How Costello’s planned Charity Act affects the charity you belong to or donate to (Costello accused of bid to muzzle charities):

1. It defines what charities will continue to receive tax-free status and tax deductibility for donations. The Australian Tax Office will decide whether a charity will keep or lose tax and tax deductibility benefits, depending on its interpretation of the definition of charity set out in this legislation.

2. In general, a charity is a not-for-profit body with a charitable purpose for the public benefit which ‘DOES NOT HAVE A DISQUALIFYING PURPOSE’. If a charity does have a disqualifying purpose it is not a charity, and will be denied charitable tax benefits. (section 4)

3. Section 8 sets out two disqualifying purposes:

(1) engaging in ‘activities that are unlawful'”.

This test means the Tax Office could strip Greenpeace of its charitable status, as Greenpeace does engage in trespass and other breaches of the law in furtherance of its aim to help create a cleaner, safer planet. Animal welfare groups which raid battery chicken farms or otherwise trespass on private property to uncover animal cruelty could also be stripped of their charitable status.

Greenpeace and other proactive charities may even be excluded altogether from the definition of charities BEFORE the “disqualifying purpose” test even comes into play. Section 2 of the Act says a body is NOT a charity if it “has engaged in conduct…that constitutes a serious offence”. Once Costello’s plan becomes law, Greenpeace could be stripped of charitable status immediately by the Tax Office citing its incursion into the Sydney nuclear reactor to prove that security was lax. A Greenpeace spokesperson said today: “We are concerned that this does smack of censorship of those who criticise the governmment or provide an alternative policy framwork. We are seeking legal advice on our position.”

(2) It is also a disqualifying purpose to advocate “a political party or cause”, to support a political candidate, or “attempting to change the law or government.

This test potentially disqualifies a vast number of charities which see it as one of their core duties to advocate for policy changes. In particular church groups, charities and medical research groups which actively lobby in public, and produce reports for public consumption to further their cause, could be under threat.

Treasurer Peter Costello today denied that he intended to strip existing charities of their tax-free status or to ban free speech by charities. But he has so far not promised to change the wording of his planned law to ensure charities are not at risk.

Here is today’s press release from the Jesuits:

JESUIT SOCIAL SERVICES

NEWS RELEASE

11 AM Wednesday, 30 July 2003

GAG ON CHARITIES NOT ON SAY JESUITS

The threat to charities and church groups that criticise government policy of losing their tax-free status is simply “not on” according to Jesuit Social Services Policy Director, Father Peter Norden.

This draft legislation is contained in the Charities Bill 2003 and is part of the Government’s response to the Report of the Inquiry into the Definition of Charities and Related Organisations.

Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello, who has introduced draft legislation that suggests that “attempting to change the law or government policy” is a “disqualifying purpose” or an unlawful activity for a charity will need to think again according to the Jesuit’s social policy centre in Melbourne.

“This attempt to silence the churches and the non-government sector was tried on by the Kennett Government here in Victoria during the 1990’s”, according to Peter Norden, “but they soon found out that it simply could not be implemented”.

“On that occasion, the gag was concealed in confidentiality clauses and intellectual property clauses in government contracts and we simply refused to sign. When Jesuit Social Services moved to engage our peak bodies of Catholic Social Services and VCOSS, the Kennett advisers backed right off”, Father Norden explained.

“Government policy advisers simply have to learn that it is a central mission of charities such as ours not only to do good but to ensure that harmful legislation and regulations are changed to protect the vulnerable members of our community,” he said.

“The Jesuits have been around for more than 450 years, and I think we will be around after the Howard Government, and even after an Abbott or Costello Government,” he insisted.

“Moral issues are our bread and butter and we will not be starved out of this activity by such misguided and poorly grounded legislation,” said Father Norden.

“A responsible and mature government encourages open and independent public debate and does not try to gag its critics as part of the democratic process,” insisted Father Norden

“The church and the non-government welfare sector makes a serious attempt to understand the complex role of government, and, in turn, we expect government to do its homework in understanding the essential role of our sector as well,” he concluded.

“If the Treasurer attempts to proceed with this legislation, without amendment, the Government will be in for a big surprise!”, he added.

FOR FURTHER COMMENT, CONTACT: Father Peter Norden, S.J., 03 9427 7388 (office), 0409 0409 94 (mobile)

***

Key Charity Act clauses

3. Definitions

(1) In this Act, unless the contrary intention appears:

advancement includes the meaning given by subsection 10(2).

advancement of social or community welfare includes the meaning given by section 11.

disqualifying purpose has the meaning given by section 8.

dominant purpose has the meaning given by section 6.

entity has the meaning given by section 960-100 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997.

government body means:

(a) the Commonwealth, a State or a Territory; or

(b) a body controlled by the Commonwealth, a State or a Territory; or

(c) the government of a foreign country; or

(d) a body controlled by the government of a foreign country.

not-for-profit entity has the meaning given by section 5.

open and non-discriminatory self-help group has the meaning given by section 9.

public benefit has the meaning given by section 7.

serious offence means an offence against a law of the Commonwealth, of a State or of a Territory, that may be dealt with as an indictable offence (even if it may, in some circumstances, be dealt with as a summary offence).

…

Part 2 – Charities

4. Core definition

(1) A reference in any Act to a charity, to a charitable institution or to any other kind of charitable body, is a reference to an entity that:

(a) is a not-for-profit entity; and

(b) has a dominant purpose that:

(i) is charitable; and

(ii) unless subsection (2) applies, is for the public benefit; and

(c) does not engage in activities that do not further, or are not in aid of, its dominant purpose; and

(d) does not have a disqualifying purpose; and

(e) does not engage in, and has not engaged in, conduct (or an omission to engage in conduct) that constitutes a serious offence; and

(f) is not an individual, a partnership, a political party, a superannuation fund or a government body.

(2) The entity’s dominant purpose need not be for the public benefit if the entity is:

(a) an open and non-discriminatory self-help group; or

(b) a closed or contemplative religious order that regularly undertakes prayerful intervention at the request of members of the public.

…

8. Disqualifying purposes

(1) The purpose of engaging in activities that are unlawful is a disqualifying purpose.

(2) Any of these purposes is a disqualifying purpose:

(a) the purpose of advocating a political party or cause;

(b) the purpose of supporting a candidate for political office;

(c) the purpose of attempting to change the law or government policy;

if it is, either on its own or when taken together with one or both of the other of these purposes, more than ancillary or incidental to the other purposes of the entity concerned.

…

Part 3 Charitable purpose

10 References to charitable purpose

(1) A reference in any Act to a charitable purpose is a reference to any of the following purposes:

(a) the advancement of health;

(b) the advancement of education;

(c) the advancement of social or community welfare;

(d) the advancement of religion;

(e) the advancement of culture;

(f) the advancement of the natural environment;

(g) any other purpose that is beneficial to the community.

(2) Advancement includes protection, maintenance, support, research and improvement.

 

Senator Kate Lundy. Photo: Mike Bowers

Here’s a piece on the censorship debate Labor’s shadow minister for the arts and information technology, Senator Kate Lundy, wrote for Webdiary. It’s got resonance with Howard’s refusal to tell us the truth about why he wanted to invade Iraq and what that momentous decision means for our foreign policy direction and our security in the region. What I like about the piece is that Kate is not afraid to discuss what democracy means, and to apply her concept of it to the case in hand. Isn’t that what we’d love our pollies to do more of?

Classification, not censorship

by Kate Lundy

There is a seductive simplicity to banning things you don’t like or find scary. Like a child covering his eyes and ears, there is instant relief. At least, there is relief for as long as you can convince yourself that the nasty thing has gone away because you can’t see or hear it.

When governments start covering the eyes and ears of the whole nation, however, there is a real problem. We only need to look at those governments that have taken it to the extreme and burnt books to understand that. But there are more subtle ways to inhibit the flow of ideas that we need to be just as alert to.

Democracy is at its heart about a plurality of ideas and opinions, all in constant competition. Some of them are always going to be offensive to some, or even most, because that is the nature of the new.

But democracies survive and thrive when they find ways to look at things that are confronting or disturbing or ugly or strange. One of the ways it does that is through the classification of material. What we are really doing, of course, is classifying people – identifying those who are too young, vulnerable and impressionable to have the fully formed opinions or sexual maturity to be able to understand the sometimes complicated context within which sit the messages and meaning of particular art works. It has never been about denying the entry of ideas.

The recent controversy surrounding Ken Park in Australia shows have far we have strayed from these important principles into the simplistic world of “just ban it” thinking.

Film festivals have long been afforded a special status in the classification world: theirs is an audience of film connoisseurs drawn to occasions where the unusual, un-commercial, peculiar or even the confronting and scary are given an airing. These events are much closer in nature to the art gallery than the cinema multiplex. As such, films that were restricted to the greatest extent by our classification laws could still be shown, watched, critiqued and discussed.

It seems that is no longer the case, and this is the development that means we must not allow the issues raised by the Ken Park controversy to fade away like another one-week wonder story from our news media.

What has happened to this film has much to say about the way this Government has conducted itself, and the ugly results this is having on our national character and body politic. A hallmark of this Government has been the way it has moved by increments to have us accept situations that a few years ago would have been unthinkable.

Banning access to this and that has been a case in point. It began with Senator Alston’s trying to “ban” some content on the Internet that was legal in other media. This was a cynical political strategy to ingratiate himself with Senator Harradine when he needed votes for the original Telstra sale legislation. Alston has forever more been branded as the “world’s greatest Luddite” by the international technology press. At the same time, Labor’s calls for a sensible approach: giving parents the skills to ‘classify’ what their children accessed through supervision and filter tools at the desktop were ignored.

Emboldened rather than shamed, Alston has since tried to “ban” interactive (online) gambling, with just as little success. At least it could be said that there was little of merit in what the Government was seeking to keep out, even if its methods were half-witted and doomed to failure.

But the same forlorn, arch-conservatism that has crept into our treatment of motion pictures through the attitude of the Attorney-General toward controversial films over recent years. And what truly betrays this Government’s failure of imagination and respect for diversity is that no-one in the Coalition Government has stood up for the arts and the right of Australians to exposed themselves to confronting as well as new ideas and images.

It is time that as citizens we reminded ourselves that the only way to maintain a healthy democracy is to expose ideas to the light of commentary and intellectual challenge. Evil grows in dark corners, not out in the full glare of public attention.

Is Ken Park “kiddy porn” as conservatives would have us think, or does it have something to say about the endurance of the human spirit? Australians should not accept that they live in the only modern country in the world too immature that make up its own mind. We are not zombies to be manipulated, we should not be told what to think, and we should not be protected from an ugly truth, any more than we should tolerate being lied to.

This is a speech on the new world order – economic and strategic – which Paul Keating made in New Zealand yesterday. His website is also worth a look. I like his introduction:

This website exists to contribute to a national debate about what sort of country Australia is in the opening decades of the 21st century and where it should be going. We hope visitors will find ideas they agree with – or which at least prompt them to think about why they disagree…

The transforming impact of the information revolution on our society and the world has only just begun. If Australia is to remain a prosperous economy and a community which values equality and justice, few things will be more important for us than the hard task of public policy making and engaging in the national reflection and debate that must accompany it.

The new global mosaic

by Paul Keating

A speech to the Local Government Unlimited Conference, Queenstown, New Zealand, Monday 28 July 2003

In the business of nation building – which is the business of all of us in public life – we are creatures of our time and circumstances. Of the prevailing geo-political and geo-economic moods. And we are always searching for the Rosetta stone, that code stone that tells us how best we might find that happy mix between what should be rendered unto Caesar – and what may properly be left to the individual.

New Zealand and Australia have much in common, including a very serious effort on the part of each of us in remodelling our economies. With a notion that markets, more efficiently organised, could deliver better outcomes, we each attempted to change our old, protected and closeted industrial societies into more outward-looking, competitive and innovative ones.

The interesting thing about both our countries is that these efforts were, in the main, undertaken by Labor Governments. It was, once, par for the course that Labor Governments tended to centralisation and protection, eschewing openness and competition of a kind that, in the event, we both chose. If I could say where I think this process has been different between Australia and New Zealand, in Australia these things were done in the context of a formal set of long-run consensual policies set out between the trade unions and the Government of the day.

While the great wish and want of society will be for economic growth and the pursuit of income, people always yearn for something else as well and that is to belong, to be included. A sense of nation and well-placed nationalism, based on the family of the country. A sense that change is directed to a point, which extends beyond economic growth to individual and community happiness and fulfilment. It is why those of us in the nation building business always keep an eye out for the country in the broad, and for those at risk of missing out. It is why the bindings that come with good social policy end up being good economic policy.

The question is, where do we go from here? Much has been achieved, but what do we do now? How do we do things better? How do we move on a wider front, yet move together, and how do we make the interests of any one of us work for all of us?

I have never been in local government in an elective sense, but I have always had a great regard for it, for the authenticity that comes from proximity to the people and their very real problems. Local government in most countries is at the coal face of government and any system which improves the representativeness and effectiveness of government will make society that much better and stronger. So I am pleased to be with this distinguished group of local government representatives gathered to think about their country, to share ideas and consider the future.

I suppose the first trick for you, indeed for all of us, as we survey the world, is to find our coordinates – the degree of strategic longitude and the degree of commercial latitude which reveal exactly where we are. Perhaps, in this discussion, I should deal with the economic latitude first. I will return to the strategic dimension in a few moments.

It is worth noting that there were three economic long waves in the 20th century – 1904 to 1929, 1947 to 1974 and 1982 until now. Each had a duration of about 25 years; and each was technology driven.

The first wave, from 1904 to 1929, was driven by breakthroughs in petrochemicals, industrial production and transportation.

The second wave, the post-war wave, was driven by the economic rebuilding of Japan and Europe, along with technological breakthroughs in areas like plastics and aviation, and, of course, motor vehicles.

The wave we are currently living through has been driven by, the third wave, has been driven by – in the 80s – low terms of trade which was a subsidy from the developing world to the developed world, and in the 90s by telecommunications and micro-processing. By all reckoning, if the past is to be any guide, this wave should run until about 2007 or 2008. Weve already had two legs, two business cycles, 1982 to 1990 and 1992 to 2000. The second one saw an enormous increase in stock market values around the world and in personal incomes and real wealth.

The good news is, I believe, that there will be a third business cycle. From about now. The bad news is that it won’t be so richly laden as the second one and we are beginning it at relatively high valuations for equities compared with those which obtained in 1982 or 1992. Or those which obtained at about this same point in the second long wave, which would have been about 1965. What will be different about this leg compared to the last two is that towards its end, the technological edge may have dissipated and the demographics will have acted to reduce unemployment substantially. Towards the end of this cycle, in say five to six years from now, we may see a pick up in real wages and with it wage inflation of a kind which may encourage central banks to do what they have traditionally done, and that is cool the economy to keep wages and prices under control.

Where the last wave ended with an exogenous shock, from the inflationary OPEC pricing of the early 1970s, and the one before that with the Depression in 1929, this one may actually go down for endogenous reasons as we struggle to maintain workforce growth in countries like our own. At any rate, we’ve probably got half a dozen years left in this cycle before more negative economic forces materialise.

One of the caveats which could affect this scenario is the potential for East Asia to mark itself out as the growth engine of the world. China, with its WTO mandates, holds out the promise of being the most important growth economy in the world outside the United States. And China is no typical East Asian top-down command economy of the kind we see in Japan or Korea, where financial intermediation is managed largely by banks in the absence of efficient capital markets. China will, over time, have a range of financial markets and instruments. As it grows, it will reveal itself to be an economy built around the individual and small to medium enterprises an economy far more reminiscent of New Zealand’s and Australia’s than Japan’s. It will become, I believe, a place that New Zealand and Australia, in a corporate sense, will want to do business. It is also likely to become, in geo-strategic terms, the second pole in what has become a unipolar world. China has the certainty of knowing who and what it is and the cultural confidence to cope and deal with the United States.

Japan, a great trading partner of both our countries, has been in a structural recession for 14 years and there is a distinct possibility that its financial system will be subject to seismic fractures of a kind that could bring its economy to its knees. There is also an acceleration in the deterioration of its demographics.

Whether North Asia and its poorer cousins in South East Asia can make a difference as to how the world behaves economically, five years from now, remains, of course, open to conjecture. But it is the part of the world in which we live; and its future matters mightily to us, because more of our bread is going to be buttered by what happens there than in any other place.

Some believe that Europe’s aggregation of populations and economies would make it a logical alternative pole to the United States. But it is yet to be seen whether the one-size-fits-all fiscal and monetary policies agreed under the Treaty on European Union will be capable of working smoothly. The arrangements are providing financial management at the broad fiscal and monetary level, but at an obvious cost. We can already see how they are limiting Germany’s capacity to restimulate its economy through fiscal policy or to run a monetary policy more appropriate to German conditions.

Perhaps more importantly, Europe remains diverse and politically fractured. It simply does not possess the coherent cultural confidence of, say, the United States or China. It may have a common market and a common currency, but it is burdened by centuries of ethnic and national suspicions. It also lacks the force projection and the arsenal of conventional and nuclear weapons, enjoyed by the United States.

Let me now say a few things about the American economy. The first thing is its absolute size. At 10 trillion US dollars, its GDP is twenty times larger than Australia’s and about one hundred and fifty times larger than New Zealand’s.

The United States has pulled the world economy along for over a decade. The American consumer, in effect, saved the rest of us. Its great strength is that it has a fungible capital market which can take capital from less productive places and put it into more productive places in its economy, faster than in any economy in the world. The administration of President Clinton also took the United States from historically large central government deficits to large central government surpluses. By reducing the relative size of the public sector in America, ipso facto, the private sector became that much bigger.

But another very important thing happened. The Governor of its central bank, Alan Greenspan, uncharacteristically for central bank governors, pursued a policy of growth to maximise wealth and incomes. Most central bankers of his standing and responsibilities would normally keep a baton of price stability in the knapsack and not much else. Greenspan thought he could, and, in the end, did, see a paradigm shift in productivity of a scale which he knew could deliver rising real incomes in the context of falling unit labour costs. So he kept monetary conditions accommodating to growth through the 1990s; believing that the productivity wedge would pay for the wages growth which in other times would have come at the expense of profits. He had the golden circle working for him rising real wages, rising profits, falling unit labour costs and falling inflation. The consequence of this extended period of his management was to increase the capacity of the American economy to grow at a rate faster by half than we had formerly witnessed.

Notwithstanding this achievement, Alan Greenspan is not without his critics. Some say he should have dealt with the asset price bubble of the Dow and NASDAQ even after his warning in 1996 about irrational exuberance.

But this opens an old argument. Should central banks focus solely on activity in the real economy and inflation or should they also attempt to operate policy to deal with asset prices? Personally, I’ve always seen activity, inflation and the real economy as being the monetary touchstones. In the end, high stock prices imply low dividend yields and these, over time, correct themselves. Investors can turn to bonds. And in the United States, you can purchase Treasury Bonds which are indexed for inflation – where the real interest rate is constant and known at the time of purchase. Markets do work as prices adjust to yields.

Greenspan, I believe, saw the main chance to move his economy up a notch to a sustainable new plateau of activity, having its inflation rate protected by productivity. Few central bankers are this brave or entrepreneurial. But it is prudent public entrepreneurship of this kind which can give a country a once in a century break. This, I believe, Greenspan has done.

In the past quarter century, the speed limit for American GDP growth was of the order of 2.0 to 2.5 percent or thereabouts. That limit now has a substantial 3 in front of it. And to have a base of $10,000 billion growing at an extra one percent in the context of continuing low inflation is a mighty achievement. And a lot of new wealth.

These are some of the reasons why America has been the motor economy and why we owe Clinton and Greenspan, in these respects, so much. I might say, but only in passing, that following the microeconomic reforms in Australia over the same period, the Australian economy grew by an even greater degree – from an average of 1.7 percent in the decade to the mid-1980s to an average now of over 3.5 percent – with endemically low inflation made possible by a doubling of trend productivity. Put in place by a Labor Government. That productivity wedge is, in the end, what the game is all about. Its not just the icing on the cake – it is the cake. It is the reason why real incomes in Australia grew by 20 percent across the 1990s – the fastest real income growth in any decade of Australias history. It did for Australian competitiveness the very same thing that Mr Greenspan and his productivity dividend did for the United States and its consumers.

But America has been in a growth recession for the last couple of years. It has not experienced negative growth, but its growth has been much slower – something like 1.5 percent – because its investment cycle topped out in 1997. Business cycles are, of their essence, investment cycles, and there has been an investment drought in America now for just on six years. Thats why we owe the American consumer so much for taking up the slack. But even the American consumer couldn’t keep it up forever. So now we await the turn in the American investment cycle. The question is when will that occur? My best guess is: any time now. Stock markets invariably pick the turn well before the real economy, and faster than the rest of us, and such a turn normally leads the investment cycle by nine to twelve months. When we look back I think that we will find that the stockmarket turn, this time, came between November last year and March, heralding a turn in the business cycle for later this year.

Now there have been, as the Americans call it, headwinds. These are not necessarily economic forces but they do matter things such as the corporate scandals (the Enrons, the WorldComs), the war in Iraq and other negatives. But the fundamentals out themselves in the end. The cycle turns.

So let me recap: I think there’s going to be a third leg, a third business cycle; the downside is that it won’t be as rich as the last one. But a third leg anyway.

The real imponderable is the geo-strategic setting. We should know, if weve forgotten, that the strategic climate governs everything. We should never forget that globalisation started in earnest in the last quarter of the 19th century when the biggest sinew of trade was between Great Britain and Germany. This did not stop either country drifting into the First World War, the repercussions of which only saw the world economy get back to sustainable growth as late as 1947 and to strategic equilibrium in 1989.

We are, they tell us, living in a unipolar moment, when the US has decided to eschew liberal internationalism and multilateralism for a winner-take-all, me-first strategy. The whole political and strategic framework of containment has been tipped over for an aggressive pre-emptive first strike doctrine which gives the rest of us very little to be part of, or little to attach ourselves to.

I think what happened is that when the Cold War finished and the Berlin Wall came down, the Americans cried victory and walked off the field. You might remember the slogan that Clinton used against George Herbert Bush, It’s the economy, stupid. Clinton was scathing at Bush’s adventurism, as he saw it, in Iraq in 1991. And before the investment cycle kicked back for the second leg in 1992, George Herbert Bush was defeated and American public policy focused on a peace dividend. It also focused on its economy and the magic of the Internet. It seemed as though the Cold War had not ended for the Americans, but simply faded away.

Of course, it did end for the Americans. It ended when the Twin Towers came down in September 2001. It ended with a bang. Clinton and Gore would have handled this strategic moment very differently from Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. The current Administration has responded by jerking American policy into a unilateral response, rejecting in its application any notion of cooperation or resort to multilateral frameworks.

The real question is whether this policy is rewarding or sustainable or whether it will leave America exhausted by the self-wrought responsibility of dealing with errant states and groups which it deems to be a threat to its security. This policy comes, I believe, at a very high price. It has fractured the 50 year long spell of Atlantic unity and tugs away at the notion of Americas righteous might a notion to which President Franklin Roosevelt so often referred.

Churchill said in 1940 that Britain was fighting by ourselves alone, but not for ourselves alone. A lot of people, I am sure, think today that the United States is fighting by itself alone, for itself alone. This is not good. The big question is – can the world be run from one city? Does the American Congress have the wit and the wisdom – let alone the resources – to run the globe? I, for one, do not believe it does. For all of its glory, indeed its past magnanimity, any attempt by America to take on the mantle of Empire is to deny the very precepts of its founding.

The really bad news in all of this is that by walking away from multilateral arrangements such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and by their failure to live up to commitments made under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Americans have given a signal to the rest of the world that they too can be part of a resumed nuclear arms race. Believe you me, this has well and truly begun. Not just in India or Pakistan, or Iran and North Korea or even Israel, but in lesser states which believe they need their pocket nuke to make the world deal with them respectfully. I hope the Americans have not led us into a Mad Max world – while they seek to shield themselves in the cocoon of national missile defence.

All of this has let a lot of hares run – and as relatively small states with a broadly European complexion, tucked away in the bottom of Asia, none of it is much good to us.

Nationalism is generally built on arbitrary and parochial distinctions between the civic and the human community; why we are worthy, and someone else isn’t. The interests of the human community, I believe, deign that the world must be run cooperatively. This period of strident American unilateralism and militarism cuts across this notion while putting no adequate or alternative framework into place.

Let me conclude then, by returning to the positive things. There are, I believe, half a dozen quite productive years left in the international economy and it might be longer if the North Asians can keep their act together. But unless the current American administration returns to a more liberal notion of internationalism we will overlay these positive economic prospects with geo-strategic uncertainty of a kind that is debilitating and broadly unnecessary.

All of this may seem a long way from the considerations of local government. But as I said, you need to take your coordinates before you start any journey.

G’Day. Yesterday on SBS community television I debated the head of the Australian Broadcasting Authority David Flint on the government’s proposed cross media changes. He will administer the new cross media regime if it gets through the Senate next time round. The audio of the interview, arranged and presented by Tanveer Ahmed, is in the right hand column of Webdiary.

Professor Flint, a monarchist conservative from way back, has broken ranks from most conservative opinion on this issue. Like our resident conservative commentator Daniel Moye, ultra conservative New York Timescolumnist William Safire – a strong supporter of the war on Iraq – is also against more media power for Rupert Murdoch and the other US media giants. As I’ve said before, Murdoch would have less media dominance in the USA AFTER Bush’s reforms than he has NOW in Australia. Besides abolishing the cross media rules to give Murdoch and Packer a stranglehold on our media, Howard also wants to abolish foreign ownership limits on our media, opening the way for the other US media conglomerates, including Viacom, to take over Australia’s media. I’ve republished Safire’s column below.

After that, Iraq war maestro columnist Jack Robertson runs the spin meter over Howard again, in a companion piece to his essay on Howard war spin last week in Anger as an energy. He reveals that the government WAS warned before the war that its claim of solid evidence linking Saddam and Osama was false.

Jack writes:

Sorry if I’m harping on pulling Howard’s lies to bits, but watching Max Moore-Wilton try to shaft the RAN Captain involved in kids overboard today on Howard’s 64th birthday Sunday special – putting the blame back on the military just as I feared when I wrote my Christmas letter to our leader – has made me explode with rage all over again – just when you’d calmed me down. (The transcript of John Lyons’ ‘Man of Steel turns 64’ piece on yesterday’s Sunday program is at Sunday.)

Margo, these people have ZERO shame. Somebody – anybody – has to nail them down at last.

I hope my latest piece is not too anal, finicky or self-centred. But I kind of figured during the war debate that a careful, written paper-trail of some kind might be needed after the dust had settled, and this ‘deconstruction’ business is necessarily complex and tedious. In particular, I think it would be worth including the entire ‘roll-call’ of Parliamentary email recipients as shown at the end of Cadman’s (sole) reply – it kind of highlights starkly the fact that every MP in the joint received my urgent – if slightly hysterical – demand.

We’ve got to smash the firewalls down, mate. Not one of those listed MPs can pretend they ‘didn’t know about doubts’, etc. I’m not much of a demo-type dude, and I can’t think of any other way to do so than by pedantic precision + written records + occasional outright rudeness. Sorry.

And even the admirable things about our Iraq commitment are being undermined now: Yanks are still dropping like flies over there, but Howard – the Man of Steel – has effectively made it look like Australia has run away from the TRUE heavy lifting there, which was always going to be the democracy and human rights reconstruction side, not the regime change fight itself.

American Republicans and Bushies observing Howard’s latter-day ‘firewalling’ of himself from any serious domestic-electoral fall-out arising from a prolonged, casualty-sodden (ie fighting force) Australian component of the occupation in Iraq – exactly the kind of heat Blair and Bush are both experiencing now – must be feeling pretty bemused. If Australia was fair dinkum about ANZUS and TRULY supporting America when it needs us, our PM would be sending MORE troops to Iraq NOW, not trying to distance him/ourselves using handy excuses – however admirable – like the Solomons.

And let’s face it – as recently as January, Downer was saying we’d never, ever intervene in such ways and places anyway. Suddenly, just when the going gets rough in Iraq, it’s an urgent local priority? I mean, I support the Solomons intervention very strongly in itself, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if our ‘Coalition of the Willing’ allies are suddenly feeling a tad ripped off.

Some wartime PM, eh?

I’ve got stacks of emails on the latest Howard/Alston assault on the ABC (see Good one John, but why stop at the ABC?) and will pull them together tomorrow.

***

Bush’s Four Horsemen

by William Safire

On the domestic front, President Bush is backing into a buzz saw.

The sleeper issue is media giantism. People are beginning to grasp and resent the attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to allow the Four Horsemen of Big Media – Viacom (CBS, UPN), Disney (ABC), Murdoch’s News Corporation (Fox) and G.E. (NBC) – to gobble up every independent station in sight.

Couch potatoes throughout the land see plenty wrong in concentrating the power to produce the content we see and hear in the same hands that transmit those broadcasts. This is especially true when the same Four Horsemen own many satellite and cable providers and already influence key sites on the Internet.

Reflecting that widespread worry, the Senate Commerce Committee voted last month to send to the floor Ted Stevens’s bill rolling back the F.C.C.’s anything-goes ruling. It would reinstate current limits and also deny newspaper chains the domination of local TV and radio.

The Four Horsemen were confident they could get Bush to suppress a similar revolt in the House, where G.O.P. discipline is stricter. When liberals and conservatives of both parties in the House surprised them by passing a rollback amendment to an Appropriations Committee bill, the Bush administration issued what bureaucrats call a SAP – a written Statement of Administration Policy.

It was the sappiest SAP of the Bush era. “If this amendment were contained in the final legislation presented to the President,” warned the administration letter, “his senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill.”

The SAP was signed by the brand-new director of the Office of Management and Budget, Joshua Bolten, but the hand was the hand of Stephen Friedman, the former investment banker now heading the president’s National Economic Council.

Reached late yesterday, Friedman forthrightly made his case that the F.C.C. was an independent agency that had followed the rules laid down by the courts. He told me that Bush’s senior advisers had focused on the question “Can you eliminate excessive regulation and have diversity and competition?” and found the answer to be yes. He added with candor: “The politics I’m still getting an education on.”

The Bush veto threat would deny funding to the Commerce, State and Justice Departments, not to mention the federal judiciary. It would discombobulate Congress and disserve the public for months.

And to what end? To turn what we used to call “public airwaves” into private fiefs, to undermine diversity of opinion and – in its anti-federalist homogenization of our varied culture – to sweep aside local interests and community standards of taste.

This would be Bush’s first veto. Is this the misbegotten principle on which he wants to take a stand? At one of the White House meetings that decided on the SAP approach, someone delicately suggested that such a veto of the giants’ power grab might pose “a communications issue” for the president (no play on words intended). Friedman blew that objection away. The SAP threat was delivered.

In the House this week, allies of the Four Horsemen distributed a point sheet drawn from Viacom and Murdoch arguments and asked colleagues to sign a cover letter reading, “The undersigned members . . . will vote to sustain a Presidential veto of legislation overturning or delaying . . . the decision of the FCC . . . regarding media ownership.”

But they couldn’t obtain the signatures of anywhere near one-third of the House members – the portion needed to stop an override. Yesterday afternoon, the comprehensive bill – including an F.C.C. rollback – passed by a vote of 400 to 21.

If Bush wishes to carry out the veto threat, he’ll pick up a bunch of diehards (now called “dead-enders”), but he will risk suffering an unnecessary humiliation.

What next? Much depends on who is chosen to go into the Senate-House conference. If the White House can’t stop the rollback there, will Bush carry out the ill-considered threat?

Sometimes you put the veto gun back in the holster. The way out: a president can always decide to turn down the recommendation of his senior advisers.

***

Fisking John II

by Jack Robertson

Four more dead American soldiers in Iraq. Meanwhile, post-invasion debate here at home continues about the roles government spin, Liberal and National Party Parliamentary acquiescence, watery public language, politicised and timid bureaucracy, firewalling, dog-whistling and imprecise reportage played in helping John Howard temporarily sell his case for war.

Here’s another deconstruction of how the unilateral war-spinning worked, and also a reminder of how many people worldwide tried hard to counter it when it still mattered, using their Democratic freedoms and Parliamentary mechanisms (Britain and Turkey spring to mind, in particular). My comments are in bold.

1. The nasty in-swinging jagger is boringly dead-batted away through point:

Melbourne’s Radio 3AW, March 14, Neil Mitchell interview.

MITCHELL: Do you have any proof that Saddam Hussein is working with al-Qaeda?

A superbly crisp, clear and unambiguous question. A real cracker.

PRIME MINISTER: We have plenty of intelligence suggesting a number of things of the toleration of al-Qaeda people in Baghdad, of links between an al-Qaeda related organisation and Iraqi intelligence. Now they’re that’s the solid evidence we have of links.

It is of course no such thing, but by merging these two statements into one and slickly substituting the soft-verb ‘toleration of’ and the soft-noun ‘links’ for Mitchell’s rock-hard verb phrase “working with’, the PM has spun a sellable approximation of a ‘yes’ answer, at least as far as Public Opinion is concerned. The ball – though seemingly only dead-batted away – is never-the-less past the man at point and well on the way to the boundary.

What I have argued is not what some people have suggested, that I didn’t prove yesterday. What I’ve argued is that if a country like Iraq is able to keep possession of chemical and biological weapons, other rogue states will want to do the same thing and the more countries like that that have those sorts of weapons, the greater it becomes the possibility that they’ll get into the hands of terrorists.

Sure, John. But so what? The (implied and) direct question Mitchell is asking is DOES Saddam have possession of such weapons and DOES your government have evidence that he will very likely pass them on to al-Qaeda in future because, as Mitchell asked, ‘he has been working with them’ in the past? That’s the crux of Mitchell’s excellent question, in relation to the urgent matter at hand, which is whether or not we should help America invade Iraq. Your Tony Blair-esque answer: “Golly, Neil, wouldn’t it just be really bad if they do/did, and we didn’t do anything about it?” is irrelevant drivel.

That’s my greatest concern and that really lies at the heart of my belief that something should be done.

Duly bedding the drivel in with contrived conviction politics, those Newt Gringichian ‘good’ words – ‘greatest concern’, ‘heart of my belief’, and especially that classic slice of Talkback-ese: ‘Something should be done’, Neil! The ball is running away from the chasing point fieldsman; can he catch it? (For the Gingrich handbook of spin, see Grant Long’s piece in Spin, anger, ethics: Your say.

MITCHELL: Do you really believe Australia is facing its own Pearl Harbour?

Mitchell, for time or flow reasons, keeps motoring on ahead, unable or unwilling to stop, back up, and then pick up and pull to pieces the Prime Minister’s outrageous – casual – claim of ‘solid evidence’. Now third man is racing around the boundary to cut off the dead-bat shot.

***

2. The newsworthy bits are spin-snowballed into firmer shape by a third party:

From the Sydney Morning Herald report:

…[Mr Howard] said many were still undecided and he hoped to win them over. “In the end, governments have got to do what they believe is right and suffer properly the consequences or otherwise of their decisions at the ballot box,” Mr Howard said on Melbourne Radio 3AW. “You can’t make policy, particularly on national security, according to the latest opinion poll.” Mr Howard said Australia had solid evidence of links between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network, blamed for the September 11 attacks. But if Australia had to wait for criminal jury proof, it could result in another Pearl Harbour style attack, he said.

But the third man can’t cut it off, either. Or rather, he kicks it into the fence accidentally while trying to do so – that ‘solid evidence’ soundbite takes on ‘extra’ resonance and credibility when re-cited out of context and by/in the third person. Note, too, the way the memorable, simplistic ‘Pearl Harbour’ riff gets good traction. Howard/Mitchell’s out of nowhere segue into what is (at least) a middle-older electorate dog whistle security/invasion/border protection/ooh, they’re coming to get us! riff is bedded in here, with that (unwitting) clause-connecting ‘But’. What Pearl Harbour and al-Qaeda – let alone Saddam Hussein – ever have/had remotely in common, is militarily mystifying. Conservative wartime governments always fail by trying to fight the last war instead of the current one, of course, but JH should re-read Churchill’s History of WW2, methinks!

***

OK, so I’m sorry about the pedanticism (and the cricketing analogies), but this was utterly typical of how the case for war was sold. And once fighting started, the war was always going to gather public support simply on the basis of us naturally supporting our soldiers (look at Crean’s gutsy and honest but doomed attempts to split the two).

There was nothing politically courageous about the PM’s decision to take us into war. Nothing at all. Howard pretended it was all terribly hard and brave and electorally-dangerous, but I’ve got a hunch he loved every minute of ‘playing Winston’.

So what? As with the WMD lies and spin and hyping, I’m just a bad loser on the Saddam al-Qaeda link lies and spin and hyping? Maybe so. But those of us who opposed this invasion and occupation for good reasons did try hard to expose this kind of concrete, identifiable misleading back when it still mattered:

3. Futile Saddam-al Qaeda ‘solid evidence’ Counter-Spin Attempt One

In response to reading the precise 3AW quotes and the Sydney Morning Herald’s necessarily-truncated reporting of them, your angry, hysterical, feral Left, un-Australian, anti-Howard, linguistically anally-retentive but security and Westminster-Government respecting Concerned Citizen (who reckons he smells a dead rodent), tries in real time to by-pass the frustrating ‘Journo V. Spinmeister’ information barrier by cutting straight to the Representative Horses’ Mouths.

His instinctive scepticism of the PM’s public ‘solid evidence’ claim may be based on linguistic close deconstruction and his memory of the children overboard affair; publicly-available other information; the failure of the PM (or anyone else in the Coalition) to prove such claims; and especially the powerful (and personally costly) protests of experts like Andrew Wilkie. Or – hypothetically – his scepticism may arise from having recently spent Christmas chatting at some length with a loved one who has considerable recent experience fighting Fundamentalist terrorism, and who has spent the last six months on exchange with a foreign Special Forces unit that has been planning future operations against Ansar al-Islam in Iraq’s northern regions which are, of course, mostly beyond Saddam Hussein’s control.

Then again, this Concerned Citizen might just hate John Howard’s guts. It doesn’t matter.

For whatever reason, boldly, recklessly, rudely, hysterically, the Concerned Citizen takes out his trusty Green Cyber Pen and tries to encourage someone important and democratically-accountable to tell the public the full truth about the PM’s ‘Saddam al-Qaeda solid evidence’ claims, to help him make an informed decision about whether or not to support Australia’s commitment to invading Iraq.

From: Stephen John ‘Jack’ Robertson

BALMAIN NSW 2041

To: All Australian Liberal and National Party Senators and MPs

Information copies: All other Australian MPs, the Parliamentary Press Gallery, ABC Media Watch, Margo Kingston’s Webdiary, Crikey.com.au, all Australian journalists.

14 March 2003

SUBJECT: AN OPEN LETTER TO THE AUSTRALIAN PARLIAMENTARY LIBERAL PARTY

Dear Liberal and National Party Parliamentary member,

I draw your attention to the Prime Minister’s address to the nation at the National Press Club yesterday, in which the Prime Minister outlined his case for Australia’s frontline role in the impending American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. I draw your particular attention to his arguments about the general WMD and terrorism nexus ‘lethal threat’, and to his repeated attempts to give this added weight by linking, either directly or by so-called ‘dog whistle’ semantic agility, the terrorist group al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I also draw your attention to the Prime Minister’s comments of today, on Melbourne’s radio 3AW, that your government has ‘solid evidence’ linking al-Qaeda and Saddam.

I put it to you that Prime Minister Howard is lying when he uses the phrase ‘solid evidence’. This phrase and the context in which it is used explicitly carries with it an implication that there is a direct terrorism-enabling and supporting relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. There is in fact no such ‘solid evidence’ to date of this kind, and you all know it. I draw your attention to the statements of former ONA officer Andrew Wilkie and the many, many repeatedly expressed views by terrorism experts worldwide that such a link to this time is both a) unlikely on account of the historically-apposite and hostile differences between Saddam’s extremist secular philosophies and al-Qaeda’s extremist theological ones, and b) in any case utterly unproven by the revealing of any serious evidence against that first principles argument.

I draw your attentions to the fact that not even the US Secretary of State has been able, or has seriously attempted, to make such a ‘solid’ link. I draw your attentions to the recent tape-recording allegedly of Osama bin Laden, in which he once more described Saddam Hussein, an implacable target of his past hostility and contempt, as an ‘infidel’ to be ultimately overthrown.

I put it to you that Prime Minister Howard is well aware that at best, any link at all between Iraq and al-Qaeda – such as those he cited on 3AW – has to date been purely incidental, and in no way could be characterised as solid evidence that the Saddam-al-Qaeda nexus is anything but a purely opportunistic and cynical lie, one designed to dishonestly lend subtle weight to his more general, and in any case erroneous and illogical, arguments about WMD and terrorism.

Member of the government, your Prime Minister is once again lying through his teeth to the Australian people. You know it and I know it. If any such solid evidence did in fact exist, it would have been presented by the US, Britain and Australia long, long ago. If I am wrong in my accusation and there IS such solid evidence, then he MUST present it now.

If the Prime Minister has a case for war, then he should make it without lying. I deeply resent being lied to by our government to win support for its dangerous, fear-mongering policies. This divisive lying and fear-mongering has been a Liberal Party tactic for too long, now. Your party is now tearing this country apart day-by-day, piece-by-piece. The Liberals will surely reap the whirlwind that your Prime Minister has long sown, even if he manages to retire in personal glory following a temporary triumph in Iraq. The strategic doctrine to which he is about to commit the Liberal Party will, of course, be with the rest of you for many, many years. That is your choice, I suppose.

However, since the Prime Minister’s lies on this occasion relate not to a ‘trivial’ matter – such as whether or not children were thrown overboard by Iraqis fleeing Saddam’s brutal regime, say – but to the matter of whether or not Australian soldiers, one of whom is my brother, will be committed to the first pre-emptive war in Australia’s history, I therefore write demanding individual acknowledgement from each member of the government as to whether or not you, as a member of the government, support Mr Howard’s claim that your Executive is in possession of solid evidence linking al-Qaeda to Saddam’s Iraq. Please advise me as a matter of urgency – personally, member-by-member, in writing – your answer to this simple question:

IS OUR PRIME MINISTER TELLING THE TRUTH, IN FACT AND IN THE SPIRIT OF THE ENABLING CONTEXT OF HIS OWN ‘LETHAL THREAT’ DEBATE WHEN HE TELLS US THAT YOUR GOVERNMENT POSSESSES SOLID EVIDENCE’ LINKING THE TERRORIST GROUP AL-QAEDA TO SADDAM HUSSEIN’S IRAQ?

Your CANNOT keep lying to us like this, for Christ’s sake. This is WAY, WAY beyond party-politics and personal ambition, now. It will be critically-important for us as Australian Citizens, in the long and messy strategic aftermath of this invasion and occupation, to be very precisely clear on exactly which members of the Liberal and National Party Government that committed us to it stood where, and publicly so. For the public record.

Come on, guys, this is NOT NOT NOT in the best long-term interests of either the Liberal or the National Parties, OR the future of our two-party democratic Parliamentary stability. This is pure, one-man-band, Presidential propaganda, and we can all see it, as plain as day. This is political suicide for the Libs in the long-term, especially.

I require a reply to this email as a matter of primacy. You may ring, fax, email or snail-mail me at the addresses and numbers below.

Stephen John ‘Jack’ Robertson

BALMAIN NSW 2041

jakkrobb@ozemail.com.au

4. …but alas! All our Concerned Citizen receives is more waffle and spin!

To be precise, a whole lot of vague, irrelevant tosh about UN Resolutions – a body which itself is urging the Coalition not to invade Iraq! (There’s also a rather silly government accusation that France’s opposition to the invasion is all about oillll!!!! Naturally, fellow Webdiarists, your Concerned Citizen ignores that silly conspiracy theory, too.)

From: Alan Cadman, MP

To: Steve Robbo

Date: 20 March 2003

A number of people, including Simon Crean, are saying Australia should not be going into conflict now but should be waiting for yet another resolution of the United Nations. Everyone admits Saddam Hussein has done the wrong thing. He should reform, but we should wait for him to agree to change.

The history of requests for this tyrant and murderer to change began in 1990 – 13 years ago. The words used by the United Nations to endorse and enforce the views of the nations of the world began with resolution 678 on 29th November 1990.

“Noting that, despite all efforts by the United Nations, Iraq refuses to comply with its obligation to implement resolution 660 (1990) and the above-mentioned subsequent relevant resolutions, in flagrant contempt of the Security Council …” (resolution 678)

2nd March 1991: “Provide all information and assistance in identifying Iraqi mines, booby traps and other explosives as well as any chemical and biological weapons and material in Kuwait, in areas of Iraq where forces of Member States cooperating with Kuwait pursuant to resolution 678 … (1990) are present temporarily, and in adjacent waters …” (resolution 686)

3rd April 1991: “Conscious also of the statements by Iraq threatening to use weapons in violation of its obligations under the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, signed at Geneva on 17 June 1925, and of its prior use of chemical weapons and affirming that grave consequences would follow any further use by Iraq of such weapons …” (resolution 687)

5th April 1991: “Gravely concerned by the repression of the Iraqi civilian population in many parts of Iraq, including most recently in Kurdish populated areas, which led to a massive flow of refugees towards and across international frontiers … “

And:

“Condemns the repression of the Iraqi civilian population in many parts of Iraq, including most recently in Kurdish populated areas, the consequences of which threaten international peace and security in the region …” (resolution 688)

15th August 1991: “Recalling also the letter of 11 April 1991 from the President of the Security Council to the Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations in which he noted that on the basis of Iraq’s written agreement to implement fully resolution 687 (1991) … the preconditions for a cease-fire established in paragraph 33 of that resolution had been met.

“Taking note with grave concern of the letters dated 26 and 28 June and 4 July 1991 from the Secretary-General to the President of the Security Council, conveying information obtained from the Executive Chairman of the Special Commission and from the high-level mission to Iraq which establishes Iraq’s failure to comply with its obligations under resolution 687 …” (resolution 707)

(11th October 1991: Resolution 715, 15th October 1994: Resolution 949, 27th March 1996: Resolution 1051, 12th June 1997: Resolution 1060, 21st June 1997: Resolution 1115.)

23rd October 1997: “Reaffirming its determination to ensure full compliance by Iraq with all its obligations under all previous relevant resolutions and reiterating its demand that Iraq allow immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access to the Special Commission to any site which the Commission wishes to inspect.” (Resolution 1134)

(12th November 1997: Resolution 1137, 2nd March 1998: Resolution 1154, 9th September 1998: Resolution 1194.)

5th November 1998: “Noting with alarm the decision of Iraq on 31st October 1998 to cease cooperation with the Untied Nations Special Commission, and its continued restrictions on the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)…” (Resolution 1205)

(17th December 1999: Resolution 1284, 8th November 2002: Resolution 1441)

The United Nations and the Security Council have expressed in the strongest terms their condemnation and rejection of the Suddam Hussein regime in resolution after resolution, year after year. The expressions in resolution 1441 are not just a recent occurrence.

From 1990 to October 1992, all the requests were unfulfilled or ignored.

Nothing was done by the United Nations in the pursuit of peace. They made the strongest complaints and concluded all of their motions with the statement that the Security Council “Decides to remain actively seized of the matter”.

There has never been such inactive seizure of any important issue. Time and again the UN has requested Saddam Hussein to comply. The UN has complained when he did not take these resolutions seriously. The UN moved motions of criticism when he failed to comply, and said that they would follow through with strong actions. None of which they did. By its failure to act the UN encouraged denigration and non-compliance.

(On) 21st June 1997 the UN condemned Iraq for: “… the repeated refusal of the Iraqi authorities to allow access to sites designated by the Special Commission, which constitutes a clear and flagrant violation of the provisions of Security Council resolutions 687 (1991), 707 (1991), 715 (1991) and 1060 (1996) … “ (resolution 1115).

The UN has acted on the premise that it does not have to take action. Australia cannot be restricted to accepting that a belligerent decision by France in the UN can control our actions. The French decision to exercise a veto should not handcuff Australia. If the Chinese decide to exercise a veto, does that mean we should not be involved?

Such a policy allows anybody to make decisions for us, but we will not make them for ourselves. We would be captive to the UN veto-and it only needs one country to exercise the veto. One country alone could stop Australia exercising its sovereign right. We would never do anything the United Nations does not endorse.

France does not come to the table with clean hands. Saddam Hussein expressed the opinion to a Lebanese journalist in 1975, that his dealings with France were ‘the first concrete step towards the production of the Arab atomic weapon’. The first negotiations after the Kuwaiti war with Iraq for access to their oil were recorded in May 1992 when Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and then minister for industry and oil, and the adviser of Monsieur Jacques Chirac started negotiations. Before bodies were cold, the French were in there negotiating for their cut of oil. The Iraqis preferred to deal with the Elf company because of its high political connections with the French government.

France should not be able to control our resistance to terrorism, genocide or tyranny simply because it has a veto in the UN.

My views coincide with those expressed in an email by an Australian Army officer to an Australian radio station. He said, “I’m catching snippets of Australian news up here yet the more I’m exposed to it the less I understand of the politicians. In my view the opposition is committing political suicide with its ill informed and puerile views on many related issues.”

He concludes:

“I fully endorse Australia’ involvement as a key member of the coalition in response to terrorism. The common belief that we are simply jumping blindly into bed with George Bush must be replaced with the understanding that peace is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity”.

Yours sincerely

Alan Cadman

<p***< p=””>

Oy, oy, oy, Alan – all I wanted was a specific answer to a specific question, mate, not a heart-felt lecture on the failures of the poor old United Nations! My thanks anyway to Alan Cadman, Liberal Party MP for acknowledging receipt in writing on the government’s behalf. And my apologies for not even bothering to reply to your waffling, side-stepping nonsense, mate. But in the end, even a Green Pen crank gets fed up with reams of rote-delivered government bullshit posing as individual Rep civic responsiveness.

On the other hand, at least Alan’s email reply is a sound written record proving that, if and when the Government starts trying to pretend that it was unaware of the doubts over intelligence assessments that there was, as John Howard claimed on 14 March on 3AW, ‘solid evidence’ linking al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, the Prime Minister can’t honestly claim that nobody tried to tell him.

Because as you can see, every member of the Australian Parliament was alerted in writing on 14 March to such doubts by at least one Concerned Citizen (and, in fact, millions of others, including counter-terrorism experts worldwide). Now that the (politically-delayed) US Congressional Report into 9/11 has indeed confirmed that the al-Qaeda/Saddam link was always, as far as the weight of the global intelligence community’s expert opinion was concerned, a great big pile of politically-manufactured bullshit, that angry Concerned Citizen wants to know why NOBODY IN THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT, OPPOSITION OR THE CROSS-BENCHES ANSWERED, OR PURSUED, OR WAS ALLOWED TO PURSUE, VIA A LONG, DETAILED PARLIAMEMTARY DEBATE ON THIS WAR, HIS CONCERNED CITIZEN’S EMAIL QUESTIONS IN TIME, IN DETAIL, AND ON THE OFFICIAL AND PERMANENT PUBLIC RECORD.

Firewall all you like, Prime Minister, but in my opinion, you were on 14 March this year, and you remain now, a liar. I respectfully request you to produce the ‘solid evidence’ of the Saddam al-Qaeda link you told us you possessed on that date, and if you can do so, I will happily withdraw that accusation and apologise. Alternatively, you should resign.

By the way, happy birthday.

News that John Howard plans an “independent panel” to review complaints of ABC bias opens up an exciting opportunity to get more accountability all round – of the government and the commercial media.

In watching news stories develop, it’s always wise to ask yourself: “Who benefits?”

Let’s see. The government had no complaints about the ABC’s coverage of the war on Iraq at the time. That’s most unlike the first Gulf War, when Bob Hawke had plenty of contemporaneous complaints.

Richard Alston complained long after the war in retaliation for the ABC dumping its digital TV experiment for lack of funds. His complaints, 68 of them, were against only one program, AM, yet he alleged systemic bias.

The ABC’s internal review body dismissed most complaints, and found a problem in vocal tone in a couple. It also accused Alston of systematic misrepresentation and decontextualisation. First Alston threatened to complain to the Australian Broadcasting Authority, which has the power to investigate complaints against the ABC. But since the complaints have no substance, what better tactic to escalate the pressure than the threat of yet another another review body.

From Alston and Howard’s public comments so far it seems the “independent panel” will have no legislative backing. It will be an informal thorn in the ABC’s side, yet another way for the Government to discourage the ABC from fearlessly doing its job of keeping governments accountable to the people.

Who will appoint the members of the panel? The government, perhaps? They haven’t managed to control the ABC’s independence by stacking its board, so why not try something new?

Remember, Alston and Howard have been trying to emasculate the ABC as a fearless scrutineer ever since it got to power. Way back in 1996 Alston wrote in a leaked Cabinet submission that he wanted to review the ABC’s charter to “influence future ABC functions and activities more directly”.

Still, the new idea opens the door to an exciting public debate on improving accountability of the institutions in our nation essential for a vibrant democracy.

John Howard is now on record saying internal inquiries aren’t good enough. “I guess it’s inevitable if you have an internal review assessment, there’s always a tendency to declare yourself not guilty,” Mr Howard said. “Probably it’s better with the public broadcaster to have some kind of arm’s-length assessment of these things. I think that is better.”

Fantastic! He’s an old hand at calling internal inquiries when he or his government is accused of lying, misleading parliament, rorting travel allowances, abusing fair process and favouring its mates. Now that he acknowledges the unsatisfactory nature of such inquiries, perhaps our national government will finally get a national version of the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). Allegations of substance could go to this body for independent review and report to Parliament.

And let’s broaden the media aspect to the commercial media. The ABC is established under legislation, has legal obligations to fulfil – including balanced reporting – and the public has the right to complain and have complaints considered. Yet the commercial media is virtually unaccountable, despite its immense power and influence.

The former Australian Broadcasting Tribunal had power to consider every three years whether a TV licence holder was “a fit and proper person” to hold the licence, and hearings considered public complaints. Labor dumped that accountability under pressure form the networks, and the new Australian Broadcasting Authority is virtually toothless when it comes to enforcing voluntary standards.

The funny thing is that during the recent debate on the government’s proposed cross media changes, the Senate tried to get a bit more accountability for the commercial networks. Just a little bit, mind you – like allowing the ABA to require the networks to run an apology or give a right of reply if they got something wrong. The ABA already has the power to order the ABC and SBS to do so, but the government rejected every single attempt to bring accountability to the commercial media. Why?

How about extending the “independent panel” model to assess complaints of bias or owner interference in news against the commercial TV and radio media? A bit of balance on the commercial talkback radio networks, perhaps? A requirement that Alan Jones correct himself on air after he makes a false claim?

And what about newspapers? Fairfax is the only commercial media group to have a publicly available, super-strict code of ethics. It requires that commercial considerations play no part in news judgement, fairness in reporting and full disclosure of conflicts of interest. Yet there is nothing in the government’s cross media proposals to secure a commitment from any buyer of Fairfax to stick with its ethics code or to have any ethics code at all. How about a requirement that all newspaper and commercial media groups publish a similar code, with complaints about its breach going to independent panels for review?

The trick here, of course, as with an independent ABC panel, is that it has to be independent of government, otherwise you’re into the dangerous territory of government control of the media, a key indicator of the descent of a democracy into fascism.

Here’s my suggestion. Each media group is required to establish a panel to review breaches of ethics codes (or legislative charters in the case of the ABC and SBS). There would be three members – one appointed by journalists on staff, one by management and the third, to chair the group, by agreement between staff and management. These panels would have legislative backing and the power to enforce their rulings through publication of their decisions in the media group concerned, corrections and rights of reply.

Come on John, let’s get serious about media accountability, and your own. Unless, of course, you have a very different agenda.

***

YOU BE THE JUDGE

Richard Alston’s complaints against AM are at dcita.

The ABC’s findings are at abc.

Send your findings to mkingston@smh.com.au

Given the ongoing debate about the intelligence presented to justify the War on Iraq, I thought I would provide a perspective that supports the War whilst at the same time supports inquiries into the pre-war rhetoric. I can relate to the furious attacks on the credibility of Bush, Blair and Howard and I am angry and disappointed too but for very different reasons.

The attempts by the Coalition of the Willing to bolster its case for War has done significant damage to the credibility of the case for an active confrontation and control of terrorist regimes and networks. By presenting faulty intelligence to justify their position it quite rightly begs questions about the whole approach to the War on Terror.

It is my opinion that by focusing on a very poll conscious strategy to convince a doubtful public, the Coalition of the Willing has created more hurdles for itself in what will be long-term struggle against oppressive regimes and terrorist networks. Conservative policy-makers throughout America, Australia and Britain ( and doubtlessly other democratic countries)

were quite rightly “woken up” by the September 11 attacks. The ideological challenge presented to pluralist democracies could know longer be ignored as the threat of an escalation of continued domestic attacks was starkly highlighted by those terrible planes and prompted questions like “if they can do that, can they do much worse?”

Leading Republican Congressman Christopher Shays, in an interview on BBC World program HardTalk ( a program I highly recommend), argued that the intelligence presented by Colin Powell at the UN and George W. Bush in his State of the Union Address were not the key reasons for his voting for going to War in Iraq.

What then are the reasons that shaped (and will continue to shape) conservative policy-makers in Washington, London and Canberra in going to War In Iraq?

Before going into the specifics, I will first present the broad challenge that shapes their thinking. The long-term national security of Western democracies is clearly in jeopardy if a confluence of events occur in the non-democratic world. If either failed states or totalitarian regimes hostile to the West either gain WMDs or proliferate them to terrorist networks then the risk of a far more devastating warfare will unfold.

They argue that containment policies that characterised much of the approach by the West in the Cold War are ineffective against this asymmetric challenge. It is ineffective because the battleground is literally everywhere and so unlike the Cold War where War game strategising against the Soviet Union or proxy warfare in third party countries is not an appropriate response.

As such, Conservative policy-makers have taken the view that rather than letting either oppressive regimes or terrorist networks choose the battleground that they will go after them whereever they are. The criteria they appear to be using is that any nation that either actively sponsors, gives shelter to or ‘turns a blind eye’ to terrorist activities effectively surrenders its sovereign rights. Obviously, they have prioritised where the threats are most dangerous – totalitarian countries that have access to or are actively seeking WMD or who are actively sponsoring terrorist activities.

After Afghanistan, why Iraq? If viewed through a post 9/11 prism what was previously a tolerable containment of Iraq had become intolerable. The Iraqi regime that invaded Quwait less than two years after a long war with Iran, that had already used WMDs and that had sought to launch a nuclear program was clearly a threat.

It is true that an on/off UN Inspection program coupled with active No-Fly zones over Southern and Northern Iraq had been moderately successful. It is also true that the link between AL-Qaeda and Iraq was unsubstantiated, but it is also true that Iraq was a prominent sponsor of Palestinian suicide bombers and their organisations.

Christopher Shays argued that the ‘old’ intelligence on Iraq was in fact the reason why he voted for war in Iraq.

This is very different to the emphasis placed by the leaders in the run up to war. By giving prominence to the intelligence highlighting the immediacy of the threat, Blair, Bush and Howard were arguing that the situation had changed. They should have argued that their standards had changed because of September 11. Clearly this argument is a far more complex argument to make and perhaps less politically saleable than the argument they presented.

I support the war and see the ongoing challenges facing the West, yet I also support a vigorous inquiry into the misleading intelligence presented to justify the War. Furthermore, the leaders should be accountable for their actions, and if their governments fall so be it – even though it might cause irreparable damage to the cause of fighting terrorism. And that is what makes me angry.

I appreciate the high standards that the Australian media (in particular Fairfax and the ABC) have demanded of our leaders. Furthermore, I believe that the cheerleading of the Murdoch press in fact helps reduce the merits of the conservative policy-makers and paradoxically helps the anti- war arguments by reducing the debates to a passionate brawl.

In further contributions I would like to provide some historical perspective on U.S. foreign policy and ask whether what Bush is doing is really new and radical. I’d also like to discuss the domestic challenges the War on Terror has for Australians.

PS: I have some thoughts about helping the poor old Labor party find some winning strategies but am still deciding if I really want to help them. I hope the negativity expressed in your articles does not pervade the rest of your life.

Margo: The rest of my life is great at the moment – touch wood – so much so that I did a tongue in cheeker on the latest Howard ABC outrage. See Good one John, but why stop at the ABC?

The chairman of the ANZ bank, Charles Goode, gave a speech today in Sydney called The way ahead – issues facing Australia. It’s a pretty interesting take from the big end of town – Goode’s top priorities are education and the environment, and he wants more government spending for ‘nation building’ through more government debt!! Thanks to the Australian Institute of Company Directors for the speech.

The way ahead – issues facing Australia

by Charles Goode AC

Australia is one of the most wonderful countries in the world. Every time I return to australia from an overseas visit this is reinforced. I will not go into the numerous supporting evidence to the statement in this gathering but will take it as given. (Margo: Gee I wish he hadn’t taken it as given. I’d love to read Mr Goode’s list of the good things – it would help us work out why what we’ve got is worth protecting.)

In thinking about this topic what has struck me is that the issues facing our country are well known. There is a wealth of information on these issues and to a significant extent the solutions are also known. Further what action is being taken is mostly in the right direction. Why then are we worried about these issues?

I think it is because we are a comfortable society that moves in cautious steps. We need to be energetic and passionate and take bold and major steps in addressing our long term issues. We are too short term, too cautious, and too complacent.

In many cases action requires increased government expenditure, and as I am not advocating higher taxes, the response is often that the money is not available. Yet when the East Timor situation arises, or Iraq, we somehow find the money. Addressing our issues will require some reprioritisation of expenditure and it may mean some increase in government debt, but this would be used in addressing the nation building issues of our future.

We are blessed as a country with great natural resources. It is interesting to reflect on the strong economic performance of countries with virtually no natural resources except their people, and I am thinking of Hong Kong, Singapore, Israel and Japan. The danger is that when our standard of living gets to a certain level there is not a great deal of pain experienced in being complacent. However we need to realise our full potential and have the capacity to look after our environment and the less well-off members of our society.

I would like to see us bring to bear on our issues the passion and focus that we bring to Australian rules football and to rugby. In the office where I am located we have a weekly football competition; the results and the ladder are out by 10 a.m. each Monday morning. If the organisation could run its business as efficiently as the football competition we would leave our competitors far behind.

Now I will address five major issues; education, the environment, the economy, population, and our relations with the outside world.

Education

In Australia we have a high standard of living and if we are to find employment for our workforce and maintain and improve our standard of living it is clear that we need a highly educated population. The leadership, skills, ingenuity and know-how of our people will be the primary determinants of our social and economic progress.

We are in a world not only of capital and people movement; through outsourcing we are witnessing the globalisation of labour. We therefore must continually move to produce higher skilled products and services.

When we consider the focus on education of the people in our Asian neighbour countries and education’s impact on growth, employment and innovation, there is an overwhelming argument to devote a higher proportion of our GDP to education. I am referring to our education system from school through to university, including vocational education and training and the professional development of our teachers.

Professor Dowrick at the Australian National University has said that an increase of one year in schooling in average educational attainment can be expected to boost output levels by about 8% in a typical OECD economy. In addition there are growth implications arising from the country’s ability to implement new technologies.

In relation to innovation there is a strong case for further incentives for increased research and development expenditure. Australia’s R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP is relatively poor for a country with our standard of living.

The Howard government’s policy called “Backing Australia’s ability” is to be commended, as are the premises behind the Opposition’s 2001 “Knowledge nation” policy,and Dr. Brendan Nelson’s policy of deregulating universities to be more autonomous, accountable and better funded.

The argument for deregulation is strong and is partly about allowing our universities to expand at a faster rate than that which would take place from available government funding.

Our HECS scheme recognises that those who receive education are likely to have higher incomes, and loans for education can be repaid out of these higher incomes. This scheme is one of world leadership in reducing the barriers to education imposed by income and at the same time providing increased income to universities.

There is much to be commended in the area of education but much more to be done to ensure the future employment of our people and growth of our economy. We also need to recognise education as one of our major export industries.

The environment

Whether or not we accept the scientific arguments of global warming, whether or not we accept that global warming has an adverse overall impact on our planet and whether or not we agree to join the Kyoto agreement does not alter the argument of having an Australian policy of caring for our environment and leaving it in no worse state for our children.

We can talk about our good economic performance in terms of growth in GDP, and I will also be doing this today, but if we included the reduction in our national assets from environmental damage it would not be such a pretty picture.

The report Australia: the state of the environment 2001 concluded that we are not managing Australia’s environment on a sustainable basis. This should be a huge wake-up call to us all; similar to that which would arise if Australia won no gold medals at an Olympic Games.

It needs a whole of government approach, community involvement and the use of market mechanisms. We need to address whether this is an area that the States should hand over to the commonwealth and we need to recognise that addressing some issues such as the environment and security will involve restrictions on our private property rights and civil liberties. This needs to be well debated.

We have made some progress on urban air quality and more energy efficient homes. However there is much to be done in addressing the destruction of prime agricultural land through salinity and the degradation of water quality in our river system.

We certainly need a national water policy which would include resolving issues such as the proper price for water, water property rights and the overlap of the states and federal jurisdictions. We need to recognise that salinity is the white death that is spreading across our country.

It is estimated that the equivalent of one football field of productive land would have been lost to salinity during the hour of this lunch and the equivalent of 50 football fields of bushland will have been cleared.

On greenhouse emissions we need a positive policy that takes into account its effects on the international competitiveness of Australian industry and at the same applies a stick and a carrot approach so there are incentives for research. After-all, technology will be the ultimate answer to emissions.

Again we have made some progress. The Hawke government in 1990 established Landcare, in 1997 the howard government established the $2.5 billion National Heritage Trust; and in 2000 the Commonwealth and the States signed the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality.

But we need to move much faster and further. A good start would be a national resource management commission similar to our productivity commission. The report of the Wentworth Group of concerned scientists published in November 2002 called Blueprint for a living continent has numerous constructive proposals. We need to ensure that funds allocated for the environment are not only wisely spent in line with well-researched holistic policies but actually spent, and there is some evidence that this is not happening today.

I would like to see us develop an environmental policy that is particularly suited to our country and to execute it in a manner that receives international recognition and approval.

Economic growth

We need to maintain our annual economic growth at one half to one percent above the average for OECD countries. This is an area in which we have been doing well. Australia’s rate of growth in average income (GDP per head) was below the OECD average from 1950 to 1990 and our ranking among OECD countries slipped from 5th to 15th.

However in the 1990s this changed, with the growth in our GDP per head being 2.5% as against the OECD average of 1.7%. We have moved from 15th position to 7th.

In recent years we have enjoyed strong growth as we have benefitted from the economic reforms of earlier years; a low level for the Australian dollar until the last six months, low interest rates, some fiscal stimulus, a strong housing cycle, relatively little excess capacity from the world high-tech boom and a good government complemented by a professional reserve bank.

We need to maintain this strong economic growth as it provides the wherewithal to address the main issues facing the country. This means we must continue to embrace change and guard against reform fatigue. There are benefits to be won for all Australians from further deregulation of the labour market.

We will be facing increasing budgetary pressure from the social and health calls on government from an aging population. It is also likely we will choose to increase our defence expenditure from its current relatively low historical level of 2% of GDP.

With this pressure we will have to be far better at interweaving our income tax and social welfare systems to provide greater incentives for people to move from social welfare to employment, especially part time. We need to encourage our society to be more self reliant and in particular carefully examine benefits paid to middle and upper income groups. I think we have gone too far in taxing superannuation, which, if encouraged, has the capacity to reduce people’s reliance in old age on the government. We would do well to examine the central provident fund system that operates in Singapore.

I personally would favour being pro-active in identifying, nurturing and encouraging growth industries such as education, medical research, the provision of health services, food processing, our service industries, and tourism.

Population

I am in favour of net migration at the highest level that we can assimilate migrants into our community, and I think this is towards the higher end of a range of one half to three quarters percent per annum of our population. An increasing population assists to create a dynamic, diverse and innovative economy. It is also supported by humanistic and defence arguments and encourages us to be more outward looking in what is a globalising world.

The aging structure of our population presents a significant problem. While today we have six people of working age for each person over 65 years, in thirty years there will only be three people to support our over 65s. This has implications for the number of people contributing to economic activity and paying taxes, and also in respect to what will be a significant rise in social and health costs.

The aging population means living standards could grow at a considerably lower rate in future than those to which we have become accustomed. With a slower growing economy and a greater demand for social and health services there will emerge budgetary problems as well as social issues.

We need policies to reduce the wastefulness of unemployment and to encourage higher labour market participation.

In this respect we have not as a society recognised that with people living to an older age their working life has also been extended. There are far too many productive people at all levels that retire or are made redundant while in their fifties. Often this is at the initiative of the employer to free up positions for younger, and in many cases more capable and energetic people.

We need to create a respected class of employment such as “extended service” whereby a person can continue on in employment, with honour and respect, while at the same time moving to a less senior job and at a lower salary. They would have a less stressful job while contributing their experience to the organisation. We need a title for such employment and to recognise that such people are not being demoted but entering into extended service. We would be moving to rewarding the position rather than the person. This would require changes to the law and we would need to relate any defined benefits pension to the person’s highest earnings period. We should also consider incentives to encourage people to work longer by say a lower tax rate on salary and wage related income for those over sixty years of age.

Australia’s interface with the outside world

We have a world in which the USA has 4% of the world’s population and at market exchange rates 32% of world GDP. The other side of the coin is China with 22% of the world’s population and 4% of the world’s GDP. We have the pre-eminence of America as the world economic and military force, and the only comparable power that I can foresee is the emergence of China over the next fifty years. We have slow growth in Europe and the emergence of Asia as the increasingly important third economic region.

We are fortunate in having a close relationship with the USA through trade and shared democratic principles and values.

We are geographically located in East Asia with considerable trade in goods and increasingly of professional services; in tourism with approximately two million of the five million short term visitors to Australia coming from East Asia – that is 40%; and through students from East Asia coming to Australia. There are at any time around 140,000 students from East Asia or 75% of the total number of foreign students in Australia.

However we need to engage more with East Asia. Australia’s capital investment in East Asia is very low, averaging only around $110 million per annum over the last five years. We need a greater understanding of the culture, history, and languages of these countries, their distribution systems and their ways of doing business. We need greater investment in each others countries and in time representation both ways on the boards of each others leading companies.

We also need to focus more on our region and to recognise that to the countries of the South Pacific we can be seen as a relative super-power. Our position and strength in the region brings with it associated responsibilities. There is a role to be played by us in conjunction with their governments in the maintenance of law and order, in the training of their people, and in the formulation of appropriate development policies. I am thinking in particular of countries such as PNG and the Solomon Islands.

There are many other issues, some of them of great significance, on which I have not commented. These include security, taxation, health services, the drug problem, the position of our indigenous people and regional and infrastructure development.

In passing I would comment on health services that I think we are waiting for someone to design a futuristic system that moves medical remuneration from the input basis of treating sick patients to an output system that rewards doctors for looking after the health of a certain number in our community.

Now let me indulge and comment on a few issues on which I have a particular interest. One is our process of government. We have a good system but it would benefit from review and consideration being given to whether we move from three year parliaments to four year parliaments (which I would favour); the role of the Senate and whether it needs to be as large as it is, (given that it was originally set up to represent the interests of the individual states); whether we should have a reduced number of members of parliament and pay them higher remuneration; and how parliamentary debate might be improved.

We are in need of a national energy policy that encourages the use of various sources of energy including our natural gas reserves and renewable energy and provides incentives for energy efficient initiatives. We clearly need to encourage new investment in exploration and the development of our energy supply infrastructure. We need to examine changes to the petroleum resource rent tax to encourage deep water exploration and the development of marginal oil accumulations and stranded gas reserves. We also need a policy to arrest the decline since 1998 in our annual mineral exploration expenditure.

Another issue is our unfair treatment of expatriates in the areas of offshore superannuaton and capital gains on offshore assets. I wonder why we have enquiries every decade as to how Sydney could be a regional financial centre when we do not address some simple people issues such as the disadvantage faced by international professionals staying in this country for more than five years. There is no reason why we should not have policies that have us talking of a brain gain rather than a brain drain.

Another question is that of our foreign investment policy. As a country it is quite clear that we do and should welcome foreign investment, however it is also important to have a national identity in our business sector if we are to retain energy, cohesiveness and diversity in our society. It is the head offices of companies that are the centre of gravity that attracts the top talented people and provides the ancillary business to the investment banking, legal and accounting professions.

Corporate governance is not in my view one of our main issues but because of the nature of the gathering today I would like to make a few comments. Actually I do not think it is a problem in australia. To me corporate governance is about a board undertaking an active monitoring of the company’s activities and ensuring that integrity prevails within the company. It requires an environment that encourages well-informed, challenging and constructive discussion. The board needs to know and carry out its duties, and for this to happen there needs to be open disclosure between management and the board. While we will be encouraged to a more compliance mode we should remember that Enron, on paper, had all the corporate boxes ticked.

To conclude, the main issues facing Australia are well known as are many of the solutions. The way forward is for us as a community to intelligently and passionately demand bolder action on our major long term issues. We need to demand from the government a blueprint of their vision for the future and more importantly the actions they propose for our country to go forward and realise its full potential.We also need to realise that it is not only a matter for the government but there is an important role for the private sector and the whole community. If you asked me the two longer term issues foremost in my mind, they are education and the environment.

As we ponder the lies our government told us on Iraq – on WMDs, on why he went to war, on when he decided to go to war – here’s a speech John Faulkner, Labor’s Senate leader and chief questioner at the unthrown children/SIEV-X inquiry, gave to the Fabian Society in Melbourne tonight on the inquiry’s aftermath.

A Certain Maritime Incident – the aftermath

by John Faulkner

Introduction

In February 2002 the Labor Party, with the agreement of the minor parties in the Senate, established a Senate Select Committee to examine fully the children overboard incident. We wanted this inquiry, called the Certain Maritime Incident Committee or CMI Committee, to uncover the truth about the children overboard lie – the how, when and why of the Government’s deceit.

While the CMI Committee enabled us to investigate the children overboard lie, it also allowed us to scrutinise many aspects of the Howard Government’s asylum seeker policy.

Today, because of the work of the CMI Committee – especially the work of my colleagues Jacinta Collins and Peter Cook, we know a great deal more about the Government’s response to asylum seekers than otherwise would be the case. David Marr, who co-authored Dark Victory, believes that if it were not for the CMI Committee most of this information would not have been revealed to public scrutiny until 30 years after the event . The exhaustive cross-examination of witnesses would not have taken place.

The response to boat people or asylum seekers was the main focus of the Howard Government in the lead up to the last federal election. The Government’s strategy was based on politicising the asylum seeker issue for electoral advantage. It wasn’t just the Tampa episode, or the bald faced lies about children being thrown overboard, it was a systematic campaign to engender public fear about asylum seekers and the need to protect our borders against them at all costs.

But, what has interested me most of all about the Howard Government’s asylum seeker policy is the largely unknown policy to deter and disrupt people smugglers and asylum seekers in Indonesia – the so calleddisruption programme.

Tonight I want to focus on the disruption programme – the most clandestine part of the Howard Government’s people smuggling policy. Very substantial resources in the Australian Embassy in Jakarta have been used to support this policy and yet we still know little about the programme. What we do know raises serious questions that warrant serious answers.

CMI Committee – expansion of the terms of reference

It may surprise you to know that it was the Liberal Senators on the CMI Committee who wanted to expand the Committees’ terms of reference so that all aspects of the Government’s anti-people smuggling policy could be examined. Originally the CMI Committee was only going to look at the children overboard episode.

Labor agreed to their proposal. The Liberals thought this expansion would be politically beneficial. They thought they could expose the behaviour of desperate asylum seekers and “dehumanise” them. How wrong they were. I believe this was a real political own goal because it gave us a capacity to raise questions regarding the Tampa, SIEV-X and the Government’s disruption policy.

SIEV-X

While the Government has claimed that Operation Relex (which aims to deter asylum seeker vessels approaching Australia through constant sea and air surveillance between Australia and Indonesia) had a significant impact on deterring asylum seekers from taking risky voyages to Australia by boat, I’m sure the SIEV-X disaster also had a great impact.

The people smuggling vessel now referred to as SIEV-X was organised by people smuggler Abu Quassey. On the 19th October 2001, a day after SIEV-X set sail for Australia, the vessel suddenly sank. Three hundred and fifty three people, including 142 women and 146 children, drowned . After a night in the water, two fishing boats rescued just 44 survivors from SIEV-X.

The news that SIEV-X had sunk killing around 350 passengers received worldwide coverage. This coverage sent a clear message of the high risks of such a voyage.

Much has been written about the SIEV-X disaster since that time. The CMI Committee investigated why the Australian Defence Force, who were surveilling the area where SIEV-X sank, by air and by sea, did not sight the vessel.

Even the question of where SIEV-X sank has been extraordinarily difficult to nail down. Let’s examine the evidentiary record.

Two pieces of evidence support claims SIEV-X sank in Indonesian waters:

1. The Defence Department Operation Gaberdine/Op Relex report dated 23 October 2001 stated SIEV-X “is suspected to have sunk inside ID TS [Indonesian Territorial Seas]”; and

2. Defence Head of Staff Brigadier Millen at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta phoned through to Canberra on the 23rd October that SIEV-X “sunk in Indonesian territorial seas”.

Four other pieces of evidence support claims SIEV-X sank in International waters:

1. The People Smuggling taskforce notes from the 23 October 2001 state “Vessel likely to have been in international waters south of Java”;

2. A DFAT Cable dated 23 October 2001 indicates “The exact position of the vessel at the time of sinking is unknown but it is judged as no further south than 8 degrees south latitude on a direct line from Sunda Strait to Christmas Is”;

3. A DIMA Intelligence Note dated 23 October 2001 states “At about 1400 hours on Friday [19 October], when approximately 60 Nautical Miles south of the Sunda Strait, the boat began taking water and finally capsized and sank at about 1500 hours”; and

4. A report from the Harbourmaster’s office at Sundu Kelapa in North Jakarta dated 24 October 2001 indicates that the fishing boats rescued the survivors from SIEV-X in international waters.

Given this evidence how could John Howard have claimed during the election campaign that SIEV-X “sank in Indonesian waters, not in Australian waters. It sunk in Indonesian waters and apparently that is our fault” .

As far as the Australian Defence Force is concerned I am sure it would be in their interest to end the public debate over Operation Relex’s surveillance at the time of SIEV-X’s sinking. And the best way to do that is to have as much information on the public record as possible about the ADF’s operations.

I note the ADF worked assiduously to cooperate with the CMI Committee – even when the Government and Defence Minister Robert Hill were deliberately obstructive.

That said, and I want to make this clear, we have seen no evidence to support claims that the Australian Defence Force ignored the plight of those onboard SIEV-X. And without any evidence I will draw no such conclusions.

But Labor Senators will not shirk from seeking answers to questions on these issues. We have not done so in the past and we will certainly not do so if further questions arise.

Regardless, I do believe the circumstances surrounding the departure from Indonesia of SIEV-X warrant further and closer investigation.

SIEV-X survivors themselves have provided information about their voyage that raises serious concern.

Before SIEV-X departed it was very low in the water and horribly overcrowded, carrying four times the number of passengers a vessel of its size should carry . About 30 Indonesian police were present. They beat some of the passengers and forced asylum seekers to board at gunpoint. The police appeared to be actively involved in the people smuggling operation .

SIEV-X survivor Issam Ismail’s account is disturbing:

“The Indonesian Police were there. They were carrying automatic guns. They were so comfortable. They were the ones who gave the signals with their torches. Turning on the torch was a signal to send out people. Turning off the torch meant stop. That was how it was done. We saw them with our own eyes. They had weapons we had never seen before. The latest brands”.

It only took minutes for SIEV-X to sink. Bahram Khan, from Jalalabad in Afghanistan, said: “The hull sprang a hole. The mechanic could not fix it and the boat sank.”

On the 25 October 2001 Prime Minister Howard was reported to be seeking more information about whether the reports that Indonesian security personnel forced asylum seekers onto SIEV-X at gunpoint were true. Since then the Prime Minister has not made public what information, if any, he received about the situation surrounding the departure of SIEV-X.

SIEVX was not the only people smuggling vessel to get a send off from Indonesian authorities.

As journalist Lindsay Murdoch reported in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2001:

“Boats [from Indonesia] carrying hundreds of people have sunk, drowning all aboard. Some survivors say Indonesian authorities have, at times, helped push boats out to sea knowing they are not seaworthy.”

These boats include the KM Palapa which sank heading for the Australian coast. Those on board the KM Palapa were rescued by the Tampa, the Norwegian cargo ship. Passengers on the KM Palapa last year told a court case in Perth that the Indonesian National Police were involved in the people smuggling operation that organised the departure of their vessel from Indonesia .

Disruption

But there is an untold story of the Howard Government’s anti-people smuggling policy – the disruption programme – the policy to deter and disrupt people smugglers and asylum seekers from reaching Australia by boat from Indonesia.

Last year I was able to explore the Government’s disruption policy through the CMI Committee and at Senate Estimate hearings.

The people smuggling disruption programme can take a number of forms, for example through Australian officials informing people in Indonesia of the dangers and risks associated with people smuggling and the penalties they might face.

I have no problem with this at all – but there was a more active element.

The Australian Federal Police explained last year, in broad terms, that the primary objective of disruption is to:

“… prevent the departure of the vessel in the first instance, to deter or dissuade passengers from actually boarding a vessel.”

The Department of Immigration goes further, indicating that disruption involves the “interception at the actual point of attempting to continue their journey, either by sea or air”.

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty informed the CMI Committee that once the Indonesians are tasked to disrupt then the AFP must leave it in their hands “as to how best they do it” .

AFP witnesses at the CMI Committee could not categorically rule out whether, as a result of the people smuggling disruption program:

* fuel suppliers had been encouraged not to supply fuel to people smuggling vessels;

* food had not been provided to people smuggling vessels;

* sugar had been put in the fuel tank of a people smuggling vessel, or that;

* sand was put in the engine of a vessel .

But what is deeply concerning about the disruption program is that there appear to be no accountability mechanisms – nothing to ensure that Australia’s disruption policy does not lead to illegal or life threatening events, either directly or indirectly.

We still do not know if disruption extends to physical interference with vessels, nor do we know what consideration has been given to questions of maritime safety.

Last year AFP informant Kevin Enniss, who admitted to taking money from asylum seekers, also, according to Channel Nine’s Sunday programme, bragged that he had paid Indonesian locals to scuttle people smuggling boats with passengers onboard on four or five occasions. Mr Enniss claimed that boats were sunk close to land so everyone got off safely . Mr Enniss has since denied involvement in sabotaging vessels in Indonesia .

We do know a number of Australian agencies are involved in the People Smuggling Disruption Programme. Along with the Australian Federal Police – the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) and the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) all have a role.

Slowly but surely, details about Government funding and resources to support the disruption programme in Indonesia are coming to light.

Specifically in relation to ASIS, Dark Victory reports one Canberra source claimed that the Abu Quassey boat (SIEV-X) was a target of ASIS – Australia’s Foreign Intelligence Service – which by this stage had been instructed by the Australian Government to disrupt people smuggling operations in Indonesia .

Thanks to our questioning in Senate Committees we now know of:

* The establishment of the Canberra based Joint Agency People-Smuggling Strike Team, consisting of fifteen officers from the AFP and Immigration;

* The creation of a Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet led People Smuggling Task Force that met on a daily basis before the last election;

* A specific protocol between the Australian Federal Police and the Indonesian National Police to target people smuggling syndicates operating out of Indonesia;

* Two Immigration positions at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta created to primarily work on people smuggling matters;

* Two AFP agents working out of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta and reporting back to the people smuggling taskforce in Canberra on disruption activities, and

* An Inter-Agency Co-ordination Group on People Smuggling at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta involving the Ambassador and Foreign Affairs, Immigration, Australian Federal Police and Defence representatives. We know that disruption activities are a key focus of this group.

Minister’s knowledge of disruption?

Last year I began asking questions about Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock’s trip to Jakarta in June 2001 but received little information from any of the departments involved.

According to Dark Victory, when Mr Ruddock met with the Inter-Agency People Smuggling Group on the 13 June 2001 at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta he raised the issue of piracy, and why pirates were not targeting asylum seeker vessels.

Dark Victory sources claim that some present at the meeting thought Mr Ruddock might be “thinking of some covert action involving pirates”. AFP officer Leigh Dixon expressed frustration at Mr Ruddock’s line of questioning and eventually cut him off saying he was unaware of the actions of pirates.

Asked for a response to these allegations Mr Ruddock appeared to confirm the conversation about pirates to the authors of Dark Victory David Marr and Marian Wilkinson when he stated, and I quote:

“There had been a great deal of public comment on that topic around the time of several meetings I had during visits to Indonesia.”

Mr Ruddock also provided Marr and Wilkinson with a copy of an article dated 19th July 2001 about the issue of piracy. However this article explains little as it simply indicates that piracy was a growing problem in the region, and that pirates primarily target cargo ships not people smuggling vessels. I note the article was published a month after Mr Ruddock’s visit to the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, so it sheds no light on why he would have raised the issue of piracy at the Embassy meeting.

In fact a search for media articles about the issue of piracy before Mr Ruddock’s visit to Jakarta in June 2001 draws a blank.

It is unclear why Mr Ruddock raised the issue of piracy at the Jakarta meeting – it is clearly time for Mr Ruddock to explain himself.

According one of Wilkinson and Marr’s sources who attended the same meeting, Mr Ruddock also asked whether people smuggler boats could be stopped by physically interfering with them. Mr Ruddock allegedly asked in a joking tone: “Well could we interfere with the boats?” Apparently in response Federal Agent Dixon reminded Mr Ruddock of obligations under Australian law. The conversation ended when Ruddock laughed the matter off and said it was just a concept in the air.

Mr Ruddock has not said whether the issue of sabotage was raised at this meeting. Mr Ruddock has told David Marr and Marian Wilkinson: “I have no formal recollection of any of those discussions which I am prepared to discuss”. Again, Mr Ruddock should come clean and say what he knows, or knew, about any covert operations involving people smuggling vessels in Indonesia.

Since the publication of Dark Victory Commissioner Keelty has confirmed that AFP Officer Leigh Dixon, who was present at the June 2001 meeting, discussed this matter with his superiors. Commissioner Keelty has told a Senate Committee that when he heard about the June meeting in Jakarta involving Mr Ruddock he “expressed concern”.

Let me say I have serious concerns about what took place at that meeting on 13 June 2001 at our embassy in Jakarta. I can assure you we will continue to investigate what transpired at the meeting and what resulted from it.

In September 2001 the Indonesian Government cancelled the protocol on people smuggling between the Australian Federal Police and the Indonesian National Police. We still don’t know why the protocol was cancelled. I have been informed by highly placed sources that the cancellation was at least in part due to the Indonesian Government’s concerns about the disruption programme.

Despite the cancellation of the protocol, the Australian Federal Police and their Indonesian counterparts agreed that disruption activities could continue, on a case by case arrangement.

From documents tabled at the CMI Committee it is clear that such activities did continue after the protocol was cancelled. According to the Government’s People Smuggling Task Force notes on the 12 October, just a week before SIEV-X sank, the taskforce discussed ways of “beefing up” disruption activity in Indonesia. According to Commissioner Keelty this probably was an “operational call along the lines of: ‘The departure of the vessel is imminent; we’d better be doing everything we can possibly do'” to stop the vessel.”

What I want to know about the disruption program in Indonesia is what precisely Australian or Indonesian authorities were doing in order to disrupt vessels? What activities were acceptable or sanctioned; what were not? Where were the checks? What were the accountability measures? How can we be satisfied lives were not put at risk?

It is all very well for Australian authorities to assure us that everything done in Indonesia to disrupt people smuggling vessels was legal. But given that no accountability mechanisms appeared to be in place, how can we be sure?

I believe the only way we can be certain that nothing illegal or inappropriate has occurred under the auspices of the disruption program is through a full and independent judicial inquiry. I have consistently called for such an inquiry to be established. The CMI Committee in its final report also called for such an inquiry. Its establishment remains a high priority.

Australian Government focus after 11 September 2001

While the Howard Government was beefing up its disruption programme in Indonesia, the world was beginning to focus on the very real threat of terrorism after the attacks in America on September 11.

September 11 was more than just a wake up call to the nations of South East Asia. It became clear very quickly that al Qaeda was active in our region. In December 2001 the Singapore Government’s Internal Security Department arrested and detained 13 members of the al Qaeda-affiliated group Jemaah Islamiah who were planning to bomb a number of sites in Singapore possibly including the United States and Israeli Embassies and the Australian High Commission.

The Singapore High Commissioner Ashok Mirpuri, in a letter to the Australian Financial Review in April 2002 indicated “only the blind would have missed the increased religiosity and radicalism of Islam” in South East Asia and even his Government had been surprised to find that “jihad terrorism” could win converts in Singapore .

Australia’s intelligence effort in Jakarta

It is interesting to note that according to Dark Victory, while intelligence chiefs in Canberra after September 11 switched their focus and priority to the terrorist threat at home and abroad, Australia’s intelligence effort in Jakarta remained strongly focused on people smuggling. This was despite the warnings the United States Embassy in Jakarta gave to the Australian Embassy about the activities of al Qaeda in Indonesia.

Marian Wilkinson has claimed that there is a serious question mark over whether the Government gave the al-Qaeda threat in Indonesia the attention it demanded before the Bali bombings. An intelligence expert even told Wilkinson: “Those of us who believed the threat was there were called alarmists and pessimists, but we called ourselves realists.”

Research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University in Scotland, Rohan Gunaratna, has expressed similar concerns:

“Despite a dozen Australian citizens and residents having participated in JI and Al Qaeda training camps from Mindanao in the Philippines to Afghanistan, the Government’s assessments and operational agencies did not believe that the threat was ‘significant’ until the Bali bombings happened.”

Howard Government’s response to September 11

So there is an issue here, because although the Howard Government announced a number of counter terrorism initiatives after September 11 Australia’s focus in Indonesia appears to have remained well and truly on the electorally sensitive issue of people smuggling.

Well, could more have been done in the fight against terrorism in our region?

Let’s look at the record. Let’s compare the initiatives the Government has taken in our region on people smuggling to those it has taken in the fight against terrorism, particularly after September 11.

In 2000 the Howard Government signed a specific protocol under the existing MOU with Indonesia to “target people smuggling syndicates operating out of Indonesia”.

In 2002 Australia signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Indonesia to counter terrorism.

In February 2002 and in April 2003 Australia and Indonesia co-chaired a Regional Ministerial Conference on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime. In two to three years time there will be another regional conference on people smuggling.

In March 2003 Alexander Downer announced that the Howard Government would organise in the next year an ASEAN regional workshop on managing the consequences of a terrorist attack as well as arranging with the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific a regional conference on security issues including terrorism. However to date the Australian Government has not organised a regional conference specifically focused on fighting terrorism – despite Labor’s calls for one.

In early 2002 Australia created the new position of Ambassador for People Smuggling “to promote a coherent and effective international approach to combating people smuggling, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region”.

In early 2003, almost six months after the Bali Bombings, the Government created the new position of an Ambassador for Counter-Terrorism. Last weekend it was announced that the Counter-Terrorism Ambassador Nick Warner, who had only been in the job for a few months, would now lead the Australian intervention force in the Solomons. What does this mean for Mr Warner’s role as Ambassador for Counter-Terrorism?

Don’t forget that the Howard Government has tried to link the terrorism and asylum seeker issues. During the last election campaign the Howard Government made the false claim that asylum seekers arriving on boats might be terrorists.

It was the then Defence Minister Peter Reith who first made this outrageous claim in a blaze of publicity – without any evidence to support it at all.

In the final week of the 2001 election campaign John Howard told the public and I quote:

“I mean you have to be able to say that there is a possibility that some people having links with organisations that we don’t want in this country might use the path of an asylum seeker in order to get here.”

Again, there was no truth to this claim. As ASIO Director Dennis Richardson indicated last year, none of the illegal immigrants arriving in Australia by boat to date had “received an adverse security assessment in terms of posing a direct or indirect threat to Australia’s security”. Richardson debunked the idea at a conference in Hobart in May 2002 when he said:

“Why would people use the asylum seeker stream when they know they will be subject to mandatory detention?”

The Government’s claims that asylum seekers might be terrorists were really low rent politics from a low rent Government. What else would you expect from the same Government who were directing the Defence Department during the 2001 election not to take “personalising or humanising images” of asylum seekers . Put simply, suggesting asylum seekers might be terrorists was just another way to fudge the facts and debase the political process right at the most sensitive time of the electoral cycle.

Conclusion

When another asylum seeker boat arrived off the West Australian Coast a couple of weeks ago with about 50 Vietnamese people onboard seeking asylum, John Howard indicated that he was prepared to spend whatever money it took to deter boatpeople from arriving on the Australian mainland .

An awful lot of taxpayer’s dollars have already been spent. But have there been other costs?

What has been the cost of the Howard Government’s disruption programme in Indonesia – not just the financial cost?

I said recently in Parliament and I have no reason to change my view:

The issue of sabotage of people smugglers’ vessels has been canvassed by the AFP informant Kevin Enniss. I ask these questions: was Enniss involved in the sabotage of vessels? Were others involved in the sabotage of vessels? Do Australian ministers, officials or agencies have knowledge of such activities? And what about the vessel now known as SIEV-X, part of the people-smuggling operation of the notorious people smuggler Abu Quassey? That vessel set sail on 18 October 2001 and sank on 19 October 2001, drowning 353 people, including 142 women and 146 children. Were disruption activities directed against Abu Quassey? Did these involve SIEV-X?

I intend to keep asking questions until I find out. I intend to keep pressing for an independent judicial inquiry into these very serious matters.

Ladies and Gentleman, I hope you agree that although this issue may not be popular and although these matters may not win many votes, a serious Opposition cannot resile from pursuing them and holding the Howard Government and its Ministers accountable for their decisions and their actions.

Since the David Kelly scandal revolves around confidentiality of sources, here’s an edited transcript of an interview post-graduate law student Georgia Price did with me on the topic on May 16 this year. Media accountability gets a going over too.

***

Georgia: Have you ever given promises of confidentiality to sources before?

Margo: Yes.

Georgia: Do you adopt any particular methodologies in your work practices, in the notes that you take or anything like that, so that your sources can’t be discovered by anyone? Perhaps even to the stage where if there was any kind of court order to look at your notes that it would be impossible to trace them back to the source?

Margo: In matters of particular sensitivity where the leak could be considered a breach of the Crimes Act I have shredded cabinet submissions, so that if the police ask I just haven’t got it.

Georgia: Has pressure ever been applied to you by anyone to reveal a confidential source?

Margo: There was one case years ago when I got a cabinet submission. Crean was the Minister. It was, I think, a cabinet submission on something to do with training type stuff. It was one of those leaks that once it was made public they had to change their policy. They called in the Federal Police and I had to go and do an interview with the Federal Police, but I wouldn’t say they put pressure on me. They said ‘Where did you get that from’ and I said ‘I’m not telling you’, and they’d gone to the department and they’d worked out all these people in the department who had past connections to me, some of them whom I’d completely forgotten, and the police said to me ‘Do you know this person’ (I refused to comment.)

Georgia: Ok. Have you ever disclosed the identity of a confidential source?

Margo: To whom?

Georgia: To anyone in a professional capacity, I suppose. Anyone who asks for it –

Margo: Yes, I have.

Georgia: Yes, ok, and what were your considerations in disclosing the source.

Margo: I can’t remember any particular examples, but once or twice I have disclosed the identity of the source to my editor on the basis that I was trying to … it’s in cases where you’re writing something that’s a shock. For example if I wanted to write ‘The numbers are there for Mark Latham to challenge for the leadership’, Noone would think that. And I would disclose in the context of: “This story is cast-iron, the source will not be able to be revealed, so I’ll have to write “it is understood” or just write it as fact and I want the story on page one.’

Georgia: Right.

Margo: So it’s a reassurance for the editor that the story is well based.

Georgia: And did any consequences flow from you disclosing the source to your editor? Did anything ever happen?

Margo: No, it was disclosed on a confidential basis.

Georgia: Right, so it never went outside the publication, in other words.

Margo: No.

Georgia: Ok. Moving onto issues of journalistic ethics. Are you a member of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance?

Margo: Yes.

Georgia: Do you know about the protection of sources clause in the Code of Ethics of the Australian Journalists’ Association?

Margo: Not really, I know there is one. I just have my own. It’s just something you say to sources. I mean often you don’t even say that you won’t reveal your source to your source.

Georgia: Right.

Margo: It sort of depends on the relationship.

Georgia: So it’s not like they would make a formal-type request

Margo: Well, it’s understood. So in one sense it’s a matter of personal honour to fulfil a promise and in the broader professional sense it’s a cornerstone of the profession’s ability to achieve the results we’re there for which is to uncover the truth.

Georgia: Right.

Margo: God knows, there’s enough against us. You know, like we’re now against the machine, the establishment, the establishment’s machine, you know, the constant flow of journalists who, unforgivably in my view, go off to the other side and get paid double the money to snow you. We have many many impediments to doing a reasonable job and this is one of the few things we’ve got going for us. If you’re in a job where you are concerned with public policy or matters of public interest, it’s one of the things we’ve got going for us: the well-understood notion that we will not reveal our confidential sources to the extent of going to jail if that’s necessary.

Georgia: Right.

Margo: There is a downside to all this which worries me. Which is that – well an extreme case of it is – I don’t know if you read about this New York Times person –

Georgia: Yes, Jayson Blair.

Margo: That that can be used by unscrupulous or unprofessional journalists to cover for the fact that they might have gone further than what their source said or that they are running a line for sources. And, you know, in political journalism and police journalism in particular you can become captured by your sources, either deliberately or otherwise, so that you do lose an accountability mechanism by this obligation. This does worry me but I really can’t see any way out of it.

Georgia: What about rather than just perhaps misquoting a source or using information irresponsibly, what about the complete fabrication of sources? And then trying to pass that information off as anonymous? Have you ever known anything like that to happen?

Margo: Not personally, but it’s certainly something that could happen and that has been shown has happened, the use of made-up quotes.

Georgia: Yes, it’s actually something that the courts allude to quite a lot in the contempt of court cases that journalists are involved in: that they’re not really willing to extend the law any further than what it is at the moment because there are fears about the fabrication of sources.

Margo: Well, there are accountability issues.

Georgia: Ok. Do you think that there are sufficient disciplinary processes in place at the moment for journalists who, for example, breach their Code of Ethics in those kinds of situations like fabrication of sources or any other ethical breach?

Margo: Well, I mean, there is effectively no external accountability. I’ve written about this extensively. I’m actually an advocate of regulation.

Georgia: Are you?

Margo: Yes. Which is a very minority position.

Georgia: I’m actually, in the conclusion I’m coming to, I’m starting to lean a little bit more towards that.

Margo: I gave a speech (see Ethics overboard: How to promote integrity in the moment of choice) to an interesting group in NSW called the ‘Corruption Prevention Network’. It’s a group of public servants, basically auditors, across departments who do this informal networking thing basically because ethics is an issue at a stage where tokenistic measures are required to be taken. So you have an ethics officer in a department or corporation or something, but no one will take a scrap of notice of them so they form these networks to try and give each other moral support for an impossible duty.

I did the keynote for them last year and floated a proposal for better ethical accountability across the professions and included journalism in that. Now, I know journalism is not a profession – God knows what it is but it’s not a profession. However, just for the sake of this I included it as a profession. The approach I advocated (it’s just an idea, it’s nothing I’ve gone into great detail with, just meant to open the discussion) is that I do feel that self-regulation, of itself, is unworkable. And I think that’s been shown in the accountancy professions and the legal profession, surveying and journalism.

It is a recipe for cover-ups, looking after mates and putting things in the bottom drawer. So I thought it would be a good idea if the government had framework legislation which different professions would register under. There could be a body that’s elected, or community reps or whatever; there would be powers, disciplinary powers, but what you’re doing is setting up a framework. There would be no other government involvement, so that the membership of the board running it would be worked out by the profession – elected or appointed community reps. Their procedures would be their own etc etc but they would have power to enforce compliance. It would be, I think, particularly suited to journalism where the real problem conceptually is government regulation of the press, which is always a no-no because of what that means in democratic terms.

One of the key indicators of a society that is transforming from democracy to fascism or dictatorship is government control of the press. The exception in Australia was the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal which was established under the philosophy that a TV licence is a privilege. To earn continued use of that privilege you had to prove every three years that you were fit and proper and ethics came into it. I was a big supporter of that, mainly because it helped to get Alan Bond. But it also put Alan Jones and some of the more irresponsible people on the block and required them and their employers to justify some of their more extreme actions. But we all know what happened to that – Labor abolished that form of accountability and you’ll never get that back.

Georgia: So, did you envisage, for this body that you talk of which has certain powers, did you envisage compulsory membership to some kind of professional organisation for journalists? Such that the powers of such a body might extend to suspension, or fines in that particular

Margo: In theory I would, but that would never, ever happen. There’s particular difficulty with journalism in that it isn’t a profession. There is no problem making it compulsory for architects, accountants, lawyers, engineers and so on, because to call themselves that they have to have done specific courses and graduated in those courses and do all this training business. There’s no problem with every lawyer belonging to the Law Society. You’ve got to be admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of that jurisdiction to do so.

But with journalism, I mean I’m not trained! I was a lawyer. I had a career crisis early (luckily). When I was 27 I wrote to the Courier Mail and said ‘Can I be a cadet?’ and they wrote back and said yes. And I started work on Monday. So there’s nothing specific at all, anyone can do it, and of course the other thing is that some of the most powerful people in the media are proud to say they’re not journalists. John Laws, Alan Jones, and I don’t think any of the shock jocks are journalists apart from the guy at 3AW, Neil Mitchell. So, I mean, what do you do with this?

Georgia: Yes, you can’t just not allow them to broadcast.

Margo: Oh you can’t do that.

Georgia: That’s right.

Margo: So I take the approach that the former president of our union took, a guy called Tom Burton who is now managing editor of the Herald. When he was president his vision was to professionalise journalism through voluntary means, to transform the Alliance as far as it related to journalists into more of a professional association. So that to say that you’re a member of that is to say that there are certain guarantees you can make as a journalist, and that’s something I’m trying to follow through with on the Webdiary.

I’ve written a chapter for a book that’s coming out on media ethics edited by Catharine Lumby and I’ve done a chapter on online ethics. It was, you know, quite difficult trying to work out what Webdiary’s ethics were and how they differed from the ethics of hard copy journalism. And I’ve found that they’re different – totally different! You know, you have to adapt them. But as part of that process I thought I’ll put that chapter up and I’ll put up the Alliance Code of Ethics and the means for complaint; and the Herald’s Code of Ethics, and the means of reader’s complaint under that. Of course there are none – we still can’t work out how to enforce it because it’s such a minefield.

So I’ve just come up with my own method which is that if you think Webdiary has breached the Herald’s Code of Ethics then you can complain to my boss, the editor of the Herald online and send a copy to me and we will print your complaint and our reply online. So the idea is to say well, you know, ethics are my responsibility. Then I drafted a Webdiary Code of Ethics, which was what my duties were, and then what contributor’s duties are.

The interesting thing about interactivity is that contributors have no ethical duties in theory, but I have certain expectations and so should other readers, really. So, for example, ‘Please don’t plagiarise and if you do and I find out I will expose you on Webdiary and here are the reasons you shouldn’t plagiarise and it’s very easy not to.’ For example, if you really like an article, send me the link! And if you really like someone’s ideas, tell me that you like this idea and why.

As soon as I put up that chapter I’m going to put all this up and the risk of course is that you’ll get these mad bloody Palestinians or Israelis picking you up on every f#!king thing. So I’ve reserved the right to rule out frivolous complaints, but on the basis that I will run them and then say this is frivolous and I’m not going to say anymore. But they still get their say , and hopefully I’ll have a different link on the right-hand column where these complaints and answers can be stored so that people who come to Webdiary in the future and are interested in the approach it takes ethically can look at all the previous things that have been spoken about. Hopefully the archive builds precedents.

And the other thing I’m going to say is that Webdiary’s Code of Ethics is a draft Code and please have input into that. Now, most readers aren’t really interested in it at all. But I’m hoping to encourage that interest.

Georgia: Yes, rather than the interest of fanatical people who would seek out that of response.

Margo: It’s a bit hard for me, because I’m some kind of lightening rod for the right and some sort of symbol for the left so I’m bound to get some pretty rough things. But I stick to the view that I am very loathe to see ethics in a black letter law sense. I think that’s one of the really damaging things about black letter, because it means that it’s just an open invitation for lawyers and others to say, ‘What’s the way around that?”. Whereas I see ethics as statements of broad principles which underpin the professional’s role in society and they are therefore, (1) ideals to strive for, which by definition one will never meet completely, and (2) principles to apply in particular cases which can be very difficult to resolve.

So part of my idea for this sort of self-regulation body with a legislative framework is that the particular profession involved or members of it are encouraged to seek advisory opinions when they get a little knot in their stomach BEFORE before they act. And for those advisory opinions to be pro forma so that they don’t disclose the identity of people who seek advisory opinions, but to have a constant flow of – well one member had this issue and this is what we thought, and encourage discussion.

And then if there is a breach, unless it’s terrible thing like a basic conflict of interest where you’re ripping of people, then the first offence or whatever is a reprimand with reasons given. So what you’re trying to do there is create an atmosphere where ethics are routinely, as a matter of mainstream discourse for the profession, discussed and debated. Not something that, you know, you find out about later or you think, oh dear, I’ve f#!ked up that one or something hits you like a ton of bricks.

Ethics have been delegitimised, and I blame economic rationalism, but I blame economic rationalism for everything concerned with the collapse of values in society. Ethics are an impediment to making money, that’s what they are! And not only aren’t ethics valued in our current value system, but it is a rod on your back if you’ve got them! You’ll make much less money if you’ve got ethics.

Georgia: So just an obstacle –

Margo: Yeah! And people who’ve got ethics are stupid, or troublemakers, and bosses are terribly uncomfortable with ethical people in their organisation because it’s such a confrontation. You know, maybe you should think about that – ‘Oh god, help me! No thank you.’

Georgia: So maybe we need to be thinking about ethics more, as you said, before breaches occur. To bring them back as part of the everyday activities of – not only journalists but we could talk about any profession – and open discussion, rather than just examining when someone might have done something really bad. Try and bring them back into everyday work and life and try and anticipate ethical problems in the workplace as society develops and as we have these things, like online web diaries or online journalism.

Margo: It’s a way of distinguishing Webdiary from your regular web log. You know, I am under constraints that webloggers aren’t. And you know, ideally, I’d like to see in time web loggers who wish to be able to say that they comply an ethical code to get together and form an association and come up with their own ethical code. Which, naturally, I think creates confidence in readers. With Webdiary, people who read it know that if I make a mistake it will be corrected as soon as it comes to my attention, it’s as simple as that.

Georgia: I just wanted to quickly ask you a couple of questions about the law as it stands at the moment on protection of sources. NSW is the only jurisdiction at the moment that has a statutory privilege, so to speak, whereby journalists might be allowed to refuse to reveal their sources in court. The judge has to weigh up any possible harm flowing from disclosure of the source with the obvious public interest in having all information available to a court to properly administer justice.

Margo: Oh bullshit. The courts treat journalism with contempt. Basically all they care about is protecting corporate interests as far as I’m concerned. I have nothing but contempt for the courts in this regard. In particular defamation. And they can get f#!ked. No, honestly, they can get f!#ked, as far as I’m concerned.

Georgia: Yes, defamation is the usual arena in which this issue comes up because if someone is trying to sue someone and they don’t know who defames them –

Margo: What are the systems in place to stop the public knowing the truth? There’s the Crimes Act, there’s the threat of corporate retaliation, there are threats to free speech in this society fostered by the f!#king courts.

You see it in local government all the time, where some poor bastard says “I’d like to protest about this development application”. The next thing they know they get a writ in the mail from the bloody developer and they have to leave town because they’re poor and the developer’s rich. The judges can clean up they’re own act as far as I’m concerned before I’m going to hand over a decision about the correctness of my decision to them. I’m very happy to defy them, very happy. That was a wonderful breakthrough, Theophanus (the case where the High Court implied a right to free speech in the Constitution). And they’ve been retreating from it ever since, as you know.

Georgia: In 1994 there was a Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs which into the Rights and Obligations of the Media and one of the terms of reference for the inquiry was this idea of legislating in some way to provide a legal privilege for journalists against disclosing sources. The recommendations were never implemented. They promised a second report which was never released. The Senate Standing Committee basically said that when the change of government came in, it wasn’t an important enough issue to have any further work done on it.

Margo: I’m just so hardline on this. The idea of the government granting me a privilege, well I’m sorry, it’s already my privilege. This is terrible, I just get angrier and angrier. Yet I’m also very concerned about the accountability of journalists, as I’ve already explained.

I have talked about it quite a lot over the years, the need for accountability, and the reason is that I am very uncomfortable about the media, which is powerful there’s no doubt about it, holding politicians and public figures to account, sometimes in the most unfair and distorted ways, while having no accountability ourselves. I’m completely disgusted by the hypocrisy of it. Sickened. And I want accountability, but the journalist is not the person to target for accountability.

We work, you know, in a very corrupt system of media concentration and the collapse of the separation between editorial and advertising and the enormous pressures on us that result. The Code of Ethics of our union, and – if it’s done properly, as it has been in the Herald with the internal Herald Code, it’s actually a source of power for journalists to fight for ethical considerations, to fight the bosses – and to win. It’s a little bit of power that we have.

You know, the public can blame the journalists all they like but we are operating in a particular system here and I suppose that’s the reason that I get so bile driven at this idea of the courts granting us privileges. We’ve got very little to protect us as individual journalists trying to be ethical, and you know, they’re just not going to take it away. And this is where we come up trumps, that it is very difficult to send journalists to jail. You know, there aren’t many people that will stand up and say ‘Well I’m going to break the law then, judge!’

Georgia: There aren’t all that many cases, in fact, where journalists have gone to jail, only a handful. One of the things I’m interested in is, does that mean a) that these issues aren’t getting all the way to court all that frequently or b) that journalists are, somewhere along the line, just disclosing their sources. And it’s very hard to know because the cases where journalists may, indeed, disclose their sources aren’t reported.

Margo: What about that big case a few years ago involving the Herald where the plaintiff asked for an order and got one, or nearly one, for the journalist to reveal his source so that they could sue the source for defamation?

Why would they want that? Why wouldn’t they want to sue the newspaper for defamation? It’s because it’s not for defamation. It’s to create fear and loathing among people they want to exert power over. And this is the safety valve of journalism and the free press – there is always a chance for the whistleblower to get somewhere.

In these particular cases I do see the courts as tools of the establishment. I’m a lawyer and a great believer in the rule of law – I’d fight to the death for the rule of law on things like ASIO, I believe in a Bill of Rights, love the courts, all the rest of it, but they do rush towards allowing themselves to be abused when it comes to journalists.

The Courts hate journalists! And we hate them! And we’ve both got very good reason for it. They don’t respect us. And you know, if they don’t respect us, I’m not going to respect them when it comes to my professional role. They’ve got no right not to respect us. We are just as important. I believe in the fourth estate. The three great estates – there is a fourth and it is us and we do deserve respect. And when they start respecting us well they might get a nod as well when it comes to this area. It is war and it always has been, hasn’t it?

Georgia: Well –

Margo: You know ‘You guys don’t make enough checks’ and you know, even in Theophanus, you haven’t “taken all reasonable steps to check’, or ‘You should have looked at that and developed that line’. I mean, spend a day in my shoes. Try and get passed first base.

Georgia: That is another thing I’m looking at in my paper is this real hostility that seems to be there between journalists and the court at so many different levels.

Margo: They’ve got no idea! Their initial position is establishment. And I don’t really understand why they take that attitude – they think we’re all irresponsible twerps and all the rest of it. Yet I’m very uncomfortable with the fact that we aren’t accountable to them. How else can it be?

Georgia: That’s right, I mean, they have their authority and they hate people who stand up to that authority in any way, as journalists often have in the past, so –

Margo: Yes and in the Court’s favour is, what principles do we have for fairness? I mean, look at Rupert Murdoch! He ran a worldwide propaganda campaign for George Bush. How is he accountable for that? Not at all! I’ve heard how those poor journalists at the Tele, during the war, would have these funny little victories and they’d go out and drink all night and they’d say ‘I got that photo in and snuck that caption in’. It’s complicated.

But if there wasn’t a power struggle you’d be worried. If the media was beyond the law you’d be worried and if the law controlled the media you’d be worried.

Georgia: That’s right. But at the same time, the law does obviously impose a lot of restrictions on the media

Margo: Huge restrictions!

Georgia: And there should always be a level of restriction –

Margo: They pay very little regard to free speech, you know? That Pauline Pantsdown judgment, I was there for that because I was following Hanson in the ’98 campaign. I couldn’t believe it! I mean, that Justice De Jersey, who I knew as a barrister. Tony Fitzgerald wrote a fantastic paper on that judgment which he delivered to the Communications Law Centre later that year. It was the most brilliant legal paper on how f!#ked that judgment was. Then the High Court didn’t grant leave to appeal. Really!? So much for their commitment to free speech.

The very idea that Pauline Hanson, of all people, who had made so many lives hell – and I defended her right to free speech no matter bloody racist it was because she’s got a right to free speech – sues someone for satirising her! The song “I don’t like it’ was pretty harmless satire, I thought. It was funny, I danced to it.

Again that Queensland judgement gets back to the conservative establishment. I’ve been a refugee from Queensland for so long, and I thought when I went back to Brisbane, ‘Brisbane’s looking pretty cosmopolitan.’ Then you turn up in court and just go ‘What the f!#k is this!?’ You know? I don’t know if I’ve been very helpful, I didn’t think I’d get so stroppy.

Georgia: That’s alright, that’s good!

Margo: Because I’m sympathetic to accountability. But I just don’t trust the judges at all. They have nothing but contempt for our role. So, you know, I have nothing but contempt for their stance on this.

Georgia: Ok, well thank you.

Margo: Look, you know there’s a lot of irresponsible journalists. There are a lot of irresponsible lawyers, but the role, if you focus on the role then you focus on enhancing the viability and ethics of that role, not destroying the foundations of it. That’s the way I look at it. Better a corrupt and corruptible free press than a controlled press.

It depends on whether you’re optimistic about the human condition or not. I mean, while ever there’s free speech there’s always a chance for progress. Without free speech there’s no chance. There’s no chance for justice, there’s no chance for liberty. Free speech is a very important thing.

And the courts – that was the most wonderful judgment I’ve ever read, that Theophanus judgment. I remember Attorney-General Daryl Williams did a press conference when that case was up for reconsideration by the High Court in the Longe case. I asked him ‘How are you going to argue Lange given your belief in free speech?’ And he comes up with some crap about making it an exception to qualified privilege or something like that. So I said, ‘Your government does not have a commitment to free speech?’

Georgia: And what did he say?

Margo: Oh, he said ‘qualified privilege, blah blah, you don’t understand’ and I said ‘I understand very well, Daryl, I understand very well what you’re doing.’ And he just ran out. We haven’t spoken for ages.

I thought Theophanus was an absolute breakthrough to the cover that public figures have exploited for much too long in this country. And as the quid pro quo for that journalists, particularly political journalists,have got to accept that they’re public figures, too.

I’m appalled by the number of journalists who sue for defamation. It should never ever happen. To me that’s a betrayal of the profession. Richard Carlton sued, Steve Price sued, it’s a complete betrayal. We keep having it both ways. No! Not on! If we give it out we’ve gotta cop it. That’s the problem in the profession – that we won’t cop it.

The Press Council has private hearings – why? We run into court and argue about suppression orders and say everything’s gotta be public except when it comes to us. All the time! Wrong. Double standards. I’m constantly trying to think through how we can be accountable without government control. That’s the trick.

So I thought of the idea of incorporating it in a profession-wide thing, because you know, all the professions are corrupt ethically. Take HIH. I mean, a partner in Minters. Blake Dawson! Preferential payments! You know, Arthur Anderson! You know, the top names! The top partners in the top names! Everyone’s compromised here. So I thought, put journalism within that broad professional context and maybe that’s sort of a way through.

I want you to trust Webdiary. Trust is the ideal at the core of all professional ethics codes, which are guidelines for conduct which aim to achieve that ideal. I’m a journalist bound by two codes of ethics drafted to apply to traditional journalism. I’ve adapted the code to meet the responsibilities of running Webdiary, and set out guidelines for your contributions. These guidelines are always open for discussion and debate on Webdiary and can be clarified and added to as issues arise.

My obligations

1. I will strive to comply with the Media Alliance and Sydney Morning Herald codes of ethics, which will be in a prominent position on this site at all times.

2. In particular, I will correct errors of fact on Webdiary as soon as possible after they are brought to my attention and will disclose and explain any inadvertent breach of my ethical duties on Webdiary at the first available opportunity.

3. I will respond on Webdiary to all non-frivolous queries or complaints about my compliance with the codes and give a copy of queries or complaints to the online editor.

4. I will not belittle or show disrespect for any reader’s contributions I publish, or to any person who emails me.

5. I will do my utmost to ensure that Webdiary is a space to which all readers, whatever their views or style, feel safe to contribute. If you are offended by something in Webdiary, feel free to respond. I won’t publish any material which incites hatred.

6. I will let you know when archives have been changed except when changes do not alter their substance, for example corrections to spelling or grammar. I will amend archived Webdiary entries to include corrections of fact and advise you accordingly.

7. I won’t publish all publishable emails, but I will read every one unless there’s too many to reasonably do so in the time available. If I haven’t been able to read all emails, I’ll let you know on Webdiary.

8. My decisions on publication will be made in good faith, without bias towards those I agree with or am sympathetic towards.

9. I reserve the right to edit contributions.

10. I will publish most contributions made in good faith which are critical of Webdiary’s content or direction, or of me.

My expectations of you

As a journalist I’m bound by ethical codes; as a contributor you’re not. Still, there’s a few guidelines I’d like you to follow. David Davis, who’s read and contributed to Webdiary from its beginning and helped draft these guidelines, explains why. “Webdiary encourages free and open debate. The guidelines for contributors are not designed to curtail this, but to remind you that just as you live in a community in the real world, the same is true in the online world. Being part of a community carries many rights, but there are responsibilities. Rather than eroding the rights, these responsibilities actually protect them.”

1. If you don’t want to use your real name, use a nom de plume and briefly explain, for publication, why you don’t want to use your real name. Please send me your real name on a confidential basis if you choose to use a nom de plume. I will not publish attacks on other contributors unless your real name is used.  

2. Disclose affiliations which you think could reasonably be perceived to affect what you write. For example, if you are writing about politics, disclose your membership of a political party.

3. Don’t plagiarise, that is don’t use the ideas of others without telling us where they came from, and don’t copy the writings of others and pass them off as your own. There’s no need. Put quotes around the words of other people, and tell us who they are and where you got them from. If you’ve used online sources for your contributions, include the links so others can follow them up.

4. Be truthful. Don’t invent ‘facts’. If you’re caught out, expect to be corrected in Webdiary.

5. Robust debate is great, but don’t indulge in personal attacks on other contributors.

6. Write in the first person. Remember, we’re having a conversation here.

Complaints

I am bound by the code of ethics of the Media Alliance union, of which I am a member. The Alliance code follows. To complain about a breach of the code, contact the Media Alliance.

I am also bound by the Sydney Morning Herald code of ethics, published separately on Webdiary. To comment, question or complain about Webdiary’s ethics, email the editor of smh.com.au Stephen Hutcheon at smhonline@access.fairfax.com.au and/or me at mkingston@smh.com.au. I intend to set up an archive of reader emails and our responses, as well as responding to complaints directly.

MEDIA ALLIANCE CODE OF ETHICS

Respect for truth and the public’s right to information are fundamental principles of journalism. Journalists describe society to itself. They convey information, ideas and opinions, a privileged role. They search, disclose, record, question, entertain, suggest and remember. They inform citizens and animate democracy. They give a practical form to freedom of expression. Many journalists work in private enterprise, but all have these public responsibilities. They scrutinise power, but also exercise it, and should be accountable. Accountability engenders trust. Without trust, journalists do not fulfil their public responsibilities. MEAA members engaged in journalism commit themselves to

* Honesty

* Fairness

* Independence

* Respect for the rights of others

1. Report and interpret honestly, striving for accuracy, fairness and disclosure of all essential facts. Do not suppress relevant available facts, or give distorting emphasis. Do your utmost to give a fair opportunity for reply.

2. Do not place unnecessary emphasis on personal characteristics, including race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, age, sexual orientation, family relationships, religious belief, or physical or intellectual disability.

3. Aim to attribute information to its source. Where a source seeks anonymity, do not agree without first considering the sources motives and any alternative attributable source. Where confidences are accepted, respect them in all circumstances.

4. Do not allow personal interest, or any belief, commitment, payment, gift or benefit, to undermine your accuracy, fairness or independence.

5. Disclose conflicts of interest that affect, or could be seen to affect, the accuracy, fairness or independence of your journalism. Do not improperly use a journalistic position for personal gain.

6. Do not allow advertising or other commercial considerations to undermine accuracy, fairness or independence.

7. Do your utmost to ensure disclosure of any direct or indirect payment made for interviews, pictures, information or stories.

8. Use fair, responsible and honest means to obtain material. Identify yourself and your employer before obtaining any interview for publication or broadcast. Never exploit a persons vulnerability or ignorance of media practice.

9. Present pictures and sound which are true and accurate. Any manipulation likely to mislead should be disclosed.

10. Do not plagiarise.

11. Respect private grief and personal privacy. Journalists have the right to resist compulsion to intrude.

12. Do your utmost to achieve fair correction of errors.

Guidance Clause

Basic values often need interpretation and sometimes come into conflict. Ethical journalism requires conscientious decision-making in context. Only substantial advancement of the public interest or risk of substantial harm to people allows any standard to be overridden.

For a comprehensive discussion of Webdiary ethics, see Webdiary’s ethics