailaco, so my family and I hid in the forest.’ Not this one though. There was something about the way he went straight to the most traumatic part of his story, and then had to stop, that made even the hardened staff of the Serious Crimes Unit sit up & pay attention.

The victims hearing in Cailaco was the first time I had seen any Timorese person express emotion about their experiences. On my first day at the Timor Post I met a fiery district reporter from Ermera who told me, briefly, that before becoming a journalist he was a member of the resistance, & had been arrested and beaten by the Indonesians. At a party in a beachside restaurant, I was in the middle of a fascinating discussion about the perils of dating feminists when the conversation suddenly turned, and my friend began to tell me, calmly, about the time militia members shot his brother in the throat in 1999. He jabbed his finger at his throat to illustrate the point, and his face was unreadable.

Given that around half of Timor’s intellectuals were tortured by the Indonesians at some point, I probably shouldn’t be surprised by this sort of story. But no amount of abstract knowledge can prepare you for the moment when you look at someone and think, f*ck, how the hell did you manage to stay sane? How do you go to work, and look after children, and work on your masters thesis, and sit around laughing and playing bad guitar (often all in the one day)? When does history tap you on the shoulder and say, okay mate, that’s enough – its time for your breakdown now – feel free to fall apart?

Timor moment…I hear the sound of laughing in the corridor & wander out to find the head of the Circulation Department giving a slapstick rendition of the time the Indonesian police threatened him when he worked at the former national newspaper, Suara Timor Timur. “Hey you – you’re pro Independence!” he says, in gutteral tones, holding an imaginary gun under his chin…to roars of laughter from the journos, hanging out in the foyer on plastic chairs. Raucous.

For my first three weeks in Timor I stayed in Santa Cruz - I only realised at the end of the second week that the cemetery up the road was the site of the Dili massacre in 91. Now I pass it every day on the way to work. Its strange - Dili feels so normal somehow, I’m almost disturbed by how comfortable I feel here. And yet on every block there’s a burned-out building, and everyone has a story of survival. People play guitars on the rooftops of ruins, hang out chatting on charcoaled verandas in the evenings. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to it, how easy it is to forget how all that happened. And then out comes the history, bubbling to the surface like the methane in the drains.

You will say - history is tall, has whiskers,
And stoops when he wheezes ‘good day, young lady’
I’ll turn: History has a face like an old man & the sea
His tears are yellow, his eyes red,
staring into nothing when the storm comes.
History holds a microphone with shaking fingers, says
‘this is what they did to my hands’
he receives a ceremonial sash, and history is buried
alive, under frangipanis in a ceremony of remembrance

History is alive and waves by the wayside as we sashay
by in trucks stocked chock-full of reconstructed lives
to be delivered, in instalments, to his waiting children.
History swallows dust along with the best
of intentions
which have a mild diuretic effect.

“First there was Portuguese time. Then there was Indonesian time. After 1999, we call it UN time”
“So when is Timor time?”
“I don’t know. Maybe now I think.”

I am breaking all the rules of good journalism. A good journalist does research and finds reliable sources. A good journalist is objective, fair and balanced. A good journalist does not quote people without their permission, or use unsubstantiated information. But given the fact that I’m not a journalist, & this site is more like an extended letter home than a media outlet, I figure I’ll get away with it.

I am writing this from the gravy train on the wrong side of the development tracks, in the country formerly known as Timor Timur. I’ve joined an army of NGO workers, volunteers, UN employees, tanned ex-pat bar managers, and international soldiers in an ever-shrinking international community. Sometimes Dili’s ex-pat scene has the feeling of a house the morning after a big party - a few hungover stragglers eating leftovers or mopping up the mess. Now that the media spotlight has moved on & the UN presence faded, I think it has become a little easier to see the huge impact that an ‘international rescue’ has on a country’s culture, economy, and politics. When I watch the last dregs of media hype about Iraq, or think back to post ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ Afghanistan, I can’t help making comparisons with Timor - and wondering who will be left in Iraq to do the metaphorical dishes in three years time. Timor, at least, has the advantage of a small population, a picturesque landscape, an eloquent and popular president. And of course the significant bonus of not being Muslim – in these times that makes people feel so much more comfortable about a place. No matter how secular we think we’ve become, the fact is that most westerners feel far less alienated in a country with a Christian background – it’s right up there with flushing toilets in the hierarchy of comfort factors.

It’s easy to get comfortable in Dili – so many bars catering to ex-pat tastes, supermarkets full of imported food, mobiles in every ex-pat hand, air conditioned offices for every ex-pat body – well, at least the US-funded bodies. The bodies belonging to people who don’t work for the UN, the World Bank, or rich NGO’s are easy to spot – they’re the ones with the big dark sweat patches on their backs as they cycle or walk around town. On my first day here I spent more time in air-conditioned cars than I had in the last five years. Sometimes I wonder if there’s identical bars in Baghdad, full of Aussie ex-pats swilling gin and tonics like they need the quinine, & watching the footy like they never left home.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m just cynical by way of self-protection. Or perhaps it’s the principle of the thing. I understand that the West is richer than the rest. I understand that the rapid recovery & development of a decimated economy requires foreign aid, and that the population of Timorese people with skills in the administration of development projects is (so far) smaller than the number of projects that need to be implemented. I understand that internationals will therefore be brought in, and that in order to attract them you may have to offer them wages that are roughly comparable with what they’d earn in their own country. But if you are going to be working in the ‘developing’ world earning 5, 10, 20 times as much as a local policeman or teacher earns in a month, then for god’s sake (says the voice in the back of my head), at least have the decency to feel uncomfortable about it. I’ve always been suspicious of the ‘it is the way it is so why think about it’ mentality – I’m concerned that if I stopped thinking about it I might start to see it as natural, inevitable, that I am paid more & live in a better house than my Timorese co-workers. I’m concerned that I could become like the UN employees who receive 95 US dollars a day just as a living allowance on top of their wage. Employees who almost went on strike last year because the UN, in an attempt to cut costs, proposed reducing their very ample wages by $30 a month.

I know that compared with say, the US government, the UN is a paragon of all lefty virtues, but some of the behaviour I’ve come across here has been profoundly disturbing. An Aussie volunteer was sitting at a table with a few NGO workers, one of them Timorese, plus one of the highest UN officials in the country. This worthy fellow leaned across the table & said to the Timorese bloke, “You - you’re just another fucking lazy Timorese, just like the rest of them…(to the rest of the table) Huh – put him in his place didn’t I?” No shit. This happened. And we wonder why Westerners aren’t universally popular and admired in the developing world.

Timor has to have the most fascinating graffiti of any country I’ve visited. It’s a bit of a step up from the Shazza loves Dazza classics at my local bus stop. Some of the efforts from 99 are still around “Welcome Interfet, militia No Way”, “we love you multinasional force”, “freedom from brutality”, “thankyou Australian Army.” You’d think they were written for a UN PR brochure. For me, the fading painted love-letters to the international community act as a constant reminder that we have a hell of a lot to live up to. We have an obligation to get the combination of hands-on support and hands-off facilitation just right. I’m not sure that we’ve reached that balance yet. But then, it’s a little hard to balance when you’re full of G&Ts.

Here’s the rhetoric: Australia is divided by more than mountains. A cultural dividing range splits this country in two. To the west – struggling Aussie battlers who are doing the thankless job of carrying this country forward on the sheep’s back. To the east – latte sipping urbanites who wouldn’t know a sheep dip if they fell into it. These people know nothing about life on the other side but insist on making life difficult for the battlers (all of whom are white, male, work on farms or down mines and wear driza bone), by whinging about land rights and the environment.

Here’s the reality: rural and regional Australians have been sold down the saline river by the very people who are supposed to be representing their interests. And they’re starting to notice.

There was a time when the Country party was just that – a party to represent the interests of people living in non-metropolitan Australia. But after one name change and decades of coalition, it has become very hard to recognize the Nationals as the party that began, believe it or not, with an agrarian-socialist agenda. Looking at the bar graphs and pie charts which represented the distilled political will of Australian voters after last year’s election, I was impressed by how powerful a position the National Party occupied. Without them, the Liberals would have no majority. If they decided to dissolve the Coalition and shack up with Labor for a while they could dominate Australia’s political landscape.

Of course they did no such thing, because they lost the ability to imagine life outside the Coalition a long time ago. Instead they did what they’ve been doing for years and accepted the loss of another front bench position like so many lambs. Or sheep. Which on the surface seems reasonable enough – their voting numbers, and therefore the proportion of National MPs compared to the Liberals, have been going down for years. Dropping, in fact, almost as fast as the population of what the Australian Bureau of Statistics defines as ‘remote Australia’ (down by 4.6 per cent between 1986 & 1996).

The main reason for the shrinking size of remote communities? Unregulated free market policies and cuts to public investment supported by the National party. And the Liberals. And Labor for that matter. In fact it seems that every major political force in Australia takes ‘don’t touch the free market or it might break’ mantra as a divinely ordained mandate. And they view anyone attempting to propose alternatives as unruly bulls entering their rather expensive china shop. Freaked out by the increasing numbers of rural and regional Australians voting against the system by supporting minor parties and independents, they’ve all made token efforts at reconciliation.

The Labor party ran Country Labor candidates in the last election. The former deputy Coalition leader, Tim Fischer, talked about establishing a ‘human dimension, a jobs dimension’ (what, the economy hadn’t featured humans or jobs before?) and assured country Australia that ‘your government shares some of your concerns that competition policy has not had enough regard to “public interest.” But the multifaceted problems facing rural and regional Australia will not be solved by throwing pots of money at marginal seats. And the charge of an enraged constituency cannot be held off forever with the red flag of race-based policies.

There is a reason that the political game the Liberals have perfected over several years is called wedge politics. The phrase was coined to describe the tactics of the Reagan years in the US, where the Republicans managed to split the Democrat vote by convincing blue-collar voters that their falling quality of life was the fault of bleeding-heart liberals who wanted to give all their taxes to blacks, gays and single mothers. If this tactic sounds familiar, it might be because the Coalition employed Reagan-era advisors in their 1996 campaign.

The idea behind it is very simple –

split the country in half successfully, and you get to pick the bigger half.

It’s quite clever really. A stroke of mathematical brilliance. The top 10 per cent of income units in Australia owned 48 per cent of the country’s wealth in 1998, compared to 43.5 per cent in 1993. On the other hand, the bottom 40 per cent of Australian wage earners experienced a drop in real wages between 1990 and 1998. To put it in clich�d terms, the rich and very rich are getting richer while the poor and poor-ish are getting poorer. How to distract voters from this blinding truth? Convince most of the bottom 40 per cent that their plight is really the fault of the bottom 5 per cent. Make the losers fight over scraps from the table in an attempt to obscure the feast going on up top. Win an election by promising to shift one billion dollars cut from spending on migrants and the unemployed to ‘battler’ families with jobs who are wondering why they’re working so bloody hard for bugger all.

Clever trick. The Coalition uses it, the Labor party uses it, logging and mining companies use it, big agribusiness companies use it. A lot of journalists use it by default because they’ve forgotten how to write stories that don’t involve two titanic opposing forces. It’s all about the creation of dichotomies – bludgers vs battlers, city vs bush, greenies vs logging towns, greenies vs farmers, greenies vs jobs.

It’s a trick used so often and so effectively that it can be hard to remember that environmentalists and struggling rural communities have more in common with each other than they do with talking heads in Canberra. They have in common a distrust of established authority, of the major political parties, and of globalisation in its current form. Perhaps most importantly, they share the desire for long-term economic and political solutions that allow rural and regional Australians to remain in rural and regional Australia. And whether you want to call it globalisation, economic rationalism, neo-liberalism, or the free market, the fact is that our current global economic system is proving increasingly incapable of providing those solutions.

Globalisation is an inherently urbanizing process. It has also exhibited a historical tendency to redistribute wealth and power from people like farmers and food processors to food distribution and retailing companies that, due to a wave of mergers, have been steadily increasing their purchasing power and therefore their ability to drive the price of produce down. The same can be said of the mining and forestry industries.

This puts the National party in a bit of a quandary. Their position in the Coalition depends on continued support for the economic status quo. This support puts them at odds with the interests of their constituency (unless that constituency is to be reduced to the managers and shareholders of mining, logging and agribusiness companies, in which case they’ll do just fine). This opens up an opportunity for Australia’s rural and green communities to engage in a little creative thinking. How can we pool our resources, energy, and political power to create mutually beneficial solutions?

At this point I should probably admit that my only qualifications in writing this article are a BA and a heritage just barely rural enough to know how little I know about the outback. I’ve had a few crazy ideas. One was to create a rural land trust for communities wanting to buy cleared land to establish community-owned plantations (this could spin off the organizational structure already created through Landcare). The upfront capital could eventually be repaid, as tax from the proceeds of selling the mature wood.

Another was to set up an investment program that funds the conversion of outback properties from diesel electricity generation to cheaper & more sustainable technologies. The converted properties could eventually repay the cost of conversion plus, say, a 20 per cent return on the investment, by paying what they usually pay for energy (I recently spoke to the manager of a homestead in the Northern Territory that was going through $450 worth of diesel per day).

Most of my ideas are harebrained, unresearched, and have all sorts of potential flaws. I’m writing this article in the hope that it will inspire people to come up with better ideas. We need young people in the National party working to bring about debate on tough questions – like why remain in coalition with a party that refuses to sign the Kyoto protocol when the CSIRO says that agricultural producers will be among the biggest losers from global warming?

We need young forest campaigners working to ensure that every battle to save a forest is also a battle for sustainable rural forestry. We need young economists looking at the viability of various schemes that encourage regional renewal – e.g. investment in cheap & sustainable transport alternatives (bringing the new breed of super fuel-efficient cars and trucks onto the Australian market could be the single most effective way to reduce the cost of living in the outback, not to mention greenhouse gas reductions).

We need young people in the Green party coming up with viable policy incentives for regional renewal that mesh rural and environmental interests. We need young journalists writing about positive examples of ‘battlers’ and greenies working together, and sending them to every broadsheet, tabloid and rural paper in the country.

Most of all, we need to remember that the myth of the ‘Great Divide’ has been created and maintained because it serves the interests of wealthy and powerful elites. To bring it down we need to focus on the creation of a common agenda for change. Played off against each other, rural and green interests can often end up being dismissed by the major parties. If we can create a political alliance between these two forces, and do it right, we’ll scare the pants off pretty much every Labor and Liberal Minister in the country. And I, for one, think that sounds like a lot of fun.

Please feel free to post comments, links, ideas or arguments below this article

This article has previously been published on:
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Vibewire

A few weeks ago I received a call from a very genteel sounding lady called Betsy Hill, asking me to give a talk at a social justice retreat for year 12 MLC students. I received this call in the morning. I’m not a morning person. I can’t actually remember the exact time of the day, as my own personal definition of morning lasts anything up to 6 hours after I wake up, which means it could very well have been seven pm. As I’m sure you’ll understand, the effort it takes my brain to perform the mathematical acrobatics involved in decided that it could still be morning when the sun is going down leaves very little room for any other mental activity. So at the end of my conversation with Betsy I had a small pink piece of paper with the words ‘Big Wide World, ordinary people what can do, social justice, past speakers medicines sans fronts mrs wood-yrch!, responsibility>world, mlc is in burwood – kerry hill’s aunt’. I also had the knowledge that I was supposed to speak for half an hour on the words written on that small piece of paper. It’s probably unnecessary to note that at some points during my little speech I made about as much sense as an ad for the GST. These are the sacrifices one must make when running a one-woman campaign against the tyranny of alarm clocks.

What I was able to glean from that slip of paper was that there are apparently teachers out there acting in flagrant disregard for the time-honoured tradition that Year 12 students are elaborate humanoid filing cabinets whose sole purpose is the temporary storage of notes, quotes and formulae. Betsy Hill apparently wanted the students to have a chance to relax. She may even – although I shouldn’t spread such a malicious rumour without evidence – have wanted them to think.

I also realised that if this unhealthy bout of thinking about social justice should cause the worthy students of Methodist Ladies College, Burwood, to come up with difficult questions, such as a ‘what the fuck are we meant to do about it all’, I wouldn’t know how to answer them. I started desperately searching through a brain that would shame any self-respecting year 12 filing cabinet, attempting to remember the sorts of inspirational quotes that one is meant to deliver to young Methodist ladies going out to meet the world. I waded through a vast quagmire of dimly-remembered advice…remember to read your textbooks, study hard, avoid drugs, brush your teeth, take a handkerchief, make sacrifices & have a life. I entered the realm of golden lines such as ‘Everybody thought that Somebody would do it, Anybody could have done it but Nobody did’, and other allegorical gems equally punctuated with unnecessary capitals. But the one which stood out the most was a pretty little story about the mass extermination of marine invertebrates…

‘A woman was standing on a beach that was covered by thousands upon thousands of starfish, washed ashore by an overnight storm. She was picking up one starfish at a time and throwing each one back into the sea. Two scientists who had come to study this freak natural disaster approached the woman. “What are you doing?” they protested, “you can’t possibly make any difference – there are so many of them.” She slowly bent down and picked up another starfish. “It’ll make a difference to this one” she said, and threw it out into the ocean.’

I remember being somewhat inspired by this at the time, in that Year 12 assembly anything’s-better-than-counting-bricks kind of way. I dismissed it of course, and went on is search of greener quote-filled pastures, as it sounded just like the sort of thing that one ought to say to an audience of MLC girls. But I’m starting to think that I might have done an injustice to the story. The more I think about it, the more I see how much it sums up the life of every activist I know.

“You can’t possible make any difference”

True and untrue (so Scheherazade began all her stories). You are a blip upon a screen, hay in a haystack, a drop in an ocean filled to the brim with kamikaze starfish. You can work 25 hours a day, give up your social life, fight the good fight and not even come close to saving the world. Even giving comes with a maximum impact ratio these days, so you could probably quantify your attempts down to the percentage points of lives saved (minds changed would be a little harder to measure). Bill Gates has just given the biggest ever recorded donation to health care (or the biggest ever recorded tax write-off, depending on your perspective). He has a team of people working on his lives-per-dollar ratio. And all that will do is save a few million lives from diseases that will mutate in a few years time. Not much more than a blip on the screen of human misery. Compared to the richest man in the world, how well will your effort stack up?

True and untrue. You are a walking billboard for a way of life. Every action you take creates a tiny ripple, and every member of the Jurassic Park generation knows that things as small as ripples & butterfly wings can make tornadoes and other useful things happen.

‘Craig Kielburger is 17 of age…Craig first became a spokesperson for children’s rights when he was 12 years old and read about a young boy from Pakistan who was sold into bondage as a carpet weaver and murdered for speaking out about child labour. Craig gathered a group of friends and founded the organisation (Kids can) Free the Children which is now the worlds largest network of children helping children with over 100,000 active youth in 27 countries around the world’ (from the Free the Children website).

One person. Hell of a lot of starfish.

“Imagine”, I say to the attentive audience in my mind “that your path to school takes you past a shallow pond. One day as you pass this pond you notice that a child seems to be drowning in it. Do you have an obligation to wade in and save the child, even though you’ll get your clothes all muddy, and by the time you get changed you’ll have missed your first class?” My somewhat fuzzy mental picture of rapt year 12 faces nods enthusiastically. “Even if your clothes will be completely ruined?” Satisfying titters. “What if there are other people walking past the pond, equally able to wade in and save the child, but not doing so – are you still obliged?” A unanimous yes (imagined audiences are so obliging). “And what if the child is far away, maybe in another country, but it is equally within your power to save them, at very little cost and absolutely no danger to yourself?” They have a little more trouble with this one, but agree that yes, distance makes no difference to their obligation. With all the subtlety of an enraged bull, I charge in with my triumphal point: “we are all in the position of the person walking past the drowning child. We can all, at no danger to ourselves, and maybe nothing more than the cost of a CD…blah blah blah…” Ah, the joys of rhetoric (this isn’t even my rhetoric – I stole it from The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle by Peter Singer).

What the real audience pointed out was that there is a difference between the starving masses of famine victims and a child drowning right in front of you. The difference which the girls were unable to point out to me, due to my hesitancy in the matter of the starfish, has a lot to do with the number of storm victims on a beach. Whether its starfish or people, one = obligation, thousands = natural disaster.

It’s natural that so many people, faced with problems so large that individual effort will be powerless to change it all, forget about the possibility of changing just a little bit. It’s a natural disaster, but it’s natural. The thing that I find scary is that ordinary people are also capable of walking past a single drowning child.

In the 1960s a woman named Kitty Genovese was raped and repeatedly stabbed in front of 38 residents in a respectable New York City Neighbourhood. No one attempted to help her, although one person did finally call the police after she was dead. Similar things have happened since in Australia, with a man beaten to death in Kings Cross in front of crowd of onlookers, and another stabbed in from of peak-hour stand-still traffic. Psychologists call it the bystander effect. In a random group of strangers, everyone individually thinks ‘is it a joke? Are they shooting a film? Could I get hurt if I intervened?’, and then waits to see what everyone else will do. The result is that everyone does nothing. Studies have shown that when subjects are asked to wait in a room before being interviewed, and hear a woman in the next room apparently fall, hurt herself, and cry out in distress, 70% of those waiting alone will go to help. This compares with a mere 7% if the subject is in the waiting room with a stranger who does nothing (from What motivates us to be good, bad, or indifferent towards others? by Celia Kitzinger). It seems that when we are confronted with situations in which we are unsure of what we are seeing and uncertain of how to react, we conform to the behaviour of others who are equally uncertain.

We live in a world where disasters compete for prime-time coverage, and not only ‘ordinary people’ but world leaders stand by in their million-fold assurance that nothing can be done. It is natural for the world’s population to do nothing as the chance of averting a kamikaze dive into ecological and humanitarian disaster retreats. Natural for a subject in a psychological experiment to think ‘was that really as it seemed? What if I do the wrong thing?’, and turn to a stranger to see what they’re going to do.

“It’ll make a difference to this one.” True and untrue, because there will always be another storm.

On the other hand, you may as well. You never know who might be watching.