the mobius strip

An announcement for the few hardy souls who get the feed from this site.

The new Centre for Policy Development website has just gone live at www.cpd.org.au

Many, many hours have gone into transforming New Matilda’s policy portal into Australia’s newest think tank. I reckon we’ve got the most geek-friendly think tank website in Australia, although there’s not much competition! Rss feeds, commenting on policy papers (yep, we’ll actually be trying to involve non-wonks in policy development & debate), with podcasting to come further down the track. I’m particularly excited about a research project coming up with Ben Eltham & Susan Kukucka on cultural policy, where they’ll not only be writing a paper but putting the source material (interview transcripts & audio highlights) online.

It’s well past time the think tank business was brought into the information age. I’m quite inspired by what demos.co.uk have done, where their researchers blog about what they’re working on as they go - that might be something to consider further down the track.

Anyway, that’s all for now (let’s be honest, for ages - all my waking hours are going into the CPD these days). Hope you enjoy the site!

Mike Scrafton, Andrew Wilkie, Lance Collins. You might not remember them, but the Fairfax archive does. They were the people behind the stories that should have been the Watergates of 2004. The sources of the kind of facts that send a slow news day’s pulse racing.

Whistleblowers.
The children-who-weren’t-thrown-overboard-after-all. The Australian government’s full knowledge of the Indonesian army’s plans for a massacre in East Timor after the referendum. For every lie revealed, every cover-up uncovered, someone risked everything to tell us what we need to know, and then disappeared quietly out of view, to spend time with their families amidst the ruins of their career. And unlike Mark Latham, Scrafton and Collins can’t rely on a $150,000 tell-all book-deal to perk up their flagging bank accounts. Exit the whistleblower, stage left, no fanfare.

Every November the journos of Australia gather to trade rumours, booze it up, and indulge in a frenzy of self-congratulation at the Walkley awards. Sometimes the media deserves to give itself a collective pat on the back. Sometimes it can’t see the (dead) wood for the (pulped) trees. But what the media awards never do is raise a glass to the real heroes – those who told the truth with no prospect of peer applause & engraved Perspex at the end of the year.

So I’m starting a one-woman drive to GET A WHISTLEBLOWER CATEGORY IN THE WALKLEYS. There’s an award for just about everything else – from ‘best headline’ to the best ‘television current affairs reporting (less than 20 minutes)’. Why not the bravest whistleblower? The Walkley board are a nice bunch – I reckon they’d give the idea a fair hearing.

If you’d like to chat to them about this you can call the Walkleys at (02) 9333 0945.
Or you can write a letter to the editor of the Walkley Magazine through their website
Or email me at miriam(AT)tsd.net.au

This post is a work-in-progress. I’ll be doing a talk on this topic at the Knot Gallery on the 10th May 2005, for the first of a new series of monthly talkfests called ‘Dont lecture me!’

New playgrounds for progressive Australians - a guided tour

The big questions

• What would it take for the ideas that we think are important to matter to the majority of Australians?
• What would it take to significantly expand the number of people who are willing to act on those ideas?
• How do we hold on to the diversity and complexity of progressive movements while making our goals/visions more accessible, relevant, and connected to the ‘mainstream’?

Learning from the enemy?

A neo-con’s recipe for success:

- Have a vision for positive change
- Speak with the assumption that right is on your side – take the moral high ground
- Use language that is difficult to co-opt – go heavy on the motherhood statements (freedom, democracy, choice, values)
- Either adopt the language of your opponents, or attach negative connotations to their key phrases/buzzwords
- Take positions that are non-exclusive (populist). Always describe your position as ‘centrist’, ‘mainstream’, representative of ‘common sense’ or ‘ordinary people’. Other groups have ideologies – you have conclusions based on overwhelming evidence.
- If you are in the minority, talk as if you are in the majority. If you are in the majority, talk as if you are part of an oppressed minority.
- Presume inevitability – frame your desired changes as necessary measures for coping with the inevitable
- Undermine the credibility of your opponents’ key organisations and spokespeople, while pretending to support the most moderate version of their goals
- When you lack public credibility on an issue, cultivate more credible (or seemingly neutral) voices to advocate your position
- Criticise all opponents for lack of transparency, while maintaining tight control of information about your own operations (especially about sources of funding, who your agenda will benefit, and who will be disadvantaged by your agenda)

Is it possible to adopt the tactics and strategies used by the neo-cons without starting to resemble them? Which parts of the list above make you uncomfortable? Which would be unnecessary or undesirable for a progressive agenda, and why? For example, given that we are genuinely trying to work for change that benefits as many people as possible, as equitably as possible, maybe we don’t need to hide our agenda – people who object to goals like that in public are likely to make themselves look silly.

To think about how a list like this could be applied to the ‘left’, imagine what it would take make the following links in the public imagination, in the same way that Bush linked Iraq & Al Qaeda, or Howard linked Labor & interest rate rises:

- Participation in pre-emptive strikes and increased risk of domestic terrorism
- Global economic inequality and threats to domestic security
- The fossil fuel industry (or deforestation) & drought, bushfires, cyclones, high insurance premiums, bankrupt farmers
- Economic rationalism & high unemployment, high levels of household debt, and personal financial insecurity
- The Institute for Public Affairs/Centre for Independent Studies & dangerous radicals (or ludicrous fringe-dwellers, or naïve luddites – or all of the above)
- Economic rationalism & unreliable/biased predictions/analysis
- (please feel free to add your own)

Potential weaknesses in the position of the Australian right over the next 20 years:

- peak oil – great potential to impact on rural & agricultural votes
- split between the big & small-l liberals
- continuing rise in underemployment
- proportion of the population who are excluded from the housing market reaches critical level
- US budget deficit finally becomes unsustainable, leading to major slump in US economy
- Gradual acceptance that global warming is a reality
- increasing awareness that, above a certain level, greater material wealth does not equal greater happiness (cross fingers)
- anything else?

We need to decide what is inevitably going to happen in the next 20 years & figure that into our plan for cultural change.

In May 2002 one of the Yes Men impersonated a WTO representative & announced that the WTO would be disbanded & reformed based on the principles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His audience at the Chartered Public Accountants conference was surprisingly receptive to the idea – here’s a quote from one of them: “You know, I’m as right wing as the next guy, but it’s about time that we give something back to these Third World countries that we’ve profited from so heavily, otherwise there will be a revolution.”

For most of the last 30 years the right has been in the ascendant while we’ve been on the back foot – partly because they have had a vision and agenda for change, while we’ve mainly been focused on stopping that agenda & maintaining the gains of the previous decades. It’s hard to mobilise support for forward-looking ideas when you are continually looking back at the past. But now that the right has gained nearly everything they want, they are vulnerable. They are the ones lacking new ideas – and they have been in control so long that they are likely to run out of ‘Others’ to blame for the downside of their policies & actions.

Where are we headed?

networks

Your Democracy
2024

grassroots political takeovers

Brisbane Direct Democracy
Power up
Quest 2025

campaigns

Project x (as yet unnamed. The Australian version of moveon.org is on the way)

thinktankery

The Australia Institute
virtual think-tank
new matilda policy project
The New Institute

tools & tactics

The Community Organising School
The Change Agency

unmanifestos

Lakoff on Framing
Clive Hamilton on Wellbeing
Eva Cox on Fairness

A friend sent me the following article. It provides an excellent backgrounder to my next project - travelling through East Timor, Indonesia & Malaysia profiling independent and community media makers.

Doors close on free press
Guardian Online, Thursday January 1, 2004

A former Vietnamese journalist, Nguyen Vu Binh, who used the internet to criticise his country’s government is sentenced to seven years in a trial closed to foreigners. Zaw Thet Htwe, the editor-in-chief of Burma’s First Eleven Sports Journal is sentenced to death for alleged treason after he published a story about the reported misuse of an international donation to promote football in the military-run nation.

One of Indonesia’s most prominent news magazines, Tempo, is being constantly victimised by the courts after it wrote several critical articles about a powerful businessman with close ties to the ruling elite. Meanwhile a senior editor at the Rakyat Merdeka newspaper is sentenced to six months for approving
headlines that, amongst other things, likened President Megawati Sukarnoputri to diesel fuel.

The Philippine press appears free, but more journalists are being killed than ever before and few thorough investigations have been made into their deaths.

Meanwhile in Thailand, the creeping authoritarianism of the prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, and his party cronies is taking its toll. They are steadily increasing their control over the country’s media - with the latest conquest being interests run by a cabinet minister taking a controlling stake in one of
the most critical news organisations, the Nation Media Group.

There has been little to cheer about elsewhere in the region in the last few months. The new Malaysian prime minister, Abdullah Badawi, has put his own people in charge of the sycophantic mainstream media while the most critical news outlet, the website Malaysiakini has an unresolved year-long police
investigation hanging over it.

Despite government claims of a new openness, few Singaporeans are brave enough to speak out. One young filmmaker who made a movie about teenage gangs was dumbfounded to have it banned for reasons of “national security”, while almost everyone I interviewed on a recent trip to the island republic pleaded to be quoted in a positive light as they feared Big Brother’s seemingly ubiquitous reach.

Lin Nuemann, a regional adviser to the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists, says his organisation’s forthcoming annual report is going to be pessimistic about the state of press freedom in the region. “What we’re saying is that virtually every place is getting worse,” he said. “Although you can’t really say Burma is getting worse, because it’s not got far to go.”

This is all a far cry from the optimism that swept the region six-and-a-half years ago following the Asian financial crisis that mushroomed into political turmoil in several places, most notably Indonesia.

The crisis prompted a sweeping liberalisation of the press in Indonesia and significant moves elsewhere. But that momentum has dissipated and is now going into reverse. The open window that allowed a fresh wind to blow through the region’s media is being steadily closed.

In a recent survey of global press freedom in 166 nations, Reporters Sans Fronti貥s ranked south-east Asia’s media as follows: Cambodia (81), Thailand (82), Malaysia (104), Indonesia (110), the Philippines (118), Singapore (144), Vietnam (159), Laos (163) and Burma (164). “The elites are regrouping and there’s much less patience for a vibrant free press now,” Mr Neumann said.

The CPJ is most disturbed about Indonesia, according to Mr Neumann, where the pendulum appears to have swung most dramatically. “You have a combination of military and national security pressures and a not very well-organised court system,” he said. “If it means an organisation like Tempo gets scared then you know the situation is serious.”

What’s worrying analysts and diplomats around the region is that with elections due in Indonesia (both parliamentary and the first ever direct presidential poll), Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines this year and a probable change of prime minister in Singapore, the room for alternative opinions to receive a fair airing is becoming increasingly limited.

The status quo is almost certainly going to remain, if not become more entrenched, in Malaysia and Thailand. Meanwhile the gun culture is so strong in the Philippines that no one will be surprised if journalists start to pull punches. Indonesia is a different situation, where anything could happen,
although journalists know that no one will be on their side in the likely event that the politicians start playing dirty as the stakes mount.

Little change is expected elsewhere. Amnesty International is unsurprisingly gloomy after its recent, second, visit to Burma, while organisations such as Forum Asia are not holding out much hope for reform in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Email
john.aglionby@guardian.co.uk