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| Image by George Hirst, editor of the Magnetic Times newspaper in North Queensland. |
G’Day. Thanks for all your contributions on media ownership and Howard’s agenda this week – they’ve got me thinking about where to from here. I’ll write on Monday about the risks Howard faces with his plan to entrench the neo-liberal global vision in Australia with the help of a media controlled by Australia’s two most powerful men.
Then there’s the question of how Labor and all Australians determined to save our democracy could counter it. I’ve got a few thoughts on that too. Fingers crossed for Mark Latham. Please don’t blow it Mark – Australia needs you.
The Murdoch push for media domination is facing strong bipartisan opposition in the United States and has just been held back in the United Kingdom, too. I’ve published the latest Guardian article on Tony Blair’s partial backdown at the end of this entry. Thanks to Webdiarist David Goldstein for the link. A comparison of the public debate on this matter in the US and the UK with the almost complete lack of it in Australia shows how dangerously concentrated our media ownership already is.
I’m off tomorrow. Here’s your latest comments on our topic this week – I’ll start with an exchange between Daniel Moye and I today.
Daniel Moye in Roseville, NSW
As a supporter of J. Howard on many issues, in particular his U.S. alliance in foreign policy and a free, deregulated Australian economy, I thought you might find it interesting that not all conservative voters support his proposed changes to the Senate, ASIO legislation and Cross Media Laws.
It is true that Australians are more vulnerable than U.S. citizens because of our lack of a Bill of Rights. I would certainly feel much more comfortable if we had our own Bill of Rights with respect to ASIO’s new powers, not because of your fears with regards to Mr. Howard’s government, but any future government of radical persuasions.
With regards to his proposed changes to the Senate and Cross media Laws, I firmly believe that the best traditions of our democracy support the rule of the majority but also that minority voices are heard and have influence. The sustainability of our democracy and its principle strength is that it allows many voices to be heard and represented. Whilst the Senate can be obstructionist and frustrating, it is through the Senate and its diverse representative powers that our federated democracy exists.
Similiarly, an informed debate through a diverse media base provides the lifeblood of civil society and although many of the views expressed by the ‘left’ in the media, in my humble opinion, are ill-informed and misdirected it is necessary that they are heard.
Whilst it will be a difficult decision, if our Prime Minister persisted with more of these changes, in particular to the Senate, I might have to change my vote.
I replied:
Hi Daniel. You know, I consider myself a small l liberal – it’s a shock to feel so far left! I wonder, though, how many voters like you there are in marginal seats? Perhaps most small ls are in safe Liberal or inner city safe Labor seats?
Daniel replied:
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I would not not know if I fit any political category, being in step with Howard on foreign policy yet opposed on many domestic policies. Having voted for Howard consistently since 1996, for many Australians like me leadership is a key basis for choice of parties. Without going into the intricacies of why Labor does not resonate with me, let me put it this way. Howard vs. Crean – Howard. Howard vs Beazley – Howard. Howard vs Latham – Latham would be a strong chance of changing my mind, Howard vs. a woman – 50/50 – as I would like to see Australia with a female PM.
Mark Latham’s biggest strength is that you have a fair idea where he stands on most things – and whilst I do not agree with many things he says, he does make me feel that the job would not overwhelm him.
Any woman would stand a chance against Howard merely because it would highlight the differences between the two parties, if only symbolically. Labor’s key problem is highlighting the difference between the two parties – Latham would do it by force of personality and a female leader would symbolise going forward in a compelling way.
All that being said – it does require Howard to be too radical in his changes coupled with a strong alternative to get a naturally conservative voter like myself and many other ‘joes’ out there to change their mind.
Keep up the controversy because I love reading views that are well thought out even though I strongly disagree with them.
I’m in Bradfield, a very safe Liberal seat.
I replied:
Bradfield, eh? As I recall Brendan Nelson fought long and hard against Howard’s proposal to abolish cross media laws in 1997 (keeping foreign limits) so Packer could get Fairfax. Jamie said on A Current Affair he “wants Fairfax for Christmas”. Not a word from Brendan now, though.
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Andrea Hamann in the United Arab Emirates
I am living in a country where government is divided up amongst wealthy ruling families. Democracy is slowly developing in its own strange way, but it is not the democracy we have celebrated in Australia. Not by a long shot.
As my colleagues keep reminding me, this isn’t my country and I don’t have any rights, even as a resident. I have the right to leave and that is about it. There is no right to protest, to question what the government is doing and certainly not to vote, even if you’ve lived here with your family for 20 years. By the same token, the leader of this country in his wisdom is transitioning this country from a nomadic bedouin culture to the brave new world of the 21st century in a time frame of 50 years, and more or less peacefully.
In Germany there are still archaic laws left over from wartime about always carrying your I.D around with you, an officially issued ‘PASS’ and you have to ‘anmeld’ – register where you live, and should you move house you have to ‘abmeld’ (deregister). And yet Germany is one of the most democratic countries in existence, next to France that is.
And then I hear about Australia and recent threats to our till now reasonably healthy democracy – where you can walk down Swanston St in a demo’ if you don’t want Jabiluka to be mined, and you don’t have a form of I.D until you get your drivers licence. Even then you are not obliged to carry it with you.
I don’t want to begin to imagine an Australia that looks like an American, or even German version of democracy, and certainly not a one party or family rule. Here’s to our Democracy and lets hope like hell it doesn’t get threatened any further.
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Marcus Faulstone
While it may be all to easy to dismiss the concerns you have raised in Howard’s roads to absolute power and the succeeding Webdiary entries as being alarmist, if not paranoiac, you have made some very serious points which should not be so easily brushed aside.
The concatenation you describe – of government policy, neoconservative ideology and a concentration of media ownership – should be of concern to all Australians who value accountable and responsible governance and openess of public discourse. We have before us the very real possibility of an indefinate ‘mediocracy’, and even those who find this an unlikely scenario must concede that it is one to be avoided at any cost.
Interestingly, much of the debate in Webdiary has focused at the point of corporations and media production. What of media consumption? On one hand, it is insulting to suggest that the vast majority of Australians simply consume media output, almost as the passive recipients of an injection. But public discourse can’t but be deformed any time an issue of public relevance is glossed over, is absent from, or simply delivered as per press release, by our media outlets. The ‘children overboard’ saga is a case in point.
Your Webdiary provides an interesting example of an alternative, more discursive form of media consumption to those provided by the mass media heavyweights of concern in your article. Weblogs abound online, encouraging a plurality of opinion and a domain for even the most impotent to express themselves. It is all too easy to leap from this observation to the hyperbolic enthusiasm of some cybertheorists for a utopian digital democracy, but this does highlight the possibilty of a more decentralised pattern of media production and consumption in the distant future.
It is interesting then that the Howard government has already put a cap on how much data a consumer may download, such that after this limit the transmission is defined as constituting broadcasting. I can’t recollect whether that occured through an act or regulation, or even the details, but it still certainly evidences a fear that the internet could encroach upon the traditional consumption of broadcasting.
Further, it could again be seen as another instance of the Howard governent acting in the interests of media players, and doing so against the interests of Australians and the development of our own digital literacy and culture. To compare, this act is as patently ridiculous as a renaissance monarch forbidding the printing of any book longer than 100 pages at the request of a great engraving house. Perhaps we’ll just have to use a digital equivalent of really small writing.
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Ann Butcher in Thornlie, Western Australia
Firstly, many thanks for your column. It’s a breath of fresh air on a regular basis, mainly because it makes me realise that other people feel the same way I do. It’s so nice not to feel isolated.
With reference to reactions to ‘Howard’s road to absolute power’, whilst reading many of the correspondents I wondered whether they watched Monday night’s Cutting Edge on SBS, ‘The Cartel – Oil And The US Government’.
The program was an eye-opener for the many links between George W Bush and companies like Enron, Reliant and El Paso. (Some of this had been documented in Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men but not to the extent of this program.) Dick Cheney and his relationship with Halliburton was also heavily featured. The program fitted beautifully with your description “(of) the US model of a corporatist state run by government in partnership with big business, where politicians and business people swap roles routinely and big business finances the conservative party.”
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Brendon Leeder
One of the things I am not sure you have mentioned in the whole media debate and John Howard’s road to absolute power is the manipulation of the public’s opinion (attitude) away from the ‘lucky country’, the free-to-do-as-you-please attitude of the Australian people. We have been led to believe (I believe misled) that we are under threat from terrorist groups and their cells in our own homes in Australia.
When the former Lord Mayor of Brisbane Jim Soorley was asked about whether there was an imminent or any future threat of terrorism in/aimed at Brisbane – or more specifically the Story Bridge, – he said something along the lines of “The terrorists haven’t heard of Brisbane, let along the Story Bridge”. I am not afraid of what might happen if I travel, I am not afraid to walk around the city, or for that matter the countryside.
If we hadn’t blindly backed the United States in everything in the past couple of years (sorry, our work to ease tariffs on our exports to the US has been commendable, though I believe military support should not be our primary negotiating factor) we would be under no threat from terrorism. Australia was not even on the radar – there would have been as close to zero threat on our nation as ever.
You will also note that after the Bali bombings, the fact that Australians were killed was originally a regret of the bombers (at least our people were not the target). However, since the war on Islam begun in earnest with the attack on Iraq and with the promise of further attacks should any non-Western nation not kow tow to the US foreign oil policies the Bali bombers have been glad Australians died in the attack.
Since Bali and the war on Iraq, terrorism has dominated the newpapers and television, coinciding with our increasing support for John Howard as our nation gets progressively more fearful of a threat that is NOT HIGH, and is only increasing because of our blind support for the United States.
Conspiracy theorists could argue that the nation has put itself at risk for the ultimate power of one person, John Howard, whose government and police will have control over everything people say, do and think in public. Hang on, didn’t we take out Saddam Hussein for those reasons?
On the side, I admire John Howard for what he has done to keep the Australian economy up there with the best in the world, if not the best, and also his leadership qualities. Also, I am a capitalist, not a socialist.
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Steve Wallace
Great work on the media issue. I read your first piece and was sick in the pit of my stomach. To say the proposition is frightening is major understatement. It is horrifying to look out on a future crafted by Howard. I am trenchantly opposed, and will remain so. No room for depression.
Those who sell contentious products and encounter social or regulatory opposition, say for example pornography (I choose the example intentionally as I find Howard World quite so), often quote the maxim “If you don’t like my product, your don’t HAVE to buy it”. The proposition seems fair, and is difficult to oppose. Well, perhaps rather than oppose it we can embrace it. I won’t buy Murdoch or Packer products.
By way of anecdote; I haven’t had a TV for more than five years. Sounds surprising I guess, but I only had one for three years. A friend was sharing with me, and was addicted, so I relented. Prior to that I didn’t have a TV for about ten years, but have lost track of the length of time. That’s most of the eighties and early nineties I’d say.
Think for a moment about the prospect. Can you imagine how that clears your head? I find that, in comparison to many people I interact with, my mind belongs to me. I start my thinking at a different point of departure and generally proceed to a different destination. I am not available for manipulation. Sure, I have little to talk about to the people at work on a Monday morning, but while they are great folks they have been generally compromised by their TV habit. And, I have a lot more time.
Perhaps in the ASIO torture chambers of Howard World the spooks will force me to watch commercial TV for days at a time (there was nothing in the legislation to stop them exposing me to this mind-altering material). Before that happens I intend to have nothing to do with TV, and only a little radio and some selected print.
I encourage all your readers to abandon their TVs and embrace freedom. Imagine the impact on the media barons if they couldn’t sell advertising. Just say NO. They are very exposed.
Oh, and I encourage you to find a large number of alternate web sites for your work before you are terminated
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Antonia Feitz in Rocky River, NSW
It isn’t just John Howard that’s the problem. The Australian body politic has been rotten for about twenty five years. How did this lamentable state happen? Someone at The Age summed it up pretty well: “For almost two decades, during the age of globalisation, the two major parties have conducted a democratic experiment in elite bipartisanship, largely excluding from the policies and considerations, signs of deep popular resistance to sweeping economic reform and change.” (20/7/98).
Read it again and get angry: “a democratic experiment in elite bipartisanship.” That, Margo, is a poly-syllabled euphemism for a defacto one party state. THAT’S why Australia is in the mess it is. And that’s why voting in a Labor government will change nothing. Way back in 1984 (appropriate!), Hawke said Labor’s task was to establish permanent acceptance of the “naturalness and inevitablity of change and reform as the authentic way of life” for the Australian people.
Since then both sides of politics have ignored the Australian people’s expressed preference for maintaining a decent society as an authentic way of life. In his book, Paul Keating admitted that the reforms had not been ‘inevitable’. Yet anybody who protested against them was routinely vilified by the media as a luddite, an economic troglodyte, a nostagia freak and, most insultingly, as envious. Ah yes, “the politics of envy”. What a catchy little phrase for the editorialists as they lecture us that reform fatigue is not an option. In a truly democratic nation, why not?
Pauline Hanson was the canary that should have warned people something was seriously wrong in Australia. Back then it was only the riff-raff that suffered, but they were inarticulate and had no voice until she accidently burst upon the scene. After she was safely neutralised The Australian commented that the One Nation phenomenon had really been about globalisation, not race. Indeed. It wasn’t Hanson but the media that disgracefully played the race card.
These days it’s not just blue-collar workers, seamstresses and dairy farmers who are being burnt by globalisation. Australian legal firms are sending their dictaphone messages to the Philippines to be processed and emailed back at a fraction of the cost of Australian workers. Call centre jobs are going to India for the same reason. The ‘Australian’ government even advises companies to follow this path and so IT and other professional jobs are being exported too. There are artificially created teacher and nurse ‘shortages’ – instead of educating our own young we import these professionals trained in third world countries because it’s cheaper. Obscene.
It’s not as if the savings in labour costs are being passed on to consumers. Brand name bras made in the Philippines or Vietnam retail for $50+ in the shops. Doona sets made in China cost $200. A stainless steel whisk made in China retails for $17. It’s the greatest consumer rip-off in history.
This is wake-up time. Do we really want to participate in the race to the bottom? Do we agree that the government’s sole aim in managing the abstraction called ‘the economy’ should be to maximise shareholders’ profits and to hell with everybody else? That’s not a society; that’s a jungle.
Back in 1998 Michael Costello said: “The very existence of the nation state will be challenged by globalisation as never before. After all, a global corporation’s patriotism is for company, not country. … globalisation reinforces the tendency of free markets unfettered to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. We are only in the foothills of globalisation and already this is happening.” (The Australian, 5/5/98). At least he was honest when he warned, “We ain’t seen nothing yet”.
Who’s really running the country? Who said the federal government should focus on “strengthening enterprise bargaining further and reducing the role of awards and third parties in wage determination.” And “while it is necessary to maintain an adequate social safety net it is also necessary to limit the duration of unemployment benefits to encourage employment search.”
Howard? Costello? Abbott? Give up? Actually it was the IMF. No, I don’t recall the IMF Party on the ballot paper either.
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Puttnam forces block on predatory media barons
Matt Wells, media correspondent
Thursday July 3, 2003
The Guardian
A heavy block was placed in the path of powerful press barons last night when the House of Lords forced the government to rein in its plans to loosen Britain’s tough cross-media ownership restrictions.
In the face of significant opposition, marshalled by the former film maker Lord Puttnam, the government agreed to impose a public interest test on any media merger that threatened to concentrate power in too few hands.
Lord Puttnam said the measure would prevent Rupert Murdoch from ever being able to take over Channel Five – a scenario that would be permitted under the communications bill, which is nearing its final stages in the Lords.
But sceptics said the power of the public interest test could only be measured when the government publishes the wording of its proposal next week.
The government dropped its long-standing refusal to give ground on the bill – first published in May last year – when it became clear that it would suffer a heavy defeat if the issue was put to the vote.
With the authority of the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, the broadcasting minister Lord McIntosh accepted the principle of Lord Puttnam’s public interest plan. Lord McIntosh said the government would publish a public interest test – in return for Lord Puttnam’s agreement to drop his own wording – when the bill receives its third reading in the Lords on Tuesday.
He said: “We are supportive of the principle behind Lord Puttnam’s amendment that we safeguard plurality and diversity of the public voice.
“Media plurality is important for a healthy and informed democratic society. The underlying principle is that it would be dangerous for any one person to control too much of the media because of their ability to influence opinions and set the political agenda. It is therefore essential to set limits on concentration of ownership.”
He said the test would be applied to a wide range of media mergers, not just any takeover of Five.
Lord Puttnam said that he wanted to prevent the “Berlusconi-isation” of Britain, warning of the situation in Italy where Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, owns or controls large sections of the country’s media.
The Tories were critical of the climbdown. John Whittingdale, the shadow culture secretary, said it was a “humiliating surrender” that added needless regulation. He pointed out that when the test was first proposed, the government’s then broadcasting minister, Kim Howells, rejected the idea saying the bill was intended to “remove regulations, not impose new and unnecessary ones”.
Lord McNally, the Liberal Democrats’ media spokesman in the Lords, said the public interest test would give a measure of protection, but urged the new media regulator Ofcom to have the courage to wield its new power.
But Lord McNally said he wished the legislation had never been framed in its present form. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “For all the denials that this is a Murdoch bill, this bill was authorised in No 10, where Mr Murdoch has had worrying influence. The bill should be redrafted to rule out an American takeover of the third channel or a purchase of Five by Mr Murdoch. Believe me, these forces are out there; in the words of the Terminator, they’ll be back.”