Progressives United - Sounds Good to Me

I was examining the headlines on the front page of the Murdochised Australian Financial Review the other day – something about the unhappiness of casual workers being a fallacy, yeah, right, I can give you examples of unhappy casual workers if you want them – when it struck me once again just how far to the right the media has lurched in this country, what a crisis that entails, and how no-one seems to feel very urgent about it. (AFR is owned by Fairfax but its editor-in-chief is now Michael Stutchbury, a former economics editor of the Australian and to the right of Genghis Kahn.)

And I reiterated to myself that the lack of urgency assumption wasn't true, that plenty of progressives feel terrible about the state of Australia. It's just that we lack a focus for our fears and hopes, and a means of channelling them effectively.

I thought about the lead-up to the 1972 federal election: the excitement that abounded at the prospect of change after 23 years of conservative government, and how much the arty class were involved in persuading the electorate to embrace the Australian Labor Party and its out-there leader, Gough Whitlam – singing the 'It's time' theme in an election advertisement were film and television celebrities like Jack Thompson.

At the time, for perhaps the only time in its life, the ALP strongly resembled the present day Greens in its degree of radicalism. Yet the policies the party implemented once in government are now mainstream: abolishing the death penalty; setting up legal aid; establishing a universal health care system; introducing a single parents pension; the principle of women obtaining equal pay for equal work; abolishing the White Australia Policy; outlawing racial discrimination and ushering in multiculturalism; increasing spending on Indigenous people and handing back native lands. Despite itself, Australia actually moved forward, conforming to the truism that humanity is always progressing.

And why was the ALP so progressive? Because it had been infiltrated by progressives! In the fifties and sixties the disaffected young of the middle classes joined the ALP in droves and changed its old-style union flavour forever – this is described in Jamie Button's Speechless: A Year in My Father's Business. It was easy for progressives to focus on one political party that wasn't captive to corporations and was proposing real change.

Nowadays, the ALP is full of people who want to stay in parliament – full stop. It should be called the STIPAC Party, short for Stay in Power at All Costs.

(The great irony is that the more the ALP ditches its progressive tenets in a bid to please the 24-hour media cycle and the media moguls, the more ridiculous it looks. It can't win, because the Coalition is just naturally better at being the puppets of big business. But that's another story.)

The ALP's progressive past, compared with its present as the puppets of big corporations, is one of the main reasons why the progressive forces are so scattered. Progressives who can't give up on the ALP are like ghosts who haven't crossed over because they don't know they're dead. It's a good career strategy – they can keep on whinging about what the ALP should be doing but isn't while ensuring they stay relevant and on-message for the Murdochised mainstream media. The MSM loves these people because they can publish their columns and thereby appear to be giving the progressive side an airing while still maintaining the status quo; everyone knows the ALP wouldn't implement their progressive proposals in a pink fit.

Yet the Australian electorate, believe it or not, are still fairly progressive – when asked questions devoid of party political connotations, that is. Polls suggest that they want more government action in the areas of health, education, public transport and bank regulation. They also want – wait for it – government support of the manufacturing industry. And a majority believes that corporations have benefited most from the economic reform program of the last 30 years, and oppose the privatisation of Telstra. The same goes for gay marriage – according to Galaxy, 64 per cent of Australians support marriage equality, but neither Labor nor the Coalition supports it as a binding party policy. Another survey showed that Australians would be willing to pay higher taxes for better aged care.

The only party willing to put these wishes of the electorate into effect is the Greens. But thanks to the Murdoch press's successful demonisation of the Greens, and the Fairfax press ignoring them (in effect a form of censorship) most people think they're either dangerous extremists or they have no policies to speak of – or both.

Media concentration in general, and Murdochisation in particular – the domination of the Australian print media by one man, and its deleterious effect on other media – has resulted in the electorate voting for the parties with policies they do not support, and against the party whose policies they do support. Understanding this conundrum is essential to understanding Murdochisation. You can see similar results in the USA, where the Murdoch funded Tea Party is full of poverty-stricken social democrats who have been successfully marshalled into defending tax-dodging billionaires but would be quite happy with an interventionist government offering good services if they actually believed such a government could exist.

Getting people to vote against their best interests is quite a feat. This, I repeat, is Murdochisation at work.

Progressives united?

To get the message out that the Greens are actually a mainstream progressive party that will improve quality of life for all Australians, make Australia more equal and safeguard our environment, we desperately need a united progressive coalition that encompasses and champions the Greens, just as Australian celebrities and the arty class in general once championed the ALP.

There are a number of reasons why this isn't happening. We need to identify these reasons if we want to move past them.

One problem is that we cannot agree on what to call ourselves. In 2012 a book of essays was published titled Left Turn: Political Essays for the New Left. Why are we still calling ourselves the Left? Do we need to evoke Lenin every time we demand, say, a decent welfare net or support for workers cooperatives? Do we even have to associate the basic human need for fairness, and the basic human desire to help someone in need, with the ruthless Bolsheviks and their Red Terror, an assassination campaign targeting opponents that occurred less than 12 months after they gained power? Didn't people agitate for social change before the Industrial Workers of the World came into being?

I am not damning unions here, or denying their vital role in curbing the worst horrors of the industrial revolution and improving working conditions. I'm saying we need more imagination. There is no guarantee that Left is always synonymous with progressive – what is progressive about Paul Howes's Australian Workers Union, which called for mining in the Tarkine?

The other problem is that there seems little talk about exactly what kind of society we want. Not that everyone needs to agree on that – far from it. But we should be talking about it, trying to capture the debate. If there's no growth, where do the jobs come from, and the money for reskilling? If we don't like corporations why don't we simply change the rules that govern them? And if someone calls themselves a socialist, that's fine, but let's ask them, in the twenty-first century, with the creeping security state, what that actually means.

And why aren't we repeating ad nauseum some pretty basic demands regarding the worst excesses brought in by Howard and continued by Labor – demands to increase the dole, get rid of the super rorts and negative gearing, stop overfunding private schools and subsiding private health, cut skilled migration and stop demonising asylum seekers.

And shouldn't we be trying to highlight the conflicts between the old style union hackery of Paul Howes and the environmentally friendly advocates of a new information economy that the Greens are? Why isn't this debate being had on community radio station 3CR – not as a fighting match but as a genuine attempt to solve the jobs versus environment conundrum? Why don't we hear more from  the Greens on 3CR, for that matter? Why aren't articulate progressives getting shows on the station, and interviewing experts (this happens, but not enough)? The Greens seem to have the worst of both worlds when it comes to the media – at times too mainstream for 3CR, and too 'radical' for the Murdocracy.

The sad fact is too much of our commentariat are stymied and paralysed by the following:

·        The Murdoch-corporate press – which has created oligarchy. Progressives fear that if their proposals are too 'radical' they will be dismissed and won't be heard.

·        Their love of lifestyle. Progressives are often quiet peace-loving types who always want to engage with debate comfortably, tend their veggie gardens and put their families and lifestyles first. Let's inject some urgency into things. We're spending too much time carrying out sustainable renovations, refashioning clothes, setting up ebusinesses and going to foodie events, and not enough time protesting. Not that any of this stuff is bad, but it's not enough.

·        Progressive ghettos. Living in the Democratic Republic of Moreland can give you a false sense of security about life, the universe and everything. I speak from experience – I live in Stonnington and my local member is the insufferable Kelly O'Dwyer, and I am anything but complacent.

·       Their career focus. As I've said before, too many of our intelligentsia have their priorities wrong – career and book deals first, the public interest second. Part of the reason is the price of housing in this country – high house prices breed conservatism, as John Howard knew so well. Progressives often focus on publicising their books to get sales, so they try to keep in with the journos. Perhaps the saddest example of a former progressive gone bad is Julian Morrow, who gives new meaning to the word hypocrisy – on his drive-time show on Radio National he happily hobnobs with the likes of the IPA's John Roskam and Murdoch warrior Joe Hildebrand.

·        ALP 'progressives' – there is a strong yet ineffective progressive rump within the ALP. The likes of Doug Cameron are actually doing the progressive cause harm, because they are giving voters the impression that at heart the ALP is a party of humanitarian progress. They provide window dressing that disguises the machinations of power and influence that now govern the party. Steeped in ALP culture and their own machinations, they no doubt have the illusion of effectiveness. The most effective thing they could do is join the Greens.

·        Single-issue parties that confuse the progressive cause. Take note the Wikileaks Party, the Sex Party and anyone else who grabs hold of one issue and creates a party around it. Before you do that, check out the Greens policy on your pet issue – it's probably similar to what you're fighting for.

·        Embittered ex-Democrats who jump at an opportunity to slag the Greens. Please realise that the public interest matters more than your sense of being upstaged by the Greens. The original purpose of the Democrats was not to be a progressive party anyway, but to take the middle ground and 'keep the bastards honest'. If Natasha Stott Despoja stopped appearing on Channel Ten, she could have a resurrected political life as a popular Greens senator or, if she understandably doesn't want to enter parliament again, in the policy area.

·       Feminists sticking to work and family issues. Many feminists these days don't seem to see themselves as much as they might as part of the progressive project. A few champion Gillard simply because she's a woman, while many talk up feminism as a social movement that seems to have little to do with economics apart from the call to give women equal participation in work, and men equal participation on the domestic front. Who is going to give single parents a fair go? The Greens. Who is for better access to education and training so single mums don't get stuck in dead-end jobs? The Greens. Who has the best record for gender equality in pre-selection? The Greens. Who has the best childcare policies? The Greens. And so on. If more feminists championed the party that actually supports their stance, it would be very helpful.

·       Politeness. It's time to name rent seeking and attacks on the poor for what they are. I'm not arguing for abuse. I'm arguing for honesty. The Murdoch press are scary and it's difficult to tell the truth about them, as Bob Brown discovered. But honesty about the media and the situation in general is our greatest ally.

·       GetUp – their election get-togethers are a distraction, and are intent on changing the policies of the major parties. Stop putting your energy into trying to change the major parties and support the Greens. Simon Sheikh, the former head of GetUp who is now an ACT Senate candidate for the upcoming federal election, has seen the light.

We need to unite. We need to storm the airwaves of the Murdochised ABC radio stations, we need to get on 3CR, we need to demand that the IPA is no longer allowed on the ABC. We need to demand an end to super rorts, and scare – legitimately scare – people about climate change. We need to talk more loudly than the timorous welfare lobby about the effects of low dole payments and the parlous state of aged care, and protest the outrageous money grab of private schools of the public purse. Who do you think was subsidising Rosa Storelli's outrageous $500,000 salary? Taxpayers.

And we need to point out how outrageous it is that fracking is going on as a ghastly environmental experiment.

Most of all, we need to stop de-politicising these issues and daring to name the only party willing to put them into practice: The Greens. To demand an end to the censorship and declare our hands.

I'm proposing a broad progressive alliance. It latches onto the Greens for now, and any independents who have a progressive agenda and are upfront about that, but only because the Greens happen to coincide with its broad vision. When they cease doing that, such an alliance would drop the Greens like a hotcake.

The right are working together. Haven't you noticed their years-long campaign about the need to improve 'productivity' and their dire warnings about labour being too expensive here? Softening us all up for the next version of Workchoices. Progressives need to unite in the common cause of increasing the Greens vote. This will not only help the progressive voice in parliament, but it will send a message to the major parties.

Progressiveness has to be a potent and positive force, not a reactive one, because capitalism as it now operates is so obviously stuffed. It has to be an open-ended project yes, but still a project. And it has to educate the public, and at least try to provide answers to middle Australia. Where would the jobs be in a progressive Australia? Where would the tax come from? If we don't want mining, what will take its place? We have to take these questions seriously, or no-one will take us seriously.

Let's get off our butts and do something – but most importantly, do it together. And let's admit that the Greens are our only hope, and actually name them, and support them, just as the baby boomers did with Whitlam.

Many of the ideas here are the product of discussions I've had with Michael Wilbur-Ham, and I thank him for his input.

Michael has recently established a progressive discussion forum, Mindful Australian Politics – you're more than welcome to drop in and look around or start a conversation.

 

Thank God We Have Julia (No, Not That Julia)

It is dispiriting to be a feminist and watch mainstream television: so many of the female offsiders and guests look like porn stars.

I understand the libertarian feminist view that says 'let ’em wear what they like and shut-up about it'. I I’m not exactly trying to bundle these women into burqas. I don’t want clothing to be regulated. But I’m allowed to offer my opinion, and to talk about ethics and setting an example. It’s a free country.

 

How much choice is there, anyway? Who is actually calling the shots here? When it comes to TV anchors and cohosts I doubt whether it's the women themselves, if recent revelations about the sexism of male TV execs have any validity. (Pictured is Janice Petersen from SBS news – yes, news, you read right - she's not about to go off and host the Logies.)

What impression is all this pornographisation having on our young gels? Should the male execs and the stars who says ‘yes master’ only think of ratings and their own careers when the over-the-top aesthetic these women increasingly sport is being planned?

For a wonderful alternative I give you the gorgeous Julia Zemiro, host of the successful, long-running Rockwiz on SBS – powerful, confident, funny and a wearer of pants suits! Yes, tomorrow’s women, you don't have to wear a blonde sculpture on your head to be successful, or a skimpy dress that looks as if you're about to swan off to the world premiere of your new film, Marlene Does Melbourne.

It’s not that Zemiro doesn’t wear dresses and tops and skirts – she dresses differently every week. She just never looks as if she’s just arrived from a porn shoot particularly.

And if you have the slightest shred of doubt about her comic credentials, watch this clip where she completely takes over the segment in the improvisation comedy show Thank God You're Here.

Contrast this with the unfortunate Carrie Bickmore, cohost of Channel Ten's The Project, whose hair is regularly done up to look like  she has had a dreadful fright, and whose dresses are beginning to suggest that the Channel Ten studios lack air conditioning.

It is little wonder that her cohost, the supposedly unsexist and celebrated comedian Charlie Pickering, is the one who gets to greet viewers first up at the start of every show. With his on-trend tie and short back and sides, he exudes authority. Lap up the male privilege, Charlie. You don't deserve it any more than any male does.

There is something clownish about extreme ‘dress-ups’. In saying this I am not being sexist. In the seventeenth century men were just as clownish with their makeup,  fancy wigs and garish coats. But gradually they outsourced being decorative  to one gender so that their own clothes could express dominance and power. Women have been lumped with the human urge to self-decorate ever since – to an absurd degree.

It was getting better in the eighties and the nineties, but with the explosion of online porn we got raunch culture and now every second woman on TV looks like a barbie doll.

Is it any wonder that too often we are relegated to the sidelines? That women are now less dominant in the area of comedy, for example, is evident when you look at clips of Fast Forward from the nineties and then compare the pre-eminence of the wonderful Marg Downey, Magda Szubanski, Gina Riley and Jane Turner to the number of women in comedy today and the status of women in the shows themselves. These women had real power, now women on TV are too often offered the choice of sexual power or no power at all.

First they dress us like clowns, then they say we’re not worth laughing at.

 

Punishing the Powerless: Australia’s Asylum Seeker Shame

Refugee advocates have slammed the re-introduction of offshore processing for asylum seekers by the Australian Labor government under Julia Gillard, warning it will lead to an outbreak of mental illness among detainees and result in a human rights disaster.

They say that under the policy, asylum seekers who arrive by boat will be sent offshore to languish in harmful limbo, away from the scrutiny of courts, the media and the public.

Others warn that existing detention arrangements are already leading to an epidemic of mental illness.

On 16 August, federal parliament passed legislation that enables offshore processing and indefinite detention on Nauru and PNG’s Manus Island.

The Greens tried to introduce amendments that would ban indefinite detention and require scrutiny by human rights observers, but these were rejected.

Labor’s backflip marks a return to the infamous ‘Pacific Solution’ of offshore detention that was adopted by the former Coalition government headed by John Howard. The Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, has said that asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru will have ‘no advantage’ over those waiting for resettlement in camps in Indonesia and Malaysia. He has refused to name the waiting period, but it could be up to five years.

Yet the policy is worse than the Coalition's because this time around, asylum seekers processed offshore will have no access to the Australian legal system.

While Nauru became party to the United Nations Refugee Convention in 2011, it is said to lack a legal framework and the expertise necessary to process fairly the claims of asylum seekers.

In addition, the department of health will no longer be responsible for the health of asylum seekers in detention.

The Refugee Action Coalition Sydney has warned that the policy is a recipe for ‘another epidemic of mental illness’.

It said that the notion of an orderly queue in overseas refugee camps was a myth. And it has estimated that the cost to taxpayers could be as much as $1 million per asylum seeker.

Indefinite detention and mental illness

Indefinite detention of asylum seekers under the Howard government, often in oppressive desert conditions under abusive and poorly trained staff, led to mental illnesses such as clinical depression and post traumatic stress disorder becoming endemic. Without a definite release date even the most mentally stable refugees were cracking under the strain, while children in detention were exhibiting severe signs of trauma after witnessing the desperate acts of those with no hope – hunger strikes, sewing up of lips, other forms of self-harm and attempted suicide.

To make matters worse, detainees who clearly needed to be released from detention for urgent psychiatric treatment in hospitals were denied it.

There was also a string of public scandals around detention centres, including nearly 250 cases of wrongful detention.

Research carried out during this time confirmed that immigration detention led to the risk of mental deterioration and ongoing issues with post traumatic stress disorder, depression, and disability due to mental illness. The longer the detention, the more severe was the resulting mental disturbance.

The response
 
The Australian Medical Association (AMA) has lamented the Labor government’s return to offshore processing and called for an independent medical panel to oversee the health treatment of asylum seekers processed offshore.

It said that the federal government was already dealing with ‘a large and growing catalogue of compensation action from asylum seekers claiming to have been traumatised by their time in Australian detention centres'.

AMA President Dr Steve Hambleton said that indefinite detention had ‘a serious mental health impact.

‘There is plenty of research evidence of the harm that detention causes to a child’s development. We must do the right thing.’

Professor Louise Newman, of the Monash University Centre for Developmental Psychiatry and Psychology, said that after 12 months in detention, people literally start to mentally decompensate [deteriorate in functioning], some people earlier. ‘And that can only be exacerbated if people are in these very remote locations where they have great difficulty in understanding their own situation.’

Refugee advocates insist that the new policy contravenes Australia’s legal obligations as a party to the United Nations Refugee Convention. They also believe it could be illegal following the High Court decision that struck down the Labor government’s planned ‘Malaysian solution’.

The High Court found that the transfer of asylum seekers to a third country for processing comes with strict conditions, including that no one be sent from Australia to a situation where they are not effectively protected under law in a way that meets minimal human rights standards.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the body primarily responsible for the protection and resettlement of refugees, has expressed doubt that credible refugee status determinations can be made on Nauru and Manus Island, and has refused to be involved in the processing of asylum seekers there. Meanwhile, legal boffins claim that because of the lack of suitable protections and legal framework on Nauru, Australia may still be responsible for the wellbeing of asylum seekers processed offshore, despite its attempts to wash its hands of them.

The Greens have slammed the new policy and recently accused the government of having insufficient mental health services on Nauru and Manus Island. For example, they claim that only two counsellors and no permanent psychiatrist will be available for 1500 people on Nauru once it is operating at peak capacity.

Amnesty has been equally scathing: ‘People languished in Nauru for years out of sight of public and media scrutiny, before ultimately ending up in Australia. It is shocking to see the panel favour punitive measures that deliberately hold vulnerable people hostage, separate families and leave them in limbo.’

Under the new legislation the immigration minister is no longer the legal guardian of children and unaccompanied minors sent offshore. This opens the way for children to be detained indefinitely and forcibly deported. The Oxford Human Rights Hub has accused Australia of trying to circumvent its legal obligations to all children within its jurisdiction as a country that has ratified the UN Convention on the rights of the Child. UNICEF has also protested the policy, insisting that children should not be sent offshore.

Labor's backflip

Since 2001, boat arrivals of asylum seekers to Australia have been highly politicised. Both major parties have exploited the issue to detract attention from broader issues of inadequate infrastructure, high immigration and insecure employment; plane arrivals are far more numerous yet attract little controversy. It has also been a staple of commercial television and the tabloid and hate media.

Yet while the stated aim has been to end the practice of asylum seekers risking death by getting on leaky, overcrowded boats and heading for Christmas Island, in the recent debate there has been little consideration of the causes of refugee flows, or government failures to provide adequate search and rescue.

In fact, the deaths of asylum seekers at sea can be sheeted home to Australian Government policies. For example, Australia’s search and rescue services operate with the priority of stopping boats arriving, not saving lives, according to the author of Reluctant Rescuers, Tony Kevin. He claims that ‘hundreds of people have died when they could and should have been saved’.

According to the Refugee Action Coalition Sydney, the deterrence policies  of the Australian government have added to the treacherous nature of the trip. ‘These include detention in Indonesia of anyone caught trying to get a boat, criminalisation of people smuggling and the sinking or burning of boats that arrive, which means only old, unsafe vessels make the trip.’
 

Shameful legacy

The current crisis had its beginnings in the abrupt policy switch that followed the Tampa affair in August 2001. As the events unfolded the Coalition government under Howard rushed through legislation that instituted the infamous ‘Pacific Solution’ of offshore detention, and affirmed the legality of indefinite detention, a policy that had been introduced by the Keating government in 1994. Skillfully exploiting Australians’ traditional fear of invasion by non-whites, Howard went on to comfortably win the federal election on 10 November 2001.

By the early 2000s, Australia’s detention centres, and its policy of detaining children, were attracting wide controversy. One child, Shayan Badraie, sparked a public scandal when he became so traumatised by what he had witnessed at the Villawood and Woomera detention centres that he was virtually catatonic; he refused to talk, eat or drink and was wasting away. The Immigration Department released him only after a storm of media protest.

In 2005 Howard was forced to soften his detention policy after a public backlash and a revolt from a group of angry Coalition backbenchers. Concessions he reluctantly granted included the promised release of long-term detainees, the release of all children and their parents, time limits on processing refugee applications and review of all long-term detainees by the ombudsman. However, indefinite detention remained legal.

Following its election in 2007, the Labor government ended the Pacific Solution, closing the detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island. It introduced ‘Seven New Values’ governing detention, but these were never underpinned by legislation, and indefinite detention remained legal.

Refugee advocates such as Pamela Curr of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre claim that all these values have since been breached. Curr and others allege that even in the existing detention centres the situation is now alarmingly close to that of the Pacific Solution under Howard.

After unremitting pressure from the opposition and media, and with the continuing arrival of new boats, the government appointed an Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers. It produced the Houston Report, which recommended that Australia immediately increase its humanitarian intake of refugees from 13,500 to 20,000 places a year, increasing to 27,000 over the next five years, and that the government put more resources into developing a regional cooperation framework for dealing with refugees.

But it also called for the re-opening of Manus Island and Nauru as offshore processing centres, a ‘no advantage’ test for asylum seekers arriving by boats, and the scrapping of access to family reunion programs for boat arrivals.

Dr Graham Thom, Amnesty International's National Refugee Coordinator, said that the recommendations ‘prioritise policies that are solely based on deterring refugees and do little to acknowledge the conflicts, persecution and regional dynamics which make people board boats’.

The legislation that was passed by federal parliament on 16 August as a response to the report has been attacked for leaving out some of the recommendations that softened it, such as access to health and education services for detainees.

Why is this wrong?

When looking at government treatment of asylum seekers, it’s important to separate two factors: the truthfulness of the claims to refugee status, and the conditions under which asylum seekers are kept while awaiting processing. Conditions must include the length of time people are detained for, and whether or not there is a stated maximum length.

Just as mental health is misunderstood in the community, so Australians and the public in general have been slow to recognise the mental health aspects of incarceration, whatever the nature of and original reason for that incarceration.

Jail for convicted offenders is a separate issue, but we can see that general ignorance at play whenever the public complains about conditions in jaIls being too good; in this case, there is a failure to understand that incarceration alone imposes punishment on the psyche, even when conditions are decent.

When it comes to asylum seekers, the level of ignorance and misunderstanding is even worse.

Furthermore, the conditions are often horrendous, and while criminals know when their sentence is due to finish, detainees have no such certainty.

Yet there is a body of research that tells us that indefinite or prolonged detention poses serious and permanent risks to mental health and can be seen as a form of torture.

Of course, the real problem is that, after initial checks have been carried out, detaining someone who has broken no law, while refusing to tell them when you are going to release them, is a fundamental breach of the basic rights that form the basis of Western democracy, including habeas corpus.

Real solutions

Refugee advocates insist that offshore processing will fail as a deterrant because the problem is a lack of regional processing.

They say the appalling conditions of asylum seekers languishing for years as they wait for processing in countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia must be dealt with. Above all the government has been attacked for its failure to increase significantly the number of refugees it takes from Indonesia.

According to the Greens, 'There ae 8000 people waiting to have their asylum applications assessed in Indonesian refugee camps, and more in Malaysia. But with only a handful of UN officers assessing their claims, the "queue" to find a safer home from Malaysia or Indonesia is decades long.

'Refugees have no legal status in Indonesia or Malaysia. That means they have no healthcare, no education, no way to earn a living for their families, and no prospects of a safe life.'
 
Over the last decade Australia has only accepted 60 people, on average, from Indonesia and Malaysia each year. According to the Refugee Action Coalition Sydney, the Expert Panel suggested immediately accepting 3200 refugees from Indonesia to clear the backlog of recognised refugees there. But the government has set aside just 400 places.
 
Advocates have called for faster resettlement, an immediate increase in UNHCR funding from Australia for the UN to process claims more quickly, and better protection for asylum seekers waiting in those countries for resettlement.

In addition, the Greens have called for the following government actions:

• Open up more family reunion places in Australia's humanitarian program
• Review the ban on people from some countries seeking protection by air
• Delink the onshore and offshore quotas for humanitarian visas
• Codify Australia's sea rescue policies and increase Indonesia's capacity so people are rescued in time
• Establish an Australian Ambassador for Refugee Protection.

'In the 1970s and 80s, we helped thousands of refugees through a genuine regional system', they insist. 'We can do it again.'

DVD Reviews: Thrills Abound, but Quirky Wins the Day

Is it a condition of getting older that you become just too refined in your tastes, too difficult to impress? Three recently released DVDS, all of which received great reviews and which I was looking forward to seeing, have proved disappointing. Then again, one that had a mediocre reception was a pleasant surprise.

I watched these DVDs on my small, 32-centimetre TV screen. I find this is a pretty good test of a worthwhile movie. I’ve no doubt that I would have enjoyed all four movies more on a larger screen, but the smaller screen is good enough if the movie is.

Warning: all these mini-reviews contain spoilers.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) flees a sinister commune in the rural Catskills and reunites with her older sister in Connecticut, Lucy (Sarah Paulson). She moves into the plush, sparkling vacation home of Lucy and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) and immediately disrupts their ordered lives. She behaves erratically, ignores social conventions and is overwhelmed by traumatic flashbacks. Conflict ensues as she challenges the materialistic lifestyle of the couple and Ted struggles to deal with her increasingly strange behaviour.

This is a psychological thriller in which almost everything works. As Martha herself has been seduced, so the flashbacks draw the viewer into the life of the commune as it is slowly and remorselessly revealed to be a dangerous cult; meanwhile, tension ramps up in the present as the cult members start to hunt Martha down. The viewer experiences her disorientation in scenes where it’s not immediately clear whether the communal farmhouse of the cult or the gleaming vacation home is the setting. Early family breakdown has clearly left Martha needy and vulnerable to the superficial warmth of the cult and the attentions of its charismatic leader, Patrick (John Hawkes).

The actors are all strong, Elizabeth Olsen as Martha most of all, although none of the characters is particularly likeable. There’s an implicit, cleverly subtle critique here of a certain sterility in the prosperous lives of the couple and their minimalist expressions of wealth, but the inverted morals of the cult are far ghastlier.

What marred this movie for me was a central weakness in the plot: it’s clear from the beginning that Martha is psychiatrically disturbed, that she urgently needs to see a professional, but despite their wealth and sophistication, Lucy and Ted do nothing about this until it’s almost too late. Martha’s untreated post-traumatic stress disorder enables the entire story of the movie to unfold. I found myself irritated by what I felt was a weak plot device, although some viewers may find it plausible.

There was another irritation that I’m finding with many mainstream US movies these days. It wasn’t clear to me whether I was supposed to sympathise with Ted’s domineering impatience with Martha: I think he’s a complete tosser, but what was the film’s attitude towards him?

Burning Man

 

This film shares a welcome characteristic with the previous one: a non-linear structure that melds the future with the present in a way that imitates the constant intrusions of memory. In one way, life is linear; in another, the past constantly gatecrashes the present.

Tom (Matthew Goode) is a successful British chef in an upmarket restaurant in Sydney’s Bondi. But he’s exploding: driving like a maniac, engaging in compulsive sex with a series of women, getting into fights, deciding on a whim to sell the house in which he lives with his vulnerable young son, Oscar. Tom’s friends and colleagues are sympathetic and worried about his self-destructive trajectory, but all the viewer knows is that he’s a total pain in the ass. Through a back-and-forth chronology, a picture of the events that have led to this crisis emerges and we see a different, gentler Tom as the reasons for his meltdown are slowly revealed. In order to maintain his life with his son he must now try to reconcile with his painful past.

Acting out is always easier to portray than internalised distress, and here is acting out at its most colourful. Was it my feminism that spoilt the film for me, or the film’s lack of it? It reminded me of The Boys Are Back in the central character’s autobiographical insistence on his own heroism for simply having to put up with life’s blows; in the case of The Boys of Back, a whole film was built around a successful male journo forced into (shock, horror) the role of single parent. I hated Burning Man’s endless round of soggy women (with the exception of Rachel Griffiths as Miriam) whose sole role in the film was to get Tom back in touch with his ‘feminine’ (read: human) side. The entire narrative arc of the film, including behaviour so foolhardy it is life threatening but that we are supposed to applaud, relies on a male character’s inability to let himself have a good cry.

Still, the film has compensations signalling writer-director Jonathan Teplistky’s talent. Visually arresting, surrealist images and high-octane, chaotic chronology dramatise the contrasts of life and death, fecundity and decay, as well as the extremes of emotional experience. Flying fruit, crashing vehicles, live lobsters, and the threats and lure of naked flame provide sensory overload. This is a film that revels in being a visual medium.

The Grey

A team of oil drillers are left stranded in a freezing Alaskan snow blizzard when their plane crashes on the way home from an assignment. The survivors find themselves in the territory of a pack of ravenous grey wolves that almost immediately begin to pick them off. Wolf shooter John Ottway (Liam Neeson) demonstrates his survival skills and becomes the group's de facto leader, attempting to lead it to safety. The men work through their differences and bond with each other in the face of the ever-present danger of death as the ferocious wolves continue to circle; on this treacherous journey through squall, canyon and raging river, each man faces a personal battle for survival.

This is the kind of film that is best viewed on a large screen. It’s a classic ‘man against nature’ story that purports to have a modern twist: a group of men testing their limits and redefining their manhood in a mercilessly freezing setting that mimics the final circle of hell. Filmed on location in British Columbia, it’s a model of chilly authenticity: if the actors look as if they’re about to freeze to death, that’s because they were.

The film’s lead actor provides a clue to its quality. Neeson has an authoritative naturalism, an unforced down-to-earth solidity that is totally believable on screen; yet like the equally talented Emily Blunt and Jude Law, he constantly trashes his own brand due to his spectacular unfussiness about the often rubbishy stuff he appears in. So my feelings were mixed from the start about this supposedly sophisticated take on modern masculinity. In the end it’s all a matter of expectations.

There are no real surprises in terms of the conversation about masculinity. Neeson’s character is a real man because he respects the ruthless bloodthirstiness of nature and owns his fear of it. Owning your fear allows preparedness, which increases your chances of survival; nothing too revolutionary here, although most of the film is refreshingly free of overt misogyny. More interesting is The Grey’s endorsement of atheism, unusual for a mainstream US film: Ottway would like to believe in God, but can’t.

As the group flees the wolves, a classic plot pattern gradually emerges and this is where the film starts to get predictable and therefore disappointing: it becomes less involving as it builds towards its climax, instead of more so. The characters can't make up for this: Ottway is too elemental to be all that interesting, and is a male archetype rather than a flesh-and-blood person. The film tries hard to make us care about the other characters but doesn’t succeed. Nor can the wolves carry the film: they just aren’t frightening enough as a horror or thriller device.

However, I’m not dismissing the film completely; it’s perfectly adequate as an old-fashioned adventure story. The Grey is superior to many action movies, and has an authenticity and narrative arc that most of them lack. It also lives up to its title: the backdrop is not only jaw-droppingly awe-inspiring, it imposes itself on the film as plot, a picturesque hell to be fought against to the death of man, wolf or both. Fans of action movies rather than thrillers will be much less disappointed than I was.

South Solitary

 

As soon as you label a film quirky these days, you condemn it to death. But quirky is good if it means unexpected, character-based and involving. The films of writer–director Shirley Barrett always have original elements and this one is no exception.

South Solitary is a film that refuses to stick to the rules of genre. Its heroine is unconventional, but unconventionally so if you get my drift, so that her behaviour always surprises. The film is a kind of love story, but without the familiar tropes and baggage you’d expect from the genre.

It is 1928. Meredith Appleton (Miranda Otto) accompanies her bombastic uncle George Wadsworth (Barry Otto) to his posting as head lighthouse keeper on South Solitary, an isolated, craggy island in the Southern Ocean. There she plays what appears to be a familiar, subservient role as his housekeeper. Wadsworth immediately finds fault with the lighthouse watchman, Harry Stanley (Rohan Nichol), and his offsider, Jake Fleet (Marton Csokas), for their occasional failure to keep the lighthouse beam burning for the benefit of passing ships.

Meredith is at once dutiful and compassionate and needy and impulsive. She soon begins a flirtation with Harry, who has a family, but is also intrigued by Jake, a shell shocked ex-soldier beset by crippling spells in which he hallucinates traumatic wartime scenes.

It’s hard to separate the strengths of this film from its weaknesses. It has a wonderful period authenticity that fights against the clean, fancy-dress-costume feel of so many period dramas these days: drab colours and homespun woollens suggest an austerity that is at odds with the stereotypes of the Roaring Twenties. Filming was done on location at Cape Otway light station and Cape Nelson, and the fierce, unspoilt scenery of the island, its carrier pigeons, feral children and unrelenting winds, gives the film a raw appeal and distinctive beauty. Barrett researched the subject thoroughly, and the details of life on South Solitary, like the precarious supplies trolley that must be pushed up the steep mountainside, provide freshness and immediacy. The scenes shot within the lens of the narrow lighthouse are at once visually dramatic and claustrophobic.

The two Ottos, father and daughter, are simply wonderful together, so perfectly in character that they’re faultless (Miranda Otto portrays a depth here that she doesn’t always have the chance to display).

But the film’s refusal to obey the rules of the genre also leads to some issues. There’s a sudden tragedy in the middle that leads to a dramatic plot reversal; it means that in the end the slow-burning love story doesn’t have quite the build-up it requires to earn the emotional power it strives towards. Nor is Jake’s character revealed sufficiently to make him desirable as a romantic object.

Still, the film is so fresh and original, its details so lovingly sketched and its characters so – there’s that word again, quirky – that it surmounts these shortcomings. Definitely worth a watch.

Are Australian Intellectuals Selling Out?

Australian culture is traditionally hostile to its intellectuals. But some of them are responding with a disturbing quietude in order to keep their opinion spots and sinecures.

Has the Australian media ever been a more challenging place for the country's intelligentsia? We have a television program, Q&A, whose stated aim is to ‘bring Australia's egalitarian and larrikin spirit into the studio’ and yet, as I complained in a previous post, it’s been hijacked by 'right-wing think-tanks, Murdoch trolls, front bench politicians ..., former politicians suffering relevance deprivation, professional stirrers, and ... ill-informed celebrities'.

Our government falsely accused Julian Assange of acting illegally, has ignored his pleas for help, probably lied about its knowledge of the US's intentions towards him, and recently passed draconian legislation making it easier for the US to extradite Australian citizens, and harder for organisations such as Wikileaks to operate within the law.

ABC news and currrent affairs is gradually turning into a personal fiefdom of the Institute of Public Affairs, a sinister organisation funded by large multinational corporations that peddles loony right policies whose main aim is to make the Australian economy serve the interests of those corporations at the expense of everyone else.

When they do attack the status quo effectively, our intellectuals experience the full wrath of the corporate machine and its foot soldiers. The hapless head of the Australia Institute, Clive Hamilton, is widely reviled by the right for little more than a refusal to be optimistic (in his opinions on climate change, for instance) and a lack of commonsense (his ridiculous support of internet censorship while a Greens candidate in the 2010 Higgins byelection). He's not evil in the manner of Andrew Bolt, say, yet he's the recipient of a sometimes murderous level of hatred from the right-wingers.

In September 2011 Robert Manne published, as part of the Quarterly Essay series, Bad News: Murdoch's Australian and the Shaping of the Nation, a damning critique of the Australian newspaper. When the ABC published on its Drum website an article by Manne about the tactics that The Australian was employing as payback for the essay, the paper's then-editor, Chris Mitchell, threatened to sue the ABC for publishing the article (thus helping to prove Manne's point that the paper behaved like a hypocritical bully in its treatment of critics).

In the midst of this, it seems that Australia's intelligentsia are in a curious position. They're both subtly sidelined yet, courtesy of programs and websites such as The Drum, still part of the national debate. In an age when ABC news and current affairs has largely become the PR arm of big and small business, their muted, reasoned voices must compete with the strident fake-opinion machine of corporate Australia and, increasingly, the vacuous yet overly confident ravings of admen like Todd Sampson (who is fine within his sphere, but too often called upon to comment upon complex issues he knows little about).

Yet are our current crop of intellectuals actually conspiring to make themselves irrelevant? Are they too complacent about the state of Australian democracy, too focused on selling their books and maintaining their media profiles? (Note: I use the terms intellectual and intelligentsia interchangeably,  broadly and somewhat arbitrarily to include articulate writers of literary fiction and non-fiction, academics (including scientists) with a media presence, journalists who attempt to find and speak the truth rather than being functionaries, and satirists. I also assume that intellectuals are progressives with very few exceptions, for reasons I'll outline in a future post.)

A beleagured bunch
Some of our brightest intellectuals live overseas, and who can blame them? Anna Funder's acuity, historical reach and narrative skill were partially foretold in her non-fiction debut Stasiland, but became fully apparent only in her brilliant first novel about the plight of anti-Nazi activists before the Second World War, All That I Am. The book is being published in 16 countries, and in February she left Australia to live in New York, albeit at least partly because of her husband’s work.

Guy Rundle, who is left-wing in the classic sense, has gained some mainstream legitimacy because of his mordant tone and wide knowledge of political theory, world history and current events, being a regular contributor to Crikey. Yet he evidently likes us so much he’d rather be based in the depression-plagued UK. John Pilger found his career niche in London reporting on world events while being periodically attacked in his home country.

Germaine Greer is perhaps the only true mainstream intellectual who does have a consistently prominent place in the media sphere, and her semi-expatriate status boosts her stature. It's good for Australia that she apparently spends four months of the year here now, but while this enables her to critique us close-up, it gives her a prominence that obscures other voices.

But many of the intellectuals who stay in Australia don't get a decent run in the mainstream media, especially if they're female. Remember Emily Maguire? She was that precocious young woman who wrote two novels and a work of feminist non-fiction, something of an antipodean Naomi Wolf. Her novels have been translated into ten languages, and she would probably be celebrated if she lived in the US, but we don’t see or hear much of her these days. Chloe Hooper is another angry young woman who in a more progressive media landscape would have a more prominent voice. And in a logical universe feminist commentator Anne Summers would be appearing regularly on Q&A instead of the journalistically, intellectually and empathy challenged Janet Albrechtsen, whose all-too-regular appearances on the show are a sad travesty.

And when do we hear of the likes of female intellectual elders like historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen or brilliant journalist Elizabeth Wynhausen? Why aren’t they revered and their opinions sought more often? Is it because they’re post-menopausal and therefore deemed irrelevant?

Of course, such writers don’t disappear altogether. They are safely siloed in the pages of The Monthly (not altogether safely, in that it jettisoned journalistic standards altogether, including an embarrassingly personal attack on Germaine Greer, during Ben Naperstek's reign as editor).

Fighting for a place
Other intellectuals do manage to maintain niches and media profiles. They have occasional gigs on ABC TV and radio, where in situations both farcical and absurd they face off against the bizarre opinions of the IPA, an organisation that seems to be sponsoring the ABC these days, so frequently do its handful of spokespeople appear on ABC programs. Antony Loewenstein is an Australian of Jewish ancestry who is highly critical of Israel and thus sidelined by the Jewish community. As his bio shows, he’s hardly locked up in some gulag, but is very much a part of this country’s intellectual life. Yet given his knowledge and prowess, his profile is lower than it should be.

Through doggedness, sheer force of personality, intellectual cheek and an ability to write short pithy articles for The Drum, Jeff Sparrow has carved out a place for himself in the mainstream despite being a strong shade of pink.

And once older feminist Eva Cox had appeared on Q&A a couple of times she became something of a star, everyone’s idea of the perfect eccentric aunty. Then there's Lesley Cannold, who continues to maintain a high profile because she's consistently, well-researched, articulate and interesting.

But these people are hardly household names, and are regularly denigrated.

Part of the system
It’s not simply that our intellectuals get sidelined by corporate stooges. Sometimes they themselves are the problem.

Satirist Julian Morrow and politics lecturer Waleed Aly have both been lured into the Orwellian intellectual sinkhole of the ABC, having co-hosted Radio National’s Drive program since the beginning of this year. Aly has previously done plenty of guest hosting on local radio 774 where his politics, given his general perspicacity, have always been unforgivably middle of the road. Morrow is a different matter. He's gone from satirising Australian culture as a member of the Chaser team to making amusing remarks about the week's parliamentary shenanigans and public perceptions of politicians and their policies (as opposed to the policies themselves) in the best tradition of Michelle Grattan and the odious Annabel Crabb. Like them, he now encourages his listeners to view the political process as an unending football match with winners and losers. On 9 March, for example, he discussed Joe Hockey’s media image. His satirical skills are now being used to encourage complacency and disengagement.

In other cases, our intellectuals are guilty of a form of thinking so lazy and deluded that it beggars belief. The main symptom is a repeated call for the ALP to adopt policies that its frontbenchers wouldn’t advocate in a pink fit. These commentators live in a fantasy world in which the ALP is still the progressive party, some no doubt because of a personal history of party membership combined with memories of the Whitlam period. At the same time they wilfully ignore the fact that most of the policies they call for are already held by the Greens. Some of them go so far as pretending that the Greens don’t actually exist.

Thus, when asked to provide an opinion on the latest ALP travesty, they will urge the government to adopt a sensible course – this time. They are blissfully unaware that the sole aim of ALP frontbenchers these days is to stay in power, and that these people will do anything policy-wise to do so. And that this is a structural issue – the whole set-up makes sure that Machiavellians and right-wing ideologues are the only ones who will get a guernsey, because those are the types who cooperate best with the real power wielders in this country – big business.

But even the more pink-tinged of our intellectuals aren't concerned, angry or loud enough about what’s in front of their eyes: a democracy in the process of being destroyed by the Murdoch press, the values vacuum of the main parties, corporate aggression, and slavish obedience to every wish of the US. Just as the mainstream media is failing to tell us the truth, our intelligentsia, whatever their stripes, are failing to sound the alarm. And they are failing to draw the attention of the electorate to the fact that the Greens represent a viable alternative.

The bizarre apotheosis of this tendency could be seen on the Q&A program broadcast in August 2011, in which Anna Funder made her extraordinary call for a new progressive party ‘that’s not controlled by the unions, or for the Labor Party to come to its senses’.

Earth to Anna:  the Labor Party is never going to come to its senses, and we’ve already got a genuinely progressive party in Australia. They’re called the Greens. What makes this lapse even more egregious is that in the Germany with which Funder is so familiar, the Greens are a far more established force than they are here, a Green governor having been elected in the country’s third largest state in 2011.

The program on which Funder appeared, held live as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival, was one of the few Q&As with a full complement of genuine intellectuals as guests. Instead of the usual suspects, we had actual thinkers – or so I hoped. As well as Anna Funder, the panel consisted of Don Watson, Kate Grenville, Malalai Joya and Omar Musa – a stellar line-up by any reckoning. Yet it ended up being one of the most disturbing I’ve ever watched.

Despite the fact that 15 per cent of the audience were Greens voters, most of the discussion proceeded as if the Australian Greens didn’t actually exist.

Grenville’s contribution was almost as woeful as Funder’s.  She began by asserting that there were indeed ‘substantial differences’ between the policies of the ALP and Coalition respectively (‘someone’s got to stick up for the Labor Party’, she opined. I'd ask: why?). Then she used as an example of the ALP’s progressive bent the policy that it was forced to adopt because of its dependence on Greens support: the carbon tax (admittedly she acknowledged the Greens’ role in bringing this policy to fruition). And Don Watson, who has his own intellectual heritage to protect as Keating’s former speechwriter? He was a model of complacency, decrying the management speak of the politicians but failing to present voters with an alternative.

Grenville, Funder and Watson all defended Craig Thomson’s right to stay in parliament and Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan. They seemed to be operating from a fear that criticising anyone slightly to the left of George Bush or Tony Abbott might mean a return to conservative rule – a pathetically compromised stance that potentially enables the ALP to get away with just about anything simply because they're not the Coalition.

The slavish adherence to the idea of the ALP as a progressive party extends to the nation’s political journalists. Thus, on The Drum recently, Mungo MacCallum  desperately pleaded with the ALP to 'Forget about the polls, the focus groups and the media: just determine to act as much like a real Labor government as the Greens and independents will allow you to’. David Marr is another example of an intellectual who clings desperately to the idea of a progressive ALP.

So what should our intellectuals be doing? How could they start contributing something worthwhile to the national debate?

A sense of crisis
Australia's brainiest need to start warning us about the factors now at play in the political system that make it systemically impossible for progressive, evidence-based policies to be enacted. They must not only face the following facts but be prepared to consistently and boldly speak out about them:

• Corporate Australia and Coalition state governments are on a concerted drive to bring down the rights and wages of Australian workers. It will be all systems if the Coalition gets into power in 2013, with retail, banking and hospitality workers penalty rates and rights under threat.
• Corporate America has been emboldened by the GFC and continues to use its increased power in state legislatures to impose draconian labor conditions on working and middle classes alike under the sinister right to work legislation and lack of union power generally. We must look to this country as a warning of what happens to the rights of citizens when naked corporate power is unleashed. The Satanic mills have returned to the US and there is no reason to assume Australia will be unaffected by this trend.
• Corporations in the US have  corrupted and damaged the food chain to a far greater extent  than they have here, to the extent that the organic food industry is under serious threat from genetically engineered crops. We are not at that stage yet, but the situation is worsening in Australia and must be acted on now.
• There is a push to reduce privacy and democracy in the US and UK as well as Australia. That this is happening in a concerted fashion in these three countries, and is being enacted by supposedly non-conservative governments in the US and Australia should disturb anyone who is concerned about democratic and human rights.
• Australia has one of the highest media concentrations in the world, and this has had massive detrimental effects on the ability of those with an average education to form accurate views about what's going on. For this reason Australians will almost certainly vote in an incompetent, economically illiterate religious fundamentalist at the next election, despite the fact that our economy is in good shape compared with much of the rest of the world. This  means that many people will be voting against their wage and welfare interests at the next election, an extremely curious situation that begs to be explained.
• The mainstream media is obfuscating the truth about the crisis outlined in the previous points. Instead, there’s a consensus among the Murdoch press and the increasingly conservative Fairfax and ABC that the status quo is actually a good thing, and democracy is in good shape, when neither is the case.
• The Greens are universally reviled and sidelined in the mainstream media, yet their policies are frequently touted as the solution - a convenient way for the media and individuals to claim they are progressive while ensuring that the status quo is maintained.

Without any understanding of the systemic reasons for these developments, commentators have no way of coming at realistic solutions. In his review of Robert Manne’s Bad News in the Australian Book Review, Robert Phiddian, Director of the Humanities Research Centre at Flinders University, is surprisingly sanguine about the extreme level of concentration in media ownership in Australia. In the quote below he displays a disturbing naivety about the possibility of the ‘national broadsheet' returning to some semblance of news values:

... in our shrinking broadsheet market, it would be good if the healthiest specimen, and the only truly national one, recognised that we need more mutual respect in public debate if we are ever going to sort through the complex problems and opportunities that confront us.

It would also be good if Santa Claus, the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy existed. And elsewhere:

We should not be overly paranoid about the influence of The Australian and News Corporation. A concerted campaign from them can wreck anything they dislike, but the evidence for their capacity to achieve a positive agenda is much more slender.

I beg to differ. Is it really possible to be too paranoid about a paper that declared its intention to 'destroy' Australia's third party 'at the ballot box'? Isn't 70 per cent print concentration enough to at least place Australian democracy in jeopardy? This level of complacency is simply inexcusable, and a recipe for doing nothing and an endorsement of the status quo.

It’s not that I think our intelligentsia should drop whatever projects they’re focused on and become spokespeople for the Greens. I’m talking about a change of emphasis here, an acceptance that there is a crisis and that when a crisis is taking place, business as usual is not appropriate. I’m calling for speaking out as a way of life, not something you do once in a blue moon or when you’re asked for a quote on the subject. I'm asking for our intelligentsia to continually remind people at every chance possible that things are not okay here, that it’s not just the rest of the world that’s in trouble – it’s us.

Of course, if our intellectuals do speak out they risk not being taken seriously by the ABC functionaries who interview them on its opinion shows, their book sales may suffer and they’ll open themselves to widespread criticism. But the alternative – an even worse version  of the Murdocracy we’re already suffering under – is unthinkable. In the Coalition's version of Murdocracy, no one with half a brain will be safe in terms of job, voice or reputation.