The failure to discover the so-called weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – and widespread reports that intelligence was subject to political pressure and interference – has so far drawn a relatively mild public response in Australia and, for that matter, in the United States. Tony Blair, however, has been under the hammer, and pressure is mounting after the death of Dr David Kelly.

The Prime Minister here has absolved himself again of any responsibility for what has to be the greatest con trick ever perpetrated on the Australian people, one with deadly consequences for the people of Iraq, who are still dying and suffering every day as a result of the violent invasion and subsequent occupation of their country.

We are supposed not to care about this – we’ve “moved on”, Howard claims, using Bush’s line, as he has done so often. We’re told it doesn’t really matter now.

It doesn’t matter, apparently, that we were told that the coalition of the willing invaded Iraq to destroy nuclear, biological and chemical weapons to prevent them being used against other states or passed on to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. The motion which the Howard Government put before the House of Representatives stated unequivocally that:

“Iraq’s continued possession and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, in defiance of its mandatory obligations under numerous resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, represents a real and unacceptable threat to international peace and security.”

And he said in his Address to the Nation on March 20, 2003:

“Therefore the possession of chemical, biological, or even worse still, nuclear weapons by a terrorist network would be a direct undeniable and lethal threat to Australia and its people. That is the reason above all others why I passionately believe that action must be taken to disarm Iraq.”

The Prime Minister went on and on about the imminent threat from such weapons this and many other speeches. They were the reason, the ‘principal’ reason, the principal objective of the allies’ military actions.

‘Truly,’ we were assured, ‘we are at grave risk; the great superpower itself, the United States, is threatened; peace-loving people and democracies are in jeopardy unless we discover and root out these weapons.’

If the United Nations won’t act, we were told, we will. Oh, and by the way, despite a mountain of international legal opinion to the contrary, our decision to be part of an invading force is justified by previous UN resolutions – don’t worry about that. And to show that it really is about the weapons, if Saddam Hussein would give them up, we will not pursue him. The weapons are the thing, we were told-both by our Prime Minister and other leaders.

It’s fair to say the only fig leaf our government had in prosecuting this case within international law was the weapons argument. Invasion of another state for regime change, the justification embraced by the Howard government since weapons have not turned up, is in flagrant breach of international law. Everyone agrees about that.

In the United States a gullible people fed garbage by Fox and the largely compliant print media have decided that it does not matter much that they were lied to and manipulated; the attack did get rid of a really nasty dictator who most of them still believe was somehow responsible for the September 11 attack. In their minds that apparently justifies their government treating them with complete disdain. Australians, by and large, appear to have reached the same conclusion; it does not matter how we got there, the bad guy has gone – although we do not actually know where he is – and none of our defence personnel got killed.

It does not matter, apparently, if the Prime Minister has shown the Australian people again that he thinks that they are a bunch of gullible fools who will swallow any old load of garbage without demur. I guess he might be entitled to think that after the largely apathetic reactions to the revelations that the government systematically misled us in the children overboard and Tampa incidents. Having fooled us he now takes us for fools.

I think it does matter and I think it matters a lot. It matters that thousands of Iraqi people were killed and injured and that their lives have been turned upside down. Electricity supplies are still unreliable; water and sewage treatment cannot be guaranteed; security is a nightmare. It matters. It matters that our own government feels it owes us no explanation for the questionable intelligence it used to justify the most extreme of actions – waging war – without parliamentary approval, putting our people’s lives and future security at risk. It matters.

Years of inspections, hours of debating in the United Nations and in parliaments around the world, acres of newsprint and endless spin from government officials and leaders were all devoted to convincing an initially sceptical public that there were biological and chemical weapons which could be launched within 45 minutes; that Iraq had wilfully resisted proper inspection and disclosure of massive secret stockpiles of weapons.

How did we know this? Despite UN weapons inspectors and other reliable sources within Iraq concluding that it was most likely that these weapons capabilities had been effectively destroyed by years of sanctions and pressure from the UN itself, how did we know this? Because our intelligence sources told us so.

The big question is: did they really? Or was there a massive disinformation campaign to create a justification for war from partial, contentious and often unreliable sources, which the intelligence agencies themselves urged should be treated with caution?

We were forced to participate in a charade of raking over past United Nations resolutions for pretexts for war, of alliances and of new resolutions – the last one dumped when it became clear that the Security Council was not going to roll over under US pressure.

We were invited to look away while bribes were offered to desperately poor nations to buy their votes and we were invited to ignore well-sourced reports of the electronic surveillance of member states to allow the United States and the United Kingdom to anticipate and prepare rebuttals to the arguments of those nations who dared oppose them – all of this conducted in an atmosphere of confected crisis and imminent threat.

We all watched with increasing alarm the big speeches by Bush and Blair and Howard, by Colin Powell and Jack Straw, replete with maps and dossiers, making concrete those fears, showing us diagrams of laboratories, specifying the quantities of weapons trained on the world, showing us all of these things and engaging in lurid speculation about the many and varied ways in which we were at risk from these “weapons of mass destruction” – the phrase repeated over and over again.

How did we know all this? Because the reach of the United States intelligence apparatus is enormous; because its ally the United Kingdom knows the region intimately as its former imperial overlord. Australia, tagging along behind, used our own intelligence agencies to try and assess the veracity of the material shared with us by our allies. We were told over and over again that there was no doubt that Iraq did possess large quantities of weapons of mass destruction which they could use at any time or hand over to the terrorists, who would have no compunction about using them on us, the hated westerners.

Besides, as one of the grim jokes circulating about the missing weapons has it: ‘How did we know that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Because we still have the receipts.’ It was, after all, the United States and some European nations who supplied most of the material and the technology and turned a blind eye while chemical weapons were used in the Iran-Iraq war and then against the Kurdish people. The flow of money, material and technology did not stop until Iraq invaded Kuwait.

It is not as though there were not plenty of dissenters within the intelligence community, even before the attacks; people who were prepared to put their own jobs and reputations on the line so that the truth could be known before such an important decision was made.

Hans Blix himself issued diplomatically circumspect and repeated cautions about some of the more extravagant claims being made about the weapons Iraq was said to possess and objected vehemently when his own report to the UN was misused by the US administration in particular and also by the Australian government. Dr ElBaradei confirmed that there was no nuclear capacity at all. And we know that the Niger uranium connection was a forgery – although John Howard continues to deny it. Indeed it was widely known well before the now notorious speeches by all three leaders which included the false claims.

Blix has since pronounced himself disappointed with the quality of US and British intelligence and has said that their governments had not been justified in their conclusions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. This man knows more about it than anyone else on this planet. Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter too made it clear from the outset of the US push to a pre-emptive strike that the inspections and the sanctions regime had effectively dismantled the greater part of the Iraqi arsenal and their capacity to develop new weapons. He argued that the claims being made by the so-called allies were exaggerated and unduly alarmist-this all before the attack.

Even more compelling was the evidence of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, who defected to the United States in 1995. CIA and British intelligence officials who debriefed Hussein Kamal after his defection and reviewed the complete transcript of UNSCOM, who also interviewed him, reported that he insisted that nothing was left. He is alleged to have said that all chemical weapons were destroyed, that he personally had ordered their destruction. Weight I think has to be given to his evidence since Saddam Hussein had him executed after he returned to Iraq.

Blair’s dossier was exposed before the war as decidedly dodgy. Downing Street was finally forced to admit that much of the dossier came from dated academic sources and one portion at least was plagiarised directly from a PhD student’s thesis. And Robin Cook’s resignation could have left no doubt about his uncertainty about the evidence. One of the most intelligent and best informed of Blair’s cabinet, he was privy to regular security briefings and was not convinced of the claims that Iraq had a massive stockpile of weapons and posed a serious threat. He recently urged the British government not to be suckered again, as he put it, by the US hawks into similar action in Iran or, we might add, North Korea.

Before the attack on Iraq, former CIA and other intelligence operatives actually wrote to George Bush expressing their alarm at what appeared to be political interference in the intelligence community. Their worst fears of course have since been confirmed.

Just in case the Howard government thinks it can pass the buck for intelligence failures to the big guys, Andrew Wilkie’s courageous resignation from the Office of National Assessment – because he believed that Australia’s decision to join in the attack on Iraq was simply wrong and was based on incomplete information – prevents them from doing so. Wilkie made it clear in a recent article that ONA officials and others were well aware of the deficiencies in US intelligence and warned the government repeatedly that Iraq did not have a substantial WMD program and that the US reasons for engagement were not really about the destruction of such weapons. He correctly anticipated that the Howard government would not be keen for an inquiry into Australian intelligence assessments on Iraq; much better, as Wilkie put it to let “the whiff of US intelligence failure drift across the Pacific in the hope it implies that Australia was the victim of advice beyond its control”.

Wilkie emphasises that there could not have been any doubt whatsoever about all this in the mind of Prime Minister or any other member of the National Security Committee of Cabinet. Report after report from the bureaucracy made it abundantly clear that US impatience to go for Iraq had very little to do with WMDs and an awful lot to do with US strategic and domestic interests. They cannot now credibly claim ignorance. It’s a measure of the contempt in which they hold for the Australian people that they are trying to so.

Now that it has been officially declared that the war is over and its objectives achieved, a steady stream of information from security sources in both the US and the UK confirms what these analysts said before the attack and what many of us who were opposed to the war suspected. There is increasing evidence of manipulation of intelligence and political pressure skewing British and US intelligence on Iraq and the use of it here in Australia. This has clearly led to the Australian government itself ignoring the warnings of its own intelligence advisers – intelligence about the supposed weapons threat was manipulated, exaggerated and spun to suit the political objectives of the coalition of the willing.

The intelligence agencies, at least in the U.K., are apparently not prepared to take the rap for the conspicuous failure to turn up any weapons. That is why they have been leaking so comprehensively. It transpires that they warned their political masters that they had no direct evidence of such weapons. The Australian agencies have been so politicised that they are throwing themselves in front of the PM and his ministers to absorb any flack. As they now do so often and with such alacrity.

In the United States while George Bush was telling the world, and being echoed slavishly by our own Prime Minister, and I quote: “… the Iraqi regime possesses chemical and biological weapons …”, a widely circulated defence intelligence agency report at the time concluded that “there was no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons”. As Jason Vest put it in a recent article inNation:

“Anyone familiar with the intelligence game knows how susceptible any intelligence – raw reports and intercepts, finished analyses, white papers, national intelligence estimates – is to potential manipulation or subversion.”

“It was clear that the Rumsfeld-Chaney axis was having its way with the CIA,” he wrote, and this should not have come as a surprise because “the neoconservative clique the Defence Secretary and Vice President hail from has a long history of using form and subterfuge to make intelligence say – implicitly or explicitly – what is ideologically desired.”

Academic John Prados, who sifted through all the unclassified CIA reports on Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological and missile capabilities, reported in the May-June Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

“It is fair to suspect that CIA analysts did not approve of the cast being given to their reporting. Conversely, Defence Secretary Rumsfeld had little real need to create his own in-house intelligence staff to furnish threat information on Iraq because George Tenet’s CIA had already been hounded into doing just that.”

One official from the Defence Intelligence Agency in the US told the New York Times:

“As an employee of the DIA, I know this administration has lied to the public to get support for its attack on Iraq.”

Another claimed the Bush administration “grossly manipulated intelligence” about WMDs. And the Australian government was being warned precisely that that is what they were doing and that much of the “intelligence” being transmitted to us from the U.S. was “garbage”. There was no intelligence failure; they wanted a war so they insisted on reports to support their case while ignoring contrary evidence.

US intelligence officials have kept up a steady stream of complaint about the pressure exerted on them. Cheney and senior aides apparently made numerous trips to the CIA, and operatives reported that they felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit the administration’s objectives.

What of the evidence now that the search has been going on the ground for almost four months, and Australia sent a team to join the US rather than involving the experienced UN team again? What have they found? Exactly nothing. A couple of mobile labs were held to be the clinching evidence – the Prime Minister even added an extra one. But an official British investigation has already found that they were to manufacture hydrogen for weather balloons as claimed, and that the mobile trailers were actually manufactured in the United Kingdom. Yet our own Prime Minister continues to insist that this is the decisive evidence of weapons of mass destruction.

Like Rumsfeld, our Prime Minister and the Minister for Foreign Affairs continue to insist against all logic that Iraq may have destroyed all the WMDs before the war started. That would be very odd behaviour if it were true. If you were going to be attacked, if war was imminent and you had one last means of defence, why would you destroy it? And there is no evidence of this having happened. So we’re now asked to grasp the straw that they had “weapons’ capabilities”.

Similar pressure was apparently placed on British officials. Reports in the UK media over the last few weeks attest to a continuing battle of propaganda on both sides of the Atlantic. British intelligence sources – one of whom is now known to be Dr David Kelly – made claims that intelligence on Iraq had been ‘sexed up’ for publication by Downing Street. On top of this, the BBC was also informed that a major claim in Blair’s now infamous dossier – that Iraq could unleash chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes of the order-was actually inserted at the insistence of Downing Street. Even The Times, which adopted a pro-war stance at the time, recently ran an analysis which concluded:

“The government is seen as having spun the threat from Saddam’s weapons, just as it spins everything else.”

Despite the apparent exoneration of the Blair government by a Parliamentary Committee on which the government has the numbers, the BBC refused to withdraw these claims and Blair is no longer trusted by a majority of the British people. Even Bush’s popularity and support for the attack on Iraq have declined. Doubt is corroding the triumphalism of the coalition of the willing.

It matters and Australians should take notice.

We should listen to Andrew Wilkie when he says so emphatically that Australians have been gulled by this government. The attack on Iraq rests on a lie-the ‘greatest foreign policy scandal’ since World War 11, as Robert Manne puts it.

Those who care about democracy, regardless of their views on this war, must demand explanations from this government. In the United Kingdom and the United States the media and some MPs are insisting on proper accounting, with severe embarrassment to Blair if not to Bush. Australians deserve no less – and the Joint Parliamentary Committee inquiring into the matter will provide us with the opportunity to expose this government’s mendacity.

So far the weapons have not turned up. There is every chance that they will not. But we already know, whether we find some or none, that intelligence has been misused and the Australian government has been prepared to ignore its own advice – to use the ‘stacks of garbage’ as a justification for such extreme action: going to war, killing other people, and putting Australians’ lives at risk. We already know that our government has been prepared to traduce the truth and to cynically manipulate the Australian people – again.

Speaking of WMD Spin, let’s do a little brief deconstruction ourselves. Here’s one cute Prime Ministerial soundbite, hot off the Spin Central presses today:

“We entered the war in Iraq based upon the failure of the Iraqi government of the time to comply with United Nations’ resolutions, we had intelligence assessments of WMD capability and we reacted appropriately.”

It’s been a while since I’ve hung out with the warbloggers, but let’s see if I can remember how to Fisk such waffle. (Margo: Fisking is blogger talk for taking apart someone’s work line by line. I had a go at fisking Howard’s press club question and answer session at the press club just before the war in Deconstructing JW Howard.)

1. “We entered the war in Iraq…”

Passive, weak and slippery verb (a real give-away). We didn’t ‘enter the war in Iraq’, Prime Minister. We helped start the bloody thing. We were one of only three countries in the entire United Nations of nations to do so meaningfully. No Australian government has ever done this before – helped start a war. Yours did. Our country won’t ever be quite the same again. No matter what your ‘profound conviction’ might be. Australians don’t start wars, John. Thanks to your government’s strategic stupidity, it’s what Australians now do. You might not think so. Most Australians might not think so. The majority of the world’s countries do. They are more right than we are.

2. “based upon the failure of the Iraqi government of the time to comply with UN resolutions…”

This statement is Classic Spin, which really means lies. The Prime Minister is merely ‘fuzzing-up’ the ‘reason’ for invading Iraq – from the very precise (read: dramatic, scary, public opinion-winning) reasons that were quoted daily, to an over-arching ‘sound-good, feel-good’ cure-all which in reality can never be tested or disproved. The Coalition of the Willing specifically claimed at various times (and among much else), that

a) Saddam Hussein was both able and willing to deploy WMD against his neighbours within 45 minutes;

b) had sought to obtain uranium from Nigeria;

c) had direct and dangerous enabling links with al-Qaeda;

d) possessed unmanned drones capable of delivering WMD beyond its borders;

e) had obtained aluminium tubes intended for use in its nuclear weapons programs, and

on, an on, and on.

These are hard, specific claims which, correspondingly, can be proven wrong or right – and all have been proven wrong. Nothing has so far turned up that ‘proves’ Saddam had ‘failed to comply’ with UN resolutions. In the absence of UN sanction for this invasion this is in any case an absurd accusation, since without the UN’s own imprimatur that very ‘reason’ to invade becomes a bitterly-dishonest forgery. The Coalition invading Saddam’s Iraq for his ‘failing to comply with UN resolutions’ – even as the UN refuses to support the action – is like thumping a kid because he ‘looked at your mate funny’, even though your mate is himself urging you to calm down and not hit him.

‘Failure to comply’ is an arbitrary, malleable, meaningless standard when you alone are the sole arbiter. ‘Failure to comply’? What is ‘compliance’ in measurable terms, John?

How can we ever prove or disprove ‘compliance’ now? This is uber-Spin; Alice-in-Wonderland stuff par excellence: Saddam Hussein will have ‘complied’ with UN resolutions when, and only when, the Coalition says he has. A self-defined, UN-excluding, self-serving linguistic roundabout. Spin. Spin. Spin – any faster, John, and your government will whirl right up its own ‘profound convictions and fundamentals’.

Also Spin here is that nifty ‘Iraqi government of the time’ bit – it’s pure (instinctive) Howard verbiage, designed to add an artificially sombre and measured tone to his reference to Saddam’s regime, and to inject a subtle reminder that ‘the world has changed’, that ‘we’ve moved on’, that of course everything (including the ’emerging’ facts) is now ‘different’, and thus, you surely can’t expect the government’s position not to change subtly, too?

As transparent as a sheet of glass. The Emperor has no linguistic clothes.

3. “we had intelligence assessments of WMD capability…”

Big deal. I’ve got my own intelligence assessments of WMD capability, too. So has every other man and his dog on the planet, now. My brother, who’s just spent several savage months in Iraq, could tell you a thing or two about ‘intelligence assessments of WMD capability’ too, John, but I bet you wouldn’t like what he’d have to say, mate. (And you wouldn’t be able to destroy him as an anti-American Lefty loon, a cowardly appeaser, or un-Australian, either; he was nicked by shrapnel once and got a richochet under the chin for your troubles, John. Didn’t find any WMD, though – maybe he was too busy reading Greg Sheridan’s riveting prose).

So – now that we’re all on a ‘WMD intelligence assessment’ level playing field – namely, none of us really have a bloody clue what was what – do tell us about these ‘intelligence assessments’ of yours, John. What did they all specifically say? Which ones (‘sexed-up’?) did you choose to accept with glee, and which ones (sexed-down? boring? too long and measured and grounded in grown-up, detailed, expert opinion?) did you choose to ignore completely? And why, and how did you make those subjective judgements, and where is the hard vindication that your choices and judgements were better than mine, or Bob Hawke’s, or Ray Funnell’s, or Scott Ritter’s, or Robin Cook’s, or Peter Gration’s, or Andrew Wilkie’s, or the late Dr David Kelly’s?

And if you can’t give us that now or soon, with Coalition soldiers increasingly being picked off in the ugly mess you’ve dumped them in, doesn’t that mean your government and your intelligence advisers are incompetent, weak on security, cavalier with our soldiers’ lives, and – above all else – not not not to be trusted on future ‘intelligence assessments’ of when and where they should be sent, in this ‘war on terror’ we are fighting?

Prime Minister – do you (and George W. Bush and Tony Blair) know what the bloody hell you are doing in this war? Or is it time for a change of government? Australian conservative leaderships, as history reminds us, have a proven knack for getting Australia into the kinds of strategic military messes that require fresh, sceptical and lateral-thinking governments to extract us from.

Are you weak on security, Mr Howard? Is George W. Bush? Because it seems pretty weak to me to commit the grand bulk of your fine fighting forces to occupying a country half-way around the world where there was no real threat to begin with, either to you or your allies.

Where was (and is) the true Middle Eastern threat to America, England and Australia? And, for that matter, to Israel? Iraq? Or was and is it from Hamas, from al-Qaeda, from Jemah Islamiah, from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, North Pakistan, the remote Afghanistan deserts? Because it’s pretty clear that none of these groups or places had, in relative terms, very much to do with Saddam Hussein’s WMD or his version of Iraq – however awful either was. Or at least, not until we waded in there with our guns blazing, anyway. Now, of course, the world has changed again; an increasing number of Iraqis hate our guts just as much as the next self-respecting anti-Western fanatic.

So why, for our own sakes, don’t Bush, Blair and you at least admit the awful truth: that of all the countries in the Middle East to invade and occupy – creating chaos, misery, resentment and increased anti-Westernism – Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was, in hard-nosed military-strategic terms, the very stupidest, most self-defeating choice. While 200, 000+ American soldiers have their hands full with newly anti-American zealots in Iraq, established anti-American zealots worldwide are cheering with glee and busying themselves with their next box-cutter or Bali plans.

So tell us a few details about these ‘Iraq threat intelligence assessments’, Prime Minister. What we want to know is why you sent our soldiers to disarm Iraq’s WMD threat by brute force if, as it looks increasingly likely, there wasn’t much of a WMD threat after all. British and US soldiers are still dying every other day. Meanwhile, we don’t even know where Saddam is, let alone what Osama bin Laden and his friends – our true arch-enemies – are currently up to. I just hope that the Coalition’s ‘intelligence assessments’ of that are a touch more reliable.

4. “…and we reacted appropriately.”

‘Appropriately’ – the most pointless word in the English language. Appropriately to what? Appropriate to John W. Howard is what, because as today’s frightening polls show, the bulk of the population in this country is utterly committed to you, John, and nothing else. A majority of Australians still cling desperately to your contrived ‘politics of conviction’ Presidential persona, Prime Minister, even in the stark face of their own dawning realisation that you lied through your teeth on WMD.

So many voters have invested so much in you personally that they have now apparently embraced an almost visceral refusal to allow the scales to fall from their own eyes. Refugees, WMD, ASIO, ANZAC deployments, Reconciliation, the Republic – swathes of ordinary Australians are screwing their eyes and minds shut against ugly facts, against their own common-sense instinct and decency, simply – disastrously – trusting in the convictions of the self-ordained Battler’s Best Mate. Welcome to Louis the Fourteenth territory, Prime Minister: L’etat, c’est Moi! Where ‘appropriate’ means whatever the hell you think is ‘appropriate’. Fine. Let me ask you about the modern Spin Doctor’s ‘Word of Mass Delusion’ I:

Is it ‘appropriate’ that Australia has ‘moved on’ from Iraq even as many Australians are still over there in-country, hunkered down in their flak jackets outside Baghdad airport or patrolling the streets with their anxious Yank and Brit comrades, wondering when a grenade is going to blow up in their face, or an anonymous bullet enter the back of their head?

Is it ‘appropriate’ that David Kelly – Iraq WMD expert – killed himself in isolated despair while gutless politicians just like you keep running like buggery and persist in avoiding the deeper truths about Iraqi WMD that he was trying to make public?

Is it ‘appropriate’ that American soldiers are being daily killed by an increasingly hostile and resentful Iraqi population that just doesn’t really want them to be there any more, and almost certainly never will again?

Is it ‘appropriate’ that George W. Bush recently excluded many of those same soldiers – low-paid political cannon fodder – from the swathe of tax cuts he bestowed upon his most supportive constituency – the rich, many of whom helped sweep him into office, and thus helped drive that an already-dangerously threatened America into an unnecessary and probably-unwinnable war? I

Is it ‘appropriate’ that your own Liberal Party backbench continues to raise not a squeak of dissent about this staggering strategic fiasco? Is it ‘appropriate’ in a modern liberal democracy like Australia – Peter Costello and Phillip Ruddock and Robert Hill and anyone in Cabinet or the back seats – that so many voting Australians continue to ‘support’ your Prime Minister, even while simultaneously agreeing that he lied to them to gain their support for sending our sons and daughters away to kill other human beings?

This, to me, at last, is lunacy territory, and with Australian soldiers again outbound on an unpredictable international intervention, it’s time for the broader parliamentary Liberal Party to wake up, re-assert some Westminster collective balance, and force our Prime Minister to stop spinning his self-serving and now dangerous webs of deceit. Or have they, too, now got too much vested interest in continuing to place their deaf, dumb and blind trust in our nation’s Spin Doctor-in-Chief?

The suicide of Dr David Kelly, the microbiologist at the centre of the battle of wills between the BBC and the Blair government, ought to represent a loud wake-up call to politicians, political advisors, and political journalists in democracies everywhere, and in Australia in particular.

The Howard and Carr governments’ versions of Blair’s unsavoury spinner Alistair Campbell wield every bit as much shadowy influence here as does Campbell in London. Figures like Miles Jordana and Jane Halton and the departed Max Moore-Wilton – unelected, unaccountable, unchecked, unscrutinised – are, if not subject to proper media pressure at last, likely to drive Australian public life as far into the gutter as has this latest tragic result of New Labour’s increasingly dangerous, soft-totalitarian attempts to control every aspect of debate.

Dr Kelly’s death is another urgent call-to-arms for serious journalists everywhere to pause, step back from the pressures of minute-to-second coverage, re-appraise what exactly is occurring in the guise of ‘harmless’ Spin and how they are acquiescing to it, and then try to forge a big shift in the way they collect information and present it to us, the public they serve.

The media, no matter how much we like to criticise them, are on our side. And we need them to start fighting hard for us. The BBC Director-General and his journalists, despite some minor mistakes early in this affair (mostly over-personalising their response to Campbell’s opening attacks on them), are clearly up for the battle. Let’s see how many other journos are ready to get serious at last, especially those in the Murdoch outlets. I personally have a feeling that the Sun-style tabloid hacks, rather than the broadsheet nancy-boys, might prove to be our most powerful shock troops when it comes to breaking down the ‘information barrier’ now dividing the public from our leaders. If only they would get their tongues out of their proprietor’s bottom from time to time.

Here are five angles on defeating the Spin Doctors. Webdiarists might have others. ‘Defeating’ is not hyperbole, either; as the Kelly tragedy shows, there has long been an information war going on between the media and the political estates and it is now starting to cause fatal ‘collateral damage’ out here among the public.

1. Introduce the public to the Spin Doctors.

We need a comprehensive list of who exactly these people are. So powerful is their influence over public life now that we are surely entitled to know far more about them than we do. Someone in the mainstream press should publish an in-depth expose of who ‘spins’ for whom, and details of their employment contracts – including how much they are paid (if they are the public payroll), their working briefs, their security clearances, and their professional histories.

2. Banish Spin Doctor and press release anonymity.

The terms ‘official spokesman’, ‘a spokesman’, ‘a press secretary’ and ‘an official speaking for the government’ and so on should be banished from the press. Instead, even the lowliest official mouthpiece should be precisely identified and named, and press releases should not be accepted unless/until specific authorship is revealed. In opposition to my belief that news reporters should ideally be heard, read but never by-lined, anonymity in influential government circles is a wholly-insidious mechanism and one critical to a government’s ‘firewall’ and ‘dog whistle’ tactical modes. It allows ‘junior spinners’ safely to make (planned) ‘unauthorised’ statements or release information of dubious morality or veracity which, while proving useful in a short-term political sense, never-the-less allow the associated politician the escape route of disowning them later.

Here is an example of how Spin Doctor anonymity destroys public life from today’s Herald; Andrew Wilkie is describing a sick personal attack on him by the Howard camp, following his principled resignation over WMD:

The day after I resigned somebody in the PM’s office leaked to the media that I am having family problems, and that I was mentally unstable. Events were moving pretty quickly, but I clearly remember thata guy called me, around midday, and said he was from the Prime Minister’s office. . . . He said that Howard was personally very sorry that this story had been leaked by a junior person on his staff. They told me that they would retract the story, and to its credit, the press did not follow the story or ask me about it. My wife and I are separated, but I don’t think that means I’m crazy, and the only reason I’m explaining it now is because I don’t want people to think that any of it is true, but that’s the kind of thing that has been happening to me.

You can see what’s happening here. A dual Spin Doctor aim has been achieved – the intended target in this case is not the public, but the Press. Firstly, journalists have now been ‘made aware’ that the ‘real story’ (wink wink, dog-whistle-firewall) here is that Wilkie’s marriage is collapsing and he’s nuts. This is intended to undermine the context in which they receive and report Wilkie’s statements.

Secondly, however, John Howard pre-emptively distances himself from the mucky tactics (in this case almost immediately); journos are ‘made aware’ by another anonymous Spinner that Howard is ‘personally very sorry’ that they now know about Wilkie’s private life. Howard’s circulated regret is no more (or less) genuine than was his public ‘agreeing to disagree with Fred Nile’ over banning Muslim headdress, or his being ‘personally angry’ that ‘someone’ in his office ‘didn’t pass on’ the children overboard or Nigerian nuke-link truths ‘in time’.

His own ‘profound regret’ doesn’t matter; the filthy Wilkie story is out there. (No doubt Howard media supporters will ‘blame’ Wilkie himself for ‘further spreading’ the story now, even in trying to hose it down.)

This is how the anonymous Spinner spins the filthy webs that his ‘respectable’ boss climbs up, creating the opportunities for him to deploy the dog-whistles, the insinuations, the mock-Socratic ‘innocence’, denying stories precisely to stoke them, ‘disavowing’ bigotry and division and gutter-politics precisely while piggy-backing on them.

But these tactics can only work if there is someone putting the dirty cards on the table in the first place. (You can see this tag-team mode of Spin swinging into action now in Britain; Blair is in ‘conciliatory’ mode towards the BBC over Kelly’s death even as his friend and former Spinner/Minister Peter Mandelson is savaging the broadcaster viciously over it).

The role of the anonymous Spinner in particular is to spread the unrespectable dirt: a ‘statesman’ can’t react in (mock-concerned, luke-warm, half-hearted) denial to a suggestion that all Muslims are terrorists, say, unless someone makes that suggestion in the first place. It might be another public figure – Nile, Hanson – or, increasingly (since other public figures can’t always be relied upon), it might originate internally, in the form of ‘an error’, a ‘lapse of judgement’, an ‘unauthorised statement’, a ‘bureaucratic blunder’, and so on.

In the latter case, what is critical is that the originator must be Mr Nobody. A Howard or Carr populist opportunist can only pull off the dog whistle + firewall manoeuvre if he is able to distance himself safely, and you can only do this if there’s no specific person you might have to public ‘finger’ (to prove you’re serious about your ‘disavowals’ – which of course, you are not.).

Clearly, if he was really sorry about this dirty Wilkie story emerging from his office, John Howard would have outed the ‘junior person’ who spruiked it and sacked them, not merely cried crocodile tears; just as, if Blair really is trying to be conciliatory to the BBC, he’d be denouncing Mandelson’s ugly accusations vehemently. But if they both did that, Howard would run out of anonymous spinners willing to leak the useful dirty stories in the first place quick smart, while Blair would have no-one shifting the heat for Kelly’s death onto the BBC on his behalf.

Low-level Spin Doctors know that they’ll never have to personally account for their own immoral tactics, which is the only way immoral tactics ever flourish and flourish. Doing truly filthy anonymous work is all part of the Spinner’s junior apprenticeship. The Republican Party in the US has a huge army of these clowns – the kind of low-level, wannabe-Dick Morris interns and undergrads who organised and peopled the ‘spontaneous democratic voters protests’ (in reality, violently pro-Bush intimidations) in ballot officials’ offices during the Florida recounts.

But now this stuff is turning increasingly poisonous, and in this case fatal. This is hardly the first time an innocent and honourable citizen has committed suicide as a result of anonymous political filth, but it’s an incredibly unambiguous example, and for once it’s not hyperbole to argue that Alistair Campbell, at a minimum, has at least some blood on his hands.

The BBC will wear much artificial opprobrium over this in the coming days, but in fact the journalists involved seem to have behaved with admirable principle and strength of purpose. Still, Kelly, by going to the press with highly-damaging information, stepped outside the government safety zone where anonymity is desirable. Suddenly, it was imperative that he be indentified, so that – like Wilkie – he could be subjected by the likes of Campbell to a vicious credibility-assault. (This is why I argue for anonymity for news reporters – the second a reporter ‘becomes someone’, they are a discreditable target. Witness also Campbell’s intense attacks on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan, who broke the story.)

I also experienced how government Spinner anonymity is deployed when I tried to defend Margo’s reputation at State Parliament last year (see In which Jack is repelled from the citadel and Jack’s back.) The ‘firewall’ low-level person in Bob Carr’s office, to whom I spoke at length, refused point-blank to identify herself, even while she demanded very, very aggressively all my own personal details (which I happily gave). If it’s good enough for the Kellys and Gilligans and Wilkies to become targets when it suits governments the same should apply to all government personal staffers, right down to the phone boy if necessary.

The time has come to put an end to the anonymous safety for the low-level dirty-work foot-soldiers of Spin. Who are these people, what nasty little things do they get up to from day to day, and – in the case of this ‘junior person’ in the PM’s office, say – how do we, the public, get rid of them, if we can’t vote them out?

The press alone are in a position to flush such grubs out into the harsh light of democracy, and they should do start doing so before the next honourable and idealistic citizen kills themself in demoralised frustration.

3. Point out that the mini-Emperor has no clothes in real time, face-to-face.

Journalists must recognise that there is only one way to take on the smooth and slick Spin Doctor, and that is head-on, using the great traditional strengths of the working reporter: drag the bullshit detectors out, and brush up on the swear word vocabulary. Good spin doctors rely above all else on tame journalists remaining tame (University-tamed, you might say); exhibiting nice manners, personal restraint, a sort of mildly-embarrassed unwillingness to make a gauche scene in front of their journalistic peers.

Margo wrote of the mostly-prissy, foot-shuffling silence from colleagues that greeted her angry tete-a-tete with Bob Carr last year. Alan Ramsey once stood up in the Canberra Press Gallery and shouted “You LIAR!” at John Gorton. Neither episode was sophisticated or elegant, but it is precisely this jettisoning of the self-censoring press conference ‘conventions’ that is now needed.

Since when have Spin Doctors been allowed to tell journalists which questions they can and can’t ask, and when, and how? Why do journalists so meekly follow the Spin Doctor rules? Personally, I crave the day when someone of the stature of Kerry O’Brien or Laurie Oakes simply says, in response to a typical slice of spin doctoring: “No offence, mate, but you are frankly full of bullshit.” I once suggested (in ‘ 52 Ideas for a healthier Australian news media) that reporters should be polite and civil, but it may be that they would make a lot more headway in regaining public support with a little more fruity aggro. Put it this way: reporters can’t sink any lower in the public eyes than right now, so there’s little to lose.

And journalists might be surprised at the effect a little contemptuous rudeness could have on the smarmier Spin Doctors. Most spinners rely heavily on an assumption that no journalist is ever going to stop playing the game. Yet laughing, sneering dismissal of any charlatan’s lies-on-behalf-of-the-boss are usually the best way to burst the bubble they try to construct. If you make them look stupid on-the-spot, then the whole charade tends to collapse. However it’s done, journos need to get the initiative and momentum back from the Spin Doctors. You can only so this by throwing them personally off-balance first.

4. Treat Spin Doctors as the powerful players they are.

As Alistair Campbell has lately discovered, the best way for the press to destroy the power of the Spin Doctor is to manifestly transform him from a nominally back-room player into the front-room ones they really are. The Spin Doctor’s most powerful weapon, both defensive and offensive, is the disingenuous claim to be ‘simply doing a job’. It is precisely why the Spin Doctor’s function is so poisonous – all care and power and influence, zero responsibility or accountability. In times of high crisis, the Spinner seeks to appear as a hapless ‘little man’ buffer, gamely doing an honest job of work on behalf of the ‘accountable’ politician. And so they stand bravely at the podium in a kind of bemused but good-natured funk, pretending to be trying hard to be straightforward with the jackals under difficult conditions.

This is, of course, exactly his role in the politician’s overall team – to act as a point man for the heat. Thus, journalists should cheerfully oblige by giving it to the bastard full on, extending absolutely zero of the professional sympathy the Spin Doctor seeks to elicit from them in such circumstances. In the absence of the relevant politician, the Spin Doctor should be savaged as if they are that politician; inspiring a ‘hey-go-easy-on-me-personally-mate’ attitude is a key to how Spin Doctors protect their bosses during crises. They should be torn to pieces by reporters so ferociously and personally that they will think twice before taking the heat again. There is no such thing as the Nuremberg defence. No-one on the planet can take refuge in, or seek an easier ride from, the ‘only doing my job’ line.

5. Reclaim language as the journalist’s vocational weapon.

Maybe this is the most important shift of all. Journalists, who more than anyone else know exactly how language can be blurred and manipulated to just about any end, must regain the high linguistic ground. And they have to be willing to challenge Spin Doctors – also linguistic gymnasts – on what might seem like tedious and even pedantic matters of language, ad nauseum, in real time. They need to be prepared to fight cant with an on-the-spot deconstruction of that cant which may seem at times a little anal. The debasement of public language has to be fought, inch-by-inch, and journalists are the ones at the front line. Favourite Spin Doctor cliches and phrases have to be blown out of the water as such, the instant they are heard. Meaningless adjective + abstract noun linkages like ‘appropriate action’, ‘inappropriate behaviour’, ‘debatable merit’, ‘compelling argument’, ‘absolute conviction’, or hard adjective + imprecise verb linkages like ‘definitely address’, ‘seriously consider’, and ‘fully reflect upon’ are all the more dangerous because they sound so convincing. ‘It is my understanding that’. ‘It could be argued that.’ ‘Some people might take the view that.’ Reporters should point out aggressively that this sort of slippery, disconnected Spin Doctor bullshit is utterly meaningless, null language; pre-emptive Alice-in-Wonderland tossing-off that allows anyone and everyone to delude themselves that whatever follows means only – and whatever – the hell they want it to mean, at any given time yesterday, today, or tomorrow.

‘It remains my absolute personal conviction that there was a very compelling argument that Saddam was a serious WMD threat, and I made the appropriate decision based on my understanding of the facts, only after a profoundly serious consideration of all aspects of the debate, on merit’. This sentence means nothing, nothing, nothing. It’s less than a lie. And yet we went to war thanks entirely to rubbish just like that.

It’s this watery, limp, gutless, waffling, obfuscating, muddying, underhand and deeply cowardly poisoning of our public conversations that is quickly eroding all the grand things that define Western civilisation, and which we are supposed to be defending against terrorist nihilists: our capacity for self-improvement through tough self-criticism, intellectual precision and rigour in language and debate; honesty, honour, humility, moral courage, principle. The rise and rise of Spin Doctor mediocrity is neither the fault of one person or group or political tint, nor is it within the power of any individual to combat alone. But it’s rising and rising never-the-less, and it’s driving the broader public increasingly into cynicism, political disengagement and civic despair.

And now suicide. I think that it’s only by political journalists confronting Spin Doctors and their Spin head on – calling bullshit bullshit in real time, like Australians in particular used to do as a matter of instinct – that these two central, and symbiotic, components of our public polity will begin to force, or scare, or intimidate, or embarrass each other – and therefore our elected masters – into ensuring that civic life becomes defined by a little more responsibility, restraint, grace and accountability once more.

UPDATE: A quick extra note. It seems there is also growing disquiet at the BBC that Gilligan may have ‘sexed up’ his reporting of ‘Kelly’s sex up’ allegations against the government. In other words, that the BBC is guilty of the same kind of spin itself. In which case, it’s an even better demonstration of the way the two sides of the Spin v Journo war tend to poison each other’s modes of communication to the public.

G’Day. Lachlan Brown is a fourth year media and communications student at Sydney University. He also plays the piano and french horn, and teaching music helps pay his way through uni. He’s written a piece for Webdiary on the Menzies vision for higher education and how John Howard has turned his back on that vision. In essence, the difference between the two men’s perspectives is that Menzies believed higher education was a public good – a public asset – while Howard and ‘social capital’ convert Peter Costello believe it is a private privilege.

In February, Webdiary columnist John Wojdylo wrote a comprehensive piece on the disastrous state of our universities called The intellectual holocaust in our universities has just begun. It’s the abstract analysis of what’s gone wrong. He’s just sent me the companion piece, an in-depth interview with Brian Bosworth, a professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Western Australia. This interview draws out the coalface reality of the top-down transformation of our universities. It’s at They wouldn’t hurt a hair of us, they’d only let us die.

Sorry I haven’t got to all your emails this week. If you’ve sent a gem, please resend.

Destroying Menzies’ noble revolution

by Lachlan Brown

“I think of the Menzies period as a golden age in terms of people,” said John Howard in 1989, “Australia had a sense of family, social stability and optimism during that period”. Fourteen years later many argue that Howard’s adulation has become emulation. In everything from the enduring length of their reigns to their decisions to commit troops to controversial wars, it seems that the two leaders are linked by much more than just party affiliation.

However, whilst hopeful large ‘l’ Liberals eye a delicious fourth term in government and small ‘l’ liberals ponder a neo-Menzian suppression of dissenting voices, there is one striking aspect of the Menzies government which Howard has failed to reproduce.

Menzies is often remembered as the ‘saviour’ of higher education. After World War II universities found themselves in an alarming state, with swelling numbers of students and decreasing levels of funding from the cash-strapped state governments. As class sizes ballooned and education standards dropped, things looked desperate.

After intense lobbying from university vice-chancellors Menzies set up the Murray committee in 1957 Three months later the committee recommended sweeping changes to higher education.

Most important was the continued injection of funds from the federal government, – as a result, 13.5 million pounds of federal money flowed into the system on top of the 15 million it had already allocated. Money was spent on new buildings, staff salaries and commonwealth scholarships that paid the course fees of twenty percent of the student population.

As a result of these changes, one academic wrote to the prime minister thanking him for starting a “noble revolution” in Australia’s universities.

Fast forward to the present and Howard faces many of the same challenges as his Liberal party role model. Student numbers are swelling. After subsequent budget cuts universities desperately need further funds. The education minister Dr. Brendan Nelson has labelled the Australian higher education system as ‘mediocre’ in an international context.

Menzies’ response was to shift the burden of funding from the states onto the commonwealth. Howard’s response, however, has been to restore some of money his government cut from university budgets supplemented by with increased payments from students and their families. So if universities need more funds they can charge more HECs. If an individual wishes to pay for the entire cost of their education they have a better chance of obtaining a place at university.

However, the difference between the two leaders isn’t just about how they pay for things. Budgets are based on priorities and philosophies. Education budgets reflect philosophies of education. And it is in these philosophies and foundations that Menzies and Howard are diametrically opposed.

At the heart of Menzies’ higher education program was the notion that society would benefit from robust universities, a notion of great significance in the nation building period following the second world war. In his speech to parliament in 1957 he explained his vision in very Menzian terms:

We must, on a broad basis become a more and more educated democracy if we are to raise our spiritual, intellectual and material living standards.

There is a collective sense of education at the heart of Menzies’ vision, education which benefits the entire country and not just isolated individuals. In another part of his speech he advised students to use their university education to advance Australian society:

[Students] will, I am sure, not forget that, under all the circumstances I have described, the community is accepting heavy burdens in order that, through the training of university graduates the community may be served.

In the current climate of economic rationalism Menzies’ ideas seem oddly out of place. Indeed in education, where Sir Robert envisaged ‘community sacrifices for community benefit’, the Howard government speaks more along the lines of ‘individual sacrifices for individual benefit’.

So when Brendan Nelson is questioned about HECs increases, loans and full fee paying positions his responses invariably highlight the benefit of university degrees for individuals. When asked about $100,000 degrees for example, he is quick to inform us that the expected lifetime earnings of a medical or dental graduate run into the millions. A university degree, he argues, is a good commodity to have. It’s an investment during your youth which brings large financial benefits further down the track.

Who then, do we believe? In 1957 Menzies declared that universities provided advantages for all of society:

Our universities are to be regarded not as the home of privilege for a few, but as something essential to the lives of millions of people who never enter their doors.

In 2003, Nelson emphatically told Laurie Oakes the opposite:

But the education that you receive at university is a privilege. It is provided by hardworking taxes of ordinary Australians, many of whom have not ever seen the inside of a university.

Whichever way we lean, it is interesting to note the type of society that is created by these two visions of higher education. Menzies wished for a unified nation or a community, where those with skills were obliged to serve their compatriots. Howard, on the other hand, seems to be breeding a type of selfishness where a university education is seen in terms of its earning power, rather than its societal contribution.

Under Howard’s system, lawyers and doctors will leave university with enormous financial debts. In order to repay them, they will need to take on high paying jobs. In these circumstances it is difficult to envisage anyone using their law or medical degree for benevolent reasons. So a doctor’s wish to volunteer in a third world country must be weighed against the massive debt that she owes the government.

In his 1957 speech, Menzies described the ‘bad old days’ of his university study:

In my own undergraduate days students were either scholarship holders at a time when scholarships were few and difficult to win, or students that were maintained by relatively poor parents prepared to make great sacrifices for their children, or (in probably a minority of cases) students whose parents could readily afford to sustain them through their courses of training.

It is easy to argue that we are returning to such days. Commonwealth funding for scholarships is miserly. Families (poor and middle class) still make great sacrifices for their children’s education. Meanwhile the rich are able to buy their way into elite schools and sandstone universities. It is ironic then, that the man marked as the ‘new Menzies’ is dragging us back to the very situation that Sir Robert dreaded. An ‘ignoble revolution’ is indeed underway.

***

Margo: Many bright, passionate Australians from all walks of life have received scholarships to study at Cambridge and Oxford universities through the Menzies Foundation. It is “a non-profit, non-political organisation created in 1979 to promote excellence in health research, scholarship and post graduate study by Australians.” Its objective is “to promote, through research and innovation, the health and fitness of the Australian community.”

John Wojdylo is one of an increasingly lonely band of academic idealists struggling to restore the central role of our higher education system in our society. He outlined the gradual destruction of this priceless national asset and the likely next phase in the destruction agenda in The intellectual holocaust in our universities has just begun. Some of his forecasts were realised when the government released its new higher education policy in this year’s budget.

John wrote to me today:

Hi Margo,

Albert Brian Bosworth is Professor of Classics and Ancient History, University of Western Australia. He’s widely regarded as a world-expert on Alexander the Great. In 2000, his book, “From Arrian to Alexander”, was included in Oxford University Presss Oxford Scholarly Classics. His “Conquest and Empire: the Reign of Alexander the Great” is also highly regarded.

After transcribing this interview, I sent the text back to Professor Bosworth with some extra questions, who then sent the text on to Dr. Judith Maitland, Head of the Disciplinary Group, to check the accuracy of the figures. She also added a few comments of her own. This cooperative effort has resulted in a number of longish footnotes and one or two interjections. I think these enhance our conversation immensely.

The point of the interview is to describe the situation of universities in Australia at a concrete level the view from the coalface. This time I’ve focussed on the humanities. Professor Bosworth cannot be certain that his “Disciplinary Group of Classics and Ancient History” will exist in 10 years’ time. The situation is precarious.

The text has been meticulously checked for accuracy yes it’s “us” not “ours” in the title!! Could you please be careful with the quotation marks, bold face and italics? Thanks!

I pressed my luck and asked John if he’d guest edit reader responses to his piece and that of Lachlan Brown on the Menzies vision for higher education (see Destroying Menzies’ noble revolution. He agreed:

I’ve long thought of how I would do Webdiary if I had to be in your position. I guess doing this guest editor thing would give me the chance to put my ideas into practice. There are two essential roles:

* neutral agitator

* partisan agitator.

These roles would have to be clearly demarcated. Also, I wouldn’t shy away from criticism, which is necessary in order to tease out what sense (if any) the writer is trying to make. I’d encourage writers to write back and develop their ideas better.

The problem, as I see it, is that it has the potential to take up a lot of time, which I’d have to create from the couple of other things I’m doing at the moment. As a one-off or two-off, though, it should be OK.

Please email your comments to me at mkingston@smh.com.au, and I’ll forward them to John.

***

John Wojdylo interviews Albert Brian Bosworth, Professor of Classics and Ancient History and a world expert on Alexander the Great, on life at the coalface of our dying universities.

JW: The first topic I’d like to get on to is rather mundane, I guess, although it’s vital to your survival. It’s operational grants and infrastructure funding. How does it work? Now, as far as I can work out, it’s a performance based grant. The Federal Government has a law, the HEFA – Higher Education Funding Act – that contains a formula which looks at a department’s scholarly output as well as the number of students it has. And based on that, the Federal Government allocates a certain amount of funding – the operational grants and infrastructure funding – to the university. Then the university decides how this is spread around the departments. Is that correct?

ABB: That is largely correct. There are, of course, two quanta: the operational one, which is based on the number of students; and secondly, the research quantum, which comes really from two sources, one is from postgraduates, in particular postgraduate completions, which, thanks to the government, is going to become more and more important. And secondly, the outcome – the publications. The publications are assessed on a pro rata basis, and the money based on those publications is transferred to the faculty, which then distributes it to the schools, and the schools use it according to the operating groups within the school. So in my own case, the research money supposedly is used to keep the staffing level up to meet what is regarded as the disciplinary group’s debt. [The disciplinary group here consists of Latin, Latin Humanism, Ancient Greek, Ancient History and Classical Archaeology.]

I would like to say that I was involved in the early stages of working out the ratio of research publications – in particular, the categories of refereed articles. We have – which is a sort of lifeline for us – a very generous allocation for books. A monograph counts 15 points, as opposed to DEST’s [the (federal) Department of Education, Science and Training] regular 5 points, which is ridiculous.

JW: So this is 15 points when the school assesses the monograph…

ABB: . . . when the university assesses it. That figure hasn’t been touched [for a number of years]. I was very glad to get that in because, for instance, if you’ve got a book of 200 pages – which is the sort of average monograph in my area – at least how many individual small research papers is that worth? It’s worth a lot. [A typical research paper only worth 1 point.]

At least we have this factored into our resource allocation. I think it’s the one area that I can think of in which the humanities get perhaps advantageous treatment. Elsewhere we’re – I wouldn’t say stuffed – but, things like well, this is one of the absurdities at the moment library funds all over Australia are being starved, as you probably know. We’ve had a moratorium on acquisitions in the Reid Library. We in Classics used up our allocation for the year a month ago.

JW: You used up your allocation for the year in May.

ABB: Yes, that’s right. And because of the lag between orders and statements, we overspent. And it means that we’ve been cutting back on periodicals. And we have what was a superb historical collection in the library – it was very good – but now it’s been cut back year by year, to the degree that it’s very problematic to use it as a basic research library. I have to go elsewhere to the big archives so that I can find what I want.

Admittedly, there are funds you see, a lot of money’s gone from acquisition – brute acquisition of stuff in hard copy – to document delivery. But, you see, to find out what you need, you have to have the research tools there. You can’t use the Web, which is a very,

JW: Porous?

ABB: Very porous, and 90 percent garbage, at least.

JW: 99 percent garbage, I’d say.

ABB: So we’re having the library cut down its acquisitions, while at the same time we’re being encouraged to publish stuff in hard copy in journals, refereed journals and refereed books, which is my line of country.

JW: So you wouldn’t be able to read your own paper in the journal because the journal has stopped coming to the library.

ABB: That’s the case in a lot of areas. In my own case, I flatter myself that I publish in journals that on the whole would never be cut back. And my books are always either OUP [Oxford University Press] or CUP [Cambridge University Press].

But the absurdity is, of course, that so many things published and classified as research will never be purchased by this particular library.

JW: At which level is library funding decided? Is it at federal government level or university level?

ABB: I’m the wrong person to ask about the mechanism of distribution. I think it comes from the operating grant and, well, from the university’s overall budget, as decided by the budget committee, so it’s an internal decision.

[Judith Maitland, Head of the Disciplinary Group, adds: Yes. The funds are devolved all the way down and allocated to us by the school according to the number of full-time staff members. As 5.3 of us (including Cassamarca appointment – see below) are trying to teach 5 branches of Classics and Ancient History, it is obviously impossible to maintain a good collection for all of these.]

It’s said that the UWA library gets better treatment than the vast majority of libraries in Australia, which to some degree is true. But even so, it’s like saying that Auschwitz is better than Dachau, which doesn’t mean that Dachau is in a particularly rosy situation.

JW: The ARC is the other major source of funding for universities. That applies to research. The Australian Research Council is a group of specialists that assesses applications for research funding from academics and scholars at Australian universities. How does the process impact on your department? How does it work? Which sort of positive aspects are there in the ARC system, and which negative aspects are there?

ABB: Positive aspects. Well, I’ve been relatively well treated myself. I haven’t a current ARC grant going, but I’ve got leave coming up. In a sense, what I need ARC money for primarily is research time and thinking time, and writing time, and this I’m going to get when I’m on study leave.

I’ve found that in the past I’ve rated relatively well. It’s largely my reputation that’s got me the grants. Some of them have been quite interesting. I’ve had, really, little complaint about the way the process has gone.

I think two things are bothering me at the moment. One is the assessment of proposals. I think more and more the move is away from not so much peer review, but informed review. Now we’re getting people who are reviewing up to a dozen applications, not in their area of speciality but in, what you might say, their wider purview of experience. And that leads to a certain degree, I think, of sloppiness and haphazardness, even more than before.

Some years ago I was ill-advised enough to put up a proposal for a research centre – a CRC, Collaborative Research Centre – on the Hellenistic Period, the post-Alexander period. This was going to bring in experts in Egyptian, Babylonian and Persian history. It was an international network of people. It was going to be based both here at UWA and Newcastle [University]. It got the university’s support – it was the first project in the humanities to be nominated for a CRC. It got absolutely nowhere. There was a one paragraph assessment which made it clear that the assessors had no idea what I was getting at. They said ‘not enough collaboration with distinguished people within Australia’. But there aren’t any – well, there aren’t all that many – distinguished people in Australia working in this field, and this was the whole point of the proposal to bring them in and stimulate it. That was very frustrating.

One of the things that got me from the start was that people didn’t know the difference between ‘Hellenistic’ – the historical period post-Alexander – and ‘Hellenic’ – meaning Greek in general. So, ‘you’re proposing a Hellenic centre – isn’t this a bit wide [and unfocussed]?’ I got that from people even here at quite a high level.

JW: How does the rest of your department fare with ARC grants, and why?

ABB: John Jory, who has now retired, has done particularly well with the ARC grants, first of all because he was into computing, and in the old days, when relatively few people applied to what was then the equivalent to the ARC, it was less competitive. He did have a big grant over many years to produce the largest ever at that time computer-generated lexicon of the corpus of Roman inscriptions – some 40000 inscriptions – and its complete word index. He was doing that in the 60s and early 70s. He has had a spell on the ARC itself. In more recent years, he teamed up with Dick Green, professor of classical archaeology in Sydney – who’s an old university friend – and they were doing a lot about the iconography of the Roman theatre. They’re both well known, they were getting very good reports. You see, the thing is, a little bit in the way of cross-disciplinary – that you’re bringing together the literary text and the iconography – so really anything that you can say is ‘cross-disciplinary’ gives you an advantage.

JW: What’s the condition placed on applications, that 10 percent of the grant has to go towards promoting Australian society and culture?

ABB: Well, it’s difficult. This has always been a problem. Up until a year or two ago, this wasn’t quantified. And it has become so that 10 percent of the assessment – what is it 40 percent on the project, 50 percent on track record, and 10 percent on relevance to Australian conditions. That was one of the criticisms made of my Hellenistic proposal – that the Australian relevance was not particularly well-founded.

JW: So how do you argue ‘Australian relevance’ when applying for an ARC grant?

ABB: It’s very difficult. All you can say is, well suppose you’re dealing with Alexander the Great, my own principle area of study, then you can say, right, Alexander is an international icon, he’s politically important for both the Greek and Macedonian Slavic communities In fact, a conference on ancient Macedonia in Melbourne a few years ago was the nearest we’ve had in Australia – or one of the nearest – to a racial riot.

So there’s that relevance. And there’s also the, I suppose you could say, the general concept of militarism and its importance. What is the justification of empire? Why are generals – why are successful killers – so idolized in the popular view?

But that isn’t simply Australian, it’s international. As soon as you push this in an Australian direction, you’re straight away into an international context. I worry very much that the focus of this, the focus of the ‘Australian relevance’, is making Australian research far less central, far less internationally ‘impactive’, if that’s a word.

And that’s the great thing about Classics: if you publish in the right places, you are read internationally. My ‘Conquest and Empire’ is translated into Spanish, Greek – I lose count – Hungarian; it’s coming out in Italian, and coming out, of all things, in Korean. So you do hit an international network. The journals are truly international.

JW: Do you think that insisting on ‘Australian relevance’ increases parochial isolationism?

ABB: I don’t think it has yet, but I think it could have that effect. People of course are going to frame their projects [so as to make ‘Australian relevance’ central]. As I said, that’s not that easy to do in the Classics and Ancient History. But people will jump in the direction of the funding. So people will form research groups on, say, nutrients in Australian history Nothing wrong with it. It obviously can be excellent research. But the challenge, then, to the people working in that field will be to present the outcome, the publication, in a form and a medium that is going to have international impact. The danger is that you’re going to get the research coming in from the [global] periphery – the sort of ground-breaking shifting of the frontiers – that’s come down, used by Australian universities, and published locally, but doesn’t go back out again. I think that’s a real problem. [See Footnote 1.]

JW: How is your department?

ABB: We aren’t a department, really. We have to call ourselves a ‘disciplinary group’.

JW: OK. I know of departments, a number of whose members receive hundreds of thousands of dollars – in some cases millions over several years – in ARC research funding, while the department itself is having great difficulties meeting its operational budget allocation, and can’t afford things like tutorials, new lab equipment, the basic infrastructure you need to teach. So you have very well funded individuals in the department – funded for research – but the actual teaching side of the funding is being neglected.

ABB: Well, we get much the same problems Yes, individually we’ve had our grants. Not on the same scale, of course, because the average grant in the humanities is about $38,000 a year. It’s going up a little bit. But then on the other hand, there aren’t usually expensive pieces of equipment or commodities required.

We’ve had the research grants, and these provide teaching relief. It’s been one of the, I think, positive developments in the ARC over the last decade, that teaching relief has become more a standard thing that you ask for. Most people, I think, getting grants in the humanities would have quite a substantial component for teaching relief. Which means you can use graduate students at decent casual rates to get the teaching experience that they need to go on. If there are any jobs to take.

So that works out at one level, but certainly the basic maintenance of the departments through normal means is minimal. I’d have to ask Judith [Maitland] what the maintenance grant was for the department this year. It’s only about $6,000, I think. [This figure is correct.]

There’s always been this mismatch between the pressure on the teaching we’ve got a lot of courses to teach, in essence because we have three, or if you include classical archaeology, four separate majors to service.

JW: What are they?

ABB: Latin, Greek, ancient history, which includes higher courses in literature and translation, things like the study of Athenian drama and so on; and classical archaeology, which my colleague David [Kennedy] does.

In fact, David is an interesting case. He’s an active archaeologist. He works in Jordan, and has managed to get the Jordanian air force to go in for remote sensing. So he goes in Jordanian helicopters over the desert and marks out sites to be investigated on the ground later. He’s the first person in recent years to have got that permission. Of course, he knows King Abdullah.

And he also was the first person to get excited about the flooding of the dam at Birecik and the inundation of the old site at Zeugma. Zeugma is a vast site, and most of it is going under water through the creation of the dam. David drew attention to that, and tried to get support from the ARC. ‘No, it’s much too big a grant, 200-250,000 bucks a year. We have not got that sort of money.’ And he got nowhere.

But then, of course, when it was too late, or nearly too late, David Packard [the American philanthropist, founder of the David and Lucille Packard Foundation] came in with millions and paid David about $50,000 to go around and to make a sort of survey on site. It could have been done years before at a fraction of the cost. But he couldn’t put the money together.

If he were in a large scale archaeology department, it’d be possible for him to take time off regularly each year. Here, he’s involved in teaching and has to use accumulated leave, use study leave, just to get away. It’s a constant struggle.

JW: How big is your department now, and how big was it 10 years ago?

ABB: 15 years ago it was 10. Now it’s 4.3. [Judith Maitland, Head of the Disciplinary Group, adds: Or 5.3 if one includes the Cassamarca appointment. That is a separate discipline attached to us thanks to the gift of a sponsor. See Footnote 2.] And the 0.3 appointment is John Melville-Jones, who’s now pushing 70 and refuses to retire … Otherwise it’d be 4.

JW: Why has it decreased?

ABB: Largely, if you like, student numbers. We’ve not had, in particular, the first year intake that we’d like?

JW: What are your first year student numbers?

ABB: About something over 100 all in.

JW: How many did you have 15 years ago?

ABB: A few more, but not significantly more. We’ve had slight declines, slight increases from year to year, but there has been a declining tendency

JW: Out of that 100, how many make it to third year, and then postgrad?

ABB: More than we used to have. In fact, our retention rates aren’t too bad, I suppose. We’d have about 60 odd in third year.

JW: That’s very high.

ABB: Yes, the retention is something that has changed dramatically since I came. When I arrived, over 30 years ago, we’d have something like over 200 first year students, and that’d go down to a handful in third year. Say, something like 20.

JW: So these days you have a retention rate of about 60 percent.

ABB: Probably not as great as 60, but certainly 50.

JW: That’s extraordinary.

ABB: Yes. We’re getting more honours [students]. We’ve got at the moment something like 10 honours, and quite a large – for our size – and almost unsustainable postgraduate load. I’ve got 5 doctoral students. . .

JW: The ‘disciplinary group’ of classics, ancient history and classical archaeology [your ‘department’] has 4.3 staff supervising 10 honours students and 12 postgrads, and is teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses for over 200 students?

ABB: Yes.

JW: The student numbers and the retention rate seem to be very good, yet you just told me that the problem is low student numbers.

ABB: Our problem has always been the relative seniority of the staff. I’ve had a personal chair [professorship] for years, David Kennedy is a professorial associate, Neil O’Sullivan and Judith [Maitland] are both senior lecturers, John Melville-Jones is, I think, a professorial fellow, so we are relatively expensive. Our numbers are small, but for us really to be making things out of the current situation we need to have a battery of level B’s or some level A’s, then the staffing bill goes down, then there’s scope for more.

It’s unfortunate: the creation of the schools was supposed to level all this out but, of course, all that happens is that you have an allocation for your group within the school, and it’s the classic thing which we’re told would never happen but we’ve just got another level of bureaucracy. [See Footnote 3.]

JW: How does the future look for the department? Is it rosy or grim?

ABB: That depends on your perspective

JW: Will it exist in 10 years’ time?

ABB: I don’t know. It will exist if some initiative is taken to fill vacancies when they arise. The big danger is that it will be said, ‘Well, Australian history (or whichever department), really needs an appointment, and they’re struggling with all these students with just one person (or whatever): we can’t afford to fill this vacancy.’ So 4.3 becomes 3.3, and suddenly you disappear. I think we’re at the absolute minimum, I think, really, on any rational basis, below the absolute minimum for covering the courses that we do. I think if we lose any more, we’re gone. It’s the old quoting the poem ‘They wouldn’t hurt a hair of us, they’d only let us die.’

Which could well happen, but I hope it doesn’t. We’ve always had at least expressions of support from up top – the vice-chancellor and deputy vice-chancellor. Latin and Greek have been, to some degree, preserved as subjects of low enrolment…

JW: 100 first-years doesn’t sound low to me.

ABB: No, that’s for the whole of the department. Most of them are in ancient history In our introduction to classical languages, we start off with about 30 to 40 Of these, the number that go on to third year varies from year to year. Some years there are zero, some years up to 6 to 8. At the moment we’re doing not too badly in honours, we’ve got 3 or 4. And a couple doing postgraduate work.

JW: What’s the global picture in classics and ancient history? Is there a Mecca where scholars can go and be paid well and have job security?

ABB: There are various places. The Mecca used to be Oxford [University], because in the late 60s and 70s it was very powerful. Most of the jobs worldwide in classics, and ancient history generally, tended to go to people who’d been at Oxford, and had taken second degrees at Oxford. Now the cutbacks have hit even Oxford. Their libraries are still excellent, though. They have more libraries, with more exhaustive holdings of books, than anywhere in England, I think. Their purchase of books is something like a thousand quid per year per student.

JW: Even at the moment.

ABB: Even at the moment. I think that’s all Oxford libraries, including college libraries. So Oxford is a Mecca [from this perspective]. Harvard could have been, but for a lot of reasons, mainly

JW: Geographical location?

ABB: Not so much geographical location. More like interdepartmental exclusiveness, for instance, and personalities. A friend of mine, an ancient historian, world expert in his fields, was appointed to Harvard with the expectation that he’d take on three graduates a year. But his demands on students were so strenuous that he took one every three years. They weren’t particularly happy with that.

[JW: What was the nature of the demands on him?

ABB: Not on him, on his students! He rejected applicants whom he considered unqualified for advanced research, and the demands were linguistic: Latin and ancient Greek as well as reading competence in French, German and Italian. For most Europeans this wouldn’t be thought outrageous, but in an Anglophone culture like the US or Australia, it is unimaginable for many students.Incidentally I think even the US makes more linguistic demands on its students than Australia – but they have six years of graduate study to develop competence.]

JW: Teaching demands?

ABB: Teaching demands seem to be fairly standard in America. It’s two courses per semester, and the courses can be anything from core courses to hordes of first-years to graduate seminars. But there’s certainly a lot of pressure at Harvard. There are two places in America which you might say are Meccas. One is Berkeley, which has a lot of high-powered people. Stanford’s good. But the funny thing is the University of Cincinnati, which by itself isn’t a particularly prestigious university, but they’ve got a superb classics department, largely through a single benefactress, Louise Taft Semple who endowed them with an absolute fortune. But just for Classics, it can’t go anywhere else in the university.

JW: Do you know offhand how much she bequeathed?

ABB: I have no idea. But it’s countless millions. You see, they’ve got one of the best classical libraries in the world. They’ve got a professor of Greek who is – well, one of the conditions of employment is that he spends at least 6 months a year in Greece…. They had a recent additional endowment from Margot Tytus.

JW: So they’ve scored two benefactors. Or more.

ABB: Oh, yeah, at least. The Tytus Fellowships invite you over there. They pay a travel subsidy, free accommodation, a stipend if you’re there for more than a month. And the only obligation is that you do your work.

JW: . . .and your thinking.

ABB: Yes. And use the library, basically.

JW: Do you know of any departments of Classics or other disciplines in Australia that have endowments from benefactors?

ABB: No. I don’t think… just a minute…. Sydney [University], I think, would be the closest. Particularly in archaeology. They’ve got a museum, the Nicholson Museum, which comes close to being world class. It’s got some very good things in it. But that was largely the donation well, it’s called the Nicholson Museum, I don’t know the details behind that… [See Footnote 4.]

JW: There seems to be this one great difference between the Australian University system and the American one, and that is the role of benefactors in the American system.

ABB: Yes. Large scale benefactors.

JW: Large scale. Huge.

ABB: We’ve had a lot of relatively small scale benefits, which have allowed us to give, well, an abundance of prizes. But we haven’t had the really big bequests. We’ve had the thousands, but we haven’t had – and don’t look likely to have – the millions. [Judith Maitland, Head of Disciplinary Group, adds: Apart from Cassamarca, which was for a specific purpose. We were not asked what was needed.]

JW: Do you think it’s something in Australian culture? Can you put your finger on it?

ABB: I think it is something in Australian culture. The university as a whole has had big donations. Music has been very successful over the years. They’ve had a chair endowed from outside funds. Then of course there’s the [Lawrence] Wilson Art Gallery. These things are very high profile. It’s more difficult to get people attracted to the run of the mill subjects. My colleague, Judith Maitland, has managed to assemble a very large support group of people who have an interest in Classics. So when we have public lectures, people come out in droves, really. We usually have about a hundred at our public lectures. And it means that there are people who feel an attachment to Classics, and I think would scream to a level that would surprise people if there were any attempt to close the subject down. But it’s not really creating endowments, as such. What we’ve got is intended to be a support group, and it’s working pretty well as that. But it’s not generating income.

JW: What made Louise Taft Semple take an interest in the Classics?

ABB: I don’t know. She might have studied Classics as a girl.” [See Footnote 5.]

JW: A lot of people did in those days.

ABB: Yes.

JW: Perhaps that’s the problem. Not enough of Australia’s millionaires have studied the Classics.

ABB: [Laughing] Well, yes, or have much interest in it.

JW: Probably none of them have.

ABB: Well, I’d think so Gough Whitlam, I think, was the most distinguished ex-Classicist. He did Classics before going onto law, I think.

JW: Professor Bosworth, thank you for your time.

ABB: Thank you.

* * *

Footnotes

Footnote 1, JW: [A long comment, and response from ABB.] In other words, it’s creating a sort of ‘fragmentation’ of knowledge, isn’t it.

What I mean is, it seems the trend is towards loss of global perspective: the tendency is to focus more and more on one’s own immediate vicinity while at the same time losing touch with other groups working on similar things in other countries. One remains unaware of manifestations elsewhere of the very phenomena one is studying at home: more and more knowledge of a smaller and smaller part of one’s own navel, while ignoring the existence of all those other navels, and not seeing or comprehending one’s place in this vast world.

I should hasten to add that that’s not necessarily all bad. In a way, it reminds me of what I saw in Europe and Japan a lot, where every town and every hillside or field has some – usually bloody, as much of history tends to be – story behind it. These are small and, on the global scale, largely insignificant events. (I do know of little-known events that certainly were historically significant, though.) Much archaeological and historical research occurs there at the local level – commissioned even (I know in the case of Japan) by local town councils. This sort of research, though of little significance on the global scale, is often intellectually (methodologically, say) quite solid. The positive thing it brings is that it serves to humanise an area – people living there, as well as visitors, feel the heritage of the place. But you also get the feeling that this kind of research is often a sort of cottage industry.

Perhaps it’s a sign of a society’s prosperity and achievement of an advanced stage of peaceful existence – together with a sense of wanting to understand more about itself through knowing its past – that it funds projects that seem to be tangential or incidental to history’s main currents. I think they really can bring something positive to a local area. But would a researcher – or anybody else – in a different country find them relevant? The fact that some samurai skewered another at Yagihara is – if it’s just a run-of-the-mill skirmish – significant only to the people living there: the event’s significance is bound to the place, and vanishes outside it.

It vanishes because irresponsible use of power has always happened and will continue to happen the world over. On the historical scale, it’s a commonplace – and commonplaces hold our interest only for a moment, before the ubiquitous other commonplaces subvert it. We are already acutely aware of the irresponsible use of power around us and by our forefathers. The real question is: what understanding – if any – of an event lifts it above the mundane? What makes an event – or object of study – universal?

I’m afraid this is the danger of focusing too much on ‘Australian relevance’: if the researcher does not have to win over non-Australians and convince them in a global forum that these events or objects of study – or his or her account of them – are anything more than mundane, then university research in Australia will slip into the sort of cottage industry accounts of the mundane any traveller can see in local town councils in Europe and Japan. Gone will be perspectives and ideas that transcend local boundaries – in will be enumeration of ordinary details and stamp-collecting. On the other hand, notions that easily transcend local boundaries may not be as solidly fleshed out as they ought to be: the claim of universality can be just a facade, a fancy coat bought at a jumble sale used to clothe a desperate emperor.

What I’m saying is that a scholar’s getting read – and accepted – internationally can be fundamentally related to standards.

I have no idea whether anybody in the federal government is enlightened enough to think as deeply as this – but perhaps there is. Perhaps the torch has been taken to the belly of the humanities in Australia – witness the lack of impact the humanities have had to date in defining ‘Australia’s national research priorities’ – because somebody is worried about the lack of universality in humanities research in Australia. But unfortunately, because the strategy, if it can be called that, hasn’t been thought through properly, they have been throwing the baby out with the bathwater, rejecting projects such as your Hellenistic proposal.

I should add, though, that there have recently been positive signs that the humanities are beginning to make their mark on federal government education and research planning, making the situation a little less catastrophic than last year – at least positive signs have emerged. Lobbying by the Australian Academy of the Humanities is starting to have an effect. Quoting the Academy’s June newsletter Symposium:

So far, 2003 has been relatively good for the Humanities. The Government announced a three-year funding boost for the AH under the Higher Education Innovation Program. Second, significant progress was made in ensuring that the four national research priorities announced last year will be expanded to incorporate Humanities interests. And third, the Federal budget included $200,000 seed funding for a new advocacy council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

JW: Is there anything in the above that you feel is mistaken, or that you’d otherwise like to respond to?

ABB: I agree that locally based research can be rigorous and extremely valuable. The problem is to integrate it into a more comprehensive matrix that encourages dialogue with an international readership. The trick is to see the wider analogy. I did this on a small scale with my research on Alexander. I was able to point out very striking similarities between the actions of Alexander in the far east and the Conquistadors in central America and extremely strong parallels in the historical tradition. I felt that the study was mutually illuminating. I took care to have my work vetted by experts in Spanish American history in the hope that the parallels would be taken up and developed. As yet that has not happened. The research has stimulated interest among Classical historians, but there hasn’t been comparable interest from the Spanish American side; it is, I would think, regarded as a footnote-an interesting parallel but perhaps not worth developing in its own right.

Footnote 2. ABB adds: The Cassamarca professorship was a special grant from the Cassamarca Foundation which is devoted to the promotion of Italian studies overseas, and the object of the position is to promote the study of Latin Humanism (i.e. Renaissance and Neo Latin). This is a three year renewable position, wholly funded by Cassamarca and attached to Classics within the wider structure of the School.

Footnote 3. JW: How was the creation of the schools going to solve the problem?

ABB: The idea was that with a larger resourcing group you have more flexibility in finance and can divert funds to help disciplinary areas which have an imbalance. That is fine if the school is properly funded. However, thanks in part to the seniority of staff, the funding allows one to do no more than pay the recurrent salaries, and the promised flexibility does not eventuate. One has to save at all costs, and it is difficult to do anything but delegate the problem to the individual disciplinary groups.

JW: In any case, perhaps the solution is at hand. This situation of an aging department such as yours can be avoided in the future if all newly appointed staff sign a relatively short-term contract – say, lasting a year or two. When the contract runs out, and the powers-that-be have had enough of a particular scholar – for whatever reason – his or her contract is simply not renewed. They’re put to the sword, quickly and easily.

We could sell this solution by trumpeting ‘flexibility in the workplace’, the jargon of management ideology. Universities can be forced to accept the solution by tying a significant proportion of promised funding to such workplace reforms. Of course, implementation of such a solution would require the establishment of a ruling class, whose members have enough stability in their positions to gain an overview of a department that allows them to make strategic decisions.

Do you think that short-term contracts are the solution?

ABB: It gives me the horrors. Casual employment has been the curse of young scholars working in the humanities. Research positions at the postdoctoral level are very hard to achieve and they are in any case strictly limited in time. Even senior research fellowships provide no security. A couple of years ago a senior ARC fellow who was working in the department (as it then was) failed to get his fellowship renewed and moved to a tenured position in Copenhagen, where his working conditions are much better than he could dream of here. At a lower level it is worse. Even brilliantly talented scholars have tended to exist on short term contracts which can take them into their forties. At that point it is very hard for them to retrain and change careers.

I feel passionately that what we need is to be able to offer the security of tenure, and that security can only encourage better research. It is no help to concentration if one is perpetually worried by the prospect of finding another position. The insecurity also leads to premature publication, writing short, insubstantial pieces simply to inflate one’s CV. So I think the challenge is to create more tenured positions at the bottom end (level B), and although the problem is recognised, little is being done to correct it, and I can see the demise of my profession through sheer neglect. One might perhaps look at the British model which has a huge incremental range at Lecturer and Senior Lecturer level. It means that young scholars can (and are) employed in tenured positions at a very early age. But it also means that it is practically impossible for a person of mature age to get tenured employment.

Footnote 4. ABB adds: To my knowledge the only comparable moneyed classicist in Australia is Alexander Cambitoglou of Sydney, who has set up the Australian Institute of Archaeology at Athens and contributed generously to it from his own funds. Comparable, but not on the level of the Semples!

Footnote 5. ABB adds: Wrong. Her husband was head of Classics, and they both pumped in money. They must have had considerable private fortunes. This is from the Cincinnati web site:

When William T. Semple assumed the Headship in 1920, he worked together with his wife, Louise Taft Semple, towards the ambitious goal of creating the finest department in the country. Under Semple’s direction, the Department embraced the holistic view of ancient studies that continues to be our hallmark, combining under one roof the study of Greek and Latin language and literatures, ancient history, and Mediterranean archaeology.

The Semples supported this ambitious project with their personal funds, fostering goals as diverse as the landmark excavations of Carl Blegen at Troy and Pylos (Palace of Nestor) and the creation of deep library resources in rare areas like Palaeography and modern Greek scholarship. When Louise Taft Semple died in 1961, she left to the department a large dedicated endowment. Because of this endowment, the Department is able to maintain what we believe to be the finest Classics library in North America, if not the world; to bring in dozens of visiting scholars every year, including three scholars-in-residence; to pamper our large graduate population; to attract a faculty of the highest caliber; to offer computer resources and services unparalleled among Classics departments; to fund several archaeological excavations and surveys (most recently in Troy, Cyprus, Pylos, Albania). The Department maintains three professorial chairs: The John Miller Burnam Professor of Latin and Romance Palaeography; the Carl W. Blegen Professor of Greek Archaeology; the Marion Rawson Professor of Greek Archaeology. In the current era, the Department has collected a prize-winning faculty [link to prizes and awards pages] with a strikingly rich and diverse set of approaches to antiquity, including textual, literary, material, historical, sociological, theoretical.

I couldn’t believe my ears last night when I heard Howard using the same tactic on Korea that he used to send us to war on Iraq without UN sanction and without an informed public debate about the risks and benefits of such radical action.

Sorry, yes I could. He shocks me so often these days I’m not shocked any more.

At a Koizumi/Howard press conference in Tokyo yesterday, the Seven Network’s Glenn Milne asked Howard:

Your counterpart there in reference to the interdiction of North Korean vessels said he would be interested to know what the US and Australia’s plans were in that regard. Can you enlighten us on that, and would we be prepared to go ahead with the United States unilaterally if other countries were not involved? And a second one if I may in Australia this morning our Foreign Minister suggested that we believe North Korea has up to three nuclear devices but they cannot yet be delivered to Australia. Do we have any assessment about how soon they will be able to develop that capability?

Howard replied:

Well Glenn in relation to the second question I can’t provide any more information than the Foreign Minister provided. In relation to the first question, you will be aware that there has been no decision taken by the Australian Government to be involved in interdiction. What we have agreed is that we will take part in some exercises, and we have in mind that those exercises will be some extension of already arranged Coral Sea exercises between the American and the Australian naval forces. Beyond that, we haven’t planned any. And it is literally not the case that we have committed ourselves. I know some people are saying that and writing that and reporting that, but that is not true. Obviously though, if you engage in exercises and you later decide to be involved in something, you are better prepared for that involvement. So far as enlightening people, there will need to be further discussions, and at this stage I think everybody is running ahead of themselves and I can understand why you want to know, but at this stage all we have agreed to do is to further discuss the matter. Arising out of the Brisbane meeting, all of the participants in effect took the matter on an ad referendum basis of going back and talking about it and thinking about it, and we have agreed to have these exercises with the Americans, but it oughtn’t to automatically be construed from that weve definitely decided on interdiction or indeed that we’ve decided precisely on what form it will take.

It’s an eerie echo of ‘We haven’t decided to go to war on Iraq but we’ve predeployed with the Americans to prepare us just in case. No decision has been made, no decision has been made.’

Of course when the UN said no, a quick call from Bush and an instant Cabinet meeting got the ‘yes’ within hours. Howard had cleverly avoided all debate about the risks for us without UN involvement by saying that until the formal US request came the question was hypothetical. Can he really get away with a big lie yet again, particularly when the case given for the Iraq war has proved to be highly misleading, even deceptive?

For an analysis of where US aggression and Australian subservience may be hurling us – a nuclear attack on America no less, according to the former US secretary of defence William Perry – see Lateline’s interviewlast night with Labor spokesman and former diplomat Kevin Rudd.

It seems that when Howard hoodwinks the people one way he tries the same way again, word vfor word. The Korea tactic comes after he played the same amoral game on what he was told on the uranium forgery scandal as he did on children overboard. I wasn’t told, the public service knew, ministerial advisers knew utthey didn’t tell their minister, the public service is good, the advisors are good and the key people will get a promotion.

Maybe Australians will fall for it again, and maybe the media is either so compromised or so cautious it won’t go in hard to flush him out. Certainly the government is doing everything it can to achieve that result.

Communications Minister Richard Alston upped the anti on the ABC yet again yesterday, this time asking the Australian Broadcasting Authority, led by Howard sycophant David Flint, to “formally review the ABC’s treatment of his complaint about bias in its coverage of the Iraq war (Alston sets watchdog on ABC to settle gripe).

This stunt is designed to make ABC journalists so defensive they lose their courage and spontaneity in reporting the news. He’s targetted particular reporters, particular programs. Alston is deliberately trying to destroy the independence of the ABC through fear.

The sinister irony is that while the ABC has a charter and statutory obligations to examine complaints and to be balanced, commercial TV has virtually no accountability contraints.

The Senate tried to do something about this on behalf of the people of Australia during the recent cross media debate. It inserted an amendment which would put the commercial networks on a level playing field with the ABC and SBS when it came to just complaints by viewers. The ABA can, after investigation, recommend that the public boradscasters publish an apology or give a right of reply, but they have no such power when it comes to commercial networks. Surprise, surprise, the Government rejected that amendment. The people are disempowered again. Commercial news imperatives without enforceable ethical duties can still run riot. The Government’s strategic objectives I outlined in Howard’s roads to absolute power continue to play out.

The most interesting thing about Peter Costello’s speech last night was what he didn’t say. On the question of trust, he said:

If you want to run a successful modern liberal economy then trust and tolerance between citizens gives you a long head start.

Trust facilitates compliance. Trust enhances efficiency. It reduces transaction costs – you do not have to ascertain and negotiate the bribe on each transaction. Trust in the legal system and the enforceability of contract underpins the willingness to invest.

Trust and tolerance, are sometimes described as social capital. In an IMF paper on Second Generation Reform, Francis Fukuyama argued: “Social capital is important to the efficient functioning of modern economies and is the sine qua non of stable liberal democracy.”

Notice he makes no mention of the need for trust between government and the people. Well he couldn’t, could he. He knows that making such a statement would be a direct challenge to his Prime Minister and a warning that Howard’s amorality when it comes to telling people the truth is dangerous to our democracy.

G’Day. Webdiary columnist Polly Bush has been angsting her way through the fraught issue of joint custody for a few weeks now, and she’s come up with a piece she’s not ENTIRELY happy with.

She calls it “the nightmare issue”, and writes:

I guess the conclusion I came to was that …

(a) joint residency is a wonderful concept and can work beautifully for some people,

(b) unfortunately I don’t think all separating couples would be able to cope with joint residency due to the differences in parenting responsibilities within relationships, and don’t think it’s necessarily good for all kids and

(c) residency issues should still be judged on an individual basis, therefore I’m against a one size fits all policy.

She found some wild men’s sites during her research, including kittennews.

If you’ve got something to say send your contributions to mkingston@smh.com.au and I’ll forward them to Polly, who’s agreed to guest edit a Webdiary on joint custody. The inquiry’s terms of reference and information on where to send your submission is published after Polly’s column.

***

Are your shoes mucky?

by Polly Bush

Just for one crazy moment imagine John and Janette ‘are your shoes mucky’ Howard are no longer comfortable old boots together and, God forbid, separate and divorce. Also imagine the three Howard children are much younger and require more intensive care from both parents.

After vetoing a teaching career to embrace the unpaid work of full-time parenting, Janette wants the children to remain with her. John knows the importance of family life personally and professionally and also wants his own time with the littlies. With both parents seen as being capable of fulfilling these roles, Melanie, Timmy and the other one are plunged into a 50/50 joint residency arrangement.

John has to somehow morph from man of steel to super dad. When he’s not protecting Australia from a handful of desperate people in leaky boats or saving the world from remarkably well hidden weapons of mass destruction, he’s busy car pooling (in a government car of course) on the school run.

Like all other dads in 50/50 share time arrangements, he’s forced to cut his working hours. On alternative weeks, he has to reschedule overseas and regional photo opportunities to rub up against world leaders and khaki families. If George calls an emergency meeting at the Ranch, John can no longer jet over at the drop of a cowboy hat. He’s far too busy sewing the sequins on the little one’s concert outfit, helping Timmy with his algebra, and talking through the birds and the bees to a pre-pubescent Melanie. The Australian public sees a lot less of their Prime Minister. Sniffs all round.

Realising the enormous pressures of being a part-time primary care-giver, John has the revelation that parliamentary sitting times are not so family friendly. When he’s looking after the children and parliament is sitting, he thinks about moving Parliament House in Canberra to Sydney. Maybe he and Bob Carr could swap cities. While in the past John may not have embraced paid maternity leave, he now considers paid paternity leave.

Anxious about John’s working hours and the time he can invest in the kids, Janette dreams of an alternative arrangement. Now sharing the costs of parenting, she looks for paid work. If she wants to challenge the presumed joint residency arrangement, she’ll take on the legal costs. With men still typically earning more than women, this might require a full-time job. Family friendly of course.

Given his stance on the Lodge, presumably Dad doesn’t want to move. For locality convenience, Janette will have to shack up close by. Fortunately, apparently there’s a vacancy in the GG’s Admiralty House right next door to Kirribilli. When the kiddies are with Mum and on the rare occasions Dad isn’t off playing politics, the kids will only have to look over the rambling harbourside lawn to catch a glimpse of Dad engaged in one of his favourite past-times – raking leaves. Then, particularly Timmy and the other lil fulla can reap the benefits of a male role model in their life.

If this scenario sounds like it’s radically changing the face of the family unit post separation, John Howard is the first to admit it. Of the Federal Government’s inquiry into changing the law to give separating parents automatic joint residency of children, Howard said it would be turning the existing arrangement “on its head”. Based on the rebuttable principle, joint residency would be the presumption for all separating couples with children – with those wanting different arrangements having to prove the other parent was incapable of sharing equal time.

The Inquiry is partially the result of intense lobbying by disgruntled fathers groups. One of the pollies targeted in the effort was One Nation Senator Len Harris, who introduced a private members bill on the issue around a year ago. The proposal was already one that was close to One Nation’s heart – in 1998, the Party’s policy on family law stated: “One Nation believes amicable family separations that result in joint custody or joint guardianship are the ideal outcome.” One Nation also planned to review “the functions and operations of the Child Support Agency”, another part of Howard’s current Inquiry.

South Australian Liberal MP Chris Pyne was targeted by another key player in the lobbying campaign, former South Australian Liberal Party Deputy Director and now Shared Parenting Association Director Geoff Greene. As such, Pyne raised the issue in a party meeting. It struck a chord, with Howard reportedly identifying the issue as an electoral “hot button”. Bit like that ol’ chestnut policy on asylum seekers.

Following the recent announcement of the Inquiry, One Nation Senator Len Harris has claimed victory. In a press release he issued last month with the headline ‘Liberals Adopt One Nation Family Law Policy’, he says: “It’s good to see that the Government is actively listening to One Nation, the voice of the people.” Again – it’s a bit like that ol’ chestnut policy on asylum seekers.

The Age’s Michelle Grattan described the proposal as “a union of battler politics and white picket fence ideology”. Labor’s Nicola Roxon labelled it “dog whistle politics to men’s groups aggrieved by the Family Court”. In response to Roxon, the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Larry Anthony (who has since become a bit of a pin-up boy on some men’s rights websites), said “I respect the Member’s long academic interest in women’s rights – but she must not let that cloud her vision when it comes to children and young people.” Because, you know, feminism is so anti-children.

Anthony has been quick to argue the Inquiry is “not about gender politics”. But isn’t it? One of John Howard’s public reasons for holding the Inquiry is out of concern for boys and the lack of so-called male role models. This nicely ties in with Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson’s recent agonising over the lack of male teachers in schools.

Of boys being brought up by separated mothers, Howard told former school teacher and now radio announcer Alan Jones that “they live with their mother, they don’t have older brothers or uncles or male grandparent with whom they can identify, and they go to schools now where there are very few male teachers”.

“They can often be 15 or 16 and perhaps never before they find a male role model and it does result in perhaps not the most balanced upbringing”.

Apart from the big question mark over what exactly constitutes a male role model, Howard’s remarks suggest the Inquiry is being set up to examine the interests of the sole male child, as opposed to acting in the interests of children per se. By dividing residency down the middle to equal shared time, some argue the proposal is not in the interests of children because it reduces them to being split like property. Perhaps that’s being generous, given the VCR doesn’t get passed between separated mums and dads week in week out.

Since news of the Inquiry broke newspapers have contained stories on joint residency families where the situation of shared time 50/50 works remarkably well. The featured couples have come up with the arrangement themselves – they live near each other and in some cases as neighbours. But in each of these stories (least the ones this ranter has read), the subjects say this is not something which would work for everybody, as in these special cases the parents have split amicably and remain on good terms. All credit to them.

On the surface the concept of 50/50 residency seems a fair one to parents, but is it fair to all children in practice? Most people would argue stability is one of the key factors in bringing up children. In this regard, is it in the best interests of all children of separated couples to regularly shift from home to home week in week out? Would it result in what Howard champions a “most balanced upbringing”? According to psychologist Jill Burrett, “the backwards and forwards between two houses can be really unsettling for kids over the years”.

At the very least, Howard’s decision to hold an Inquiry has spurred a side discussion on the broader issue of parenting. Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward applied the ‘even-if’ debate, looking at the role of fathers. “Equal parenting is not the 16 minutes of child play a day that is the average amount of time men spend with their children,” she said. By the time of divorce, Goward said, “one parent by then has invested so much more time and energy in the relationship with the children”.

Chief Justice of the Family Court Alastair Nicholson has a similar view. Responding last year to the perception that the Court unfairly grants residency to mothers (voiced in an article by Bettina Arndt), Nicholson wrote:

“The fact is that we do live in a society where the mother is the primary care giver in most intact marriages. It is therefore not surprising that parents are most likely to decide that mothers should retain that primary responsibility … it is also not surprising that judges will choose an environment that provides the greatest continuity and least disruption for children.”

A study released by a University of NSW researcher last week calculated the amount of time working mothers and fathers of young children had each day for their own leisure time. Of the 4000 families researched in the study, working fathers are said to have one hour and 12 minutes a day free time. For working mothers, it’s estimated at less than a second per day. If parenting arrangements currently have one parent with a more hands on role than the other, would shared parenting seriously be an option for most separating couples?

One of the separated fathers interviewed in a feature in The Age (‘Degrees of Separation’, June 28, Insight) conceded he’d like to have his daughter over to stay more, but “realises his job makes that impossible”.

When Bruce Smyth from the Australian Institute of Family Studies researched families in 50/50 situations, the fathers in these circumstances needed to reduce their working hours. An expert in family law, Smyth has described the arrangements of such cases as “the most logistically complex parenting arrangement possible”.

While many people argue the Family Court unfairly favours mothers, statistics are on the move, with an increasing number of fathers who appear in court winning residence. In 2000-01, 19.6 percent of residency orders went to fathers, up around ten percent from twenty years ago. Other research shows fathers winning up to 40 percent of cases they contest. Family law expert and University of Sydney Professor Patrick Parkinson has described the statistical jump as “a massive cultural shift in the interests of fathers”.

Currently, only around five percent of residency cases make it to trial. Most separating couples make their own arrangements; many others settle. With court stats recently showing an increase in granting residency to fathers, decisions favouring mothers have subsequently fallen. While split residency orders (splitting up siblings) have risen slightly, the already small amount of joint residency orders have recently fallen.

If legislation orders joint residency as the presumption, the number of couples appearing in the Family Court to alter this arrangement could actually increase. This would add significant costs to the separating couples involved, which in turn could cause debt to spiral and the rest. The Law Council of Australia’s Michael Foster estimates that with rebuttable joint residency in place, “there would be many more [court] proceedings … and far fewer settlements”.

It’s also estimated more women would bear the brunt of legal costs with many not able to challenge the arrangement. As the University of Sydney’s Professor Patrick Parkinson explains:

“There’s no way you could say it is in the best interest of the majority of children. If there’s a presumption, a lot of women will be pressured into it because they can’t afford $20,000 to litigate.”

If reports are true that Howard recognises the issue as a “hot button”, he’s right. Many people have stories and experiences on this highly emotive topic. Ask anyone. Stories from children of divorce will vary from bitter divides between parents to parents who had reasonably amicable relationships. Stories from separated parents can vary from those who want less contact to those who want more residency.

Like all issues, this one has its extremes. Some will argue that limited contact combined with the costs of child support combined with family court costs is literally killing fathers. At the other end, the debate shifts to the old fashioned argument that women are universally better parents. Like all debates the truth probably lies murkily in the middle.

The point is that all family situations are unique. Let’s face it, all families are different and have their own individual make-ups and break-ups. This is one of the main arguments against imposing a one-size-fits-all policy like joint residency. A one-size-fits-all policy will not fit all, and arguably won’t even fit the majority of all current situations. While the current system doesn’t satisfy all involved, cases are examined on an individual basis with the Family Court basing its judgement on the best interests of the child(ren).

As a politician, John Howard would know too well the demands his working life has had on his family. Would shared residency be an option for a career politician and his/her partner with young children? It might be easy to spoof John Howard tackling the joys of care giving in a shared residency arrangement, but why so? Why should the scenario seem outrageous? Take out the gender argument and it might be simply because it’s assumed the job of a Prime Minister would be too intensive to also factor in intensive hands-on child caring. If so, is a workaholic by choice or by career really a good role model for their children? Do workaholics keep families together?

If Howard is prepared to examine the issue of giving separating parents equal time, he should be prepared to have a broader debate on the roles and responsibilities of parents prior to divorce. The issue of shared parenting must be tackled well and truly before governments have inquiries into shared custody. Shared parenting and family friendly work practices for both parents might even just keep more families together.

***

Inquiry into child custody arrangements in the event of family separation

Terms of Reference

see childcustodyinquiry

On 25 June 2003 the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, the Hon Larry Anthony MP, and the Attorney-General, the Hon Daryl Williams AM QC MP, asked the committee to inquire into child custody arrangements in the event of family separation.

Having regard to the Government’s recent response to the Report of the Family Law Pathways Advisory Group, the committee should inquire into, report on and make recommendations for action:

(a) given that the best interests of the child are the paramount consideration:

(i) what other factors should be taken into account in deciding the respective time each parent should spend with their children post separation, in particular whether there should be a presumption that children will spend equal time with each parent and, if so, in what circumstances such a presumption could be rebutted; and

(ii) in what circumstances a court should order that children of separated parents have contact with other persons, including their grandparents.

(b) whether the existing child support formula works fairly for both parents in relation to their care of, and contact with, their children.

(c) with the committee to report to the Parliament by 31 December 2003.

Submissions to the inquiry are sought by Friday 8 August 2003. Given the tight reporting time for this inquiry those making submissions are asked to keep their submissions concise. Contributors making submissions are advised to obtain guidelines on the preparation of a submission. These are available from the secretariat or from the committee’s website. If you would like your submission, or parts of it, to be made confidential, please indicate this clearly in your submission.

Submissions should be directed to:

Committee Secretary

Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs

Child Custody Arrangements Inquiry

Department of the House of Representatives

Parliament House

Canberra ACT 2600

Australia

Tel: (02) 6277 4566

Fax: (02) 6277 4844

Email: FCA.REPS@aph.gov.au

Public hearings, community forums and briefings also will be held to collect further evidence. Details of these will be posted on this website as soon as they are known.

Speech to the Sydney Institute, Wednesday 16 July 2003

The pollsters and the professional advisers will tell you that it is dangerous to become reflective about political life. If you reflect on things you are liable to say what you think.

The political participant should resist the urge to become a commentator. The privilege of being a commentator is reserved for others, mostly journalists, who have the luxury of being able to step outside the action. The active participant is part of the action.

But last month I was doing a press conference, on a rather memorable day, and I became reflective. At the end of the press conference I said this:

“I want to see Australia be everything it can possibly be. I want to see it prosperous and strong and secure and tolerant and I want to be able to see it fulfil all of those objectives and I want to make a contribution to that.”

As I was speaking I was thinking about the kind of country I would like Australia to be. I was thinking about a prosperous country with high living standards supporting high standards of health care and education, high standards of transport and communication, and disposable income. I was thinking about a strong country respected in the region and the world which was secure against outside threat and able to protect its citizens and allow them to enjoy this high standard of living. But I didn’t want to leave just a picture of a country that was obsessed with material prosperity. I wanted to leave the thought that we should aim to be rich in values as well. So I talked of being a country that was tolerant.

To be frank I did not think at the time that talking about a tolerant country would prove controversial. But judging from the mail I received it certainly did. The word tolerant produced a big reaction. It turned out to be a verbal bunker buster.

Most people who wrote to me supported the idea of a tolerant country, but not all. Some of them wrote to me to tell me why.

One correspondent from Paradise in South Australia wrote as follows:

“You are reported as favouring a more tolerant Australia. More tolerant than the Howard Government presumably, although if a Costello Government was more tolerant than the current one, the mind bogles (sic).”

A correspondent from Cronulla in New South Wales wrote as follows:

“I am alarmed at your so-called tolerance stand on certain subjects as reported recently by various news media sources and which seems to indicate your failure to understand the opinion of the silent majority in the electorate.”

Another from Coburg North in Victoria wrote as follows:

“Please note that if your personal policy is to pander to and show leniency to the illegal Muslim immigrants who are queue jumpers and sworn enemies of all Christians. My family and I most certainly will not vote Liberal.”

There was another category of person who wrote to me to tell that if I wanted a tolerant country I had better support particular policies of one kind or another.

For some it was reconciliation. For others it was a republic. Although I have supported both, in different ways, I was not thinking of these things. Obviously a tolerant society can exist under either a Monarchy or a Republic and intolerant ones have existed at various times under both of these constitutional arrangements.

Some people wrote to tell me that a tolerant country would not support military action in Iraq. I most certainly did not have in mind that we should be more tolerant towards Saddam Hussein. Saddam could have practiced a little more tolerance to critics of his regime – rather than cutting their tongues out – and a little more tolerance to ethnic minorities like the Kurds – rather than attacking them with chemical weapons. The downfall of Saddam has saved tens of thousands of people from arbitrary arrest, torture and execution.

A tolerant country will allow dissenting views, it will allow ethnic minorities to live in peace and security. The downfall of Saddam Hussein and the Baathist regime in Iraq is a major step for the better for Iraq and the world.

A tolerant society is one that respects differences and allows people to pursue their different aims and ambitions within an overall framework of order. How do you promote such a society? Where does the notion of trust and tolerance come from?

Think of Paul Bremer with the overall responsibility of re-building Iraq. This is a country that has no modern experience of tolerance of Sunni for Shia or Sunni for Kurd, no modern experience of competing political ideas, no modern experience of the ballot box. It is expecting a lot to think that these things will organically emerge with the removal of the Dictator. The fact that the Dictator could emerge in the first place, tells you that these values were not strongly and widely rooted.

Iraq is a country with a wonderful economic base. Its oil reserves are the second or third largest in the world – between 8 and 11 per cent of the world’s total. It has fertile arable land. It has good sea ports with access to world markets. It has some highly trained and sophisticated scientists. It has a lot of human capital. Properly managed, Iraq would be a very rich country.

We know the outline of what a good economic policy would look like in Iraq. There would be a system of private property rights, Government revenue would be invested in crucial civil infrastructure, there would be an independent monetary authority etc. But how would you go about implementing this?

You could turn to various models that have proved successful in other countries but these will not work unless the economic institutions can take root and engender public confidence and trust in Iraqi society. A prosperous economy takes root best in a society that has institutions and relationships that promote confidence and trust.

A totalitarian state aims to control every aspect of a society. It controls the judiciary and the police force and everything else so that outside the state there is no centre for opposition or dissent. There is nothing to organise resistance around. There are no opposition political parties, no independent service clubs, no independent newspapers – nothing outside government direction. And a totalitarian society deliberately breaks down trust between citizens. In a totalitarian society you can never really state a view to a neighbour because the neighbour might be an informant. At home you can never really sound off in front of the children because they might relay your comments, unintentionally, to a teacher at school who is also part of the state apparatus. You trust no-one. And the totalitarian state likes it that way because where there is no trust between citizens, there is no basis for dissent or opposition. The only certainty is the state and its apparatus. And that certainty is that dissent will be punished.

If you were re-building a country from the ground up after the fall of a totalitarian state you would have to start re-building trust amongst citizens. You would need to build a culture of tolerance between citizen and citizen which would allow expression and association within the context of trust. You would need to build trust between citizens and institutions.

And this can take enormous effort. This is part of the problem in Eastern Europe. When communism ended, East European countries mostly endorsed liberal market capitalism but they had little of the independent social institutions and framework to sustain it. Some countries had more than others and have made a better transition. These countries had institutions that stood outside the totalitarian state. In a country like Poland there was the Church and Solidarity which were institutions outside the state that retained public trust. These associations and relations outside the state were sometimes referred to as civil society.

A country that has the experience of the voluntary associations is likely to have a higher level of trust between citizens which can be used to build confidence in public institutions.

But in other countries where there was no legal framework for private property, no contract, no institutions outside party control, the transition to a market economy is a mammoth undertaking.

I well remember in December 1999, when we were coming up to the implementation of the GST, I had the chance to discuss with Russia’s Finance Minister the Russian experience of VAT. I asked him whether it was true that Russian tax collectors were being armed with assault rifles. This was only partly true, he told me. “The rifles are only for the purpose of self-defence.”

If you want to run a successful modern liberal economy then trust and tolerance between citizens gives you a long head start.

Trust facilitates compliance. Trust enhances efficiency. It reduces transaction costs – you do not have to ascertain and negotiate the bribe on each transaction. Trust in the legal system and the enforceability of contract underpins the willingness to invest.

Trust and tolerance, are sometimes described as social capital. In an IMF paper on Second Generation Reform, Francis Fukuyama argued: “Social capital is important to the efficient functioning of modern economies and is the sine qua non of stable liberal democracy.”

In 1987 Margaret Thatcher famously declared: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”

This is an extremely individualistic view of the world. And she received a lot of criticism over this statement.

At the other end of the spectrum are the collective views of the world usually held by politicians of the left who want to submerge individuals into groups of one kind or another. One clear giveaway is the tendency to put the word “community” after everything. Joan Kirner was a classic example of this. She was forever talking about the “Victorian community”, the “artistic community”, the “ethnic community”, the “Greek community”, the “business community” etc., etc. In this view of the world there are no longer individuals who are artists or Greeks or businessmen. There are a series of groups into which individuals are divided and treated together. It is assumed that they have a uniformity of opinion because they share a particular characteristic even though they might never have met, have no desire to do so, and have very different perspectives.

In reality, individuals have varying connections of varying intensity with others. In the first place there is the family, then maybe the street, the neighbourhood or a town. They might have a religious association through a church they attend and their relationships might extend to involvement in a voluntary association, a sporting club, or a political organisation.

These are the networks and associations that give rise to trust between people.

Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone has tried to measure the rundown of engagement in voluntary organisations in America over the last third of the 20th Century. Although I have not seen a similar attempt to measure this in Australia, all the anecdotal evidence to me from the churches, the political parties, the Scouts, the local sporting clubs suggest that membership is in decline and in that sense social capital is running down. Next week the Productivity Commission will release a research paper on social capital which will review the work that has been done in Australia.

Putnam quotes a slogan used by a volunteer Fire Department to publicise its annual fundraising effort: “Come to our breakfast, we’ll come to your fire.”

Of course we know that the volunteer bushfire brigade will come to our fire whether we come to their breakfast or not. But we also know that if nobody comes to their fundraiser, or if nobody comes to join their brigade, there will not be anyone available to come to our fire.

Engagement in these voluntary groups produces a direct outcome, for the bushfire brigade – a group that can attend to a fire. But it also produces by-products. By-products like friendship, belonging, tolerance and trust – and forms the basis for relationships which can be extended to other worthwhile causes.

Last week, I attended a major fundraiser for medical research and as I walked around the tables to talk to various people, it was obvious that one table organiser had invited his friends from the Rotary Club, and one had invited his contacts from the Synagogue and one had invited his associates from the Liberal Party. When each of these organisations have their own events there will be a table gathered by each of the other groups including a table of medical researchers. Engagement is reciprocated, it sponsors further engagement. And in these groups where people have a common interest, and a name, they build trust and tolerance.

Does it matter if this culture of engagement is running down?

I think it does. I think the public laments the fact that engagement is running down. But we should be careful here. The majority of the public is not so worried about the issue that it makes them want to change their behaviour and reverse the trend of declining participation. If people were really worried they would presumably start flocking back into all those associations now struggling for membership.

But there is a tendency to think fondly of a time when people in a neighbourhood knew each other better and seemed to be closer.

Although television could well be one of the main causes of disengagement it is replete with shows that depict people living together in close neighbourhoods. The Australian TV series Neighbours is one such show. The American series Friends is another. The American TV show Cheers was about a bar “where everyone knows your name and they’re always glad you came”. People laughed and joked and took an interest in each other. There are not too many television shows about people who sit at home and just watch television shows. Even if people don’t actually engage that much with their neighbours, they apparently like watching others who do.

I should mention here that not all social groupings are positive ones.

The Mafia is a very close social network – in fact calling itself a society, an honoured society. It generates a high degree of trust amongst its members. It uses these associations for anti-social activities such as extortion, racketeering and the like.

Some social networks also inspire enormous trust between insiders on the grounds of a common intolerance to outsiders – paramilitary organisations in Northern Ireland work on this principle. Urban gangs are another example. These organisations develop social capital amongst themselves which they then direct in a destructive way against others. It is the combination of internal trust and external tolerance that produces positive benefits for the wider society

Recognising the importance of the non-government sector and the positive values arising from it, what are the lessons for policy?

The first thing is the very important maxim for government, any government, on any issue: “Do no harm.”

These social networks are neither established by, nor controlled by government. They are voluntary. That is their strength. So while the Government cannot establish these associations and should not force engagement it should be careful to do no harm. Secondly if Government has a choice between delivering services in a way that enhances engagement and one that does not, then, all other things being equal it should prefer the former. Thirdly Government should be alert to deal with any threats that arise to the voluntary sector.

I am a great believer in parent control of schools. The main reason for such a policy is that the parents, on behalf of their children, really are concerned about standards and outcomes in schooling. In my view involving parents is likely to lead to higher standards. The parents who meet to elect a council, which meets to appoint a Principal who is responsible for the staff, form a community around the school which supports it and takes responsibility for it. They have an interest in the outcome. But in the process, the school becomes a focal point not just for the children but also for parents. It builds relationships not just amongst the children but amongst the parents too.

Suppose the Government decided that it would offer a grant to each school of the precise amount it raised by way of the school fete, on the condition that the school did away with this as an annual fundraising activity. That way the school would be no better and no worse off in a financial sense. The parents could save the time they spend planning and conducting the fete. Would the school be just as well off? No. Although it would lose no money it would lose all those voluntary hours of common purpose and commitment. It would lose the association the parents have made with each other and the teachers which is just as valuable as the funds that are being raised

It is the activity, as well as the result, that brings the value.

This is the benefit of mutual obligation. Take a work for the dole project. In return for income support a person engages in a work project. The project produces, hopefully, some valuable infrastructure. But the person who has engaged in the activity has more than just income support. They have the experience of meaningful work, social contact, and hopefully have developed their work skills.

This is why reliance on welfare can damage communities: A person who receives income support without engaging in the social activity of work misses all the side benefits of that activity, and the positive benefits of self-reliance. This is why we should be heightening mutual obligation for people of working age.

On the principle of do no harm, a Government should be careful not to usurp the voluntary sector. It should not take away those things which people can and want to do for themselves. But where it can support the voluntary sector, without smothering it, it should do so.

And it must be alert to threats to the voluntary sector. One such threat is the public liability crisis.

We would all agree that an innocent person injured through no fault of their own is entitled to compensation. But if the cost of insuring against the compensation threatens the viability of the local sporting club or the pony club or the scouts then it will threaten an important dimension of our society. It will undermine social capital. This is why it is necessary to limit pay-outs and heighten the protection against liability for the voluntary sector. It is defending a very important part of our social infrastructure.

In the 2001 Bolte lecture I suggested that we could revive the non-government organisations of Australia by spending one hour a week in a volunteer activity.

Again I was surprised that some people were critical of the suggestion. I did not stipulate that it should be charity work, although that is a particularly important area of voluntary activity.

I suggested one hour a week at the Rotary, the Lions group, the Church, the Synagogue, the sporting club, the neighbourhood watch, the school or the RSL, the Scouts, the book group, the political meeting or at a neighbour’s house.

The idea was just to heighten engagement. It was not being critical of anybody. Some people suggested this was a deep plot to withdraw government funds from the voluntary sector by increasing unpaid participation. Some people were of the view that if there is a problem the Government should fix it. But if we expect government to solve all our problems even in this voluntary sphere of life we are a long way from the solution.

The view I am putting is that there are non-monetary things that add to the wealth of a society. Civic engagement and the values which it promotes like trust and tolerance are some of those things. You can call them social capital if that is conceptually easier. It might help with the idea of building them up, running them down, adding to our wealth, or detracting from it. But a society which has these things should be careful not to let them run down. Once they are gone it takes a lot of effort to get them back again.

G’Day. Today, some of your responses to Faultlines in Howard’s plan for absolute power. I’m getting stacks of great emails on the implications of Howard’s agenda and how to counter it – sorry if you haven’t got a run. I LOVE this suggestion from Sue King: “Wouldn’t be bad to have an Australian version of opengov.” A Washington Post report, Site lets citizens monitor Big Brother, begins:

Ryan McKinley relishes the idea of turning Big Brother on his head.

Concerned about expanded government monitoring of individuals, McKinley, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has created an Internet repository for citizens to provide information about public officials, corporations and their executives.

The result, he hopes, will be a giant set of databases that show the web of connections that often fuel politics and policymaking, such as old school ties, shared club memberships and campaign donations.

I’m off to Adelaide this afternoon for the Adelaide festival of ideas, so I’ll get an injection of ideas I’ll share with you next week. I’m giving a speech called ‘Redrawing maps of home’, a great phrase used by WebdiaristChristine Evans after the 2001 federal election (Redrawing my map of home). Her piece, republished below, was a response to the question “What will you do?” after the 2001 election result.

My speech will be based on what we’ve been discussing for the last couple of weeks – haven’t written it yet, but I’ll publish it when I get back to work on Tuesday.

Contributors today are Stuart Skelton, Joe Bryant, Damian Shaw-Williams, David Redfearn, Grant Long, Greg Carroll, Mark Carey, Alistair Noble, Malcolm Manville, Stuart Cairns, Sven Klinge, Philip Hewett, Simon Jarman, Matthew Barnes, Jim Robinson and Andrew Byrne.

Thanks to University of Sydney journalism student Lachlan Brown for helping me process your emails this week.

***

Christine Evans (published in Webdiary on November 13, 2001)

I am writing from the US, which the Fulbright commission has generously funded me to visit on the presumption that world peace is more likely if we get to know people from other countries and share our views and lives a little.

I am trying to make sense of the fact that the post-Sept 11 atmosphere seems more poisonous in Australia than in Manhattan, where strenuous attempts are being made to AVOID racial profiling and bigotry. I am trying to redraw my map of “home” after the deeply depressing election results – and more generally, political ugliness – in Australia.

Globally, I feel we are living through the first death throes of the nation state and that the ugliness and fear we are seeing is more than just racism, but a response to the vague but real perception that borders mean less and less.

With over 28 million refugees now world wide, our way of being “citizens” and defining our sense of belonging has to change, unless we are going to define an exponentially escalating part of the population as pariahs. And populations with nothing to lose are, of necessity, terrifying.

Back to ‘What will I do’ and the map of home. Edward Bond (playwright) says that the child maps the world in a process which also creates the child; the map and the mapmaker are one. He writes “If the map is torn, the mapmaker is torn”. My map of Australia has just been torn, but along folds that have been worn thin for a long time.

Another vision of maps inspired by visiting Belgrade this summer (in conversations with my Serbian theatre friends who have survived, overcome despair and offered continuous resistance to a far more poisonous political situation than ours) is one in which “home ” is redefined not as country or race or nation, but by the connective tissue one builds between points of meaning: connection points to land, music, people, ideas, cultures. The task is then to make “home” by building bridges between these starry points.

This sounds abstract, but as a strategy kept my theatre friends alive as people and artists for 10 years: when “home” was unlivable they worked overseas; when the regime fell they brought their international friends to visit. They refused to be as small as the degraded and shrunken politics of their country would have them be, and defined themselves as both Serbs and more than Serbs, human beings and artists with loyalties beyond their State.

How can I apply this way of mapping? By ways despised in the current climate in Australia; through art, conversation, imagination and trying to strengthen community. By refusing to recognize the borders of the nation state as the borders of my and others’ world.

For instance: I am writing a musical set in a refugee camp. Much of it takes place in the Australian desert. I hope I can get it produced in Australia as well as the US and that the music will be so seductive that even people who hate its politics will tap their feet.

I also visit the International Institute in Providence, RI USA, twice a week helping on a project where recent immigrants are learning English and writing a script together. I’m organising a visit for my Serbian friends to Providence, where we will do a theatre project bringing African-American, student, and local arts communities together. Dijana Milosevic will lecture to our community on “The Role of the Artist in Wartime”.

These are only small things but they are attempts to redraw the map. Every day with every action we vote for the world we believe in, which – like the notion of a country – is both imaginary and real.

***

Stuart Skelton in Germany

It would appear to me that the mere inclusion of your obviously partisan diatribe serves to show exactly how patently ridiculous your premise over media bias is.

Your keep referring to John Howard’s popularity. It is so painfully obvious that you are upset that so many people actually approve of him, and the job his government is doing. How galling it must be that DEMOCRATIC PROCESS doesn’t agree with YOU!

The avenue for your consistently anti-Howard messages, along with your equally partisan colleagues Messrs Carlton and Ramsey have yet to be interfered with from this “evil” conspiracy of right wing media ownership.

The reform of the Senate has been one of the avowed ideals of Labor Party policy since 1975, and yet now you scream blue murder at the fact that the Liberal Party are actually the ones to contemplate reform and present an actual plan for doing so (see Howard’s rubber-stamp democracy). The Senate has been the private publicity firm for single issue parties (or in some case single issue people) almost since its inception. Does anyone really think that “Keep the Bastards Honest” was about party platform rather than about headline grabbing?

Whatever your arguments with the current Federal Government, you seem to be most upset with it because it simply doesn’t agree with you. Strange then that they are continuously re-elected. Perhaps the “intellectual elite” that you so obviously feel to be a part of could get it so wrong so often.

Perhaps you should learn a little more about the PRACTICE of democracy rather than your CONCEPT of what you think it should be.

As far as I am aware, the Government presents its policies. The Opposition presents their policies, and then the PEOPLE decide who they would prefer to have running the country for the next four years. It must be of endless frustration to you that the PEOPLE so often, in your opinion, get it wrong.

Keep scribing your Labor Party advertising, please! It continues to make a mockery of your claims about media bias, and displays your true colours about what you really think about Democracy, and the people who practice it!

***

Joe Bryant in Sydney

Here’s an extract from the Declaration of Independence that we should all know off by heart, not only Americans but all people across the world, because it states important truths, in particular the lines highlighted:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.”

Let’s mark what it meant then and make it mean something in the future.

***

Damian Shaw-Williams

What can be done in this mono-media-culture people ask?

Several things came to mind. One is the move-on movement in the US which is an online organising forum which has provided momentum for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. The online forum would provide a means of democratic and electoral discussion.

More generally it would be a ‘permanent petition’ for anyone registered to vote in Australia, regardless of political persuasion. As opposed to affixing your signature to a petition once for a worthy cause, it would be a mass of people subscribing to say four or five core principles, and a declaration that those undersigned will vote according to the democratically determined position on selected issues.

Of course there is no obligation apart from the stated intent, and those who differ in opinion could simply vote however they please. But impact would occur in marginal seats if it could be demonstrated that those on the site represented a block large enough to swing the electorate.

In short it would be the next step on from Webdiary, with a charter and a permanent presence (i.e. not subject to the ownership of the Fairfax group). Cheap and relatively easy to run too.

***

David Redfearn in Northcote, Victoria

A few random thoughts.

1. Reading ‘Howard’s Faultlines’ made me think of Victoria in 1999. Who would ever have thought that Labor would have won seats like Ripon and Seymour (with Green help in the latter). The national situation is obviously much more complex because Victoria’s demography and a bipartisan consensus on our diversity ensured that One Nation never had much oxygen here. But we should never really underestimate genuine grass roots discontent wherever it occurs because electoral consequences are more than possible (Tony Windsor and Peter Andren should be testimony to that).

2. A friend in Queensland who is a genuine swinging voter with Liberal leanings (and Peter Beattie watch out because he is not happy with you after supporting you for two elections!!) said in a recent email that he had now enough reasons to vote against Howard but not enough to move across to Labor. I don’t think it was Simon Crean per se, as he has some regard for him, but there is a cry for some sort of leadership on the Centre Left to articulate a vision for Australia.

There needs to be some sort of dialogue to find issues which unite us on the Centre and Left with the aim of removing Howard and ensuring a vigorous but unifying debate occurs because much that most Australian’s treasure will be lost by stealth and clever wedge politics. It will require effort, considerable patience, acceptance and tolerance at times but is achievable at community level, which is a most delightfully subversive way to do it!! And to boot, Murdoch and Packer will never know until it is much too late (once again I return to Victoria 1999)!!!

3. I am ever sustained by my outward looking and curious adult children who are blessed with knowing and valuing many Australias. including the very small rural NSW community I hail from, their Italian and English heritage, and their cosmopolitan environment in Melbourne.

Some things are right in this country and must be fiercely protected.

***

Grant Long in Newcastle

It’s great that you pick up on the grass roots resurgence in ‘Faultlines’. Over the last few years it has been easy to become very disheartened by what was happening politically in this country. This, I’m sure, is exactly what the government and the big corporate players want.

But tough times demand tough hearts, and it is at that local level that most people feel that they can make a difference. We are seeing many signs of this happening. This week’s news report about a Supreme Court victory by a local group against a mobile phone tower was an example.

The beauty of this sort of action is that it highlights a latent passion for our places and shows that our local societies are strong. These actions bring people together. The joy on these people’s faces was invigorating.

It’s good to hear about the US Democrat Howard Dean who is garnering support from individuals. The prominence of Ralph Nader at the last US elections is another example that people are not comfortable with the shifts taking place in our democracies. The Michael Moore website also includes some stinging comment regarding the current US president (the latest, a letter to Lt Bush is a doozee and focuses attention on the unpopular question, ‘When is a victory a VICTORY?’).

Your alliance discourse was also enlightening. In Australia, we had the alliance between the Australian Conservation Foundation and the National Farmer’s Federation over land degradation (dryland salinity, water quality, etc). This “unlikely” alliance seems entirely logical when seen in context.

As a whole, I think your faultlines are a reality today. Far from being disheartened, every time I hear Howard pushing his little barrow I see another nail in his political coffin. His comments this week regarding the Hicks trial were laughable. It’s like one of the rules of cross-examination – leave irrational and absurd answers where they lie.

All we can hope is that an alliance will withstand the inevitable pre-election barrage. Oh yeah, and let’s all hope that we don’t have another Tampa or children overboard fiasco the week before.

***

Greg Carroll

I think your analysis about the disconnection and alienation from communities and the consequences is spot on. I hope your speculation about possible weaknesses in the current neo-liberal domination are proven to be as accurate. Like you, I think the Nats are at fork in the road. It will be interesting to see if they’ve got any guts or pride left.

***

Mark Carey in Springwood, NSW

Howard has always been divisive: look how the Liberals divided around his ambitions, several times, back in the 80s; his consistent wedge politics; the polarisation of the country now. Accumulating power to oneself is by definition divisive.

I think you are right that to counter this, we must look for what the rest of us share, what we have in common, what unites us. Call me romantic if you like, but the awareness of Howard’s megalomania will grow if it is named often enough, and his willingness to say whatever keeps him in power will undo him.

The only thing is, each round we go with him the stakes are higher. You have pointed out where his agenda is taking us (Howard’s roads to absolute power). It is important to keep on saying what is happening. This is a time when every conversation you have, every piece you write, makes a difference.

***

Alistair Noble in Glen Innes, NSW

Your recent analyses of Howard’s agenda have cheered me up no end – it’s so good to read views similar to one’s own in the media! The full horror of Howard’s vision may only now be becoming certain, but we should all have seen it coming years ago. The thought of a (l)iberal backlash is lovely but I’m not going to hold my breath any longer …

From where I live, in what Howard so patronisingly calls “the bush” (here in Glen Innes the nearest real bush is a 45 minute drive away!), I can see at a grassroots level the development of the sort of unholy alliances you mention.

This might yet prove to be our salvation. Imagine the support a Greens/Nationals alliance could gather across the country.

Keep up the good work, Margo. You can’t really hope to keep the bastard honest but at least you can annoy him a bit and you’ll be able to say to everyone “I told you so!”.

***

Malcolm Manville in Killara, Sydney

I hope your articles about John Howard’s political position in our lives stirs people into action, because that is what is needed. Howard has, without one dissenting voice from his government colleagues, made Australia a different place. I have a mental image of Howard going to bed at night kissing his wife goodnight, then the photo of Bob Menzies that sits on his bedside table and once more turning the clock a bit further back.(Margo: Howard is no Menzies. A Webdiary intern, Lachlan Brown, is writing a piece for Webdiary about Menzies’ vision for education, and boy oh boy is it poles apart from Howards!)

Surely we don’t need another political party under John Hewson but rather a reduction in party political power. We don’t get to chose our members of parliament anyway, it’s done by the party machine. We just have the privilege of voting them into a job without really knowing their capabilities or often them knowing anything about us.

This was the case with my federal MP hastily moving into our electorate and given the nod weeks before the election. In the process our long standing and respected MP was dumped to give the blue eyed boy a seat.

If voters were to select an independent member who was truly concerned about the electorate – hopefully without any previous party affiliations – he or she might truly be representational and not just a puppet too frightened to speak out when it counts. The people, in the bush in particular, would then have some control over their destiny, Brian Harradine, for example, has managed to do quite nicely.

***

Stuart Cairns in Armidale, NSW

I wouldn’t cross my fingers too hard for Mark Latham if I were you. I can see what is going to happen to him even if there is not another Beazley challenge. Last week we had Mark Latham saying on Lateline that he would be interested in looking at the issue of negative gearing in relation to taxation and revenue raising. The next day we had Simon Crean wetting himself when asked about this and saying that no, that no consideration would be given, when formulating new policies, to the issue of negative gearing.

We then had the Treasurer smirking his way through a one-liner about Labor not being able to make up its mind between Lateline and lunchtime. Very droll, Very depressing.

Given that there are sound economic reasons for examining the effects of negative gearing on an over-heated housing and construction market, I would have thought that Labor should look at it if, as has been said often, the only policy issue not under consideration is the sale of Telstra. However, it looks as though we will just have to stand by and watch Simon Crean morph into a small target like his predecessor did. Perhaps he doesn’t know that most of us don’t own investment properties and avail ourselves of the tax minimisation advantages of negative gearing?

There is also a sizeable minority of us who want to see taxes raised equitably and spent on the creation of a fair society. If this is the case, then it may not be too difficult to convince others that bold policies which achieve this are worth supporting.

If this is to be the direction in which Labor chooses to go, then I’m sure that Mark Latham will go the distance. However, if Labor is heading in the direction of becoming a new style small target, then I doubt that he will stick it out.

***

Sven Klinge

‘Faultlines’ didn’t mention the Greens once. (MARGO: Not true!) Labor doesn’t represent the left or the centre – since 1983 it joined Thatcher and Reagan in a world-wide move to the right.

When looking at the 20th century as a whole, Labor now represents a moderate-right and the Liberals a far right. The political spectrum has become narrower with the ideological battleground moving to the right. It seems from your writing, with its focus on Labor, that you have fallen into this trap.

Given your voice, why not encourage people to think about Greens, Independents and other truly LEFT wing candidates for elections?

It’s a mistake that activists in the USA make – supporting the Democrats. As was seen with Clinton, nothing really changes. Instead of an ultra-ultra-ultra right wing corporate-sponsored conservative political party, they just get a ultra-ultra right wing corporate sponsored conservative political party.

People will not vote Labor if their policies are virtually identical to the Liberals in all the important areas. Is it laying too much of a burden on Dr Bob Brown?

***

Philip Hewett in East Gosford, NSW

I wish I had the capacity to write nice dispassionate logical analysis as do others who contribute – but I can’t so here’s an alternative diatribe.

Packer and Murdoch are almost always referred to as Australia’s most powerful men. Why is it necessary to preface their names this way? They hold no power or sway over me. I do not read their journals, magazines, watch their TV stations or consume anything else they produce – to the best of my knowledge.

Whatever power they have stems from general (but waning) public acceptance of the corrupted political system by which they are feted. If enough people think the system is no longer worth supporting (which it isn’t) then they can turn on these powerful ‘elites’ and dismantle the system (as many have done throughout history). Howard is in the same position. He stays only as long as the people accept his corrupt and corrupting system.

Power can only be held for so long. Like wealth, it tends to accumulate. Then one day a seething populace snaps and the real action starts. Let the powerless masses revolt now against these mandarins instead of bleating in fear of losing a democracy that has been in terminal decline for more than 25 years.

Today’s Australians seem unable to exercise the level of courage of their ancestral shearers, miners and waterfront workers, who at enormous risk and expense stood up to the abusers and the exploiters. These were long and debilitating battles but they won our democracy. We too are going to have to fight for our democracy instead of handing our souls over to the corrupt Howards, Murdochs and Packers of this nation.

These oligarchs fear losing power more than you can image. To be at all like the mob absolutely spooks them. But Howard certainly has the measure of mainstream Australia (his ‘mob’).

He knows they are confused and divided. He knows they lack the ticker of past generations. He knows they have grown fat on consumption and have become intellectually lazy. He knows they will merely bleat and appeal to fair play. He knows they will not stand up for themselves. He loves that.

Get over it Australia. Get active and give the whole system a damned big shake up.

***

Simon Jarman

Thanks for your recent articles. They really resonate with me and give me cause for optimism. I have to say that everything this government does and stands for makes me feel oppressed as a citizen. It’s a sense of oppression that I don’t believe will be lifted until John Howard’s political demise (which can’t come too soon).

It’s almost as if everything that I valued as good or great about Australia has been under assault since his election. During 1997 I was the Secretary of the A.C.T. Branch of the Community and Public Service Union. Peter Reith had just introduced his workplace relations act and was sacking thousands of public servants. My job was to represent 40% of the workforce in Canberra during this time.

That job was tough, but what I find harder to come to terms with is the current state of the Commonwealth public service. This once great Australian institution that proudly provided ‘independent, frank and fearless’ advice to ministers is now, under John Howard’s stewardship, nothing but a hollow shell. Ministers simply shout their orders into it and back comes an echo. Senior staff are rewarded if they can tow the party line.

Just look, for instance, at Jane Halton – the current Secretary of the Department of Health and Ageing. Ms Halton was one of the architects of that derided policy that wanted to make our parents sell their homes to obtain a place in a nursing home. Any public servant worth their salt should have advised the government that this was a dog, but Ms Halton got rewarded – and then when she covered for the Prime Minister in the ‘children overboard’ scandal she was rewarded again with the plum job she has now. Is this the kind of public service that Australians deserve?

Our taxes pay for it and as citizens we must demand better. I understand that this is not a sexy issue with the voting public, but nevertheless it’s vital to the strength of our democracy. Hopefully Labor will move to restore the public service as part of its policy and election platform.

The Public Service may be a personal hobby horse of mine, but in general, it’s the lack of fairness exhibited by this government that assaults my value system. If a country or government should be judged on the way it deals with the worst off in its society, then John Howard’s government would be guilty on all counts. Under John Howard there has literally been an explosion in welfare for the rich – at the expense of the poor. He’s our very own Sheriff of Nottingham.

It’s certainly not the ‘battlers’ who benefit from the private health insurance rebate or the massive funding increases to wealthy private schools at the expense of the public school system, but their taxes certainly provide for these little luxuries. The working poor may now be forced to pay for a visit to a doctor – even though they’ve already paid their Medicare levy, but a retired millionaire with a concession card? No problem madam – you’ll be bulk billed!!

Throw in the regressive nature of the GST, Howard’s failure to tax trusts as companies (trusts being a favourite tax dodge for the wealthy) and his treatment of those seeking asylum in this country and how long is this piece of string?

Next to the lack of fairness, I would have to say that John Howard’s mastery of deceit would have to be one of the saddest hallmarks of his Prime Ministership. I don’t just mean the bald faced lies like the ‘never-ever’ GST, but the day to day stuff – like the plastered-on look and tone of false sincerity when he insists that he hasn’t already decided to commit our country to war. You know, simple stuff like that.

Sorry if I’m rambling Margo, but you got me started! The last thing I want to say is that I’m a bit of a fan of John Ralston Saul, who talks about the power of language in some of his writings. I think its time that journalists, the opposition and community leaders harness the power of language to attack this government.

Let’s face it, this is the most extreme right wing government this country has ever experienced, so let’s call a spade a spade. A label like ‘extreme (or ‘ultra’) right wing’ could be an enormously damaging one if used against this government in a concerted and ongoing way.

I suppose, if you throw enough mud, some of it has to stick and there are plenty of instances where it would where John Howard is concerned. Maybe applying such a label is propaganda, but maybe we should fight fire with fire. Maybe there is a better label, but anything that takes the gloss off this disgusting government would be worthwhile.

***

Matthew Barnes in London

I’m at a loss to understand what John Howard stands for economically other than stealth tax and spend. Do you think that Howard is aware the burden that his policies have on the average Australian?

I would suspect that he and the Treasurer have absolutely no idea. Nevertheless, I’m sure they think they are doing a great job because there’s not a budget deficit and economic growth is about 3% per year.

Paradoxically, strong economic growth is a function of just how hard Australians are having to work to keep their heads above water.

Under the Australian regime its very simple to have a budget surplus. Every year there’s substantial wage creep and it’s a no brainer to earn surpluses by simply giving very little of it back. In contrast, over here in the UK there is a commitment to an annual indexation of the income tax brackets notwithstanding that economic growth is rarely more than 2% per annum.

Australians have really received none of the fruits of the labour they could expect from the 10+ years of strong economic growth. The top tax rate of 48.5% cuts in at about 1.4x Average Weekly Earnings compared to about 1.7x in 1990.

Nor can I understand this government’s obsession with being debt free. Name a company that carries no debt on its books! Compared to a company, governments have the benefit of a predictable revenue stream and should carry some debt. Nor can it be said that the interest burden for a AAA rated government is at all an issue.

Margo, I assure you I care about issues other than economics, but I feel the federal government’s lamentable performance in this area has not been criticised anywhere near to the extent that it should have been by the Australian press.

Opponents of the government should focus much more on this issue, as dissatisfaction in this area is much more likely to cause the Liberal’s electoral demise than some of the other issues that so infuriate opponents.

***

Jim Robinson in Perth

I read with great interest your articles about Howard and his plans. As a transplanted Canadian, I urge you to look at the Canadian situation in regards to US political partnership.

Canada has an appointed Senate, which means they are a ‘rubber stamp’ body that does nothing but cost money. All the real power is in the Prime Minister’s Office. This has lead to rorting of both power and money. For example, the ex-Minister of Public Works was investigated for influence peddling and appointed Ambassador to the Netherlands.

Canada does more than eighty percent of it’s trade with the US, and is the USA’s biggest trading partner. This did not stop the US from slapping a 27% duty on Canadian softwood lumber for the third time!! The last two times the WHO and NAFTA overturned the duties, but that did not stop the US Federal Government from trying again. If the US will do that to their biggest trading partner, what will they pull on Australia when they feel like it?

The politicians here need to be very careful when dealing with the US because they have proven time and again, that a deal is only a deal when it is good for the USA. And let’s not even start on the war in Iraq …

If you want a view of where Howard appears to be taking us, just look at the Great White North (Canada :-))

***

Andrew Byrne in Chiswick, Sydney

I recently read an article on the SMH online had me laughing my head off (Australia could be richer if economy more free).

The article was prompted by the publishing of a report primarily pushed by the Cato Institute in Washington. Seeing Cato and the name of a “reputable” economist Milton Friedman made me gag. Friedman is as neocon as one can be.

A while back, Margo, you wrote an article with an accompanying piece by Alistair Mant on corporations muddying public waters ( Muddying the waters between guardians and traders). It discussed PFIs (Private Finance Initiatives) and PPPs (Private/Public Partnerships) models.

Friedman is the god of Globalisation and father of the original PPP and PFI models in Chicago in the 1970s. The man is a lunatic who believes the world should roll over and let the corporate world get on with owning everything. This is his version of “economic freedom”. This philosophy is used by the priests and snake oil salesmen of the World Bank, World Trade Organisation, International Monetary Fund and the Cato Institute.

Their freedom medicine comes down the heroin syringe of Free Trade Agreements. In the US, the same system brought California (and other states since) to its knees.

As for the Cato Institute – where does one start? They’re very wealthy because vaults of money are hurled at them every year from the biggest corporations in banking, tobacco, oil, pharmaceuticals, media, technology and finance.

Names like Shell, Chevron, Exxon, Citibank/Citicorp, Chase Manhattan, American Express American Petroleum Institute, Pfizer, Saloman Brothers, Prudential, Microsoft and Philip Morris are just some of them.

Rupert Murdoch is up to his eyebrows in Cato (including his directorship of the institute (1997). The sponsorship data is very hard to get from Cato (but not impossible, obviously). Still, they’re very coy about who pays them to spout Orwellian gumpf.

I could spill it all out, but the previous paragraphs are enough to show that the SMH article promoting free trade is a standard diversionary plant. In World Bank/WTO parlance it’s part of the first of four phases in Free Trade Agreement based take-over called “Softening” (that fell out of their mouths – not mine).

The connection with Murdoch is even more wonderful. The article said Hong Kong was number one – the most free economy in its study. Does this suggest that its sinking democratic rights are directly proportional to its “economic freedom”? (It’s comparable to gloating that a death row in-mate has the best surround-sound home entertainment system on the cell block – gee, he’s so lucky and well off!)

How ironic to laud the greatness of Hong Kong’s economic freedom when Murdoch is currently pushing his media empire in China. Consider his cancellation of the BBC on his Star TV channel because Chinese authorities complained the BBC was being too nosy into China’s human rights history. In 1994 Murdoch said: “The BBC was driving them nuts. Its not worth it”. Murdoch quickly disconnected BBC from Star TV.

The Cato Institute said in its report: “The actual income of poor people increases as nations gain in economic freedom because of the increased wealth economic freedom generates.”

(Stunned silence)

A year or two ago a rubbish dump in Argentina saw the odd sight of jobless professionals combing the trash-heaps for food. It was just after Argentina had been manhandled into “economic freedom”.

Want economic freedom as Cato promises? Go ahead, enjoy your home entertainment system – the problem will be paying the 400% electricity bill increase from yesterday’s price just to watch your DVD. (400% increases and worse occurred regularly during the Californian energy crisis due to these same “free market systems” designed to allow private industry to set the prices for electricity, water, gas and telephone at their whim with no government oversight.)

In June last year Melbourne QC Julian Burnside launched a group called ‘Just and fair asylum’ with a blistering speech I published at Well, it’s the rule. A year on, he updated the state of our refugee policy in a speech at Victoria’s Parliament house on World Refugee Day. Here it is.

Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers: The view from outside

by Julian Burnside

A speech at Parliament House, Victoria on World Refugee Day 2003, first published at Scatt

The universal declaration of human rights is the most widely accepted international convention in human history. Most countries in the world are parties to it. Article 14 of the universal declaration of human rights provides that every person has a right to seek asylum in any territory to which they can gain access. Despite that almost universally accepted norm, when a person arrives in Australia and seeks asylum, we lock them up. We lock them up indefinitely and in conditions of the utmost harshness.

The Migration Act provides for the detention of such people until they are either given a visa or removed from Australia. In practice, this means that human beings men, women and children innocent of any crime are locked up for months, and in many cases years.

They are held in conditions of shocking harshness. The United Nations Human Rights Commission has described conditions in Australia’s detention centres as “offensive to human dignity”. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has described Australia’s detention centres as “worse than prisons” and observed “alarming levels of self-harm”. Furthermore, they have found that the detention of asylum seekers in Australia contravenes Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which bans arbitrary detention.

The Delegate of the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner who visited Woomera in 2002 described it as “a great human tragedy”. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have repeatedly criticised Australia’s policy of mandatory detention and the conditions in which people are held in detention.

In short, every responsible human rights organisation in the world has condemned Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers. Only the Australian government and the Australian public are untroubled by our treatment of innocent, traumatised people who seek our help.

The matter reached an extreme during the Tampa “crisis”. The rhetoric of the Federal Government at that time came to this: that Australia had a sovereign right to protect its borders; that it had a right to decide who came into Australia and the circumstances in which they would come; that the Captain of the Tampa was threatening to infringe Australia’s sovereign rights, and that the civilised nations of the world supported Australia’s firm but principled stand. That was the rhetoric which helped the Howard Government win the November 2001 election.

The truth, of course, was very different. The Captain of the Tampa followed the written and unwritten law of the sea: he rescued people in distress and took them to the nearest place of safety, Christmas Island. For his efforts, Captain Arne Rinnan received the highest civil honour in Norway; his ship received commendations from mercantile and shipping organisations around the world; all the companies who had cargo on Tampa congratulated Captain Rinnan for the stand he took, even though their cargo was delayed 10 days by the episode. Australia, for its part, threatened to prosecute Captain Rinnan as a people smuggler. The disparity between Australia’s self-perception and the view of others from outside could hardly have been greater.

As a sidenote, I was recently in London and was introduced by Geoffrey Robertson, Q.C. to a number of European lawyers. He introduced me as “the barrister who acted for the Tampa asylum seekers”. It took me a couple of minutes to recognise the significance of the fact that his introduction was immediately comprehensible to them: they all knew about the Tampa episode and the stain it made on Australia’s national image. In recent months, Australia’s human rights’ record has been criticised by the South African judiciary. Less than 30 years ago, most Australians would have been ashamed to think that South Africa would criticise our human rights’ record.

It is hard to understand how Australia has got itself to this position. Part of the difficulty is, I think, that we lack the imagination to understand the realities of our policy of mandatory detention; and we fail to understand why it is the people seek asylum in the first place. The prevailing view in Australia seems to be that asylum seekers come here to improve their economic circumstances, and that we put them in holiday camps for a short time whilst their claims are processed. Let us consider the reality.

In late 2000 a family fled Iran. They were members of a small quasi-Christian sect which has traditionally been regarded as “unclean” by the religious majority. Their lives have traditionally been marked by persecution in every conceivable aspect. The recent history of Jews in Germany and Poland is a sufficient reminder of what happens to groups who are regarded by the majority as “unclean”. The family’s flight was triggered by a terrible event, the details of which are too terrible to relate at a luncheon like this. They arrived in Australia after a terrifying voyage across the sea and were locked up in Woomera. The family comprised mother and father in their thirties, and two daughters aged 7 and 10.

In Woomera, month after month, their condition deteriorated. In particular, the 10 year old girl who ceased eating, stopped engaging in self-care activities, had trouble sleeping and began scratching herself constantly. The Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service of South Australia learnt of the family’s plight and went to examine them. They wrote a report which included the following passages:

“(She) does not eat her breakfast or other meals and throws her food in the bin. She was preoccupied constantly with death, saying ‘don’t bury me here in the camp, bury me back in Iran with grandfather and grandmother’.

(She) carried a cloth doll, the face of which she had coloured in blue pencil. When asked in the interview if she would like to draw a picture, she drew a picture of a bird in a cage with tears falling and a padlock on the door. She said she was the bird.

It is my professional opinion that to delay action on this matter will only result in further harm to (this child) and her family. The trauma and personal suffering already endured by them has been beyond the capacity of any human being and I foresee that this family will require intensive and ongoing therapy for some time to enable them to conciliate and recover.”

Despite the urgent recommendations in that report, the family were left where they were. A further report was sent and, after weeks of delay, the family was finally sent to the Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Centre: Melbourne’s own concentration camp. When the family was moved, the South Australian authorities urged that the 10 year old daughter needed daily clinical attention. Nevertheless, for another three weeks nothing happened: no-one saw the family, no-one paid attention to the obvious psychological and medical needs of the 10 year old. Not long afterwards, on a Sunday night whilst her parents and her sister were at dinner, she hanged herself.

She did not die. When she was taken down, she tried to swallow shampoo because she had seen adults kill themselves that way in Woomera.

The family remained in immigration detention for another year. At last, after they had appealed to the full Federal Court, they were finally granted protection visas. In the meantime, they had suffered under Australia’s detention system for more than two years, the entire family has been traumatised to an extent which is inconceivable for ordinary members of the Australian community and a 10 year old girl very nearly succeeded in ending her own life.

That is the reality of mandatory indefinite detention in Australia in the 21st Century. It is passing strange that a government which prides itself in family values still implements policies so harsh that they drive children to attempt suicide. Suicide amongst pre-pubescent children is almost unheard of except in Australia’s detention centres.

* * *

Just as we do not really understand what mandatory detention entails, neither do we understand fully why people come here in the first place. If we had even a glimmer of understanding of the conditions which drive people out of their homeland, we might be inclined to treat them more compassionately.

Let a single instance serve the purpose. Currently in Australia’s detention centres there are several hundred Iranians who desperately fear being returned to Iran. They have so far failed to make the Immigration Department understand the fate which awaits them should they be returned to Iran. One of them sent me a video tape which had been smuggled out of Iran. It is the most disturbing video tape I have ever seen or ever wish to see.

The tape is apparently an official recording: it contains an Iranian watermark in the bottom right-hand corner. Notwithstanding that, it is fairly poor quality handheld and a bit blurry at times. The scene is a largish room. On one side of the room stand two people who might be officials: they are holding sheets of paper from which they are reading out loud in a flat, bureaucratic manner. In the centre of the room stands a group of five or six people, huddled together, looking distressed. They may be members of a family, or possibly friends. On the opposite side of the room is a table. On the table lies a man, face up. He is being held by the shoulders.

Most of the time the camera is focussed on the officials: they are reading and reading and reading.

The camera swings to the family group who look very distressed and upset. Then it swings to the man on the table who attempts to sit up but is restrained and held down again, he looks increasingly disturbed and terrified.

The camera focuses again on the officials who continue reading at great length but flatly, bureaucratically, without interest. Just as the viewer begins to wonder where all this is leading, the camera swings around to the man on the table and then they remove his eyes with forceps.

* * *

In 2002 Australia, along with more than 80 other nations, acceded to the Rome statute by which the International Criminal Court was created. The court is the first permanent court every established with jurisdiction to try war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators and regardless of the place where the offences occurred.

As part of the process of implementing the International Criminal Court regime, Australia has introduced into its own domestic law a series of offences which mirror precisely the offences over which the International Criminal Court has jurisdiction. So, for the first time since Federation, the Commonwealth of Australia now recognised genocide as a crime and now recognises various war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Australian Criminal Code now recognises various acts as constituting crimes against humanity. Two of them are of particular significance in the present context. They are as follows:

268.12 Crime Against Humanity Imprisonment Or Other Severe Deprivation Of Physical Liberty

A person (the perpetrator) commits an offence if:

the perpetrator imprisons one or more persons or otherwise severely deprives one or more persons of physical liberty; and

the perpetrator’s conduct violates article 9, 14 or 15 of the Covenant; and

the perpetrator’s conduct is committed intentionally or knowingly as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population.

Penalty: Imprisonment for 17 years.

Strict liability applies to paragraph (1)(b).

268.13 Crime against humanity torture

A person (the perpetrator) commits an offence if:

the perpetrator inflicts severe physical or mental pain or suffering upon one or more persons who are in the custody or under the control of the perpetrator; and

the pain or suffering does not arise only from, and is not inherent in or incidental to, lawful sanctions; and

the perpetrator’s conduct is committed intentionally or knowingly as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population.

Penalty: Imprisonment for 25 years.”

(The Covenant referred to is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the ICCPR.)

The elements of these offences are relatively simple. For the first, the elements are as follows:

The perpetrator imprisons one or more persons;

That conduct violates Article 9 of the ICCPR;

The conduct is committed knowingly as part of a systematic attack directed against a civilian population.

Australia’s system of mandatory, indefinite detention appears to satisfy each of the elements of that crime. Mr Ruddock and Mr Howard imprison asylum seekers. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has found that the system violates Article 9 of the ICCPR. Their conduct is intentional, and is part of a systematic attack directed against those who arrive in Australia without papers and seek asylum. A representative of the International Criminal Court has expressed privately the view that asylum seekers as a group can readily be regarded as “a civilian population”.

The second of the offences begins with imprisonment in violation of 268.12 and has an added element that the perpetrator inflicts severe mental pain or suffering upon one or more of the persons in the custody of the perpetrator, and the pain or suffering doesn’t arise only from lawful sanctions.

There is abundant evidence of overwhelming mental suffering in Australia’s detention centres. Neither Mr Ruddock nor Mr Howard could rationally deny that they are aware of the suffering of the people they lock up.

A careful analysis of the criminal code therefore suggests that Mr Ruddock and Mr Howard are guilty of crimes against humanity by virtue of their imprisonment of asylum seekers. The prospect of their being prosecuted is remote, because the Federal Attorney-General has an effective veto on the laying of charges under these provisions. But whether they are charged with these offences or not may not matter. The important point is this: an increasing number of people are raising their voices against Australia’s system of mandatory indefinite detention of asylum seekers. They assert that the system is morally wrong. Unfortunately, the debate generally stalls when the protagonists are unable to agree about moral norms.

The argument against mandatory detention takes on a new complexion when it is seen that the system very likely amounts to a crime against humanity. Those who support mandatory detention on whatever grounds appeal to them may find it harder to justify the fact that our Government is engaged in crimes against humanity judged not only by the standards of the international community but by the standards of our own legislation.