Australia No Longer a Country of Fresh Ideas and Innovation



Photo courtesy of Gorman


For a short period of time it seemed as if Australia was a nation coming of age. Fresh ideas, original policies, the shedding of the White Australia Policy, the adoption of multiculturalism, a commitment to Indigenous empowerment, an accord between government and unions and embracing of the arts and innovation were just some of the developments that saw Australia become a country willing to lead the pack between 1972 and 1996.

The cultural and social renaissance put in train by Whitlam, partly sustained by Fraser and given new direction by Hawke and Keating echoed an earlier time when Australia was in the vanguard of progressive social policy (though sadly not where race was concerned). Stonemasons who walked off the job on the site of Melbourne University in 1856 were among the first in the world to achieve an eight-hour working day. Non-Aboriginal Australian women were granted the vote at federal level as early as 1901 (compared with Britain, which did not grant equal suffrage for women until 1928). The Deakin government introduced invalid and aged pensions in 1908. We were the country of the fair go.

Howard's reign from 1996 to 2007 took us back decades. Squandering the GST billions, he threw them back to the electorate in the form of often regressive bribes, priming the electorate to ask 'What's in it for me?' He demonised boat people while eventually sustaining record numbers of economic immigrants. After the 2005 Cronulla riots he dog-whistled at the rioters and their supporters by refusing to admit Australia was a racist country. His ministers openly labelled unemployed people dole bludgers and his government silenced advocacy groups by threatening them with a loss of funding if they spoke out against government policies.

Yet some of the seeds of Australia’s malaise lay in the actions of the previous government, and its fateful decision to let Rupert Murdoch buy the Herald and Weekly Times in 1987, thereby granting him not just a stranglehold over Australia's print media and the tenor of its policy debates, but power over the very make-up of its government.

Australia is now a backward-looking country. From a small window when we seemed to have regained some of that early idealism, we are now provincial and moribund once more, and in the grip of entrenched corporate interests. We may have thrown out the cultural cringe, but perhaps we need to adopt a social one. We need to understand how behind we actually are if we are to become the forward-thinking, innovative country we once were.

What is most disturbing is that we don't get to hear the truth about how far we lag behind. The Murdoch-dominated press, and the ABC, which now takes its cue from it, fail to tell us. We need a new version of The Lucky Country. We need outsiders to dare criticise us, to tell us how inward-looking and insular we have become. Here are just some of the ways in which we've fallen behind the rest of the world.

Ethical and sustainable fashion
There are loads of interesting designers and developments relating to ethical, sustainable fashion in Australia (such as Lisa Gorman, whose work is featured in the above pic), but you wouldn't know it in the mainstream media – nor would you know how advanced the UK is in this area compared with us, and the extent to which ethical and sustainable fashion are becoming part of the mainstream there. Sadly, some brands that have ethical accreditation in Australia don't even see it as worthwhile, from a marketing perspective, to highlight their accreditation.

Women's rights
Many commentators see the status of women in Australia as somehow naturally improving over time as if by some immutable law. This couldn't be further from the case. Women's rights and status are constantly under attack, and things went backwards over the Howard years. Australia is now one of the most sexist of the advanced Western nations. For example, we rank only sixteenth in the world, behind Thailand, when it comes to equality in the office.

The default family structure has the man working in a prestigious full-time job while his wife does a couple of days in a poorly paid position and bears the bulk of the housework and child-raising burden. If they divorce she moves into poverty due to her lack of skills and childcare responsibilities, and he gets angry because he doesn't see enough of the children. Until the business sector takes shared parenting and flexible work arrangements seriously and until the government properly funds childcare, and pays workers in the care sector a living wage, nothing will change.

Gay marriage
The two larger parties still won't support gay marriage in Australia, despite the fact that a majority of Australians now do. According to Wikipedia, the following countries now allow same-sex couples to marry: Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, and Sweden. Same-sex marriages are also performed and recognized in Mexico City and parts of the United States. That some fiercely traditional Catholic countries now allow gay marriage and we don't is pathetic.

Battery recycling
In Europe, many more things are recycled as a matter of course than they are in Australia, and one of these is batteries. This may seem a minor issue, but battery pollution is one aspect of our environmental footprint that doesn't even get discussed here. Batteries contain toxins, including mercury, nickel and lead, that leach into the environment and pollute water systems.

The European Parliament's 2006 Battery Directive has led to many European member states passing battery and waste management laws, including Belgium, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Finland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France. According to Wikipedia, Belgium and Sweden have battery recycling rates of 59 per cent and 55 per cent respectively. In Australia, used batteries go straight to landfill.

Climate change
Economist Ross Garnaut, hardly a radical, has said that Australia lags behind the rest of the world when it comes to dealing with climate change, but he goes further: he believes that our attitude has held back international action on climate change. Given that we are the highest per capita emitters, the situation can only improve.

Prison policy
The USA is hardly a bastion of progressive thought when it comes to sentencing and prison rehabilitation. Yet the fiscal situation there is making it politically feasible for mainstream politicians to adopt more enlightened sentencing policies.

In contrast, in some Australian states our prison policies are going backwards. Governments of both major parties establish an unholy alliance with victims' groups and the uneducated to pursue policies that actually perpetuate crime rather than tackling entrenched disadvantage and second-rate education. Sentencing policies are about to hit a new low in Victoria, as the state government is currently conducting a survey via the Herald Sun newspaper that asks readers to recommend suitable sentences for a series of crimes; the Baillieu government has promised that the results will inform government sentencing policy. On the face of it, this seems to violate one of the basic tenets of Westminster parliamentary democracy, the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary.

Animal welfare
Animal torture is legal in Australia. As we speak, exhausted, debeaked and defeathered, aching from osteoporosis, hundreds of defenceless chickens are enduring a living hell at a factory farm near you. Industry self-regulation in the form of the 2009 Code of Practice permits the use of the battery cage for hens. It's legal for farmers to stuff these intelligent animals into cages so small they can't lie down (if there was a floor to lie on), with each hen assigned a space smaller than an A4 page. Some starve to death, many remain in pain for months after debeaking because the nerves are still active, prolapses are common. Many animals succumb and their brethren are forced to remain alongside their corpses. The federal government promised to revisit the issue in 2010 and did nothing. Yet a national survey found that 86 per cent of Australians believe that battery cages are cruel.

According to Wikipedia, the European Union is planning to ban battery cages from 2012 after a 10-year phase-out, to be replaced by 'enriched' cages. Hens must be provided with at least 750 sq cm of space, and cages must contain litter, perches and 'claw-shortening devices'. The use of battery cages is already banned in Germany, Belgium, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands, while Germany will prohibit enriched cages from 2012.

Suspect ingredients
When it comes to banning suspect ingredients from food and non-edible products, we’re sadly remiss. A number of suspect beauty industry chemicals are banned in Europe and Japan but available here.

On the food additive front things are also dire. For example, a number of food colourings that damage children’s behaviour and learning are being phased out in the UK and carry a warning in Europe, but are available here.

I know there are still a few areas where we lead the world. These tend to be the areas where entrenched interests have absolutely no credibility with the wider community – restrictions on smoking and cigarette advertising are one example. As I write, the House of Representatives has just passed a bill mandating plain packaging for cigarettes. Yet whenever a powerful and influential lobby group threatens to unleash a media storm, the government shies away from bold reform. It doesn't have to be this way.

Doomed Bromance: Book Review of Inside Wikileaks by Daniel Domscheit-Berg

Sanity can be a little dull sometimes, but it’s far preferable to its opposite. Someone once said that the daily news was simply a report of what all the people with personality disorders had been doing that day.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s Inside Wikileaks is an insider account of the author’s three years with the secretive organisation whose publishing of US diplomatic cables and the infamous Collateral Murder video led to the arrest of Private Bradley Manning. It reveals the story behind the rise and fall from grace of Wikileaks’s charismatic founder, Julian Assange, and the explosive high-level leaks that dominated headlines for months and set the US Government and Assange on a collision course.

Accused by two women of sexual assault in August 2010, Assange has since been battling a February 2011 decision by English courts to extradite him to Sweden to be questioned in relation to the assault investigation. After a prolonged falling out with Assange, Domscheit-Berg left the organisation in September 2010, taking Wikileaks’s site architect with him (and the architect's infrastructure plans) to pursue a new initiative, OpenLeaks.

If you’ve been following the story of the accusations against Assange and found it difficult to decide on a position – is he good or evil? Is he a rapist or was it a case of sexual bad manners? – this book is a must. If you’ve been a little seduced by Assange’s quietly spoken intensity, his sometimes professorial hair and endearing lisp, and secretly wondered whether he is some kind of hippy saint, this book will contextualise your confusion. It argues what was already evident to many – that Assange is brilliant, pioneering, courageous, workaholic and extremely flawed.

In his love affair with the media, Julian Assange bears some comparison with Princess Diana. An early photograph of the princess staring enthralled into the lens of a paparazzo reveals a deep engagement with and interest in the attention. Long before I read this book, I remember watching a clip in which Assange and Domscheit-Berg gave a joint presentation at a computer conference. Domscheit-Berg was addressing the audience, in his rather monotone voice, about the work of Wikileaks. As he mentioned a recent victory, Assange raised a clenched fist in a gesture of triumph, and chuckled as the crowd responded appreciatively. The gesture, while a response to what Domscheit-Berg was saying, also took attention from it, and I wondered whether Assange was, at the time of the address, already addicted to the adulation he received as an outlaw celebrity.

This book is part doomed bromance, part tell-all expose. It's a translation, and the tone is lucid and verging on the pedestrian. Domscheit-Berg is at pains to explain that, for much of the time during which Wikileaks emerged as an organisation to be reckoned with, he himself was not merely an ‘employee’ but the joint spokesperson for the project along with Assange and an integral part of its development and growing success. The book traces Domscheit-Berg’s initial infatuation with Assange and his growing disillusionment as he comes to understand the extent of the man’s failings and begins to question his management of Wikileaks. Domscheit-Berg ultimately paints Assange as a paranoid megalomaniac who at one point threatens to destroy him, makes sinister statements such as ‘I will not tolerate disloyalty in [times of] crisis’, is astonishly lax about security and conceals the details of the organisation’s financial affairs; yet for most of the book the author is as weak as the most besotted relationship addict in his inability to let go.

Domscheit-Berg initially heard about Assange through his involvement in a community of computer activists in his native Germany. At the time of their first meeting, at a conference in Berlin December 2007, the author was stuck in a corporate IT job that did not satisfy his need for meaningful work. ‘Something was missing from my life in those years’, he recalls. He writes with affection of his first meeting with Julian: ‘My first thought on seeing him was: Cool guy’. Later he asserts: ‘right from the start I had the feeling that we were a pretty awesome team’.

Domscheit-Berg became active in Wikileaks and soon discovered it was a much smaller organisation than Assange had portrayed it, punching way above its weight. Eventually he left his job to work for Wikileaks full time, and was involved in crucial aspects such as developing its technical infrastructure, creating agreements with journalists from the mainstream press to publish leaked material, and soliciting donations. As the project gained momentum and notoriety, the wheels began to spin out of control.

The sense that the project had gotten too big too quickly and was technically unable to protect its sources is one of the reasons Domscheit-Berg says he wrote the book – he remains concerned about the organisation and, as someone who failed to speak up about his concerns sooner, feels responsible to those who trusted him. He raises some disturbing questions about Wikileaks in the wake of the fallout: without the work of  ‘the architect’, is it a trustworthy organisation, and does it have a future? From his account, OpenLeaks sounds like not so much an offshoot of Wikileaks but a splinter group.

The subject matter of the book might verge on the tabloid at times, but, true to Domscheit-Berg’s somewhat phlegmatic personality, the tone rarely veers beyond the exasperated – Julian threatening to ruin Domscheit-Berg’s vintage couch with his grotty eating habits, Julian bringing women to the hotel for sex in the double bed that he shared with his colleague as the latter tries to sleep, Julian tormenting the author’s beloved cat, Mr Schmitt, for amusement. At the same time he willingly acknowledges Assange’s brilliance and the complexity that made him as compelling as he was impossible: ‘On the one hand I found Julian unbearable and on the other hand unbelievably special and lovable ... utterly committed to ... changing the world for the better’. Just as Levin’s marriage to Kitty forms the counterpoint to Anna’s journey towards romantic doom in the tragedy of Anna Karenina, Domscheit-Berg’s own blossoming personal life forms the counterpoint to the Wikileaks wild ride and Assange’s eventual derailment.

Above all the book questions the need for someone in Assange’s position to be assigned, or to assign himself, rock star status. It calls into question the media coverage of Assange that presents him as a romanticised lone wolf hunted by CIA baddies and surfing the couches of Europe for his own safety. Some of the revelations have an ‘He’s not the messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy’ flavour, such as Julian’s decision to start travelling with bodyguards, which was, Domscheit-Berg implies, grandiose. ‘At some point, I began to think that the worst of all scenarios would be for me to get arrested before he did’, he writes. But he never attacks Assange for the sake of it: while the book puts the lie to the supposition that the charges against Assange were politically motivated, Domscheit-Berg suggests that they were probably nothing more than a case of sexual bad manners.

In these days of personality politics, it would be easy to label stories such as this one as worthless gossip and thus malign them by associating them with the feminine. But the personal aspects of this story are important, because the Wikileaks picture would be incomplete without them. The question that kept nagging me as I read, especially as it became clear that Domscheit-Berg had stayed with Wikileaks long after Assange had decisively rejected him, was: Why did he hang around after the fallout? The answer is undoubtedly emotional investment, both in the project and the relationship with Assange, which Domscheit-Berg has agreed in an interview was at one point like ‘a marriage’. He had also invested his own money and much unpaid time to the project.

That he did hang around for so long is to the reader’s advantage, because we hear the inside story of the leaks that led to Wikileaks becoming a world phenomenon: not only the diplomatic cables and Collateral Murder but the Afghan War Diaries and other highly significant leaks that did not receive the media attention they deserved.

The book also offers fascinating insights into the world view of globalised technology activists. Here is a loose group of utopians who travel the globe attending communitarian conferences, and envisage a world transformed by unfettered access to information. There are also revelations about the initual amateurishness of the Wikileaks project, bouyed as it was  by Assange’s self-confidence and front.

Inside Wikileaks is clearly an attempt by Domscheit-Berg to defend himself as well as to tell his version of the Wikileaks story. He has said that a major reason for writing the book is because other, less well-informed, sources have, or are planning to, put forward inaccurate versions. He also seems keen to pre-empt Assange’s criticisms of him; the latter has reportedly received an advance of more than $1 million for the rights to publish his autobiography. Since the publication of the book, Domscheit-Berg has been denigrated in some quarters as a pro-establishment right-winger who has ridden on the coat tails of Assange’s brilliance and is now eating out on the back of his character assassination.

But the fact remains that ‘the architect’, a key figure in Wikileaks, chose to go with him to set up Openleaks rather than remaining with the charismatic Assange. And transcripts of strained chat room conversations between Assange and Domscheit-Berg do lend credence to the latter's assertion that Assange had megalomaniac, not to mention messianic, tendencies. As well, Domscheit-Berg's persona, both in the book and media interviews, does not seem dominated by egoism; in this book he freely, even breezily, admits his own mistakes.

Nice guys may come last but perhaps their works ultimately endure for longer. Domscheit-Berg was saddened and disillusioned when he left Wikileaks. If you currently look up to Assange as a freedom fighter, this account may leave you feeling the same way. Of course, it's ultimately subjective; Domscheit-Berg seems to be a reliable if phlegmatic source, but he is only one source, and he has an axe to grind, and his own reputation to maintain. The complete account is yet to come and may be many years away. It will be fascinating to read Assange’s autobiography, in particular his likely riposte to this complex, highly critical portrait.