Aboriginal women have come out. They have admitted their terrible secret. We must respond. But how? Janice Judd at the University of California wrote to me last night: “I would like to make a contribution to the legal costs that the women who claim they have been raped by G. Clark incur. Please let me know where and when to send it.”

 

There is no fund for a civil action by the women against Clark, and since the disdain shown for their allegations by Geoff Clark and Pat O’Shane in her first incarnation, they have gone to ground.

 

It’s been a long and upsetting week, but next week we should really think about what can be done.

 

ATSIC must pull a plan together. At the very least there needs to be a safe house in every community.

 

The government and the opposition must commit to addressing the national emergency. Maybe the government should call an urgent summit or commission detailed options from the experts.

 

As citizens, maybe we could set up a fund.

 

 

Maybe our young Aboriginal leaders could tell us what needs to be done. Maybe the Aboriginal community needs to retire its current crop of leaders, and bring in fresh, young leaders with fresh ideas.

 

David Davis wrote last night, after reading yesterday’s diary: “I’m now lost for words. This is really heavy stuff – I can’t remember the last time I read something as disturbing as today’s Web Diary. It wasn’t just one contribution or just your comments – it was the whole thing. It’s painful but perhaps it engenders a greater sense of urgency and a greater level of honesty.”

 

I begin today’s diary with an edited speech by Danna Vale, the woman who went to the brink for Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory subject to mandatory sentencing for theft and has persistently urged John Howard to apologise to the stolen generations. She was a juvenile justice lawyer before winning the middle class Sydney seat of Hughes in 1996 for the Liberal Party. Last year, she told Parliament about the Queensland report on the violence which is only now making headlines. Her speech was unreported. ATSIC was silent on the report.

 

Thank you to contributors this week for sticking with the issues arising from this story. Nothing in it is black and white.

 

Danna Vale

 

Speech to Parliament, June 7, 2000

 

Today, regretfully, I rise to speak of the unspeakable. I will speak not just of matters which are politically incorrect but of matters against which many of us turn our faces and block our ears because we just do not want to know.

 

There is a war zone in Australia today that is more dangerous than any battlefield. It exists in many of our indigenous communities, particularly in the remote and rural regions of Australia, but of course it is not exclusive to those communities.

 

I was shocked to read details of this war zone in the recent report of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Task Force on Violence, which reported to the Queensland parliament last December…

 

What impressed me was that the task force constantly asked themselves three questions: can we possibly do justice to the great human suffering and tragedy in the stories we were given? Can we reasonably write of the courage and resilience we have observed and found? Do we have the skills to make sense of this senselessness so that others will understand what we are trying to say? They struggled for words until the decision was made to let people tell their own stories with as little interpretation as possible. I have adopted the same principle in speaking to the report.

 

It is relatively unknown in mainstream Australia that in some of our indigenous communities violence and sexual abuse have reached a crisis point. While the source of this violence can be traced to the impact of colonial history – with the consequences of dispossession and marginalisation, the introduction of alcohol, unemployment and poor education – it matters little to the innocent women and children who are being bashed, raped, mutilated and murdered on an appallingly large scale.

 

It is not an exaggeration to describe the lives of many women, children and elderly people as lives of unpredictable and frequent mayhem. Many women and children in these communities are being deliberately ignored by those who have a moral duty to protect them. There is only minimum intervention, which may or may not occur.

 

In my opinion, such neglect is worse than the policies that led to the Bringing Them Home report because the policies of the past were at least initially motivated by good intentions. The motivation today is silence. As the report itself points out, Silence is the language of complicity.

 

I wish to take the time to record my respect and regard for the personal courage, strength of character and scholarship of Boni Robertson, the chairperson of the task force, and for her fellow members, who ‘shared the agony, grief and at times the triumphs of the many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who have survived incredible ordeals of violence’. These fine Australian women dared to bring such ordeals into the light so that we all may face the truth together and share in the eradication of atrocity and indifference, which affect the most powerless amongst us.

 

It seems to me that the time has come to put aside fears of being politically and culturally intrusive and to do what is necessary to protect and support the women and children in these communities. It can no longer be dismissed as the Aboriginal way. Both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians must work together to help eradicate the violence.

 

There are few services available in isolated communities to deal with these problems, and the lack of appropriate services exacerbates stress and the likelihood of continued violence. Due to isolation and lack of skills, the innocent cannot escape. They must endure the suffering.

 

In some communities, at least one member of each family is likely to become a victim of violence. Many of the victims believe that the services intended for their protection are in reality increasing their violation.

 

There is no doubt that the impact of history and forced acculturation has been a key factor that has led to the present tragedy. It is crystal clear that the decades spent focusing on the problems of the past have not been productive in protecting any of the women and children who live out their lives in these communities.

 

These are fellow Australians whose lifestyle reality is a continuum of bashings, rapes, mutilation and violent death, and our silence and indifference convicts the rest of us as accomplices. Appalling acts of physical brutality and sexual violence are being perpetrated within some families and across the communities to a degree previously unknown in indigenous life. There are women, children and other older people living in a constant state of despair and desperation…

 

The report of the ATSI Women’s Task Force reveals that not only has there been a significant increase in the number of offences recorded in indigenous communities but the level of severity in such crimes has increased.

 

Violence is now overt. Murders, bashings and rapes, including sexual violence against children, have reached epidemic proportions, with both indigenous and non-indigenous people being perpetrators.

 

It is alarming to note that almost half of the female hospital admissions for intentional injury are indigenous women. We should be alarmed to learn that indigenous children are five to eight times more likely than other children to be the subject of abuse or neglect.

 

One of the reasons I sat up and took notice of this report was that it contained the views of ordinary indigenous people, whom you never hear on radio or television. It was coming from their present, real life experiences, undistorted by ideology or political correctness.

 

Misused authority, like the sly grog trade, assists violence in these communities. There is reluctance on the part of authorities to enforce regulations and to carry out their duties. The result is the abuse and violence perpetrated upon innocent indigenous women, children and older members of the community.

 

The extent of this unspeakable violence is being hidden. The task force reports that the number of violent offences is much higher than the officially recorded data. In all the consultations, there was an obvious reluctance to talk about sexual assaults. The task force estimates that 88 per cent of rapes go unreported.

 

One of the informants to the task force said: “I got a call out on the weekend to see a seventeen-year-old mother who had been tied to the bed and repeatedly raped by three men. She was raped within reach of her three-year-old child, and still did not press charges. What do you do? Fear has immobilised many people from taking action while others have accepted it as normal behaviour because they have not been able to get help when they have tried.”

 

This reluctance is driven by fear of reprisals or shame, because of the nature of the attacks. As well, it appears that the sexual abuse of young males is increasing and, because of the hidden nature of male to male sexual attacks, it goes unreported. Despite this, violent and sexual offences and breaches of domestic orders for ATSI offenders in Queensland increased from 664 in 1994 to 1075 in 1998.

 

The rate of sexual abuse among young girls who ultimately became involved with the criminal justice system is between 70 per cent and 80 per cent. In one state, it is claimed by the Aboriginal and Islander child-care agency that 50 per cent of children within the court system in the region were victims of incest. It is time to end the taboo on discussing this form of sexual atrocity. If we do not face it, it will never be eradicated.

 

Alarmingly, this report states: “… sexual abuse is an inadequate term for the incidence of horrific sexual offences committed against young boys and girls in a number of community locations in Queensland over the last few years.”

 

You can hear the women and children weeping in the trauma chronicled in this report. One informant poignantly explained: “Because of the social isolation and emotional deprivation many Indigenous families experience, the youth and the children are vulnerable to ongoing abuse and violence from both inside and outside the Communities. Many Indigenous young people are searching for love, emotional security, a sense of belonging, a parental figure, and escape from the dysfunctional home or Community. They want to enjoy the things that a limited income cannot buy, or to gain warmth and acceptance from others. Their deprived situation puts them in a position where they may attract the attention of sinister elements. Many Indigenous children are growing up in a disabling environment where they are vulnerable to great harm. This is a matter that warrants urgent attention and investigation if there is to be a positive future for the next generation.”

 

It is recorded that that type of sexual assault has become worse because of the recent widespread availability of pornographic videos. Together with alcohol and illicit drugs, the task force identified that the pornographic videos are creating deformed male socialisation. It was explicitly reported to the task force: “The incidence of sexual violence is rising and is in a direct relationship to negative and deformed male socialisation associated with alcohol and other drug misuse, and the prevalence of pornographic videos in some communities.”

 

The link between pornographic videos and indigenous child sexual abuse has been known for some time. The Aboriginal Coordinating Council brought it to the attention of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991. Since then, access to pornographic videos no longer trickles into indigenous communities. It is now a veritable tsunami.

 

It seems that access to pornographic videos has become a common factor in a new wave of sexual crimes, including child sexual assault on other children. While there are many factors that together fuel sexual crime, the recent widespread availability of pornographic videos is being seen more and more to be the trigger for those crimes across Australia.

 

This is the case whether it is in Far North Queensland or in the white communities in the respectable outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne. According to the task force report, cash-on-delivery orders of $4,000 to $5,000 worth of pornographic videos have been sent into Cape communities. It is no wonder that one community, with a history of pornographic video usage, has the highest rate of men in prison for sexual offences.

 

A lot has been written and said about the violence of the past but, frankly, it is the violence of the present that should rightly concern us here in the parliament of the nation. … Since 1990, indigenous deaths from domestic violence have been almost 30 per cent higher nationally than indigenous deaths in custody for the same period.

 

The National Committee on Violence reported to the Australian government that in Queensland Aboriginal reserves the homicide rate for the 17 communities under review was 39.6 per 100,000, which is more than 10 times the Australian national homicide rate. Over a three-year period in South Australia, Aborigines-who constitute approximately one per cent of the population-constituted 10 per cent of that state’s homicide victims. The Northern Territory police advise that, in 1987, Aboriginal females were victims of 70 per cent of total deaths involving chargeable offences.

 

Members of the task force were advised that, while some indigenous people in these remote communities do not experience violence, there are others whose daily lives are marked by its constant presence. The harsh reality is that many families in remote communities are now trapped in environments where deviance and atrocities have become accepted as normal behaviour. As a result, deviance and atrocities form an integral part of the children’s socialisation.

 

This is a hopeless state of affairs. It must be fully and effectively addressed, and it is up to us here in this House to help address the violence. It seems to me to be pointless to speak of reconciliation unless we can bring the people of these isolated communities into the same Australia that the majority of us share. Otherwise, reconciliation will do nothing for these Australian families. It will be but a hollow word and an empty promise.

 

I applaud the fact that the government is taking positive steps to address this spiralling and appalling violence amongst indigenous families. The Howard coalition government has provided $6 million over four years for an Indigenous Family Violence Grants program under the Partnerships Against Domestic Violence initiative.

 

These grants will provide practical and flexible support for grassroots projects and will test new approaches to addressing violence in indigenous communities. This funding will support community based organisations to develop innovative ways of reducing and preventing family violence in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. It will also support projects with a holistic approach so that the social, emotional and cultural wellbeing of the whole community will be addressed to increase the long-term capacity of communities to respond to family violence.

 

As difficult and as complex as this problem is, there is much to be done in developing community strategies that focus on healing the whole community. In particular, indigenous men need to help to restore to themselves a value system that protects the vulnerable in their family and community rather than abuses and exploits them. Special programs are needed to help treat sexually traumatised children in order to break the cycle of the abused becoming the abuser.

 

The most pressing problem advanced by the report was the influence of alcohol. Alcohol misuse has a devastating effect on family life by precipitating domestic violence and sexual abuse amongst members of the community.

Whilst there are many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who remain responsible social drinkers, there are many others who have a serious problem with alcohol which has been identified as a major trigger for violence.

 

The introduction to alcohol is a legacy from the earliest colonial days. It has become a curse in these remote communities. There is a desperate, urgent need for culturally relevant programs to address the destruction of alcoholic abuse.

 

We cannot ignore this human tragedy any longer. For too long there has been a lack of violence targeted services, especially perpetrator education programs, and it must be recognised that this need also must be addressed. It will take a long time for conditions to begin to improve – probably generations. There is also a desperate need for safe haven accommodation for the vulnerable women and children.

 

The report is as traumatic as it is comprehensive of the pain of daily existence experienced by these neglected Australians. Somehow we must help. But first of all we must understand their pain.

 

The poignant words of one contributor from Central Queensland attempt to inform us. I quote: “If they want to help us heal and to stop the violence that we are seeing, then we must all go back to the beginning and help some of our people start again for it is those people who are stuck in a vacuum where they are now adults, but there is a small and vulnerable child, confused and abused in all manners, that is lurking deep within.”

 

“The trouble is that this situation may describe too many of us. Everyone I have spoken to has been affected by the process of being taken away, being brought up on a mission or having suffered some form of discrimination or abuse at the hands of authoritative figures either in the schools, when you go to get a job or just by watching what has happened to your family.”

 

“You can’t experience these sorts of pain and not expect some of it to be retained in the young mind. I think that is where much of this violence is coming from, unresolved conflict which has been allowed to fester within and with no counselling available for many years, the individual has often resorted to other means for release, ie., alcohol which encourages other difficulties to surface which in some cases is abusive and aggressive behaviour which can act as an agent for unresolved and pent-up feelings that have no other form of release.”

 

I think there is a lot of truth in those words. But it is now time for us as a nation to help these Australian communities to overcome the violence. They have suffered enough and they cannot help themselves on their own.

 

During Corroboree 2000 we saw a real warmth in the goodwill expressed by the vast majority of ordinary Australians across the nation. This real warmth expressed extended towards the personal pain endured by our fellow indigenous families. Many truly wish for reconciliation.

 

By working together to help these remote Australian communities, we can provide an important step in the healing journey because we have no right to enjoy the legacy of being an Australian unless each and every Australian shares in the bounty together.

 

David Eastwood

 

Congratulations on diving head first into one of our largest taboos – criticising the Aboriginal community – and the meatiest debate in years. I’m already blown away by the quality of your and your contributors material on the Clark/O’Shane/Rape and Violence issue. It’s truly exciting watching this unfold. When did that last happen in politics?

 

I’ll confess I’m no expert on reconciliation, I know little about the Aboriginal nation and its issues, but I’m interested, as a “logical reconciliationist”, to see the perspective from some pundits and scribes that this episode will set the cause of reconciliation back.

 

I’m not sure I agree. Surely the open public airing, debate and analysis of what appears to be a long hidden problem in the Aboriginal community can only serve to broaden our understanding of the real plight this section of our community faces, and boost our collective empathy towards this community?

 

As this issue takes its course its hard to believe some major action will not eventuate, and it’s even conceivable to me that it may become an election issue.We sure need one in today’s political vacuum.

 

I’m sure something good will come of this, eventually.

 

Brendan

 

In response to Ken McAlpine and your response to him, I agree that the gulf between Aboriginal and white experiences is so great that it makes almost anything one might say trite and patronising.

 

I don’t like the term reconciliation, but I do think that the most urgent task facing Australia is understanding our history, exploring the meaning of our silence and forgetting, and working out how we have damaged ourselves as a culture because of our spiritual and imaginative failures. The key one is our failure to respond to the challenge of the Aboriginal experience. Only when that happens will reconciliation become possible.

 

But any talk of reconciliation is patronising unless there is a genuine dialogue, with all the risk this implies. Australia is not a long term prospect unless we take this risk and try to create a new sort of society. Why should we matter in the bigger world if we are too timid to try and understand ourselves and create something new?

 

I also don’t see how racism and sexism can be separated. Hierarchies always diminish and humiliate and someone is always at the bottom. How can anyone argue against racism and implicitly condone sexism? Both represent a diminishment of one’s own and another person’s humanity. Both take you to the same place – degradation and humiliation, and you can’t leave either behind without rejecting both.

 

Andrew Cave in Kuraby

 

What a dilemma for the company of columnists singlehandedly battling the forces of PC from their swivel chairs.

 

Do they gleefully leap upon the opportunity to kick all Aborigines for being of the same race as Geoff Clark. Do they fall upon that class chatterer of the chattering classes Margo Kingston for supporting the publishing of the allegations? Will they try a contortion of McGuinness-esque complexity and blame the Labor Left as well?

 

For my money, I agree that there is considerable misogyny among Aboriginal men. Unfortunately, I have seen much the same from white males of a similar background. Against that there is a considerable body of Aboriginal and white men who are not misogynists.

 

From your statements one could easily gain the impression that to be Aboriginal is to be violent, alcoholic and unemployed. But of course, most Aboriginal people work for a living and most are not reliant on welfare. Just like most other Australians, most Aborigines are also not particularly interested in the political process and are not involved in the organisations. If an Aboriginal family lives in the suburbs and dad has held the same job for the past 20 years (and there are many who do and have), their story is not going to be raised in the media. (“SHOCK: Aboriginal family entirely normal” is not a headline to move many papers or hearts).

 

In the responses in Web Diary and in your chat with P Adams on Tuesday there has seemed to be a slight note of hysteria creeping in. Things are not as bad as all that, nor does “the Aboriginal problem” have to be solved before the year is out. You don’t change many important things in 2 years or 10. You don’t turn around 100 years of active spite and benign neglect in 20 years. Keep pushing the point and ignore the doomsayers.

 

To quote our favourite economist – GIT (Give it Time.)

 

 

Andrew Elder

 

The actions of Geoff Clark and ATSIC brings out the patronising (but no less pressing) question of whether the Aborigines can run their own affairs. From the latest eruption we see fully exposed one of the vulnerabilities in our national life.

 

The old certainty of powerful whites over powerless Aborigines is our default option. When Hanson and others claim that Aborigines were “happy” to accept what little they were given by White Australia, they don’t mean “happy” in the sense of true inner joy and satisfaction; they mean that they support the only clearly understandable and practicable relationship in existence.

 

Many of us want a truly clear and practical progressive ethos that enables Aborigines to have both the social and economic opportunities open to other Australians, while enabling them to live as a community shaped by their choices.

 

There is no firm evidence of such an ethos in race relations today; there is much earnest mental groping toward the realisation of such an ethos, much spirited discussion an amount of taxpayer funds devoted toward the realisation of a progressive ethos in race relations.

 

What certainties have arisen over the last few weeks? That all accusers in rape cases are untrustworthy, or none are? That Pat O’Shane is an Aboriginal leader, or she isn’t? That Geoff Clark is a beneficiary of our politico-legal system, or a victim of it? The old certainties can look better and better in the face of this maelstrom, even before you start the full-scale romanticising of the past.

 

In the absence of a clear progressive way of working we take an open, liberal approach that may allow a progressive ethos to take shape, the work of many hands (and not just plastic ones stuck in a lawn). The current absence of a satisfactory, practical model of race relations gives Hanson and other reactionaries satisfaction that is not due to them; they sneer at “talk shops” (like this one!) and believe that the old order can be reimposed by sheer force of will.

 

The oldest conceit of the reactionaries is that democracy and compromise is weakness. Having denigrated open discussion, they can shut it down further by demonising individuals within the debate. They knock down “straw men” in the absence of a clear alternative paradigm, which discourages the committed striving toward an unrealised ideal.

 

When the media focuses on the bloodsport rather than the issues behind any given conflict, they accept the assumptions of the reactionaries. If we had more light than heat cast on reportage and analysis of Aboriginal issues we would have a better chance at achieving a true, deep reconciliation.

 

We should be less shy in demanding such stories. We should defend the slow process of consideration and deliberation. We should give more credit than we have to the small successes that light up this vast expanse of failure. We identify the straw men before reactionaries can take a decent swing at them.

 

The weaknesses of liberalism lie in its preference for compromise, its fawning and cringing in the face of confrontation. Reactionaries know this, and believe that glossing over the old certainties is better than taking a chance with uncertainty.

 

In this debate as in so many others, progressives need to show that deep thought and wide-ranging debate provides a foundation for our future that is far stronger than the crumbling, glossed over “certainties” of old. Stand up for the aims, stand up for the process, and know that the reactionaries can only play their poor hand if you don’t call their bluff.

 

Never mind the heat, it’s the endurance that counts. So much is possible if we insist upon good and wide-ranging discussion: a republic, ameliorating the digital divide, all these and so much is possible if only we defend the slow, earnest deliberation and the small steps taken toward reconciliation.

 

 

David Palmer

 

Having moved here from the US in 1992 – and now a citizen – I’m quite amazed at the problem of libel law and the media in Australia – as if anyone who says anything critical of powerful figures will be sued. Perhaps this is an opening wedge to reforming these laws and the legal pattern around it.

 

On the “race” vs. “gender” issue, I’m reminded of what happened in the U.S. during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings by the U.S. Senate. Thomas was up for the Supreme Court, and Anita Hill was brought forward as a witness that he had sexually harassed her on the job. Thomas was no ordinary bureaucrat – he had responsibility for overseeing the most important agency in the U.S. – the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) which handled complaints of racial and sexual discrimination in employment. Hill was his personal legal assistant.

 

Americans were glued to the TV, and the hearings ran live for a number of days. At the time I worked at the George Meany Center for Labor Studies in Washington D.C. and everyone stopped work to hear Hill testify. The straw poll among all of us – “progressive” educators who were a fair mix of men, women, black and white? All the women all believed her and the men were split

I (being of white/Anglo background – not really an “identity” for me) believed Hill – it seemed obvious. In the larger black community, a majority supported Thomas and considered Hill was betraying her people. But a minority of African Americans, including most black leaders (Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus among them), supported her and opposed Thomas.

 

At that time people just didn’t want to talk about sexual harassment and abuse if it was in the black community – although many community activists did of course. Now the whole situation has changed – and there’s considerable awareness of the need to address black women’s issues and issues of harassment regardless of where they are.

 

Unfortunately you’d have no idea of this if you listened to the gansta rap from the US now hugely popular among young teenage Australia males. But back in 1990, when this issue was something you just couldn’t bring up in some circles people brought it up anyway.

 

One comparison with Clark and Thomas that intrigues me (keeping in mind they are very different people – with very different political viewpoints – one to the left, the other to the far right): both claimed they were “tried” and “convicted” in public, though not in a court of law.

 

A newspaper, however, is not a court of law – nor is a U.S. Senate committee that is conducting a confirmation hearing. The public, however, is misled into thinking that these men have in fact been “tried”. In part this demonstrates not only the ignorance of the public regarding the nature of the courts – it also shows that public figures encourage this misconception.

 

Just as background – my criticisms do not come from someone who is not sympathetic to the cause of Aboriginal people. I recently published a feature article in the Overland journal, entitled “Injustice in Black and White,” addressing in part the problem of backward government policies toward Aboriginal people.

 

This piece targetted the “human rights crisis” in Australia, as we’ve seen recently in mandatory sentencing, badly run and ill-conceived detention centres for illegal immigrants, and the Howard government’s non-cooperation with the U.N. human rights committee.

 

At the same time made the point that Australia’s “human rights crisis” does not necessarily divide along typical “left/right” or “Labor/Liberal” lines – it is complex and cuts across all previous stereotypes. The same can be said about the current controversy with ATSIC and Mr Clark’s credibility as its leader.

 

One last thought. The issue of sexual abuse and sexual harassment is not just one confined to Aboriginal communities and families – it is Australia-wide and affects every community regardless of ethnic background. Perhaps the discussion needs to be broadened – including the media-led reporting at the moment. Such a discussion can only be beneficial in the long run, and maybe neglecting it is part of the crime.

 

Brian Bahnisch

 

I did not want to enter the lists again (Brian debuted in The sound of values clashing) but it is hard to stay out.

 

Four decades ago Abraham Maslow identified safety, sustenance and shelter as basic needs for all humans. In a civilised social democracy these needs translate easily into rights. And basic means basic and irreducible. No one should have to trade one for the other, even as an interim strategy.

 

Rape is a horrible crime from which every-one should be safe. On this topic Marea Donnelly’s article in Tuesday’s Sydney Morning Herald was truly shocking. Quoting official figures she wrote that only 15 per cent of cases were reported to the police. Of these, charges were only laid in 22 per cent of cases. Of these, 30 per cent were convicted of sexual assault and 12 per cent convicted of a lesser charge. That means a rapist is convicted a little more than one per cent of the time. Marea Donnelly concludes that sexual assault has been effectively decriminalised.

 

In a civilised social democracy where freedom is valued, the State should see that every-one within it’s borders is safe. Further, the State should not only see that the basic needs of its inhabitants are met, it should nurture and support them at least to the extent that all have reasonable opportunities to pursue higher needs. (Here it is worth noting that the economic theories underlying economic rationalism deem that the second helping of caviar for a rich man has the same status in the market system as the basic meal for the starving).

 

In the case of the basic needs, many Aborigines and others in our community, the marginalised and the powerless, there has been a clear case of market failure. The market society has no use for the poor. This properly is a concern for all of us, especially our government.

 

Initially I thought it appalling that Pat O’Shane feels that concern for sexual abuse and violence needs to be suppressed or given a lower priority while the greater evil of racism is addressed. Then I thought it is appalling that she and others should feel the need to make such a choice.

 

We have had enough cheap shots at feminism and feminists for a while. Where misogyny exists and is manifested in cruel acts we are all diminished. Similarly, many of us think the male role in modern (postmodern?) society is in trouble. This harms women also, and needs to be addressed by the concern, understanding and action of both sexes.

 

Overall I agree with David Davis (in The sound of values clashing) that this controversy could be a marker. In the end even Pat O’Shane’s anger may serve a useful purpose, as it certainly gave the whole thing legs. It all depends on what we all do from here on.

 

Ken McAlpine (Webdiary yesterday) has thrown an amazing hand grenade into the works. I can’t go all the way with him. To broaden the debate further, we are all standing in it as late capitalism sucks meaning out of our lives. It is becoming ever more difficult to construct a life, given this lack of meaning and growing uncertainty. Some of us are up to our ankles in it, some up to our knees and some up to our necks.

 

By and large the Aborigines are in so deep they have lost their footing. I repeat, capitalism has no use for the poor in this country. The reserve labour supply is now elsewhere in developing countries. We tell big business it sucks, so increasingly they are leaving. CSR is the latest to say they’re off to where the action is. We can’t, we’re stuck.

 

But on this website we are trying to construct a bit of meaning so we can understand the nature and the extent of the problems that face us. It is what we do now that counts, and history shows that it is not possible to say when turning points are reached.

Ken McAlpine is a very occasional contributor who always makes me sit up straight. Last time (in Feral admission) he chastised me for letting antipathy to Kim Beazley cloud the big picture of whether Labor or Liberal was best to rule us. Today, he’s at it again with a depressing piece with a ring of truth.

 

“This is an awful business. This supposed issue of rape and reconciliation has made a lot of people (particularly at Fairfax, and including you) make what they probably think is a very big judgment call, but in the end it is all just a sideshow in a bigger game.

 

What the entire Clark/Fairfax/O’Shane media circus has done is rip any credibility out from underneath those who supposedly drive the reconciliation process. But it is only a small piece in the puzzle. I have long thought that the “reconciliation process” is an oxymoron akin to the Middle East peace “process” – there is no process at all, just a lot of set piece demonstrations, presentations, shows of support, patronising essays, reactionary statements, funding cuts, power plays and exploitation of stereotypes.

 

The truth is that Aboriginal reconciliation is dead, it was probably never really alive, and very little has changed over the last 25 years despite all the fuss. Reconciliation was a political issue from its origins in the late 1960s and will never change. It is not a popular movement at all, despite the mumblings to the contrary by people like Sir Gustav Nossal and Ray Martin.

 

John Howard’s replacement of Paul Keating in 1996 is probably the best example of what I am talking about. Keating talked a bit too much about reconciliation for the comfort of most people in Australia and John Howard promised to govern “for all of us” (the subtext being of course that he would not bother to look after blacks, gays, immigrants and feminists like Keating had tried to do). And Howard won in a landslide.

 

White people do not properly understand Aborigines enough to save them and I see it as inevitable that the process of wiping out the Aboriginal race that began over 200 years ago will soon be complete, despite the well-intentioned hiatus that began in the late 1960s.

 

It is very depressing, but my view is that white people have already done far too much damage to Aborigines for them to survive past perhaps the year 2050. We have put alcohol, tobacco and petrol into their society and left it to fester there for decades upon decades. Yet in the meantime we have denied them the health benefits and infrastructure that allows white society to subsist despite a high level of abuse of these substances in our culture. And to top it off we jail their kids if they commit even the most minor crimes. Quite often they kill themselves in jail, which makes them cheaper to deal with than other prisoners (apart from when a royal commission is called and a few tough questions get asked).

 

Deep down, not enough white people do not care enough about Aborigines to take serious steps to save them when it comes to the crunch. We are not willing to change our lifestyle to improve theirs. If you want to talk about practical reconciliation (again, whatever that really means), I suspect that the response of most white people would be to ask why we can’t just sponsor a child and forget about it like we do for African kids.

 

Journalists and columnists can all make digs about things like the embedded culture of domestic violence in Aboriginal society (whatever that means) but the fact is that white people started a fire a long time ago and really only turned their minds to putting it out just recently. This circus in the media regarding Geoff Clark is not even on the radar when you turn your mind to the big picture.

 

For the record, I don’t think Fairfax should have run with the article/s on the rape allegations. You can put your own spin on the justice system and its ability to find the truth, but Clark has been seriously defamed and no criminal charges have been laid against him. We all are subject to the same laws and courts. Working for a newspaper gives you a little bit more financial protection than is afforded to Geoff Clark from those laws.

He might be a thug, he might be a liar, he might be a rapist and he might be a conspiracy theorist, but he hasn’t been charged with any of these things under the law. Let him go for a while, and use the webdiary to explore some of the bigger issues.

 

From what you say, Ken, reconciliation is the biggest issue of them all. The native title debate was the one which forced us to decide if we would give away some of our privileges, and in the end we did, however grudgingly and after a truly brutal political process.

 

Try as we might, we can never enter into the reality of the black experience in Australia, and yes, so often we make it worse with our romanticism.

 

My first experience of covering Aboriginal issues was as a green reporter at The Courier Mail in Brisbane. The Aboriginal legal service called a press conference to detail allegations of fraud against the then federal Aboriginal affairs department. Ray Robinson, then its head (now deputy chairman of ATSIC) appeared – clearly drunk – and made spectacular but seriously garbled allegations without a shred of proof.

 

I was lost. Should one simply report the allegations, or report the spectacle? I rang the department, and was given detailed information, including what they thought Ray was saying, what they said the truth was, and some background on why they thought this was happening.

 

In the end, I wrote up the allegations in general terms that were not defamatory, and the department’s reply. The experience was so complicated, the layers of the story so intricate, and the impossibility of discerning right from wrong so acute, that I swore I would never venture inside black politics again.

 

Some time later in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane’s mild equivalent of King’s Cross, I saw an Aboriginal man and woman yelling at each other in the street. She held a baby in her arms, and was trying to run away from the man. He grabbed her and started pulled the baby from her so violently that it dropped onto the road. She screamed, and I ran down the street to get help. I found a policeman. When he tried to arrest the man, the woman turned on him, screaming “Pig, pig, pig”.

 

The policeman told them to go home. He explained that the woman would never give evidence against her attacker, and I suggested I give evidence instead. He said if he arrested the man, the woman would wait outside the lock-up until he was released and take him home.

 

When I told my sister about this, she related the experience of a school friend who was nursing in an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory. Sexual and physical assaults on women were endemic, and most tragically of all, toddlers were sexually abused as a matter of course. Her friends dilemma was this – should she take steps to remove the children concerned and produce another stolen generation, or should she let them stay with their community. She chose the latter.

 

Years later, I reported the Mabo and Wik debates and became passionate about reconciliation. But I did not venture into the internal workings of Aboriginal politics or Aboriginal communities again. A cop out, I suppose, but perhaps its all we whites can do now. It is for the Aboriginal peoples through their leadership and their grass roots efforts to repair their communities, with all the money and resources we can supply.

 

What has been so graphically revealed in the last week is that the Aboriginal leadership has done little to stop the sexual and physical abuse of women and children. Pat O’Shane, Evelyn Scott and Lowitja O’Donoghue have admitted that women have let these things go on – on the ground, and in elite Aboriginal circles – to protect their men and fight us whites for equal rights and respect.

 

And make no mistake – the men run the show and take the big pay packets. Sometimes they even take money Aboriginal women have applied for for health or other services to buy four wheel drives.

 

O’Shane yesterday detailed a story where a prominent female Aboriginal leader was bashed by Aboriginal men at a conference and refused to go to the police. Yet O’Shane too, when asked to comment about the allegations of four women that clark had raped them, replied that a lot of women made up such allegations (official figures show that 2 percent of reports of crime – including rape – are fabricated) and said she believed Clark’s claim of a conspiracy against him. Most Aboriginal women thought fighting racism was more important than fighting for their physical and sexual integrity against their men, she said.

 

The former Aboriginal affairs minister John Herron says that five years ago he raised the issue of violence against women and children with the ATSIC board “and there was total denial’.

 

“They said: ‘What are you talking about?’There was only one female board member and I said to her … later: ‘Why didn’t you stand up to them?’ and she said: ‘I’m too afraid’.”

 

The Australian’s Frank Devine today quoted from an interview he did with Herron when he retired as minister, when he said that he’d suggested a program to help battered women. Ray Robinson said, “Well I suppose we could give you $200,000”. Herron threatened not to sign off on ATSIC’s $1 billion budget unless there was more, and ATSIC allocated $1 million. The then family services minister Jocelyn Newman allocated $20 million from her budget last year.

 

We now have an Aboriginal leadership whose credibility is utterly on the line, especially after Geoff Clark refused to address the allegations of the women who accused him of rape and the ATSIC board’s decision to back him as chairman despite his refusal to attempt to clear his name by suing for defamation. Sorry Geoff, this matter has not unified your people as you so cynically suggest. It has opened up its sores to the wider community.

 

Yet who am I to judge?

 

As David Davis said yesterday, reconciliation cuts both ways, and the more understanding we get about each other the truer will reconciliation be. Many of you see this matter as playing into the hands of the people who do not care or who are malicious. Those of us who do care must ensure this does not happen.

 

Here’s a piece I spent months thinking about, which appeared on the Herald’s opinion page on January 17 this year.

 

Labor’s silence can only harm Aborigines

 

It’s time to the Opposition to stop tiptoeing around the problem of welfare-dependence among indigenous people, writes Margo Kingston.

 

DURING the last Federal election campaign, Pauline Hanson faced claims by a Queensland One Nation MP that indigenous Australians were better off when they lived and worked on pastoral leases “for a bit of meat”. Hanson responded that it was a much “happier time for the Aborigines and the pastoralists”. The next year, Noel Pearson began his crusade to end “the poison of welfare”, and came close to concurring.

 

“The dilemma facing policymakers at the time the equal wage case was being debated [in 1965] was this. On the one hand, Aboriginal stockworkers were being discriminated against in relation to their wages and conditions and this could not continue,” Pearson said. “On the other hand, it was clear to everyone that the institution of equal wages would result in the …removal of Aboriginal people from cattle station work to social security on the settlements.”

 

The tragic consequences of taking the latter option were cultural (Aborigines removed from traditional lands to settlements), social (work to no work) and an end to coexistence, however flawed.

 

Equal rights for Aborigines are an essential ingredient of a civilised society and a bedrock precursor to reconciliation, but Pearson believes the Government should have used Aborigines’ social security entitlements “to subsidise continued work in the cattle industry” and improve living conditions on the stations. Ironically, this would have meant agreements between government, pastoralists and Aborigines, something taking place only now since the Rock decision.

 

Labor’s Aboriginal affairs spokesman, Bob McMullan, notes that Pearson’s honesty about the horrors of welfare dependency in Aboriginal communities and his radical solutions like giving social security entitlements to Aboriginal communities rather than individuals are fraught with danger, including One Nation-type dangers of winding back rights.

 

But Labor has succumbed to this fear for too long. It has not yet engaged in serious public discourse on Aboriginal welfare, leaving itself open to Pearson’s charge that “the left side of politics is strong and correct on rights and the conservative side is strong and correct on responsibilities”.

 

Another reason for Labor’s silence is its lack of fresh ideas after establishing ATSIC, the embodiment of its self-determination ideal. That vacuum saw Paul Keating renege on the third prong of his promised response to the High Court’s Ameba decision a comprehensive plan to ensure social justice for Aborigines.

 

As the revolutionary ATSIC endured teething problems, money disappeared before it reached those on the ground. In 1994, an evaluation of Labor’s $250 million Aboriginal health strategy found “little evidence” that it ever existed, “a lack of political will” to get the job done and “a confusing and dysfunctional array of political responses” standing between problem and solution.

 

The then minister, Robert Tickner, said the Government needed “vision and purpose” to break through, and warned of the pending political mood shift which would fan Hanson’s flame. “The climate of public and government opinion is changing… Now is the time to act,” Tickner said then.

 

Most Australians are eager for new solutions which benefit from old failures, and would agree with Pearson that it is no longer enough “to just hold on to our ideals as a matter of philosophy and intellectual debate [while] the real society and economy unravels in front of our eyes”.

 

Keating’s Labor took responsibility for health away from ATSIC and gave it to the health minister. The Coalition’s Michael Wooldridge, deeply committed to Aboriginal advancement, has begun moving some decision-making and responsibility for Aboriginal community health to communities on the ground.

 

This attachment of rights and responsibilities in a constructive way is what Pearson is talking about.

 

Last year Peter Reith made an impact with a pilot employment program where private sector employers get a $4,000 subsidy to place an indigenous Australian in paid work for 26 weeks.

 

Reith’s response to the “special treatment” brigade was the simple, effective statement that Aboriginal unemployment was higher than the average and his job was to ensure equality for all Australians.

 

It is senseless for progressives committed to the survival of Aboriginal people and their culture to tiptoe around Aboriginal welfare dependence because they fear that engagement would fuel racist flames.

 

Everyone sees the problem, and without a progressive philosophy to tackle it, the solutions may end up promoting a largely unstated goal of many on the Right assimilation.

 

Reconciliation is about each culture learning from and adjusting to the other. It should enrich the lives of all Australians. I don’t fear what will happen if progressives publicly debate the future of Aboriginal welfare. I do fear what will happen if they don’t.

 

ends

 

Emails have poured in again today on this desperately painful topic. I’ve grouped representative pieces according to theme.

 

 

THE PROBLEM OF WHITE JUDGING

 

Stephen Blackwell

 

The issue I am having the most trouble with here is encapsulated in your claim that “There is no doubt that present-day Aboriginal culture is misogynistic.” This claim, I suspect, calls to a tacit understanding in white culture of the cliched Aboriginal scenario of deprivation, anger and alcohol engendering male aggression towards females.

 

That this scenario constitutes the domain Aborigines occupy in our collective imagination is part of their “burden”. It dominates all our thinking on the topic. To call someone “racist” or “politically correct” according to their views on rape and racism again only re-enforces our much cherished inner bigotries.

 

Personally, I have no idea what the statistics are in regards to the abuse of women in Aboriginal society – nor am I certain that those statistics necessarily mean that Aboriginal men actually “hate” women. But I do have a suspicion of any “truth”, however well meaning, revealed by a dominant culture concerning a marginalised culture.

 

This includes the “truth” that Aboriginal culture is currently mysogynistic.

 

The unfortunate result of this discussion, and why I think it is so dangerous, is that stereotypes are toyed with, perhaps redefined, but ultimately camouflaged by an ever greater sense of our “understanding”.

 

WHO IS THE REAL WINNER?

 

Cesar Benalcazar

 

I am with you all the way about Geoff, but who are the winners from this situation twenty weeks before election?

 

Should I believe in the purity of The Age “moral” stand? Is this situation ultimately creating an enormous breakdown of social forces that were gathering to send Howard to the history bin? I believe the winner in this tragic situation is Howard.

 

 

SUGGESTIONS FOR CLOSURE

 

Kathryn Pollard O’Hara in Lismore

 

This is an email Kathyrn sent to Geoff Clark in response to his statement after the ATSIC board meeting which backed him.

 

Dear Geoff,

 

This matter that you write of will not come to rest.

 

Some people would say that the reason why so many Australians are losing their zest, why there is so much depression and spiralling rates of legal and illegal drug use is because there is too much unfinished social business.

 

Lots and lots of people have damaged psyches. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people carrying around bags and minds full of angst and anger. They feel they cannot have their voices heard. I think people desperately need to sit down with those they believe have done them wrong. I think they need to sit around big tables or under trees and let all their grief spill out.

 

I think people like the women who have said that you raped them need the opportunity to sit down with you and for all of you to try really hard to understand each other irrespective of whether you did rape these women or not.

 

I think perpetrators, just and unjust accusers and victims need to tell their stories to each other face to face as was the way of problem resolution of yore before courts and cops and judges and jails were ever invented.

 

Lots of junior Australians are perplexed when they learn of the farce that is called justice in this country. Inconsistencies and double standards abound and bring confusion and distrust where should be care and respect.

 

In my mind we can only respect each other when we are authentically honest with each other, when those who have hurt and harmed can get down on their goddamn knees – admit that they have done wrong and ask for ways to be make up for the hurt and damage.

 

I agree with those who scoff at the courts and the jails but at the same time there must be more listening to those who push for alternative ways to render justice. You know and everyone else knows that the legal system will look after you and your ilk while women and child cry in silence that it could all be so different with authentic community spirit , where people looked beyond their immediate friends and family to whole nation, whole world stuff of unconditional care for each and all.

 

At the end of the day, whether we like to admit it or not – we’re all related.

 

Robert Lawton

 

I am a lawyer. I spent six of the twelve years since my admission working in the criminal justice system representing accused people, two of those years with an Aboriginal legal aid organisation which refused to take female clients alleging sexual or physical assault by Aboriginal men, referring them instead to the (non-Aboriginal) legal aid office. In that time I often represented Aboriginal men who pleaded guilty to such offences, but did not represent men who denied them, referring them as above. Later I spent two years liaising with the office of the DPP in SA regarding the prosecution of lawyers. I’m now working as a quasi-judicial member of a civil law tribunal.

 

A few comments about the real problem at the heart of the Geoff Clark allegations:

 

a. The Victorian Director of Public Prosecutions, like the Commonwealth Director (whom you pursued so vigorously over Peter Reith), is an independent statutory official. His decisions to be prosecute or not are not reviewable at law.

 

b. The DPP, Mr Geoff Flatman QC, charged Mr Clark with rape. Mr Clark exercised his rights under Victorian law to have the evidence tested by a magistrate at a committal hearing. Not all states and territories still have such a right available to an accused person. The magistrate found insufficient evidence of the crime charged, to warrant sending the charge to the County Court to be heard by a judge and jury. The exact wording of the evidentiary test in Victoria might require that last sentence to be slightly recast, but I am confident that I have got the gist of the magistrate’s decision.

 

c. There is other evidence, known to the police, of other sexual assaults involving Mr Clark. We do not know why the DPP has chosen not to proceed with charges. The long delay between the acts and the apparent complaints to police is likely to be the chief factor. Perhaps the politics of Framlingham came out poorly against the police witnesses at the committal hearing.

 

d. Mr Clark is a very prominent man.

 

e. The Age has access to some of the evidence that the police have, and perhaps more. If the accounts of these potential witnesses are accepted, Mr Clark has committed several very serious offences, and if convicted even of one would be likely to receive a jail sentence.

 

f. I believe the DPP could, in serious and special circumstances, proceed direct to jury trial in relation to any appropriate indictable offence without the process of evidentiary testing at committal (or indeed in the face of a magistrate’s decision to dismiss the charge). This process is variously called laying an ex officio information or indictment.

 

Margo, you used the press to put pressure on Damien Bugg QC to lay charges in relation to the Reith telecard. True, the accounts of the witnesses published by The Age were not in the public domain as was the story of Paul Reith when you pursued Bugg. But that story came to light as the result of a leak, and that leak went to press. Immediately the prosecution policy of the Commonwealth was under scrutiny.

 

Only the press can put real pressure on the decision making power of a DPP. Such officials have great responsibility and little accountability. Mr Clark’s prominence, not his race, and the apparent (I repeat apparent) quality of the evidence make ex officio indictments the appropriate course here.

 

It is quite unfair to Mr Clark for the DPP to let these allegations sit. It is completely wrong of the ATSIC commissioners to do or say anything “backing” Mr Clark or otherwise. It is completely wrong of Ms O’Shane to make various airy statements about the allegations. It is even worse that Tony Jones and the Lateline team at the ABC chased her for sensationalist quotes, as they would well know her inability to resist an open mike.

 

It was quite right of The Age to publish. The door of the court, in which the allegations may be tested, can be opened by Mr Flatman. If ex officio indictments are beyond him then at least another single committal is justified. The DPP’s prosecution guidelines make the public interest one of the reasons to prosecute, or to hold one’s hand. The public interest has changed since he made his initial decision to proceed no further with charges against Mr Clark. One hopes Victorian judges are brave enough to withstand the inevitable application for a permanent stay of proceedings on the basis of the publication by The Age. Perhaps even Mr Clark might see the sense in submitting himself to a jury.

 

It’s time to try these questions.

 

CLARK SHOULD GO

 

 

Raelene Myles

 

Isn’t pressure put on politicians to step down until proven innocent so as not to bring disrepute to their position? Shouldn’t this be even more important for people in positions of power who should be setting an example for the younger people to follow and respect.

 

John Thomson

 

I consider myself a reasonably tolerant, “look for the best in people” sort of bloke. I am 47 and although I have never committed any crimes against Aboriginal Australians – in fact I’ve hardly ever encountered any in my lifetime so far – I am genuinely sorry for those removed from their homes and families all those years ago.

 

I am not sorry because they are Aborigines, but because they are HUMAN BEINGS. It is a truly sad part of our history which any reasonable & compassionate person must view as regrettable. I’m sure that many of the people actually involved in the exercise of removal were genuinely well intended, believing that the childrens’ lot would be improved in terms of health, welfare and education. Alas, in the light of another era the actions appear (correctly) as very cruel.

 

I am saddened for the Prime Minister’s refusal to say sorry, but I am even sadder because of his reasons for not doing so – for fear of legal proceedings designed to extract unrealistic sums of money from this or future governments. Wouldn’t it be nice if he just “did the deed”, and Aborigines equally simply said “thank you for your expression of sympathy, now let us go forward as Australians, together.

 

But what I have become angry about, is self-serving politicians (black and white) who want one rule for themselves and another for everyone else. Geoff Clark is a politician. To kill off ANY debate about these most serious allegations from his past, he plays the “racially vilified victim” card.

 

I personally believed the women’s stories after reading the Herald, because I could see nothing to be gained by the women – especially in revealing themselves by name. Mr Clark, on the other hand, has much to lose. I believe he was a boxer, footballer and thug. A “tough guy” because of his size, who happened in to politics. Someone used to pushing people around. I doubt he is involved in ATSIC for anything other than reasons of personal aggrandisement. Good, old-fashioned naked ambition. And he has cleverly, cynically and deliberately used his colour to make a “defence” when his colour has absolutely nothing to do with the issue – in fact, 3 of the women were Aborigines themselves.

 

Geoff Clark is beneath my contempt – a cynical human being who has learnt how to use being a member of a minority group to his own advantage – a top-drawer ugly Australian. He doesn’t name who these mysterious conspirators are (because he can’t), nor does he show any pity for the women. What is sad is that the Aborigines are stuck with him because they are too scared to kick him out.

 

I would like to make a concluding and positive suggestion. The cause of the Aboriginal people would be far better served if they removed Geoff Clark as Chairman of ATSIC (preferably from any role in which this scum purports to represent anyone but himself). My choice for his replacement? Sir William Deane. A truly great Australian and human being, who I strongly suspect is more genuinely concerned about Aboriginal Australians than Geoff Clark will ever be – and someone who would bring great dignity and respect to the cause.

 

Anna Garrett, student and legal secretary

 

I wanted to let you know how much I agree with your arguments regarding the allegations against Geoff Clark. I made the mistake of reading the original article over lunch, and was unable to finish eating. I was further sickened by the response of Pat O’Shane (with powerful women like that, who needs powerful male chauvinist pigs!)and the ATSIC board members and others who came out in support of Geoff Clark.

 

Perhaps Clark is right, and there is some kind of so-called conspiracy to find dirt on him. But the dirt diggers obviously found a lot of dirt. The matter should be further investigated by the police and hopefully in Court. Clark should stand down now until the truth can be discovered.

 

The dominant male culture in Australia still does not respect women enough,

 

Ronda Ross

 

1) I find the comments made by Pat O’Shane offensive and derogatory towards women and in particular Aboriginal women.

 

2) I find her comment “bleeding heart middle class feminists” offensive and derogatory towards all women and in particular our Aboriginal women who have been in and are still in high profile positions.

 

3) I do not think that the ATSIC Commissioners should be making public statements whether it be in support of or otherwise, on behalf of all Aboriginal people – THIS IS A PERSONAL MATTER BETWEEN GEOFF CLARK AND THE WOMEN CONCERNED, which has to be dealt with in the appropriate manner.

 

5) In my opinion ATSIC is fully aware that supporting Geoff Clark is a deliberate tact to divide black and white in this country – how can we expect non Aboriginals to be sympathetic to our cause (health, education, land, employment, stolen generation etc etc) when they see this happening.

 

6) I wish the country to know that when Geoff Clark states that “the Aboriginal Community supports him” I am not one of them.

 

7) Pat O’Shane states Geoff Clark has been trialled by the media Pat O’Shane has already condemned the women concerned through the media.

 

8) Geoff Clark should stand down from his position till such time as he has been cleared of all allegations.

 

CLARK SHOULD STAY

 

Les Bursill

 

The point you are missing is that the police have no evidence upon which to raise a charge, so why should newspapers raise the issue – that is trial by media. Now I see that you have a poll on whether he should step down – surely that is the ATSIC boards issue not yours.

 

How would you feel if someone started to investigate your activities and raise them in the news? They wouldn’t need evidence just hearsay and innuendo. Give us a break and let the Aboriginal community sort this out.

 

I do not believe you (news media) are the messengers here but rather the message. You have manufactured the entire story from start to finish (sought out victims and raised a lot of hearsay evidence). As an Aboriginal man I do not like Geoff (I have met him and spoken to him over a number of hours). It is the law that must act, not some newspaper journalist.

 

Brendan

 

I read all this material on Geoff Clarke and some things stand out – Fairfax and its journalists give themselves the right to judge and execute, but there is no accountability for decisions, no transparency of process or decision making, and no genuine prospect of redress for the aggrieved.

 

Journalists get very high minded and present themselves as a profession, but they never really hold themselves accountable. The story generates stories and gets its own momentum and then something else happens and everyone moves on.

 

But the story sits there and those who have been caught in it have to deal with it after the crowd has gone. Story tellers have moral obligations because they control the narrative and shape its life in the world. The Age and Andrew Rule seem not to know this, or worse not to care

 

They seem to think that it is simply enough to make accusations and then its up to Clark. This is an act of bad faith, fundamentally patronising to readers and exploitative of those they write about. It’s the sort of thing you get from Sixty Minutes and A Current Affair.

 

I don’t particularly object to publication, but I don’t think The Age took the story seriously enough to finish what they started. So they short change everyone, including Clark. But then, The Age hasn’t been a serious newspaper for years.

 

It is a shame to see the witch hunt against Pat O’Shane. She is a fine public servant with a very long record of progressive social activism. She doesn’t deserve the vilification. Danna Vale can condemn from the warm sanctity of the Liberal Party. She might have stood up to Howard on mandatory sentencing, but then she backed down, and hey, we still have mandatory sentencing and she’s still in the Liberal Party.

 

Laurie Forde

 

My take on your article “Who is oppressing who here, Geoff?” is that this period leading up to the Federal election, will go down as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the Australian media, particularly with regard to the treatment of Aboriginal people.

 

I have no objection to the publication of the names of prominent people who have been accused of offences by a number of complainants prior to any legal proceedings against them – there is indeed a law for the rich and a law for the rest – but let us have the same rules for everyone.

 

PAT O’SHANE

 

She’s wrong

 

Karel Zegers in Marong, Victoria

 

Watching Ms O’Shane trying to worm her way out of admitting to what she said on Lateline last night, I couldn’t escape the impression she was digging her hole deeper and deeper.

 

Some 15 years ago I was told in Alice Springs and Cooper Pedy that abuse of women was happening at a grand scale amongst Aboriginal communities. The medical community and the police were very aware of this phenomenon. But no action was ever taken because the “politically correct” of this country have caused this to be hidden.

 

Only a mention of this and one would have been labelled a “racist”. The media at large are guilty of this situation as well and should be ashamed of themselves, as many Aboriginal women have suffered enormously due to this behaviour.

 

Reporters and newspapers should report, not opinionate or push a political barrow. Funny thing is that some are now trying to make out that this abuse is a “cultural phenomenon” in Aboriginal communities. (Duhh!!!)

 

Sue Hunt

 

For all those defending Ms O’Shane, a simple question. What if a white magistrate had spoken out and stated “well, it’s a fact that a lot of Aborigines are violent criminals”? Would these defenders still be supportive, agreeing that yes, it’s true, so the magistrate is entitled to say so? Or would they be calling for blood?

 

And what chance would such a magistrate have of still being employed, let alone remaining qualified to sit in cases concerning Aboriginals? Zero, I would expect, and with reasonable justification. Is the O’Shane situation any different?

 

David Davis

 

In her most recent outburst, Pat O’Shane labels the people who criticised her original comments as “bleeding heart, bleating middle-class feminists”.

 

I don’t have much time for those who use the term “bleeding heart” as some kind of put down. It implies that a certain level of naivete exists within those with so-called bleeding hearts.

 

Let’s turn it around. The opposite of a “bleeding heart” is probably a hard liner not interested in the welfare of any. If Australia’s bleeding hearts could be eliminated quickly we would live in a much harsher and more unjust society.

 

It’s interesting that we live in a society where words like “ruthless” and “hard-liner” are positive descriptions while the term “bleeding heart” is a negative term. No one wants to be known as a “bleeding heart”. Pity about that.

 

As for the middle class thing – all I can say is here we go again. Why are middle class people less entitled to a view? I don’t like this attitude because it ends up antagonising those who could be most helpful in mobilising broader public opinion in a way that would help Aborigines.

 

There seems to be an idea that you can’t have a view or any “street cred” unless you have been there yourself. That’s rubbish. Again, let’s turn it around. The alternative is for middle class people to shut their mouths, withdraw from debate and ponder less weighty issues like their next visit to the suburban shopping mall. If less middle class people care, less will be done. It’s as simple as that.

 

Anyway, I’m not so sure a “working class feminist” or an “upper class feminist” would form a different view. I actually think the vast majority of feminists and non-feminists of all classes would object to the line that “a lot of women manufacture a lot of stories about men”. Turning it solely into a feminist and even more ludicrously class based view is really clutching at straws.

 

I’m not sure why Pat O’Shane is now pushing the line that she had everything to say about violence toward Aboriginal women 20 years ago and no one cared then. If that’s the case, she should be happy now that at least people are finally listening.

 

She doesn’t get out of it that easily though because it is totally inconsistent with her original comments implying that a lot of complaints from Aboriginal women are fabricated. What a muddle.

 

If the bleeding heart, middle class feminists are bleating so be it. What’s Pat O’Shane doing? Running around like a chook with its head chopped off if you ask me. She’s not making much sense. The bleaters are.

 

Fiona Ferrari

Like Rhonda Dixon, (diary Us and them) I thought Margo’s piece Rape and racism was excellent. I’m surprised at the negative reaction.

 

I want to explain why I find Pat O’Shane’s remarks that ‘ lot of women make up lots of stories’ offensive, and why it is not simply about ideology.

 

Isn’t it interesting that this issue has attracted responses from 15 men out of 18 people. Of the 3 women, one response was from an Aboriginal women. (Please send more! – it’s the voices of Aboriginal women we need to hear more of).

 

Most of the men and one woman objected to Margo’s analysis. Of the men, two cited the case of a mentally ill woman whose false rape call in a Melbourne park led to the killing of a gay man. That does not mean that ‘lots of women manufacture a lot of stories about men’.

 

Here are the reasons I am so grossly offended and shocked at O’Shane’s comments:

 

* it was an assault on the four women who made the allegations – how shattering it must be to hear such condemnation by one of the highest profile Aboriginal women in Australia;

 

* it will discourage women in general and Aboriginal women in particular from coming forward with rape allegations;

 

* it feeds into the general public consciousness about attitudes to sexual assault – in particular, it gives more power to pedophiles who are well known for threatening children with the line that no-one will believe them;

 

* it is simply not true!!

 

If O’Shane wanted to make the point that it was possible the story may not be true she should have done so. She could have made this point without attacking the credibility of three brave Aboriginal women and one brave white woman.

 

So how many women make up rape stories? No-one knows for sure. No-one knows how many rape stories are true or untrue. There is no way of empirically testing this. Usually its one man’s word against one woman’s word. Sometimes its one man’s word against a child’s word. Sometimes it’s a gang of men or boys’ words against one woman or one girl.

 

So when its one person’s word against another and there is no compelling physical evidence either way what do we do? As individuals and as a society, in social discourse, we make judgements based on probabilities- we consider the likelihood of this or that being true based on our previous experience. This is informed by personal experience and ideas which have infiltrated our consciousness from television reports, soap operas, news stories and sometimes academic theories.

 

When Pat O’Shane says lots of women manufacture lots of stories she, because of the position she holds and her credibility, shifts the general public’s sense of the balance of probabilities against women. In my view, her comments will lead to more people being more likely to doubt a woman’s story. She has sown seeds of doubt in the general public consciousness about the credibility of all women who allege rape.

 

This issue seems to have struck a chord with men’s fear of being falsely accused of rape. And so these men accuse women of being ideologues if they object to a woman stating categorically that lots of women lie about rape.

 

Last night on Lateline, Tony Jones should have challenged Pat O’Shane to justify her claim that lots of women make up lots of stories. He should have asked her what is her evidence for making that claim. Did she have personal experience of this? Did she discover this in her court?

 

I will share my personal experience. Here are four cases of women I know who have

been raped but obtained no redress through the legal system.

 

Case 1

 

A woman in her mid-30s, adopted by a conservative Catholic family, and raped on a daily basis by the church-going white next door neighbour, a ‘close friend of the family’ from the age of 10 to 16, drinking alcohol from age 12 to block it out, alcohol addiction problems continue through university – still can’t tell her parents – tried to tell them once when she was a child but they didn’t believe her. So why wouldn’t they believe her? Because they thought it was quite likely that women and girls make up such stories and how could they even think that their church-going neighbour and friend would do such a thing? Better to doubt the child.

 

Case 2

 

A white woman in her early 30s, sexually assaulted by a white family friend from 5 years to 7 years old, gang raped by teenage boys at age 11 and pregnant to a 19 year-old at 13. Gave birth to the child at 14 and married the 19 year-old. Became a sex worker. The father of her child turned out to be a pedophile who sexually assaulted neighborhood children and his own daughter when she was 12. The grandmother still blames her daughter and calls her a slut.

 

Case 3

 

A white doctor in her late 30s, sexually assaulted by a ‘servant’ while her parents were posted to a third world country from ages of 3 to 6. Still can’t tell parents. Years of thinking they wouldn’t believe her.

 

Case 4

 

A white woman in her mid-twenties, adopted into a Foreign Affairs family as a child, repeatedly raped by the high-ranking father from age 12 to 17. Tried to tell the department but they did not want to know. She now has mental illness (in my view directly related to the rapes) and would have no credibility.

 

One of those women was my partner for 6 years. Let me tell you, when you hear the graphic details of the rapes and see the aftermath- the addictions, the nightmares, waking up screaming, the headbanging, the pure unadulterated emotional pain which may diminish over time but never goes away -you get angry when anyone perpetuates the view that ‘lots of women’ make up these stories.

 

When Pat O’Shane says it, it makes it worse than if some old white man says it because she knows better. She knows how damaging such comments are to those who are survivors of sexual assault, and because she is a well-known feminist and Aboriginal role model her comments have more credibility and do more damage than if said by someone else.

 

So to those men who were affronted by Margo’s piece I ask you to put yourself in the place of a young girl (black or white) being raped by a friend of the family who your parents trust implicitly and who keeps telling you no-one will believe you if tell and what’s more he’ll start on your little sister and kill your cat, how do you feel when you hear Pat O’Shane make those comments?

 

Imagine your wife or your daughter has been raped and you believe their story – you know them so well you know beyond a skerrick of a doubt they are telling the truth. But your mates at the pub cast aspersions and say are you sure it really happened – after all lots of women make up these stories. How do you feel then about Pat O’Shane’s comments?

 

To finish, I have to say I think, Margo, you are not being fair to drag out comments from 25 years ago and use them to explain O’Shane’s entire philosophical approach to life. There is truth in what she said last night on Lateline that she has been talking about violence in Aboriginal communities for a long time when others have not.

 

Now its time to turn the heat away from O’Shane back onto Clark where it belongs. I agree with Michael Johnston (diary yesterday) that we should leave O’Shane alone now.

 

Dig up Clark’s public policy record on violence. Why hasn’t he responded to O’Shane’s report that she said last night was presented to him last year? What has he ever said on the public record about violence and sexual assault in Aboriginal communities? What is ATSIC doing about it? How much money is being spent by ATSIC to redress the problems?

 

And I hope more journalists prove O’Shane wrong and do some investigative stories exposing high-profile white rapists.

 

One final point to demonstrate what I said yesterday about our legal system not giving justice to women who have been raped. The Canberra Times reported on Tuesday in ‘Canberra man wins acquittal on incest charges’ that ‘the collapse of this case is but the latest in a string of unsuccessful prosecutions for sex-related offences in the ACT Supreme court. It was the seventh case in succession in which an accused has been acquitted of serious charges.’

 

And these are only the cases that got to court. Remember the SMH reported onTuesday that ABS data shows 87% of women who have been sexually assaulted do not report to the police. No wonder some of us now welcome investigative journalism exposing rapists.

 

And like Margo said today, most top defamation lawyers would do the job for Clark – they do that for high-profile cases all the time. Clark is hiding behind his claim that he won’t sue for lack of money.

SOME GOOD WILL COME OF THIS

 

Bronwyn Fletcher

 

Well done on having the courage to speak so honestly about the race versus gender conflict faced by women within the indigenous community. The first step in resolving any complex problem is the revelation and acknowledgement of all facets of the problem.

My Geoff Clark comment piece on page one of the Herald online yesterday has provoked howls of protest. So here it is, then your response and my reply. Then, some wonderful pieces by contributors, first on Geoff Clark then on Pat O’Shane.

 

Who is oppressing who here, Geoff?

 

 

By Margo Kingston

 

What happens now that the ATSIC board has backed the word of its chairman, Geoff Clark, against the word of four women – three Aboriginal and one white – that he raped them?

 

Let’s be clear on this. Mr Clark has refused to detail why the allegations are false. For example, we don’t know whether he knew these women or had ever met them. We don’t know whether or not he had sex with all or any of them, and if so, his version of what happened.

 

In other words, he has refused point blank to take their allegations seriously enough to address them. Who is oppressing who here, Geoff?

 

Instead, we have from Mr Clark two defences. First, that he is a victim of a conspiracy by whites and blacks to destroy him. He gives no detail of this conspiracy.

 

His second defence is that he has been picked on by the Fairfax press because he is a radical Aboriginal voice. “The fact (is) that my only crime is that I am an Aboriginal and I have had the audacity to question the legitimacy of this country, to question the treatment of Aboriginal people…and I have called for a treaty.”

 

Whether the women speak the truth or not, it is difficult to doubt their courage in being prepared to be named, and to detail their alleged experiences. There is also little doubt that they are – in the absence of the Fairfax story – powerless voices.

 

And whether the Fairfax papers should have published the stories or not, it is utter nonsense to accuse them of racial motives. Just ask John Howard whether he thinks The Sydney Morning Herald supports the cause of Aborigines or not – during the Wik debate senior Liberals called the Herald the Aboriginal Morning Herald, and several Aboriginal leaders have told me our relentless campaign for native title rights was an important factor in their favour during the long debate.

 

There is no doubt that the fracturing of Aboriginal culture since colonisation has seen Aboriginal men assault women as a matter of routine. The reason the previous Labor government funded a separate Aboriginal women’s legal service was that the general Aboriginal legal service would not take on their cases if they were assaulted by black men.

 

There is no doubt that present-day Aboriginal culture is deeply misogynist, and that the burden of being Aboriginal and a woman is, in many cases, to double the tragedy of their circumstances.

 

Mr Clark has not sued Fairfax for defamation. If he chooses not to do so, the story will end, unless someone or some group is prepared to fund the women to take their own case for defamation against him.

 

The deputy chairman of ATSIC, Ray Robinson, said on Tuesday that ATSIC “will support him in whatever legal course of action he should pursue in seeking remedy against the newspaper”. Given ATSIC’s previous performance in such matters, this could mean that it funds a defamation case launched by Clark, who refuses to comment on whether or not he will sue.

 

Mr Clark said after the ATSIC board backed him: “I think this represents a turning point in the history of Aboriginal relationships in this country. I believe that now Aboriginal people know and feel in their hearts that they need to unite.”

 

How chilling. Is Geoff Clark saying that women better realise it’s black against white, and the injustices black people suffer at the hands of each other should be put aside in the greater cause?

 

And isn’t he coming very close to the stand Aboriginal magistrate Pat O’Shane took in choosing to effectively call the women liars on the basis only of the media report she and Mr Clark so condemned?

 

For Mr Clark to say this story has healed division in the Aboriginal community is shocking in its silencing of the voices of many Aboriginal women who want justice within the Aboriginal community as well as from the white world.

 

As the supposed leader of Aboriginal Australia – male and female – his public comments have betrayed the just cause of powerless female Aboriginal people, and left a nasty taste in the mouths of many white Australians who are deeply committed to the Aboriginal cause.

 

The least he owed to the cause of Aboriginal unity was to address the allegations of the women concerned. And the least he owed to the Australian people was not to indulge in ludicrous reverse racism.

 

 

GEORGE OOI in Clifton Hill, Melbourne

 

Some women do lie!

 

I cannot understand the fuss over the remarks of Pat O’Shane’s remark that in her experience as a Magistrate, some women do lie.

 

Do her critics, including the Sydney Morning Herald reporter Margo Kingston, claim that women never lie?

 

Do her critics have such short memory that they forget a recent case in Melbourne when a woman, falsely crying “RAPE!” led to the tragic bashing to death of an innocent gay man at a park in Melbourne?

 

Do the outraged feminists seriously claim that women NEVER LIE at all!

 

I’ve been a long time supporter of women’s rights and was one of the few men at the first conference of the Women’s Electoral Lobby at Canberra in the mid 70’s but does not further the cause of the feminists to make outrageous claim that women never make false accusations of rape or any other matter.

 

Sure, it’s sad that many men and women do not report rape. But all accusations must be tested in court.

 

Geoff Clark should not be tried by the high and mighty Fairfax Press usurping the role of prosecutor, judge and jury and Pat O’Shane should not be pilloried for supporting him and stating the obvious that some men and women do lie.

 

Stating the Geoff Clark has legal remedies open to him is a furphy. Firstly, according to a legal expert on Radio 774 Melbourne, it costs about a quarter of a million dollars to mount a complex libel case against the Fairfax press, which is OK for Geoff Kennett, Kerry Packer or the Fairfax Press but very few ordinary Aussie can even contemplate it.

 

Secondly the accusers should have the burden of proof, not the accused. Why should Geoff Clark, the accused, have to prove anything at all, Margo, or even respond? As the Prime Minister, to his credit asserted last Thursday, under our system of Common Law, a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, not in the press.

 

The presumption of innocence is the very foundation of our law and judicial system and must not be usurped by the press.

 

Neither Geoff Clark nor Pat O’Shane has anything to answer for! It is the ilk of Margo Kingston and Andrew Rule (who wrote the story) and other arrogant usurpers of justice who should apologise to them and answer for their diatribe!

 

IAN WILSON in Toowoomba, Queensland

 

Margo Kingston’s article should read: There is no doubt that present-day media culture is deeply misandrist, and that the burden of being white and a man is, in many cases, to double the tragedy of their circumstances.

 

GEOFF HONNOR in Undercliffe, NSW

 

“What” huffs Margo Kingston “happens now that the ATSIC Board has decided to give their full support to Geoff Clark.” Well manifestly unjust as it may seem Margo, a public lynching of the Editor of the Age and the Fairfax columnists who so enthusiastically co-operated in his tawdry little knockoff plot is probably out of the question.

 

All however may not be lost. Pat O’Shane looks to be limping badly. With a bit of a push you guys might be able to get her instead and smother her to death with the old Fairfax sanctimony.

 

And yes indeed Margo, I too think that Geoff should follow John Marsden’s heroic example and absorb months of corrosive, character-destroying mudflinging in a can’t-win and utterly unnecessary attempt to “clear his name.” It would be almost as entertaining as watching journos discover the high moral ground; in the middle of a very smelly swamp.

 

PETER NUGENT in Queensland

 

Margo Kingston opinion piece published on 20 June is exactly the point Geoff Clark makes on the same day. However loathsome the crime of rape, and however unappealing his response to the allegations, Mr Clark is currently an innocent man.

 

He does not become guilty unless convicted in a Court following proof of his guilt by the prosecution. Mr Clark is under no obligation to prove his innocence and is entitled to simply deny his guilt and then mutely await the verdict.

 

The presumption of innocence is one of the cornerstones of our allegedly free society. A free and independent media is another cornerstone. I support the original publication of the story and all genuine reporting on it.

 

After all, Mr Clark can always have his day in the defamation Court and, if he wins, the Fairfax organisation will then simply have made him a wealthy man.

 

Kingston’s piece is pernicious and deplorable. A responsible editor should have consigned it to the wastebasket. I wonder whether she would have written the same things if the allegations had been about a different type of crime. I bet she wouldn’t have.

 

STEPHEN KUHN in Austinmer NSW

 

In defence of the women who allege they were raped by Geoff Clark, Margo Kingston says: ” There is also little doubt that they are – in the absence of the Fairfax story – powerless voices.” This is not true.

 

The courts are the appropriate venue for this debate. I would not want the courts replaced by the Sydney Morning Herald.

 

The Burden of proof is on the prosecution not the defendant. The police have chosen not to prosecute at this stage. A large article in the Sydney Morning Herald does not equal a full prosecution and therefore no defence is required.

 

Is Margo Kingston suggesting that the burden of proof be lowered in criminal matters, so that a few statutory declarations and an article in the SMH proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? I hope not.

 

If the Police charge Geoff Clark then a defence will not only be desirable it will be necessary. Until then Geoff Clark has no case to answer. In the meantime all that is being achieved is that Geoff Clark is being deprived of his liberty.

 

********

 

MY DEFENCE:

 

I’ll begin with a contribution by Brian Bahnisch, as he makes it as clear as I could that the criminal justice system is not about truth, but proof according to strict rules of evidence – as it should be when the citizen’s liberty is threatened.

 

BRIAN BAHNISCH in Ashgrove, Brisbane

 

Disclosure: I used to work in the Department of Education in Brisbane and studied some philosophy and sociology many years ago. I was cleaned out by Wayne Goss’s boys 10 years ago when everyone was suspected of being a National Party toady. Now I mow lawns, invest in stocks and shares and try to work out how the world could be better organised.

 

Since The Age published the Geoff Clark allegations I have read and heard a lot on the ABC about the issues raised. I found your analysis particularly helpful and was particularly struck by the Rhonda Dixon email (Diary yesterday). It had the ring of truth about it, and if true, was clearly disturbing.

 

My reason for writing is not to add to the condemnation or praise of Pat O’Shane, Geoff Clark or The Age, but to identify an aspect of the discourse which has been overlooked to some extent.

 

We use different standards to establish the truth depending on the context. This was highlighted in the Carmen Lawrence matter. A Royal Commission uses ‘the balance of probabilities’ whereas a court uses ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.

 

This higher standard of proof is important if we are to preserve the presumption of innocence. It is based on the notion that an individual’s rights in criminal matters must not be trampled in the interest of the State or society.

 

It was interesting that you said that The Age needed to satisfy itself as to the truth of the allegations against Clark ‘on the balance of probability’. It seems to me that the ATSIC commissioners should be using this standard of proof also.

 

If the police won’t act for whatever reason, the facility to test the criminal standard of proof is not available. To use the lack of a criminal conviction is a copout.

 

It is a copout because the question then becomes not whether Geoff Clark is a criminal, but whether he is fit to fill the position he holds. Here the Commissioners have a duty to the position of Chair which should take precedence over any feeling of solidarity towards an individual person.

 

Furthermore the Commissioners should not privilege the voice of the powerful over that of the weak and marginalised. To do so is to call into question their own fitness for the commission they hold.

 

One statement you made about the misogyny of Aboriginal men brought me up with a start. I had heard of it and read about it, but you made it sound pretty general. Then came the witness of Rhonda Dixon and just moments ago I heard you read out to Philip Adams a powerful statement by Evelyn Scott (in the Herald today) – chilling indeed!

 

It seems to me that if people like Pat O’Shane feel they have to choose between solidarity against racism over a concern for possible victims of crimes against women then the whole ATSIC project is deeply flawed. All the more reason for the Commissioners to think carefully about who should lead them.

 

ends.

 

The second part of my defence is this. There is a civil law which applies to this case – just as much THE LAW as the criminal law. It is the law of defamation.

 

The High Court held in the Theophanous case, as clarified in the 1998 Lange case, that the media has the right to publish matters in the public interest in certain circumstances. Clearly, the Clark story diminished his reputation. To defend ourselves, we could rely on truth, which we could have to prove on the balance of probabilities, or “qualified privilege”.

 

The High Court held unanimously in Lange that “Each member of the Australian community has an interest in disseminating and receiving information, opinions and arguments concerning government and political matters that affect the people of Australia.”

 

Now what must a media group prove to come within this limited right to free speech?

 

The Court said the media group “must establish that its conduct in making the publication was reasonable in all the circumstances of the case…The proof of reasonableness will fail as a matter of fact unless the publisher establishes that it was unaware of the falsity of the matter and did not act recklessly in making the publication”.

 

“As a general rule, a defendant’s conduct in publishing material giving rise to a defamatory imputation will not be reasonable unless the defendant had reasonable grounds for believing that the imputation was true, took proper steps, so far as they were reasonably open, to verify the accuracy of the material and did not believe the imputation to be untrue.”

 

This defence allows the media to engage in investigative reporting in the public interest provided it is meticulously researched and bona fide.

 

As I wrote in Monday’s diary, we do not yet know all the steps taken by The Age on this story. Clark says he won’t sue because he can’t afford it. This is incredible – any number of lawyers would take a case like this “on spec” if it had a reasonable prospect of success because of its potential for huge damages.

 

In these circumstances, the full details of the steps taken by The Age will come out in the press council hearing of Clark’s complaint, when he makes it.

 

By the way, do not imagine that the ATSIC Board is as one on this issue. Note that NO statement was issued by the board – instead deputy chair Ray Robinson announced verbally that Clark had the its unanimous support. I understand that intense pressure was placed on the five female board members to sign a statement supporting Clark. They refused.

 

GEOFF CLARK

JOY STEVENSON in Thornbury, Melbourne

 

Disclosure: My background includes teaching and research on Aboriginal communities (Borroloola, also Alekarenge and Goulburn Island). I have also worked at a Women’s Refuge and with women dealing with sexual assault.

 

 

Thursday’s front page article on Geoff Clark was the first time I have been really ashamed to be reading The Age. I looked forward to seeing your take on the issue in your Monday piece, and also listened to you talk to Philip Adams and then read Tuesday’s piece. I was so disappointed, and I have been trying hard to put the reason into words. Here goes.

 

Firstly, to look at an action and think ‘would we do the same if it was a white bloke?’ is only one of the checks for racist behaviour, and is very limited. Over and over the comment (not just from you) has been that the article would have of course been printed if it was a white official accused.

 

Well where are those articles? There is no lack of men in high positions who have raped and abused women and children (true!). There are many, many women who have been raped and never have seen justice.

 

So why does it happen that the one they get the dirt on is from an Aboriginal background? Think about it. Think what his background is. Think what his being Aboriginal means in terms of the research that led to those women, and of their positions. Of course it is a race issue.

 

If there was the evidence to convict Clark it could have been done and justice would have been seen to be done. But without that evidence Clark, innocent or guilty, will deny charges and act in a way to cause least damage to his own life and reputation, and to that of his organisation and his cause.

 

So what is the point? To expect him to address the women’s claims is just bizarre. It would be detrimental to himself to put them down, or to give any credence to them. Of course he will do neither.

 

Secondly, putting the issue as sex vs race politics is terribly simplistic. It may have been a concept to grapple with in the 1970’s but it is you, not Pat O’Shane, who is running with it now. And it is also The Age’sdefence against any criticism of its article. How clever.

 

Sex and Race are both issues of personal as well as wider social justice and of course no one should be keeping quiet about one for the good of the other. But I would query if that was the issue for those women in trying to get justice done.

 

If there had been accessible justice and support for the women at the time of their assaults there would not be an issue now. That there was not says more about our policing and justice system than it does about race politics in Aboriginal organisations.

 

Thirdly, I cannot believe that this is an ethical piece of journalism. If Andrew Rule and The Age had wanted to bring justice to those women, they should have got enough evidence to convict. Since they didn’t, this article is simply a slur. It is a slur on Geoff Clark, and then it slurs onto anyone who defends him, who supports him, onto his organisation and quite possibly onto the women who trusted The Age with their stories.

 

The Age knew that the police were not taking up the cases. What did they expect to get out of it? Front page news. Well done.

 

As for the women, I hope that having their stories told brings them some good and some healing. But it is also possible (likely?) that this experience may be a continuation of their abuse.

 

For Geoff Clark, if he is innocent it has been a wicked abuse of his rights by The Age. If he is guilty he learns to dig in his heels and keep denying it.

 

For the Aboriginal community, no matter who says what about the issue, they will be jumped on and needled and dug at to try to get more front page news. ATSIC is an organisation under enormous pressure, it is fighting hard to keep working well in spite of attack from all areas of society. This is the latest one.

 

It is possible that good may come from this story. Maybe, somewhere along the line, there may be justice done on some issue, or important issues aired and examined. But at the moment all I can see is destruction.

 

The messages that come across from this piece of journalism are the same old ones:

* Aboriginal men abuse and rape women,

* Abusive Aboriginal men get power,

* Aboriginal women are victims,

* Sexual abuse and misogyny is a much bigger issue in Aboriginal Communities than it is in ours,

* It’s the Aborigines who are racist, not us,

* ATSIC is a mess,

* The Aboriginal community does not support its leaders but are too frightened to say so,

* If they do support their leaders they are putting race politics ahead of the truth. and

* Journalists aren’t racist, and they are fighting for justice.

 

 

HUMPHREY HOLLINS

 

 

Geoff Clark’s tough approach may not be so effective against the Libs now. Surely if he backs anyone into a corner he will be reminded that he is on very thin ice.

 

I am reading an Amazon book called ‘The Mafia, CIA, George Bush’ about the the Contras, cocaine and Texas money.The author says journalists are not in the proof business, they are in the information business, and that proof is for mathematicians and courts of law.

 

What amazes me is how the elite – black and white – have closed ranks behind Clark. I heard the Age man justifying his work and he talked about a video of a footie match involving Clark when he bashed several players and was suspended. I know that he was a violent bastard and despite my support of Aboriginal rights, I dislike him.

 

ELLIAS ELLIOTT in Townsville

 

“Luvvy, luvvy, got two dollar?”

“No mother, I’m skint.”

“‘Ere, I know you. You been foolin’ with my daughter.”

“Rubbish. She just helped me blow my pay packet in the pub.”

“‘Ere, ‘er ‘usband, ‘e fix you up good.”

“But I never touched her.”

“Gimme two dollar.”

“Listen. I’ve got nothing left.”

 

I get home and find the T.V. and video missing. Charge me with rape? All I’d get is the luxury of defending myself at law.

 

In court, the currency is supposedly truth. But many people do lie in court and for truly base reasons. For such people, truth is a secondary issue. The real prize is leverage. Even vengeance for some perceived wrong is often a windfall outcome.

 

Outside the court, the currency is cred. People will believe what they want, interpret what they hear as they like and always push their own barrow.

 

In our urban jungles guilt or innocence becomes irrelevant when it comes to cred. Fairfax has unwisely bought into the furore surrounding Geoff Clark, ostensibly in a quest for truth. Truth will be lost in a battle for cred.

 

My many indigenous friends and neighbors know I would shun impropriety, let alone commit rape. But that doesn’t get my T.V. back. Somewhere, with someone, the thief has more cred.

 

I do not presume to know the truth of Mr Clark’s actions, but to attack his credibility is to engage in the realpolitik of indigenous society. A domain in which I fear Fairfax has no real experience, one in which it’s meddling will provide only succour for Hansonites.

 

DAVID DAVIS in Switzerland

 

Martin Williams (diary yesterday) talks about “the grubbiness of the attempted destruction of two of the most important Aboriginal figureheads and power brokers”. He’s referring to the reporting of the rape allegations made against Geoff Clark and the subsequent comments by Pat O’Shane. He then makes the point that Aborigines of both sexes are the most likely to suffer from all of this.

 

He may be right in the short term and this saga is undeniably regrettable from virtually every aspect. But who started it and how else could it have panned out?

 

If four women come forward and allow their names to be attached to such allegations, they need to be listened to. Clark deserves and gets his presumption of innocence but to brush aside or cover up the allegations would be unforgivable. To do that in the name of promoting the Aboriginal cause would be grotesque.

 

So far we don’t have a “Ministry of Truth” and while ever we don’t at least there is some hope of reconciliation. It would also be pretty weird if the O’Shane remarks weren’t set upon by any who care about justice and the rights of women. Her dismissive remarks were breathtaking.

 

This controversy could be a marker – opening an avenue for further discussion. Reconciliation is by definition a two way street. For it to be successful it needs to run below the superficial level of the white elites and the black elites. Unless both sides can be frank and discuss the issues openly, reconciliation cannot take place. (MARGO: My emphasis.)

 

The broad swathe of white Australia is not going to be brought along if they see double standards operating at the highest levels. Equally, I am not so sure that a huge chunk of Aboriginal women in particular would be happy with Clark or O’Shane. Potentially happy or unhappy is an inadequate description – “betrayal” may be more appropriate.

 

No one is untouchable and it would be an utter outrage if the media started adopting some kind of censorship based on race. Leaders, elected and unelected are accountable to their constituencies. The idea that different standards should apply is patronising.

 

In criminal terms, rape is about as serious as it gets. The idea that repeated, independent allegations would or should be ignored is nonsense.

 

Margo, I found your comment that present day Aboriginal culture is deeply misogynist to be disturbing but thought provoking. I have no particular reason to doubt you and it seems that practical experience suggests it is largely true.

 

The truth can sometimes be painful but denial and double-talk are ultimately more damaging.

 

Beyond all the symbolism though, there are some practical issues, such as how on earth can either Clark or O’Shane continue in their present roles?

 

If I were Clark and I were innocent I would not rest until my name was cleared. I certainly wouldn’t be trying to put the issue behind me and “drive on” in the name of aboriginal unity. That’s why we have defamation laws. Our law recognises that character is crucial. There’s a reason for that – it’s central, it’s intangible, and it can’t be bought or sold.

 

Character is actually priceless. Once irreparably damaged, it can’t be easily repaired either. ATSIC needs a leader who is seen to have character intact. Unless Geoff Clark or someone else can do something to restore his character he has to go.

 

PAT O’SHANE

 

MARTIN WILLIAMS has something to add

 

I note the the peculiar haste with which women in the Liberal Party (Chikarovski, Vanstone, Vale) have rushed to condemn O’Shane and demand her removal. As a federal minister, Vanstone’s comments were actually no less outside her brief than O’Shane’s. And Danna Vale’s pugnacious comment demanding to know what O’Shane had ever done for Aboriginal women really stuck in my craw.

 

With Howard’s contempt for judicial activism and Vale’s demand that O’Shane be judicially active, where is one left to go? In fact, the women in the federal Liberal Party have generally done their utmost to redefine and expand what it means to be “token”.

 

Their long standing uninterest in Aboriginal welfare has been even less edifying. (MARGO: To be fair, Danna Vale led the confrontation with Howard over the Northern Territory’s mandatory sentencing laws for children.) So their comments make me seethe, but they will probably capitalise more than anyone else from all of this.

 

I grew up in Kempsey. Not what you might call Australia’s model town as far as black-white relations are concerned. Anyone who has lived there can relate (with hilarity or discomfort and embarrassment depending on your attitude towards Aborigines) or relay stories of black women having the crap beaten out of them, up and down the main street, by a drunken black man while their children watched and while all the whites stared, laughed or walked away.

 

It brings me to tears to remember such things. And how “c…” is the favoured and prominent term of abuse used by younger male and female Aborigines who are inclined to talk like that.

 

And how black women are casually referred to as “gins” by white men at meetings of local civic organisations”.

 

My girlfriend is also “Aboriginal” – of a tribal indigenous minority – but not from Australia. She can also tell any number of stories about how poorly or superciliously Aboriginal men from her own community and elsewhere treat her and other women. And how she was ostracised from her village when she had a child out of wedlock. And in particular how top Aboriginal male leaders in political circles retain strongly sexist and contemptuous attitudes toward women and aren’t afraid to show it.

 

But these behaviours were so culturally accepted that there was absolutely nothing one could do to avoid them apart from flee to the cities and find work, where new sexist regimes would lay in wait. So I gained an insight into the predicament facing indigenous women from her as well.

 

But I still maintain that O’Shane’s looming fall is an utter tragedy, for all. And I get the impression that most ordinarily responsible voices (especially white people who approvingly “thought O’Shane was a feminist”) are treating O’Shane’s words more like a personal affront or an ideological sin rather than first and foremost considering that in the end hers was a supremely crude defense of the presumption of innocence of the defendant (which is her job, oddly enough). And also considering what effect O’Shane’s removal will have.

 

The key to escaping or fighting injustice is education, and O’Shane is a highly educated Aboriginal woman under siege by judicial and media inconsistency and who is not being assessed on her merits in balance. What a fine example this will set for young, aspiring, Aboriginal women.

 

If O’Shane gets the boot, she becomes an ethnic scapegoat. If she is allowed to stay, she will be forever branded as Australia’s judicial Uncle Tom (“better patronise her and let her stay, she’s Black and makes us look good”). The Liberal Party’s Aboriginal affairs thinktank could not have scripted this affair any better.

 

After the current media fuss dies down, I can’t see any dramatic increase in interest in Aboriginal women’s welfare in the short to medium term. Cathy Freeman must be grateful that she’s out of town and so not have to view and be asked to comment on all of this unravelling.

 

SEAN RICHARDSON

 

Disclosure: White male former military officer, currently studying law & working part time as a researcher.

 

I think you’re guilty of a knee jerk reaction to Magistrate O’Shane’s remarks. I say this because of what looks like a near deliberate attempt to misinterpret her.

 

Having said that, I can well understand anyone reacting angrily to what APPEAR to be convincing allegations of forcible rape, as I think the community generally holds this crime to be in the worst category of offence, along with murder and child sexual abuse.

 

I can also understand a woman being especially incensed, as there is nothing makes us humans more furious than an injustice which were powerless to stop, as are most women when confronted with a male rapist.

 

It is undoubtedly true that the majority of sexual assault allegations are made bona fide, and that many more instances go unreported, leaving vicious males (I’m loathe to call them men) free to offend again.

 

It is also true that false accusations are made. The motives for this need not even be malicious: I’m sure we all remember the recent tragic case of a gay man being bashed to death in a Sydney park after a mentally ill woman falsely claimed that he had raped her. Those men who thought they were doing extra-judicial justice for that woman are now, as I understand it, in gaol.

 

Which should give us all pause when considering Ms O’Shane’s remarks, especially journalists. Contrary to what you have now written several times, the magistrate DID NOT say that “most” women are lying when making such allegations. She said “a lot”, by which I take her to mean a number which is not statistically insignificant.

 

I have a friend working in family law who would agree, both that the majority of such allegations are well founded, and that quite a few aren’t. It is ridiculous that anyone can sincerely suggest that a woman appearing before O’Shane would be worried about gender bias. To once again buck the trend and cite an example, it was O’Shane who refused to punish women found guilty of vandalising advertising that she felt was sexist. As a feminist jurist, O’Shanes runs are on the [bill]board.

 

You have said that O’Shane “rejected the testimony” of Clark’s accusers. Your use of that legalistic term implies that the allegations were akin to court testimony when they were not in fact subject to cross examination or the rules of evidence.

 

Furthermore, O’Shane specifically stated that she had not seen the women or heard their stories. In other words she does not consider a newspaper report to be “testimony” at all, and was not judging the truth or otherwise of the specific allegations. (MARGO: If you check the transcript at abc.net.au, or the extensive excerpts in Rape and racism, diary Monday, you will see that she specifically attacked the credibility of one of the women, as well as all four in general terms.)

 

The magistrate was merely reminding society that the allegations could conceivably be false, and that Clark is innocent until they are proven, which is a degree of responsibility not shown by Fairfax or yourself.

 

The stories about Clark were presented as factual accounts, which almost certainly elicited feelings of outrage in the breasts of many readers similar to those experienced by our above mentioned park vigilantes.

 

If O’Shane is worried about a media witch-hunt, exacerbated by the emotive nature of the alleged crime and community prejudice, I would say that such fears are well grounded in the country whose press brought us the Chamberlain fiasco. (MARGO: Are you kidding? That was a jury verdict, and it stank!)

 

I hope you can see the parallels, but I dare say Australian journalism’s response would be much like Homer Simpson: “Marge my friend, I haven’t learned a thing.”

 

MICHAEL JOHNSTON

 

I feel you have been hard on Pat – I have seen her work and was impressed. She has bled to shift very stodgey/reactionary judicial attitudes especially in relation to authority, police, minorities and rape.

 

I’ve found the outcry against her very opportunistic – it will be a loss to the broader community if she is driven out.

 

Misogyny is a big issue in the indigenous community – the Australian has ran some devastating articles on it recently.

 

The dilemma of appointments to co-opt/achieve diversity is: do you go for the Clarence Thomas (at least he’s black) who’ll echo established values not matter how far they are removed from his community’s reality or do you pick an O’Shane who is willing to take risks to make a difference even though she shares the (tragic) blind-spots of her community.

 

Better still let’s pick someone safe from a nice private school who won’t rock the boat. With luck they’ll put a tax form in.

 

It may be in the public interest to report the allegations against Clark, but it will be a disaster if Pat goes down in the fall-out. The power of the Meejah again – for good or for ill.

A week away, and a deeply complex, multi-layered issue to think about – the allegations of rape against Geoff Clark published in the Age and the Herald last Thursday.

Let’s start with Pat O’Shane, because she’s easily dealt with. O’Shane began her Lateline interview with a condemnation of trial by media. “Well, the first thing I want to say, Tony, is I think it’s tabloid sleaze at its best – or worst, however you like to characterise it. Now, it seems to me that what we’re seeing in the absence of any successful criminal legal proceedings, a trial by media. And that’s outrageous.”

She then judges the four women making the allegations on the basis of the media report.

JONES: I guess that’s what surprises me in what you’re saying Pat O’Shane, that you seem to have no sympathy for these women.

O’SHANE: Tony, I can only tell you on the basis of my experience that people will raise allegations for all sorts of motives, including some exceedingly base motives, and I can tell you on the basis of my experience that a lot of women manufacture a lot of stories against men. Now, I know a huge number of my feminist friends are going to be shocked to hear me say it, but we don’t live in fairy land. We live in a real world.

And I find it extremely difficult to accept, especially in the case of one of these women, who was the daughter of, I take it from the report, an Anglo-Australian fellow of some standing in the community, that she was afraid to report the matter because of Geoff Clark’s alleged violence and gang leadership, which allegations, by the way, are extremely spurious in themselves, since there is absolutely not a shred of anything further being raised in support of such allegations.

They’re just thrown off in broad general terms, which just leave one wondering, “Well, what was that all about?”

JONES: Now, Mr Clark is saying that there’s a conspiracy against him. It’s because he’s questioned the legitimacy of this country and the treatment of Aboriginal people. Do you agree with him on that?

O’SHANE: Well, of course, there is a lot of truth in what he says in that regard, Tony. If I were to say to you there are allegations against senior Liberal Party politicians in the Federal Government accused of sexual assault when he was at university – Sydney University, would you run that?

Of course not. For the very reason that he is who he is.

But if it’s Geoff Clark, head of ATSIC in this country, yes, it gets run. One has to question the motives in those circumstances…

JONES: But do you seriously think that these women are part of such a conspiracy?

O’SHANE: I put nothing past anybody, let me say that Tony. I don’t know these women. I haven’t heard their stories, apart from what is reported in the newspaper, and I’ve just made my comments about those.

The case against O’Shane is open and shut. Based on a media report she decries, she clearly judges the women unreliable and gives credence to a conspiracy theory which casts them as deliberate liars. This prejudgment is intolerable behaviour for any self-respecting lawyer, let alone a magistrate. One has only to reverse the comments to see how untenable they are. If O’Shane had said, “Of course, most men who rape deny the charge” she would clearly be accusing Geoff Clark of rape.

One need not even enter the sexual and race politics embedded in this issue to find O’Shane guilty of the very behaviour she accuses the Fairfax press of perpetrating. So now – bereft of any defence for her actions, she complains of the general remarks of a white, male Supreme Court judge about feminists, homosexuals and the like. There is a crucial difference – those remarks were not related to a particular case where the facts were at issue.

And the implication of her counter-attack, that she is being targetted because she’s black and a woman, is nonsense. Her remarks could have easily come out of the mouth of a white male judge 30 years ago. If they came out of such a mouth now, he’d be condemned in spades. Justice Bollen was crucified some years ago when he suggested that a wife might expect “rougher than usual handling” from her husband. In fact, O’Shane is being treated more gently than she would have been had she been a white male.

We can see from the transcript that O’Shane’s remarks were no slip of the tongue. She explicitly states that feminists will be upset. She knows that over the last several decades women have fought the inbuilt bias in the justice system against women alleging they have been raped, including the fact that a women’s sexual history is fair game while the man’s is off limits.

Sure, a few women fabricate rape, about the same proportion as allegations on non-sexual matters. But to say this is commonplace, to the extent that a woman’s version of events should be doubted as a matter of course, attempts to take us back to the days before women won respect for their rights on being raped.

One heartening fact in all this is that O’Shane has not taken us back to those dark days. Her remarks have been unacceptable to the NSW Attorney-General, a man, the chief magistrate, a woman, and to men and women across the spectrum. That’s progress.

One disheartening fact is that O’Shane made the remarks despite the fact that Aboriginal culture is so deeply misogynistic that many Aboriginal men still think it appropriate to rape and assault women as a matter of course. In this regard, Aboriginal women are still fighting the battle won, at least in part, in the white culture for years. If their allegations are true, the courage of the three Aboriginal women to come forward is enormous. Yet O’Shane casts a shadow of suspicion over her black sisters in the course of defending a male Aboriginal leader from allegations which neither she or we know are true or false. This is sexual and race politics on collision course, and O’Shane has picked loyalty to the latter at the expense of the former, which makes its own statement about women’s value in Aboriginal politics.

And here is the rub for Geoff Clark. Does he represent the Aboriginal peoples – men and women? If he truly does, should he not stand aside, for now at least, to show Aboriginal women that he does indeed respect their rights and interests? Is it enough for him to merely deny the allegations and claim a giant conspiracy he will not detail? And if he does not step aside, should he not at the very least sue the Fairfax press for defamation to allow the matter to be tested in Court?

A serious problem in this mess is that the allegations are out, the police will not prosecute, and we are at stalemate. Noone knows the truth of the matter. It sits there, festering. As Labor’s Aboriginal affairs spokesman Bob McMullan said in a statement, the allegations “are extremely serious”. “However, Mr Clark, as any other Australian, has a right to the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise. Any further activity in relation to these allegations is a matter for the Police. It is in the public interest that this matter be dealt with in a timely and transparent manner.”

Which brings me to the most difficult issue of all, the decision to publish.

Let’s get out of the way the ludicrous notion being peddled by the ATSIC deputy chairman Ray Robinson – coincidentally himself convicted of rape until it was overturned on appeal and he was found not guilty at a retrial – that Fairfax was racist to publish.

Robinson charges that “non-Aboriginal leaders … would not be subject to this type of treatment.Why is there another rule for Aboriginal leaders?” So does O’Shane. “If I were to say to you there are allegations against senior Liberal Party politicians in the Federal Government accused of sexual assault when he was at university – Sydney University, would you run that? Of course not.”

I can give you an example right now. Some years ago, I published a story that the wife of WA Liberal Senator Noel Crichton Brown had taken out a domestic violence order against him some years before. It was a controversial story at the time, with many arguing that the matter was private. My defence was that domestic violence had finally been taken out of the closet, and that federal and state leaders had agreed that it was a crime. I won’t say I was completely happy about what I’d done – far from it. It was a very difficult decision to make. And it was interesting that while little was done after that revelation, Crichton Brown was later expelled from the Liberal party for telling a female journalist he would “screw your tits off” if she published a certain story. A nice case of the socially unacceptable being more serious than private domestic assault.

We would publish if the alleged perpetrator was a white public figure. This contrary claim is reverse racism at its most destructive. It is untrue, it is self-serving, and it debases the currency of race politics. It also raises serious questions about the quality of some of our present Aboriginal leaders and their fitness for office.

If a white politician was accused of serial rape, he would stand down or be stood down by the Prime Minister. Clark, in contrast, remained chairman even while a criminal prosecution for rape was on foot. In my view it is the Aboriginal leader who is getting more favourable treatment than his white counterpart, and every Australian knows it. How damaging is this distasteful fact?

By the way, to me it is very significant that it was the Fairfax press which published the allegations. The Fairfax papers are noted for their long-held support of the Aboriginal cause. A media organ antagonistic to Aboriginal interests which published the story would make the whole murky affair even more murky. For O’Shane to allege a racist conspiracy by Fairfax is just plain silly.

But there remain incredibly important questions about publication. The fact is that police know of all four cases. They prosecuted one, and Clark was acquitted due to lack of corroborative evidence. The other three women were not called to give evidence at the trial. This is because of the strict rules of evidence, which mean allegations of similar crimes cannot be used in court as evidence that the crime being prosecuted was committed because the admission of such evidence would be prejudicial to the defendant. For the same reason, a defendant’s previous convictions cannot be raised in the trial, even if they were for rape.

The only exception to the rule is “similar fact” evidence. If other allegations follow an identifiable pattern, they may be introduced in evidence. But the exception is very strict, and basically allows evidence to be admitted only if the modus operandi was precisely the same.

So if Clark was charged with the four alleged rapes, in no case could the other three women be called to give evidence. You can see the bind. For example, ten rapes committed in ten different ways without witnesses a long time ago and the perpetrator gets off scott free.

So Clark is safe under the law. That does not mean he is innocent or guilty. Does the media then back off and do nothing? And if it chooses to do something, in what circumstances should it do so?

The Age gave the following reasons for publishing the story.

“Three months ago The Age set out to profile Australia’s most powerful Aboriginal politician. In the process, our reporter travelled widely and spoke to many people.

What emerged was a picture of a hard and powerful man who wielded his power to great effect. But there was also something else: a deeply disturbing pattern that reached far back into Mr Clark’s life.

What we uncovered was a compellingly consistent story. We found four women who accused Geoff Clark of raping them inn a series of attacks in the 1970s and 1980s.

We acknowledge that these are claims stretching back 30 years but the stories of these women is no less harrowing today. They are all prepared to be named. We have tested them on their accounts and they have remained steadfast. We can find no reason why they would not be telling the truth.

These are grave and damaging accusations but we believe they have to be published. Geoff Clark is a prominent public figure. It is in the public interest that these serious claims against him are revealed.”

You can see the problem. A media group publishes allegations because it is convinced they are true. This is a grave responsibility.

Imagine for a moment that you are a public figure. Someone accuses you of rape in the distant past. You did not commit rape, but the damage done to your reputation is almost irredeemable. You are put in the position that to save yourself you must initiate expensive, time consuming, and very unpleasant defamation litigation.

To my mind, there is no doubt that a single allegation of rape would not be published. It is the number of allegations which allowed the publisher to cross the line. While the evidentiary rules against admitting other offences help an alleged serial rapist in Court, the number of similar complaints helps the alleged victim when it comes to media publication. Deprivation of liberty is, after all, more serious than deprivation of reputation.

Then there is the question of relevance. It is clearly in the public interest for a public figure in Clark’s position to be investigated, and substantial allegations published. But what if, for example, the person concerned was the head of a corporate watchdog? To me, you cannot draw any lines here. The limits do not depend on whether one is a public figure or not, or the duties one carries out as a public figure, because we are talking about a serious criminal offence.

Instead, the limits are purely practical. If you are not a public figure, the media will not investigate your past. If you are a public figure, you run the risk of investigation.

Then the question is whether serious, “compelling” evidence of wrongdoing will be published. Clearly, publication is defamatory. The judgement is two fold. For the publisher’s lawyer, the question is “Can we prove on the balance of probability that the allegations are true?” If yes, the editor’s question is “Are we prepared to pay the bills for an expensive defamation trial?” A related question is “Will he sue?” Another related question is “Will the damages bill be so high if we lose that the risk outweighs the desire to publish?”

To me, there is not enough on the public record to know whether the decision to publish was correct. In a case where a potentially frightening precedent is created, the public should be told by the media group:

1. The precise circumstances leading to the investigation. For example, did the police, frustrated by being stymied in court, lead the reporter to the witnesses, perhaps hoping other victims might come forward? Did the reporter happen upon them through Geoff Clark’s enemies? I know some sources cannot be revealed, but a story such as this does not pop up from nowhere, and as much information as possible should be provided to the reader.

2. The evidence which convinced the publisher of the truth of the allegations. Merely to state that the witnesses didn’t change their story is not enough. We need to know why the publisher believed the story, the evidence upon which that assessment was made, in what ways the Age tested the truth of the allegation’s and the reliability of the accusers and, if there is any reason to question the motivation of the accusers, the reason why motivation was judged not to be tainted.

3. The processes by which the decision to publish was made. In my view, it is not enough to state baldly that “it is in the public interest that these serious claims against him are revealed”. We need to know, precisely, the public interest considerations the publisher found relevant in coming to his decision – both for and against publication – and how he weighed up those competing factors.

The reason I believe these three matters should be addressed is because we are relying on the publisher’s judgement, and the publishers judgement has the potential to destroy careers. The law is one way to test allegations. The law has not helped these women. The media are another way, and there must be strict, self-imposed accountability on the media. Yes, the public has the right to know. But they have the right to know everything that the publisher can reveal. I mean, public servants must give citizens written reasons for decisions which effect them – surely the media must have, at the very least, a commensurate responsibility.

It seems likely that this story will not be resolved, one way or the other. But damage has been done, and it is vital in the public interest that the precedent this sets is debated and analysed on the merits to create clear guidance on when the power of the media to disclose and destroy should and should not be exercised.

Now there could be strategic reasons for the absence of full disclosure from the Age so far, in that they must have expected a writ (none so far). I can tell you what happened at the Herald. We got the story the day before the Age intended to publish. The Herald and the Age have an agreement to share good stories which are not generated out of the Paper’s Canberra bureaus.

In such swaps, the paper getting the story from the sister publication relies on the latter’s judgement in matters of truth and journalistic rigour. The papers share the virtually the same requirements of journalists and standards of journalism.

The first question asked by the Herald’s deputy news editor, Mark Coultan, was “Would we publish if the story concerned a powerful right-wing figure?” That was easy – yes.

“The fact that it was an Aboriginal leader made me think twice, and you ask the question – is this some anti-Aboriginal conspiracy?”

The Herald lawyers read the story and consulted the Age lawyers.

The one hole Mark could see in the story was that it stated that all the women had spoken to the police but did not reveal the status of the police inquiries. The Age advised that the story was not dependent on police inquiries, but its own. Mark got a Herald reporter to ring the Victorian police, and was told that they were not taking the matter further. This was inserted into the story.

Mark’s other worry was that Clark may not have been given sufficient time to reply, the allegations having been put to him the day before. His concerns were alleviated when Clark issued a statement on the matter.

An important factor, of course, is that the Age would publish the next day anyway and that it would quickly go national. By publishing the story in the Herald, our readers would know the facts before the furore.

Today, Jack Robertson’s Meeja Watch looks at the Clark case. George Hirst, editor of the far north Queensland newspaper the Magnetic Times, took up my challenge to question politicians on the ground about pollies super, and I’ve posted his excellent report. Thanks to those who emailed hoping I’d get well soon.

MEEJA WATCH

The Triumph of the barbarians

By Jack Robertson

It’s been a noisy two weeks for the Fourth Estate.

The McVeigh execution was a journalistic farce of Kafka-esque dimensions. Whatever your position on Capital Punishment, no civilised person could endorse the way it was fetishised to the point where blah blah blah. It was the most sickening blah blah blah I’ve ever blah blah blahed, and unless journalists stop blah blah blahing, then blah blah blah blah blah.

Now in Oz, the allegations against Geoff Clark. Whatever your position on the seriousness of Rape, no civilised person could endorse the decision to publish, given that police weren’t intending to blah blah blah. It was the most outrageous blah blah blah I’ve ever blah blah blahed, and unless journalists stop blah blah blahing, then blah blah blah blah blah.

Actually, I was convinced by the four women’s accusations. Then again, I was convinced by Clark’s denials, too. I was convinced by Pat O’Shane. Then I was convinced by Pat Staunton’s denunciation of O’Shane. I was in turn convinced by John Howard, Kim Beazley, the ATSIC commissioners, the Civil Libertarians, the Age’s editor, Andrew Rule, the legal experts, every single columnist on the planet, Clark’s enemies, his friends, the man-in-the-street and the Ordinary Australian. I now believe absolutely everything, and absolutely nothing, I see and hear in the Modern Meeja. I’m a child of the Modern Meeja Times.

Journalism is as sick as a dog. Even our good young Reporters are doomed to be bad Reporters now, because the only weapon journalism ever had was its own credibility, and all the Boomer generation has done during their watch is to collectively ensure that the Public will never again ascribe credibility to any journalist.

They’ve progressively transformed a career in Reportage into one pointless road-trip, with the stories simply along for the ride to pay for the gas. Janet Malcolm is still the one writer who has come close to honesty about New Journalism – it has become, no matter how genuine the individual Reporter, a collective exercise in the exploitation and betrayal of Humanity.

I’m beginning to think that the only possible answer is to sack every journalist over fifty and start completely from scratch using only anonymous Reporters, so methodologically-compromised is the Watergate generation.

Ultimately, McVeigh’s execution and Clark’s rape allegations cannot be any more than just the latest in the long series of adversarial soap operas that has increasingly defined news Reportage ever since Nixon was taken down by Woodward and Bernstein.

It shouldn’t be this way; rape and execution are both deadly serious. But the Meeja has become hopelessly dirty. Like a reverse Midas Touch, it automatically diminishes everything it touches – rape, execution, war, love, sex, death, genocide, global catastrophe. That small square box-with-a-lens, the ten second soundbite, those 1000 word limits, that ninety second satellite feed – they transform real life into mere self-parody, gold into lead.

The problem isn’t the message, or even the journos, who mostly try like hell to do the impossible – make the same old stories hit home, somehow, anyhow. But just how can you interest anyone (who doesn’t have to live there) in the Middle East, these days? All you can do is jack up the level of sensationalism.

It’s a limitation of the Meeja itself. No matter how profound the subject or adroit the Reporter, a story can never be much more than just the next few frames in that long, blaring MTV video that now incorporates OJ Simpson’s bloody running shoes, Bill Clinton’s dob of dried spunk, the crumpled Mercedes in the Paris underpass and those smart bomb’s-eye views of rapidly-approaching Iraqi bunkers.

Perhaps serious journalism was doomed the second the first lurid TV images from Vietnam flashed into our homes, or perhaps the moment when the irresistibly seductive idea of the Deep Throat informer took hold. Perhaps it’s just that the corpse is taking a while to rot.

Watergate, OJ-gate, Diana-gate, Clintongate, McVeighgate, Clarkegate, Yawngate. This is the cyclic Meeja Paradigm the Boomers bequeath, a 24-hour linked and layered electronic hypertext of regurgitated conspiracy theories, manufactured emotional hysteria, adversarial confrontation.

A blanket of Meeja noise in which so much nonsensical babbling now goes on that Baudrillard and Foucault are starting to sound like plain-talking Good Public Citizens in comparison. It’s all very exciting and chin-stroking if you’re a Reporter, a Columnist or a Cultural Studies Professor, I suppose, but for the overwhelming majority of the world’s people, Journalism is over.

It’s gone. It’s broken. It doesn’t work for us any more, it works only for itself. How can it do otherwise, when it’s impossible to distinguish, from outside it, the real from the staged, fact from fiction, substance from spin, and profound Human truth from a tossed-off throw to a dunny roll ad?

The Blahbarians have come at last, and us Human Beings can’t get a word in edgeways.

POLLIES SUPER

Magnetic Times 15 – 28 June 2001

 

Questioning the Candidates

FEDERAL ELECTION WATCH

This issue we wish to ask a question which concerns independent MP Peter Andrens Parliamentary (Choice of Superannuation) Bill 2001 which would enable parliamentarians the

opportunity to vote for the option of being able to opt out of the compulsory Parliamentary Super scheme.

The question comes in two parts. The first: Would you like to have the right to opt out of the compulsory Parliamentary Superannuation Scheme in which taxpayers provide a 69% contribution and be able to join an ordinary super scheme with the rules that apply to all other salaried Australians which include a 8% employer contribution? If so, if elected would you support Peter Andren’s bill which would give you the right to exercise that choice?

 

Peter Lindsay (Sitting Liberal Member for Herbert):

I would go further than the Times question asks. Not only would I support the right of Members and Senators to join the super scheme of their choice, I have the view that Members in the Parliamentary scheme should not have access to their super before reaching age 55. I support the Prime Minister who has taken the lead on this issue and intends to bring changes to the scheme forward within about two weeks. (MARGO: Tricky, Peter. Howard wants to change ONLY the age 55 principle, and then ONLY for future politicians. The super-generous scheme otherwise remains intact.)

 

Conway Bown (Independent candidate):

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly with Mr Andrens bill to allow parliamentarians the opportunity to choose a scheme that is in line with that offered to every other Australian as opposed to the incredibly generous taxpayer funded scheme currently in place. And Yes, if elected, I would have absolutely no hesitation in choosing Andrens scheme. One in, all in, I say.

 

Jenny Hill (Labor Candidate):

(1) I dont think it is sensible to create two or more different schemes for the same group of workers.

(2) I would endorse the move to bring politicians superannuation closer in line with community standards especially in relation to the age at which MPs can get access to their pensions.

(3) I believe the best body to consider the MPs superannuation scheme is the Remuneration Tribunal which is independent and looks after MPs entitlements EXCEPT superannuation which is operated under an Act of Parliament and administered by a trust operated by the Minister for Finance.

Editor’s note: Incidentally, Peter Andren has noted: “If Kim Beazley did his research he’d find the Remuneration Tribunal has already given the thumbs up to the salary and super package MPs receive. In its 7th December 1999 report on MPs pay the Tribunal concluded it was satisfied that the remuneration package for Senators and Members (salary, superannuation and vehicle) is now competitive.”

George Hirst wrote: In his answer, Member for Herbert, Peter Lindsay said, I would go further than the Times question asks. Not only would I support the right of Members and Senators to join the super scheme of their choice, making a clear statement of support for Independent Peter Andrens bill.

Our Members statement was, according the Peter Andren’s office, the first solid expression of support for the bills option by any member of the government across the country so MT decided to ask if our member was prepared to let his feet follow his tongue and cross the floor of parliament on an issue that irks probably more Australians about their representatives than any other and, if need be, vote against his own party.

The opportunity to applaud Peter Lindsay for his courage soon evaporated however when we sought the answer. Mr Lindsay said, “I don’t want to add anything at this stage until I see what the PMs task force comes up with. This issue is not straightforward as there are many things to be considered. It therefore would not be prudent to shoot from the hip without the benefit of knowing the outcome of the PMs committee consideration.”

Its a pity, it would only be a short walk to the cross benches where Peter Andren sits. The Labor party sounds, as Herbert candidate Jenny Hill confirms, like it wants to make the right sounds and even support the Prime Minister’s plans to push back the access age to 55 but that is as far as it goes. Her party line follow-up comment which Peter Andren has exposed as the Beasley line and not much more than a sensible sounding sham, gives little cause for hope to cynical voters while John Howard’s plan to defer superannuation entitlements till age 55 won’t apply to anyone already in Parliament. More than a bit clubby you may think.

Little surprise then that the only candidate to make himself perfectly clear with no outs was One in, all in Independent, Conway Bown.

I’ve been off with the flu and come back to protests about our new in-story advertisements. Marie Toshack writes: “How about a column on this new online policy of placing ads in middle of stories? There’s a line under ads in the copy which leads to Tom Burton’s explanation of this new advertising rort. Would you like to find it in your stories? I think not!”

 

I admit to being shocked at the idea, and for a moment took comfort in the fact that no-one would want to advertise in our ghetto on smh.com.au. I’ve deliberately not asked Tom for the readership of Inside Out out of fear, but when he told me these ads could appear here in time, I took the plunge and he’s setting up monitoring of webdiary readership. I’ll let you know the result.

 

The thing is, the standard banner ads up the top of the screen don’t work for advertisers, so they’re not buying them any more. They are buying this new concept. As you know, online is NOT making money. It’s LOSING it. That means smh.com.au is not only a FREE service to you, but is a COST to us.

 

There’s two ways to at least break even – subscription or advertising. Last year, I raised the question of subscription to smh.com.au or this page, to be told firmly that it wasn’t on. Here’s what I wrote on November 14 (So what are YOU prepared to do about journalism?)

 

“Take smh.com online. Subscribers to the paper are, in effect, subsiding Australians round the country and the world who use the website for free. Would any of you in that position pay to see the Herald online?

 

“We have credibility, reputation, and journalistic resources to sell. Would you buy? Or if the basics remained free and specialised pages within it required subscription, would you do so?

 

“For example, how much would you pay, if anything, to access this web page? It’s cost is basically my salary plus the technical and back-up resources of the paper. Say no advertising was allowed on my page. The annual budget would be, say $450,000, allowing for a reasonable return on capital. Say about 5,000 people visited this site, about the same number as bought my book,. Would you be willing to pay $90 a year to subscribe?

 

“A big advantage, again, is that subscribers would “own” the site in a very direct way, and thus have enormous power to help shape its content. Subscribers would have confidence that the space is independent, because it would not be in the papers interests to compromise the site. I could even envisage a “contract” with subscribers, including guaranteed access to critique the site, and a transparent accountability system.

“My guess is that the answer to these questions would be no. So what value does the public place on independent quality journalism?”

 

 

David Eastwood had three objections – subscription would confine debate to an elite who could pay, the media had a moral responsibility to inform the public and should not discriminate between those who had internet access and those who didn’t, and a subscription would widen the gulf between the information rich and poor.

 

David Davis got angry. “If you restrict access in such a way to the media, isn’t it the ultimate in elitism and the ‘two Australias’? Let’s face it, good quality journalism is NOT a product like a quality wine, journalism is a key aspect of our democracy, our society. Let’s not start introducing haves and have nots in the world of political journalism consumers. There is something DEEPLY disturbing about it. Did you really think this through? A contract to have views heard? Are you SERIOUS? This is Margo’s “cash for comment”. I pay cash to you so I can comment??? Hell will freeze over before I pay CASH to express my opinion…I think you have lost it if you really think this way. If it doesn’t make money and Fairfax are not prepared to cross subsidise it then you should kill it off. Don’t bastardise it by making it an elite thing.”

 

Don Arthur preferred advertising, saying: “While I worry about advertisers I’m probably more worried about the lack of funding for in-depth journalism. Good reporting and the background work for informed analysis can consume a lot of time and money. It’s not much good having independent reporters if all they do is write stories around media releases, quick phone interviews or reports from wire services.”

 

Chris Abood said the question wouldn’t matter soon, because the net would end the media’s role as agenda setters because of online chatrooms and forums, and end our role as news gathers because news creators would go direct to readers. “There are greater issues facing your industry than maintaining quality, independent journalism. The sands are shifting, and shifting fast.”

 

 

Only Richard Lawrence was willing to pay. “I would happily pay the price you suggest to maintain access to the sort of journalism that is emerging from this site. In fact, I would subscribe to a smh.online.com site in it’s current form, if that was what it took to maintain it free of advertising and allow experiments like this.”

 

So there you have it. I still reckon we’re safe – who would want to advertise here? If someone does, a way to keep us advertising free within the page would be to find a sponsor for it. Oh yeah?

 

 

Barry Jones fans might note he’s speaking at a seminar on Saturday called “Relaxed, Comfortable and Stupid” at the State Library in Sydney. He will speak on “The challenge to the knowledge nation” at 10am. I’m speaking in the afternoon on “Australian newspapers: bringing back the provocation”.

 

Today, Tim Dunlop – like me – has Friday on his mind, Elen Seymour demands scientific activism in the research and development debate and our man in Britain Sean Cody reports on the election campaign.

 

First, new contributor Ellias Elliott in Queensland responds to Peter Kelly’s piece on citizen as punter (Webdiary Tuesday).

 

“I am not sure if this is just a heavily moderated newsgroup tacked onto a major metropolitan daily, or an embryonic avenue for some to mass circulation. (MARGO: Me either!) Still I feel compelled to point out toPeter Kelly that a Punt is a unit of currency. Historically of Irish origin. A punter is simply one who indicates their faith in something by putting their money into it.

 

“Gambling is but one form. Punters attend rave parties, rock concerts, even gallery openings and soirees. If punters are allegorically voters, I hope very few of them use the dropped pin lotto method of choice which must seem to some to be endemic.

 

“Of course the analogy of politics as a horse race is age old. But in our democracy, even as punters, we are free to start, join and in all ways participate in political movements. The gambler is never literally IN the horse race. The political horse, the party, is made up of people. That there is a dearth of choice reflects more on ordinary voter/punters ambivalence to participation.

 

 

TIM DUNLOP

 

The news that Friday On My Mind had been voted the best Australian song ever was an uplifting moment in a week when our two major political leaders raced each other to the bottom, hotly pursued by the mindless media, in an argument about who could think up the best excuses for not calling a tax a tax. It got me thinking about something friends and I had discussed on occasions: making Friday On My Mind the national anthem.

 

Such a sweet paean to anti-neo-liberalism, to unbridled fun, to act first think later, it captures an important element of the national psyche in a way that Advance Australia Fair and Waltzing Matilda never could. It would do for national anthems what the Canadian flag did for flags: make them something simple and memorable and meaningful. Youd have more national unity in a split second than you would in a decade of stage-managed events celebrating Federation.

 

There is a temptation to read the lyrics and the sentiment they invoke as yobbo and anti-intellectual, but this is a favourite ploy of our betters to denigrate working class and non-elite culture in general. In fact, the lyrics are a beautifully succinct evocation of the working persons week, as poignant as anything Orwell ever came up with. The fact that its all backed by a riff-to-die-for simply adds a sense of hope and elation to what could otherwise be a bitter expression of relentless downtroddeness.

 

And its power does not lie in its ability, these days, to evoke a lost past of 60s hedonism and yoof at the barricades. It is instead a reminder of what we could be; of what a society organised around the exaltation of the social rather than the economic could actually be.

 

The Friday that the song has on its mind isn’t just a day of the week: it is exactly the same thing as Chifley tried to evoke with the phrase “light on the hill” or what John Howard clumsily tried to capture when he said he wanted Australians to be comfortable and relaxed. That’s what the Easybeats wanted too; it’s what we all want.

 

The song allows us to think our way out of the narrow, lifeless and petty trap of economic rationalism and the small-minded, scared and kow-towing attitudes of those who we, in our desperation and marginalisation have handed the country over to.

 

The thing is, Howard and Beazley and Co love politics. They love all that stuff that drives most of us to distraction and with which we cant be bothered, and it allows them, therefore, to take control: remember Ellis’s first law: power devolves to the most boring person in the room. The proof is sitting in parliaments all over the country.

 

Most of the rest of us don’t love politics because it doesn’t do it for us; it doesn’t get our feet tapping or our mouths humming. In fact, the dullards who run it run it in such a way as to make it as boring and inaccessible as possible to the rest of us, just so we dont get involved. It’s about time we changed their tune.

 

I think the willingness of people, particularly those under 50, to participate at some level in politics, government or society would increase by about a million percent if we made Friday On Mind the national anthem.

 

It sings to the better angels of our nature and actually reminds us what politics and government is meant to be about: people. All of us. However we express it, we’ve all got a version of Friday on our minds, and it’d be nice to be reminded of the fact every time we won an a gold medal, opened a national building, or welcomed a visiting dignitary.

 

It’d sure (easy) beat the hell out of having to sing that our land is girt by sea or that some jolly swagman had stuffed a sheep in his tucker bag. Let’s put it to the vote.

 

 

ELEN SEYMOUR in Ottowa

 

“The science community welcomed Backing Australia’s Ability, but as a first step, the beginning of a process,” Dr David Denham said. “It was a partial solution to the issue of how Australia should invest in our national future.” (Webdiary “Another World”, Thursday May 24th.)

 

It was next to no solution!!!! Yes, yes the corporate rate got lowered to 30% – big deal! Still not within spit of being competitive with Ireland or Canada’s R&D concessions, or Singapore’s aggressive approach. Fail.

 

I really think – and here I have observed Tim Blair’s warning about a sense of humour in WebDiary “Copping it Sweet” Friday May 25 – the science community should not be so compliant and welcome any and every statement of projected investment, like some kind of grateful beggar. I know they are starving but its time for some self-respect and some militancy please!

 

And instead of wasting money and training (as per the chief scientist Robin Batterham) on giving scientists and engineers the appropriate selling skills it would be better to give them activist training! Maybe scientists should take a leaf out of the self-funded retirees book on “how to extort more money out of the government”.

 

Take off your lab coats guys and don the cardigans instead! At the least scrape together the last of your research dollars into an aggressive media scare campaign, or maybe one featuring prominent sports people saying nice things about R&D.

 

The problem is not only a reluctance of governments to “do the right thing” but that science – unless its about D.N.A. or involves some cool thing in outer space – is B-O-R-I-N-G. Scientists have no political clout because no-one cares. The only time people think about it is when scientists start cloning sheep and talk about genetic modifications.

 

My expat scientist husband likes to joke about the desired closure of the Lucas Heights Reactor by saying “What, and have a lot of angry unemployed nuclear physicists running around?” But does that scare anyone? Do scientists have a tenth of the scare power of farmers?

 

This brings me to the more serious stuff of “myths” and the strange, paranoid comments in Webdiary “Gen-Xers are Serious Young Insects” by the PhD in electrical engineering “Brian Jones”.

 

First Brian’s “Myths”.

 

(1) There is a lack of people doing science, engineering and IT. This is absolute rubbish! The numbers in engineering and IT are on the increase. The real problem is that many companies only want the very best and experienced people. When recruiters and companies say there is a shortage of skilled people they really mean skilled people of a very high calibre.

 

Yes, it is true that IT is probably flooded with less than high calibre people – if Oz is anything like Canada you probably have heaps of adverts in print media and television for IT qualifications along the lines of “Can you read to the end of this advert? You can! Congratulations – you qualify for a career in IT!” But there is a genuine decline in enrolment in the sciences, as Barry Jones stated, as the Institute of Physics has stated over the past few years, as most science faculties could tell you.

 

And you can’t just blame it on recruiters and posters in bus shelters, you have to ask why there is a lack of skilled people of a very high calibre? Not because idiots are enrolling, but because they lack proper research and industry experience, and are not suitably qualified.

 

Why? Could it be because there are few enough positions for qualified scientists and engineers in industry and government research bodies, let alone for cadets or traineeships or just summer work experience? Could it be the steady drain from universities into research positions in industry and the lack of proper university funding means second rate equipment, inadequate library facilities, frustrated cynical staff, all adding up to mean the education they receive is more closely approaching adequate than outstanding?

 

Could it possibly have something to do with the fact that there is a brain drain to the US and Canada and other countries leaving behind fewer and fewer mentors for the next generation? Could it be that scientists and engineers and academic staff are having to spend more time being “managers” and out seeking funds, leaving less time to supervise, less time to give a damn?

 

(2) People leave Australia because the salaries are poor. Consider this. You’re talking about salaries ranging from $50K to $120K for corporate R&D. Ask someone who is earning less than $30K (either in the city or rural areas) if these are poor salaries! People leave for three reasons: careerism, lifestyle interests and even more money.

 

Hello, have you checked the value of the Australian peso lately? Even leaving aside the sorry state of the dollar, to compare research salaries to $30K is a bit of a cheap shot!. Well of course $50K plus is more money than $30K. However, remember the wild, crazy idea that remuneration is commensurate with experience and education? That a PhD would give you more salary power than a Bachelors, all other things being equal? That is what happens in Canada, that is what I suspect is happening in Finland, that is what happens in the USA – that is what happens in a society where researchers are valued! You get paid more.

 

And what kind of qualifications are usually required in research? Post docs, PhDs and Masters. That is why they get paid as much as they do and quite often a lot less than people in my profession(the law) who rarely have Masters, post docs or PhDs.

 

Brian wrote: “Big deal if the chief scientist Robin Batterham says there are no Porsches in the car park. I receive an annual package worth close to six-figures and I ride a $200 bicycle to work. Do you think I care?”

 

 

The point Robin Batterham was making was *symbolic*. And there are plenty of Porsches in the carparks of research labs in Ottawa. Not all of us are able to withstand the siren song of materialist possessions either.

 

Brian wrote: “Consider what happens when you have another group of people who all earn over $100K and have somewhat right-wing tendencies? In my experience, scientists and engineers are not the most sympathetic group of people towards low-income earners, farmers, and the disadvantaged. There’ll be greater affluence for a few people.”

 

Oh and lawyers and doctors and financial consultants are much more sympathetic I suppose? My argument is based on the idea that increased R&D in Australia is to safeguard Australia from becoming a banana republic, a nation left behind.

 

Brian: “The end result could simply be the creation of another elite group. If you listen carefully to groups such as the Institution of Engineers Australia, you’ll find that what they really want is for engineers to have more power and influence, and not necessarily higher salaries! I think Australia has done well not to let scientists & engineers have as much influence as in countries such as France and the USA. We don’t want to be giving too much power to another group of specialists, and highly paid specialists at that.”

 

What influence do French and US scientists have that is questionable in its wisdom, what kind of decisions are they improperly impacting upon, what policy are they inappropriately guiding? This fear of the specialist is precisely what *Barry* Jones’ deplores in the “The Cult of Management” subsection in his speech to Macquarie University, April 27 (see WebDiary waiting for the Knowledge Nation, Wednesday May 16) It disheartens me to see someone who has survived the cutbacks and secured themselves a good position in reward for their hard work should be so uncaring of their fellow travellers.

 

Finally, thanks for all the cheques Margo, keep ’em coming!

 

BRITISH ELECTION 2001

 

Spin and Substance

 

By Sean Cody

 

Channel 4 has been running a series of documentaries in the past couple of weeks under the umbrella heading of “Politics Isn’t Working”. Monday’s show was titled “Party Crashers”. Three young people were asked to pose as volunteers and try to infiltrate the party headquarters of Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, then to keep a video diary of what they saw and experienced while working in the party machines.

 

While some would not agree with this style of investigation, it was a fascinating expose of how certain matters are dealt with by the three major parties in this election campaign. The following appears to be acceptable behaviour.

 

You are the leader of the ruling Labour Party. Because of an epidemic of foot and mouth disease you find it necessary to postpone the Local Authority and General Elections until later in the year. Instead of informing the public relations staff in Labour Headquarters, you get in touch with the editor of the Sun newspaper and inform everyone via a leak in the morning paper. Your party headquarters are thrown into confusion but you don’t seem too worried.

 

You are a senior apparatchik with the Liberal Democrats arranging an interview/PR exercise with the leader Charles Kennedy and the Lib Dem candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds. You appoint as press officer for the occasion not one of your experienced media liaison people but a volunteer with no experience, but coincidentally, is an Asian woman.

 

When deciding which of the candidates will be given a chance to say something, you veto most of the candidates because you believe that the moment any of them open their mouths the spin doctors will have to go into overdrive to repair the “damage”. You decide that only Kennedy should speak at the interview.

 

Finally, you try at all costs to avoid the fact that virtually all of your candidate showcases of ethnic diversity are standing in unwinnable seats.

 

You are a PR guru with the Conservatives. You move most of the elderly volunteers out of the party’s call centre and replace them with young, dynamic types from differing backgrounds, wheel in the news cameras, Hague follows, and bingo!! Instant campaign launch for the press and public, highlighting the tireless, young and vibrant Conservative Party workers that sacrifice their time for the good of England. The stand ins are removed and the original workers led back in.

 

Later you bring into the same call centre a young model no-one has seen before who is in a wheelchair, put a headset on her, stick her in front of a terminal, and take photographs. She leave, never to be seen again until a party platform leaflet is handed around and she is on the cover.

 

You are a Labour spin doctor with concerns about stories being covered by the BBC. So phone one of the production staff at BBC1 and demand to know the running order for the Today show (a morning current affairs program) and the daily news. When the staffer won’t tell you, you respond with school bully tactics – “Do you know who I am?”, “What’s your name?” and “Let

me speak to your supervisor”. You get in touch with a more senior employee and suggest stories the BBC should be covering on Labour’s campaign. You joke with colleagues about feeding information to “tame” journalists, even to the point of writing the stories for them.

 

You are a member of any of the three main parties in this election committed to achieving success for your party. You cultivate relationships with people in other parties and place moles in the headquarters of the other parties. These people give you immediate access to information from your opponents such as press releases and survey results. You either leak this information to the press, or use it to get some your people on the ground at the opposition’s campaign launches to cause a ruckus.

 

Is it any wonder, when activities such as these appear to be common practice and don’t even raise an eyebrow, that most people feel jaded and disillusioned by politicians and their antics?

I phoned several politicians today about the endemic bashing and sexual abuse of women and children in some Aboriginal communities. Two have spoken out to date.

 

The former Aboriginal affairs minister John Herron has been fighting for five years to convince ATSIC that something needed to be done. He said: “It’s make or break now as far as I’m concerned”. He is considering writing a piece for the webdiary.

 

Carmen Lawrence is the shadow minister for the status of women. She is preparing a domestic violence package, and is “very keen to see appropriately designed policies are produced for the indigenous community, and that means working with indigenous groups to help break down the barriers to this being spoken about and acted upon”.

 

She said domestic violence in Aboriginal communities was more properly called “community violence directed towards women and children” and that programs should be “linked closely to health, legal services and appropriate housing support”.

 

“There’s no refuges, there’s no support from the legal system, and women are often exposed to the same players. These are the key reasons why indigenous women often shut up about it,” she said.

 

“The program has to be something that the Aboriginal communities help develop and own. ATSIC needs to be involved.”

 

She said programs for Aboriginal communities were still in the early stages of development, and that rather than detail programs now, Labor’s policy would point to the areas it believed needed urgent attention.

 

By the way, I checked with the Press Council this morning and Geoff Clark had yet to file a complaint more than ten days after the allegations against him were published.

 

A hearing on the injunction taken out in Cairns against Brisbane’s Courier Mail on Friday night by Pat O’Shane’s brother Terry – who is on the regional council of ATSIC – will be heard this afternoon. The injunction prevented the paper publishing certain allegations.

 

Today, I begin with Jack Robertson’s Meeja Watch, then suggestions on what can be done from Otto Ruiter, Anne Marks, Peter Gellatly, Richard Ure, Dianne Davis, Greg Clarke, Sean Cody and Mark Williams.

 

MEEJA WATCH

 

Fairytale or murder story?

 

By Jack Robertson

 

Last week (in Rape and racism) I said that the story of Journalism was finished. I was soon proved utterly wrong, but I might also still be proved depressingly right. The Meeja has performed half of a great (if heart-breaking) service. What happens next is largely in their hands. Reconciliation must be embraced with gusto and flair, as a point of Meeja honour. A few positive suggestions:

 

1. More Meeja space for grass-roots leaders & facts: Editors should establish Indigenous pages, radio/TV should run more dedicated Indigenous shows. These should place a marked emphasis on communities. Journos need to elicit more from grass-roots leaders and ‘doers’. Those who drive the real improvements rarely have the time, the means, or the inclination to seek publicity. Yet they’re the key to Reconciliation.

 

2. Distrust self-advertisers: Anyone who spends time and energy proclaiming their own achievements on, and commitment to, Indigenous issues, should be treated by journalists with suspicion. Ruthlessly deconstruct the words of those who seem to think that ‘talking about doing’ and ‘actually doing’ are morally and practically equivalent.

 

3. There are no Big Picture cure-alls: There are no ‘big’ answers. This will be the hardest Meeja aspect to alter, because it thrives on issues like treaties and apologies. I support both, yet my ambivalence tends to rise with each escalation of debate over them.

 

4. More Publicised Respect for Indigenous Elders: Why not initiate regular (state-based?) ABC programs hosted by tribal (as opposed to political) leaders, in which Indigenous affairs are discussed? Aboriginal Elders need to re-establish broader influence. The only way is by exploiting modern technology. If this poses problems for Elder protocol, then Elder protocol needs to adapt. Profile equals power. Only TV gives real profile, now.

 

5. More Indigenous journalists: We need more black faces in the working Meeja. If that means aggressive positive discrimination, including hiring unpolished and inexperienced journos, so be it. We could use less slick Hollywood bullshit, anyway.

 

6. More ‘confrontation’ in real time: Much heat in this debate tends to be generated by the stand-off ‘War of the Whitey Columnists’ – Paddy Mac has a crack at Manne, Bob blasts Quadrant in reply, Pearson v. Marr, Reynolds v. Windschuttle – yet these prodigious motormouths rarely go mano-a-mano, the only way to establish common ground. My personal preference would be to bung the whole pack into the jelly-wrestling tub at the Kalgoorlie Miners’ Arms, but perhaps the Meeja could at least facilitate more live round-table discussions like the SBS Insight one regarding Pearson a few months ago – calm, methodical, relatively assumption and baggage-free. I reckon Tim Dunlop should chair a two-hour job on the ABC. (Why not? We need NEW faces in this debate.)

 

7. Imagination from Editors and Producers: Re-rig the contemporary Meeja paradigm. Turn the world upside-down, get pro-active and up-beat. Some specific pitches:

 

a. Black on White: A TV/radio program which invites Indigenous leaders in various fields to interview non-Indigenous peers. Turn the Meeja tables. Pat Dodson interviewing John Howard about his political career. Stan Grant interviewing Gerald Stone on journalism. Freeman on Waugh, Wes Enoch on Williamson, Anu on Minogue with ‘Indigenous Issues’ (as such) taking a back seat. Black Australia almost always fills the ‘passive’ role in mainstream Meeja. It’s ossifying.

 

b. Australian Dreamtime: Replace those bloody 6.30 ‘Yes Minister’ re-runs with a half-hour live story-telling slot. First fifteen minutes – a Dreamtime story. Second fifteen minutes – a dramatisation of one of the old or new bush or town poets, matching the theme. We’ve got to start stressing the Human impulses that bind us together, not the ideological crap that hoiks us apart. That’s what Art is for. It used to be, anyway.

 

c. The Fairfax Award: An annual $10,000 prize offered for the best good news print feature, by a freelance journalist, on life in any type of Indigenous community.

 

d. Indigenous 7-Up: Pick ten Indigenous kids from diverse backgrounds, and follow their progress as they grow up. Perhaps look in every couple of years.

 

e. Television Walkabout: Give a couple of ‘middle Australian’ Meeja Faces – Jeff McMullen and Ernie Dingo? – a 4 X 4, a crew, a fistful of bucks and a six month brief: to boldly go and ‘educate’ themselves, each other, and the rest of us about the complexities of contemporary Indie Oz. One hour slot per week, say. Done with enthusiasm, idealism, Oz humour and clarity of purpose – to inform – it could make a mighty difference.

 

OK, so I’m no programming guru, but the point I’m trying to make is that it’s up to the Meeja to come up with positive contributions, now.

 

That’s the downside of making a story happen – you enter it as a player, and a player can’t just leave the game when it suits. Black Australia has taken (another) demoralising hammering, as an unfortunate but direct by-product of Andrew Rule’s story.

 

The Meeja owes them constructive passion. Most editors endorsed publication on public interest grounds. Fine, but the Public must remind them that our Interest isn’t something they can casually conjure up to justify a scoop, then disregard.

 

At the first sign of the Meeja retreating into the safe house of ‘journalistic detachment’ – as this issue gets trickier – we have to point out that it’s an option they’ve now forfeited.

 

What happened last week was that Australian journalists unambiguously and irreversibly repositioned their profession at the heart of the Reconciliation process. They mustn’t forget it. And it’s got to be a good thing in the long run.

 

That is, it literally MUST BE MADE to be a good thing in the long run, simply because there is no bearable alternative.

 

For the Meeja to disengage now would be a fantastic betrayal of a black community whose fledgling sense of unity is shredded. It would be akin to a crusading social worker who has a wife-beater arrested and the wife and kids placed in emergency care, but then drifts off, neither helping police secure a conviction, nor facilitating the wife lasting independence. Leaving him free – bursting with resentment – and her with no option but to return, humiliated, to the old order.

 

Don’t let any of your colleagues pretend otherwise, Margo – all reporters, whether they like it or not, now have a direct stake in Reconciliation. The Age editor Mike Gawenda crossed a journalistic Rubicon.

 

In the best traditions of the inky trade, the Clark story stirred up what obviously needed stirring up. Whether Andrew Rule’s explosive prose becomes the opening to a fairytale or a murder story is mostly up to those who endorsed its publishing.

 

Having admitted I was wrong to say that journalism was finished, I would be gutted if the next few months proved me wrong again. Reconciliation would be, too.

 

Otto Ruiter in Springwood, NSW

 

Here’s my plan. As the SMH provides us with this public forum, I propose that the SMH actively promotes indigenous awareness. Employ indigenous journalists, reporters, editors, photographers and whoever else is needed and publish a complete page of Aboriginal News (unencumbered by advertising), in print and online, not once a week but EVERY DAY. When we are informed from an Aboriginal perspective on a daily basis, there will be no easy escape for anyone.

 

Anne Marks

 

So you’re concerned about the level of violence in Aboriginal society Margo. Hooray! See if you can get hold of a video called Minymaku Way (SBS Independent and CAAMA Productions). You’ll be able to watch a gut wrenching account of how the women at Ernabella got the white owner of the nearest roadhouse to stop selling the alcohol that was a huge contributor to the death rate of their dearly loved families (male and female).

 

It took them ten years to do it. It might have helped those women if some journalists had had the energy and initiative to get out there and cover their immensely courageous taking on of white power and money.

 

Now your interest and the interest of the Herald has turned to this area I look forward to real support for Aboriginal people who have been beavering away for a long, long time to make their lives bearable.

 

Peter Gellatly in Canada

 

I feel very uneasy about contributing to this topic. My leanings are probably towards assimilation as a resolution, but I do not want to seize this particular opportunity to score points. Some of those from whose arguments I strongly dissent are nonetheless people whose moral commitment I admire. And in the end their evaluation might prove correct, and mine flawed.

 

First, I too thought you got it wrong re the allegation against Geoff Clark and his determination not to respond. I am less sure where I stand on the appropriateness of O’Shane commenting, given her public duties as a magistrate. There are good arguments both ways. As to the impact on Clark’s reputation, well, if some are prepared to think ill of him on the basis of unproven allegation, he is surely justified in dismissing such opinion as of no great merit. That is not to say I conclude the allegations are groundless; I am in no position to conclude anything, so without court-adjudicated proof I MUST adhere to the presumption of innocence. Any other course is for me too corrosive of our legal system to even contemplate.

 

Anyway, I won’t join any chorus of condemnation re either Fairfax’s decision to publish or your perspective. In highly charged and polarised matters like this, one almost inevitably ticks off half the readership whatever one does. The only sure-fire solution is to be timid: which would make for a useless newspaper and a thoroughly undermined Web Diary. So please, don’t ever be deterred from blazing away.

 

I confess to amazement about the way this story has evolved. Why on earth does it take an allegation against an Aboriginal leader to bring to light the tragedy of widespread abuse in Aboriginal communities? Frankly, I find it a bit sick. However, one could endlessly ponder the vicissitudes of collective social conscience, so I’ll drop that thought.

 

What strikes me reading the news concerning in-community abuse are the strong parallels between the Australian and Canadian situations. Sadly, in both countries equally well-meaning people are diametrically opposed in how they see resolution to the problems faced by their first peoples. More importantly, abundant evidence of past dreadful policy errors appears to have no cautionary impact on the assessment of contemporary ideas.

 

Here’s a comparable piece from the current Canadian agony. I hasten to add that the situation it describes, while all too common, is by no means typical – rather it represents the extreme. Moreover, another columnist in some other newspaper would probably see the situation described in an entirely different light. For Canadians, despite treaties, constitutionally entrenched native rights, and billions of dollars in government appropriations, are, just like Australians, still grappling with the seeming impossible.

 

Canada’s “Globe and Mail”:

 

Who will save Kitty Turtle?

 

By Margaret Wente, Saturday, June 23, 2001

 

Last February, 16-year-old Kitty Turtle shut herself up in her bedroom, blocked the door, and tied a noose around her neck. She dangled from the ceiling for three minutes before her brother-in-law broke in and cut her down.

 

Later on, someone asked her why she did it. She said it was because her boyfriend was going out with other girls. “I thought it would be much better for him.”

 

In Pikangikum, girls like Kitty try to hang themselves all the time. They hang themselves the way affluent suburban girls get anorexia. In this Northern Ontario reserve of 2,100 people, a dozen girls and young women have died by hanging since 1999. Five of them were 13 years old.

 

Michael Monture blames these and Pik’s many other misfortunes on Indian Affairs Minister Robert Nault and the federal government. He says the people there are being denied the basic necessities of life. He is the native doctor who went missing last week after he went into the bush on a spiritual quest “to pray for the people.”

 

Dr. Monture’s disappearance and rescue, and his comments, have been a big story in the national media. He describes a devastated place where people have very little food and no clean water, where the school was closed for months, where the government has arbitrarily cut off funding.

 

His descriptions of the kids were especially horrific. High on solvents, they howl all night long. “They have a fire going in the garbage dump to keep warm while looking for things to eat. It’s very upsetting to think that this is Canada.”

 

Anyone not made of stone agrees with that.

 

Dr. Monture’s condemnations were echoed by many. Pikangikum Chief Louie Quill said there have been three more deaths since the government seized control of band finances last month. Matthew Coon Come, the fiery chief of the Assembly of First Nations, warned that the battle over Pik could become another Oka. David Masecar, president of the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention, accused the government of making the suicide epidemic worse because it has taken away people’s sense of control.

 

In fact, what’s killing the children of Pikangikum is very much worse than this. They have been utterly abandoned.

 

Kitty Turtle and her friends live in a world where children are unparented, unfed, neglected and routinely sexually abused; where most girls are mothers by 16; where there are no rules, no structure, no role models, and nothing to aspire to; where children are isolated from any other way of life and deprived of any firsthand knowledge of the broader world.

 

The usual diagnosis for these problems is that they are suffering from loss of culture. But they do have a culture, and it is very strong. It is a culture of violence, despair and death.

 

To keep people in such a place, especially children, seems unbelievably cruel. Yet that is our official policy.

 

By no means are all native reserves as bad as Pik. It may be the worst of the worst. “It was one of the most traditional communities in the North,” says John Donnelly, the Indian Affairs official who oversees the region. When he was there in 1975, he recalls, the Ojibway-Cree women still wore their traditional outfits of skirts and pants, and sat in the back rows at council meetings. “It could have been 1875.”

 

Geographically, Pikangikum is not so terribly remote. It is 300 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg; Red Lake, a mining town, is only 50 kilometres away. But there are no roads in. And for many years the settlement has been torn apart by infighting.

 

There are 13 different Christian churches, ranging from Mennonite to fundamentalist Baptist. There are family feuds, and factions, and the current chief is the third in 18 months. People there do not trust outsiders, but they trust each other even less.

 

Pik has probably the highest birth rate in Canada. Sixty per cent of the population is under 20, and a third are under 9. In other words, it has a thousand children in crisis.

 

A few months ago, psychologist Barbara Jo Fidler was asked by the regional counselling agency to prepare a psychological assessment of Pikangikum. She sought to portray the people as they saw themselves.

 

Her report (which has not been made public) is enough to break your heart.

 

In addition to the familiar story of poverty, addiction and joblessness, she wrote of “physical abuse, wife assault, child sexual abuse, sexual assaults/rape, [and] a high death rate by other causes besides suicide.”

 

Infant deaths and accidents are common. Everyone, she writes, “is in a constant state of grieving”. The homes have individual gravesites at their doorsteps, some adorned with flowers, photographs and small toys. “A walk in the community leaves one with a sad and eerie feeling that is almost beyond description,” she wrote.

 

Dr. Fidler asked many people, old and young, what factors contributed most to the breakdown of the community. Their most frequent answer: “lack of parenting.”

 

Of the children, she wrote: “They don’t have the coping skills to deal with any kind of adversity . . . the direct result of lack of parental limit setting and boundaries dating back to childhood.”

 

They are impulsive, desperate and in pain. And, like all kids, they imitate their friends. And that’s why girls like Kitty Turtle try to hang themselves when their boyfriends leave them.

 

Pikangikum is not short of social services. There are mental-health and substance-abuse services, crisis teams, volunteer youth patrols, a bereavement project, suicide-prevention programs and much more. But people don’t use them very much. When the school closed last year, a recreation program was set up for the kids. But no one came.

 

“The community problems are so huge the workers feel overwhelmed and demoralized,” wrote Dr. Fidler.

 

About $16-million a year in government funds flows into Pik. It is not true that there is no food. Although it is expensive, the local store is well-stocked. Social-assistance payments have not stopped. When the water-treatment system broke down last year from lack of maintenance, the government flew in bottled water.

 

Like other local services, the school is run by the community. Last year, it was shut after a broken valve was not replaced. When the fuel truck came to fill the school’s oil tank, the oil overflowed and did a huge amount of damage to the building. Cleaning up the mess took the band 10 months, and cost $1.6-million. The federal government supplied the money.

 

In her report, Dr. Fidler writes of the image that haunts her most. It’s not the graves or the flowers, or even the faces of the damaged little girls with whom she talked. It was the sight of a naked baby doll, hanging by its neck from a telephone wire.

 

You won’t hear these things from Dr. Monture (who is a Mohawk, from Southern Ontario, and new to the area, and looking for a job). You won’t hear them from Mr. Coon Come, or the chief, or any of the other people who hope to exploit the sufferings of Pikangikum to serve their own agendas.

 

It’s not they who will save Kitty Turtle. They are part of her problem.

 

Richard Ure in Epping, NSW

 

In wondering what to do next, perhaps we should step back a little and ponder what we think we do well and then apply it to where we have failed.

 

Australia has a proud record in welcoming new settlers to this country and most seem to want to become “one of us” within a generation. Perhaps Pauline is correct. Treating indigenous Australians as a special class seems to be causing more harm than good. Even if ATSIC was doing a super human job (and it does not seem to be) since when did adding another layer of politicians solve anything? By its mere existence ATSIC perpetuates a divide between indigenous Australians and the rest of us.

 

Assimilation probably wasn’t the best policy and multiculturalism seems to have worked far better with many times the number of new settlers than there are indigenous Australians today.

 

As we ponder our first 100 years as a nation, we are reminded of the almost unanimous dire predictions of early politicians and commentators were there to be a chink in the White Australia policy. Despite the doom laden fears, people the subject of this former policy are migrating to this country and moving to our suburbs daily with little fuss.

 

So long as indigenous Australians are seen as different, I can’t see us having effective mechanisms to deal with same problems the rest of society has. The main difference seems to be they have them in greater number.

 

Dianne Davis in Sydney

 

I watched you on Lateline on Friday night this evening (Friday, 22 June) and I wish to applaud your courage and conviction for speaking out – as an individual, not a journalist – about what you rightly describe as the “national emergency” of horrendous violence and abuse suffered by women and children in indigenous communities.

 

I wish to state upfront that there is also totally unacceptable levels of violence against women and children in European communities. But the facts and the research show that within indigenous Australia, it is at epidemic levels – as Evelyn Scott noted earlier in the week, it has become almost a “cultural norm”.

 

Excerpts from the Boni Robertson Report are almost too painful to comprehend; we live in a world where technology delivers accounts of suffering and brutality daily and perhaps we are in danger of becoming inured to it. But the Robertson Report and the stands taken by Aboriginal women of great dignity (Scott, O’Donaghue, Perris Kneebone, Pryor) must impel all Australians to take action – lobby our politicians, contribute to a fund, publicly demonstrate – whatever it takes. This is human tragedy writ large.

 

I found Michael Mansell’s response on Lateline to be the specious retreat of those who would rather play the race and Fairfax conspiracy cards, than truly confront the savaged minds and bodies of far too many women and children within his own community.

 

I believe something of huge benefit and goodness has emerged from the Clark drama, the “flailings” of Pat O’Shane, the past lethargy of ATSIC – and this is to absolutely blast the horror faced by many indigenous women and children onto the front pages of our newspapers, onto our television screens, and into our hearts and minds.

 

From horror can come good; let’s all make a commitment – with the guidance of enlightened Aboriginal leadership – to rebuild the many broken souls and bodies, and to protect future generations. That is real reconciliation. This is not so much a race issue but a profound human issue.

 

Greg Clarke in Canberra

 

I was amazed at how Michael Mansell on Lateline completely refused to address the substantive issues of the abuses going on and the lack of action by ATSIC. But I don’t see how any reasonable person can be duped by his constant harping about conspiracies, media conspiracies and Fairfax conspiracies.

 

Mansell was arguing as if he just doesn’t what the status quo disrupted, as if he’s hoping the whole thing will blow over. Heaven forbid if ATSIC looks bad over this – that sounds like Mansell’s worst fear! But really some major change has to happen if this chronic abuse is to be stopped.

 

The leading Aboriginal women like Evelyn Scott have got to keep pushing hard. I hope this issue does not die until something is done to stop the abuse, occurring, and it seems obvious that the current set of (mostly male) Aboriginal leaders won’t do it.

 

Sean Cody in London

 

I’ve been watching the debate and issues surrounding Clark and then the larger domestic violence and sexual abuse horrors unfurl over the past week, and it leaves me depressed beyond belief to read what people are experiencing today in Australia. The despair that has fallen over me has left me weeping as I have read some of the postings to the diary, but there is one thing that you have really struck on in your Friday entry – “It all depends on what we all do from here on”.

 

To deal with Geoff Clark, I’m sorry, but he MUST stand down. I neither believe nor disbelieve the allegations made against him, and I am undecided as to whether or not they should have been published originally – although I do tend to go to the side of approval. But the fact of the matter is that this information is now in the public domain, and regardless of whether it is true or not, its very existence now clouds every single thing that ATSIC will do with regards to the horrendous problems of sexual abuse and domestic violence in indigenous communities in Australia.

 

There appears to be no doubt that the most helpless and the most innocent in human society, children, are being violated to the very core of their being, and that their siblings and mothers are suffering the same fate. That action is required is, of course, a ridiculous understatement.

 

Action must come from a source untainted by any hint of similar action. Since ATSIC must be one of the driving forces behind fixing this dreadful situation, then surely it must follow that the head of ATSIC must not himself be in a situation that compromises his integrity with regards to these matters.

 

To the much larger issue of what can be done – I have no answers, only ideas. I do know that given the history of white and black in Australia, the response to the horrific problems facing certain members of the indigenous population must be driven by the leadership of the indigenous population. White Australia cannot step in as it has in the past and possibly spawn a whole new generation of stolen peoples.

 

However it cannot sit by and let the indigenous population deal with these matters on their own. Support and co-working must be at the forefront of our efforts, but the indigenous leadership must be at the vanguard.

 

I must stress this – one of the measures of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. Those Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders that find themselves to be the victims of atrocities perpetrated on them by their fellow community members, and who feel powerless to escape their hells, are surely some of Australia’s most vulnerable members.

 

How we, as a society, help them escape their predicaments is how we should and shall be judged. They are our brothers and our sisters, and we must NOT stand by while they suffer. More than commissions of enquiry, more than councils, more than working groups, there are things that each and every one of us can do.

 

If we see a situation where we believe domestic violence to be happening, then we must notify the appropriate authorities. If we do not, we are guilty of complicity through silence. If the appropriate authorities do not take the appropriate measures to investigate and, if necessary, deal with the allegations, then they are guilty of complicity through inaction.

 

I am not in any way suggesting vigilante action, nor the patronising and demeaning attitudes taken in the past as part of official policies of forcible removal – I am calling simply for compassion and care. Cultural sensitivities are of course to be considered at all times, particularly when one considers the treatment that the indigenous population has received at the hands of white Australia, but they should not stand as a barrier to the salvation of people suffering.

 

If we, as a society, do not act as a society – the non-indigenous and indigenous population working together – then we are all damned as a society.

 

Martin Williams

 

Buried in Danna Vale’s speech (in Time for action) is one enticing sentence: “It seems to me that the time has come to put aside fears of being politically and culturally intrusive and to do what is necessary to protect and support the women and children in these communities.”

 

Seems fine, doesn’t it? The priorities are right, surely? BUT, does what is necessary to protect and support Aboriginal women and children demand political and cultural intrusion, or even the fear of it? This statement is equivalent to “We have license to intrude politically and culturally, as we define it, to protect Aboriginal women and children.”

 

So Vale is crystal clear: if race and gender interests conflict – and they probably will – then regrettably, race is expendable.

 

It is instructive that Vale does not offer any examples of justifiable political or cultural intrusion, other than implying that the intruders will be white people. In fact, she offers no measures at all except in the broadest and most unsurprising terms (apart from a safe house suggestion, like yours, which need not be so intrusive) and – surprise! – is reduced to lauding the fact that the Howard coalition government has provided $6 million over four years for this or that programme, a party political bit of cheerleading just as barren of insight and vision as any of Beazleys current approaches to policy description. It’s just more money.

 

Race and gender interests need not be in conflict, but such political rhetoric sets up a very convenient division between them when a number of options may instead be available in stopping the violence. So why set the division up in the first place?

 

She even invokes that tired chestnut political correctness to denounce those who would dissent on any aspect of her argument, almost as if dissenters would consider the abuse of Aboriginal women and children to be defensible. Curiouser and curiouser.

 

I hope these comments do not come across as petty or too abstract. I fear they may even appear insulting or distract from the depravity and suffering inflicted upon the women and children described earlier. What I am suggesting is that the subtler elements that accompany this kind of political rhetoric ought not be ignored, for they have definite ideological and practical consequences for the future of Aboriginal people as Aboriginal people.

 

One other reason I am concerned about Vale is precisely that she went to the brink for Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory subject to mandatory sentencing but then came back from the brink. She put herself on the line to defend the most basic of principles – the welfare of children – and compromised! She was too craven to cross the floor. I dont care how intimidating Howard

may be towards his backbenchers. This is the same theatrically gutless politician behaviour were used to from all sides of politics, but it no less damages her moral authority as spokesperson for Aboriginal welfare reform.

 

Vale’s emerging use of divisive tactics in advancing a necessary and complex cause may prove to be untenable. But if divisiveness is going to be an acceptable way of proceeding with this problem, then let us play her game for a moment.

 

If by chance a persons CV offers any reflection on her character and on her credibility in sticking up for the wretched, what do we see?

 

Consider the choice between Danna Vale, who decided to give away a job in juvenile justice to become a politician serving a comfortable, middle-class urban seat for a government whose policies on women’s and Aboriginal affairs speak volumes, and Pat O’Shane, a legal officer who has travelled the country for decades trying to oppose at times intractable prejudice against women and others in the face of bitter opposition, including that of fellow Aborigines and erstwhile friends.

 

There would be no contest. Except, perhaps, in a brave, new, yet strangely unchanging Australia where “political and cultural intrusion” is promoted as a default and neither adequately described nor feared.

Hey, we’ve made the mainstream! The Australian media section, via journalist Tim Blair, says the following about webdiary.

 

“The Sydney Morning Herald’s site, for example, is elegant, easy to negotiate, and carries most of the information contained in the print edition. But scroll down to the bottom right of the SMH website and you’ll find the gateway to Margo Kingston’s otherworldly Web Diary.

 

Margo, a noted political journalist and author, is allowed absolute freedom in her diary including, it seems, the freedom to run what would pass as her own PR campaign for Pauline Hanson. If you are suddenly struck by the need to hear the One Nation theme song (“a real pub stomp”, according to Margo) it’s just a click away at Margo’s diary. Margo recently described Hanson as “a breath of fresh air”, which shows what can happen to an agile mind when it spends too long in Canberra.

 

Actually, despite its name, Margo’s diary mainly consists of pieces written by a hardcore regiment of four or five regular reader/contributors, most of whom are obsessed with dairy deregulation. There is a whole archive of dairy deregulation pieces at the site, featuring this style of direct, searing argument:

 

“So, as with, say, the quantum theory of physics, throughout its evolution economic theory macro and micro was refined in the light of repeated observation, the results of tangible experimentation (unlike in natural science, mostly unintended, indirect and arm’s-length, but sometimes as in the case of Keynes deliberate, direct and even nail-biting), and re-evaluation of models.”

Forget dairies; it’s this diary that needs regulating. Incidentally, does Margo pay her writers? Is she running some kind of online sweatshop? Why didn’t the M1 demonstrators burn her effigy?”

 

Our Meeja Watch writer Jack Robertson was quick to respond to Tim Blair in the Australian online.

 

“Dear Tim,

 

Pretty cheap shot to dismiss Margo’s Web Diary as a ‘PR campaign for Hanson’, mate. You and I both know that she has done more than any journalist in this country to investigate, attempt to understand, and thus expose the emptiness at the heart of One Nation. Where were you when she was getting spat at by right-wing maniacs, physically assaulted by ON mobs, defamed across the country, and even abused by fellow journos for getting – of all things! – too ‘close’ to her subject?

 

Just where was Tim Blair when Margo was one of the few journalists who bothered to investigate One Nation where it really matters – on the ground in the rural and outer suburban electorates?

 

Can’t quite figure out why you would want to slag her off in such a self-evidently stupid way, mate. She’s actually, er…one of the more serious, independent and committed journos in this country. Don’t you think so?

Yes, I am one of her contributors. No, I’m not obsessed with dairy dereg. And no, we don’t get paid for our Webdiary contributions. Instead, we get to contribute to public debate without having to toe any editorial or proprietorial line. That’s what we get. Sound good to you, Tim?”

 

I’ve had my say on the budget online and on radio, so today it’s all yours, and to end, a sorry day idea from Fiona Katauskas – Reconciliation week is next week – and calls for radical action by ABC supporters fromPeter Dyce.

 

A couple of readers have asked for the figures on the joke funding in what was obviously a bogus innovation statement called “Backing Australia’s Ability” released in January.

 

Of the $2.9 billion to be spent over five years to merely lessen the rate of decline in research and development funding since the election of the Howard government, a miniscule $86 million will be spent in the whole of next financial year. The Herald’s higher education writer Aban Contractor calculated from the budget papers that:

 

* of the $736 million to the Australian Research Council, $19 million will be given in 2001/2

*$337 million for project specific infrastructure, $27 million in 2001/2

* $246 million to upgrade research infrastructure, $26 million in 2001/2

* $151 million for 2000 new university places, $14 million in 2001/2

 

And just to rub the bruised and battered nose of what’s left of our university sector into the government’s contempt, the sector will get a funding increase of 1.7 percent, a real cut given the projected 2 percent inflation rate.

 

Because we’ve focused on R&D a lot lately, here’s an edited budget press release from the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (if you’re interested in the group, call its executive director Toss Gascoigne on (02) 6257 2891, 0408 704 442).

 

BUDGET FAILS THE MODERN ECONOMY TEST

 

 

“The science community welcomed Backing Australia’s Ability, but as a first step, the beginning of a process,” Dr David Denham said. “It was a partial solution to the issue of how Australia should invest in our national future.

 

“This Budget needed to deal with the outstanding issues, like the funding of our university system and CSIRO. At first glance, the Budget has failed to do so.

 

“Science and research are too important to be decided in the hurly-burly of daily politics. We face the constant danger of the important issues being swamped by urgent but less important matters.”

 

Dr Denham said that Australia is well below the average OECD investment in R&D, and trending downwards.

 

“The most dismaying fact is the gap is growing larger every day. Other countries see where the future is – why can’t Australia?” he said. “We will pay a heavy national price if we continue to neglect science, research and higher education.”

 

Dr Denham said science groups estimated Australia needs to invest an extra $13 billion over the next five years to reach the OECD average. The $13 billion would be split almost equally between the Federal Government, and industry and the State Governments.

 

The average spend in this area by the world’s leading economies is just over two percent of GDP, where Australia is currently spending about 1.5 per cent. It is measured by GERD (Gross Expenditure on R&D) as a percentage of GDP (Gross Domestic Product).

 

“To reach this target, the Federal Government would have to make an announcement of the size of Backing Australia’s Ability ($2.9 billion) every year for the next four years,” he said. It would take a conscious effort to change national priorities if Australia wants to become a competitive modern economy.

 

“It will require a shift of national resources into areas that will pay the best dividends for Australia. Australians need to agree, as a nation, that this is where our future lies.

 

“The low Aussie dollar, the steady drain of our best talent overseas, our slide down international rankings – to a significant extent, all of these can be blamed at Australia’s failure to recognise the world has changed.”

 

THE BUDGET – YOUR CALL

 

ROBERT HENDERSON

 

Well done on being the sole voice pointing out the smoke and mirrors of Costello’s latest budget. All the big headline grabbing items, eg $1.7 billion for this or that over four years, only have miniscule amounts for the next financial year.

 

As a public servant of 9 years, the usual operation for new money is that it is equally divided up over the number of years. At our post budget briefing today, I asked if these generous amount for future expenditure could be cut and the answer was a definite yes.

 

So the stage is set for the next budget to cut all these programmes back if the Liberals get back in office. Or for the Labour to try and find the funds for the programmes as they start to blow out the bottom line. I’d like to see a consolidated breakdown by financial year of the items announced in the budget.

 

Another point is that not all the money announced is new money, but reordering of priorities.

 

On the media, I wonder to what extent you feel you are tilting at windmills. (MARGO: That’s exactly what I do.) I really enjoyed your comments on the media and the need for diverse ownership (MARGO: They’re in Webdiary MAy 21 – I’m saving up most of your comments on this till tomorrow.)

 

I’d like to raise a different point, and that is the depressing irrelevance of the quality press. I have a friend who works for Media Monitors. Like me, before getting his job there he would have looked at a Daily Telegraphabout six times in his life. Now it is his bible. The stories that make the news are not those covered by the Herald, except in rare circumstances, or those covered by TV, but those stories run by the Tele. The line that is run by the Tele is picked up by Alan Jones and his ilk which in turn is picked up by TV. My friend’s view was that TV put the story to bed but rarely kept the story going or introduced new material. Depressing isn’t it?

 

But perhaps the influence of the quality press is more subtle. The bankrupt solicitors who continued to practice but paid no tax was a story broken by the Herald. It was taken up by other papers later. So you influence the agenda, but don’t get the credit.

 

LINDA PETRIE in Capalaba, Queensland

 

This Prime Minister is more divisive than any other I can recall in my 53 years.

 

I am a disability support pensioner only 2 years off the aged pension, but I am outraged at the assumption that self-funded retirees have contributed to the ‘building of our nation’ while all other types of pensioners have not. This is classism at its worst.

 

In my active working 28 years of adult life I owned a nursing home employing 70 people for nine years.Virtually every single day of the balance of the 19 years of my working life I was employed in a variety of highly responsible jobs and paying tax nonstop before being thrown on to the scrap heap of humanity.

 

Since then I have worked as a volunteer for my community while continuing to look for work.

 

How dare this pompous man arrogantly engage in such inaccurate and destructive value judgements to execute the personal political policy agendas of an elitist and out-of-touch few!

 

S’all I can stand, I can’t stand no more.

 

WINSTON

 

I listened to your views on the budget on Late Night Live and absolutely agree with you. It is indeed highway robbery when a powerful body like the Government uses its muscle to take from the people over many years (and continue to take from ordinary people) and then give these takings to the people who can afford not to need them.

 

I am also concerned at the way money is been spent on education – one of the most important aspects of nation building next to family enrichment. By this I mean if we look around at the nature of family situations we find devastation all around – broken homes – drugs – homeless kids – violence.

 

We need a Government to work for the people. This is a long time coming – and we need the media to pursue that line of philosophical thought – what does it mean to work for the people?

 

PETER IAN (JACK) WOODFORDE in Canberra

 

 

The plight of one group of self-funded retirees – permanent invalidity pensioners – has, if anything, worsened as a consequence of Tuesday’s budget.

 

Two factors make life extremely difficult. The first is their very high medical costs. A huge wallop of income goes on pharmaceuticals, prostheses, vital occupational therapy items like grab rails for the toilet and shower or bath (to add insult to injury, the latter are ruled inadmissible for rebate by the Tax Office, are no longer subject to sales tax exemption and have full GST applied) and all bar bulk-billed medical visits.

 

The second is the cost of feeding, clothing, sheltering and educating often very young families. Invalidity retirees themselves may be quite young, albeit with reduced life expectancy. Their kids bear a very unlovely financial and emotional brunt. Spouses are often job-disadvantaged because they are single-handedly caring for partners and/or kids. Overwhelmingly they are ineligible for caring assistance.

 

As well, invalidity retirees usually find themselves with substantial fortnightly PAYE income tax obligations. A pension plus any kind of combined spouse income altogether totalling $48,880 wipes out any kind of Centalink medical assistance. A modest pension plus a very small spouse paypacket will easily do this and was at the crux of the “grey power” senior’s card push.

 

Medical costs, no matter how vast, don’t affect income assessment, although they may be partially rebated after spending thresholds have been reached. A spouse who may be trying to juggle care and work with a prudent eye to a future which may well involve the premature death of an invalid partner, can forget either a decent career or any kind of assistance. Many invalid pensioners will never live long enough to get within cooee of a senior’s card, which must be contributing to considerable savings. Let’s hope the money markets are happy with such rectitude.

 

The federal government has very good excuses for letting invalidity retirees, every one of whom is a fully fledged “self-funded retiree”, fall through the cracks on Tuesday night. The reasons are similar to those used for kicking around aged and other Commonwealth pensioners. The latter once didn’t count because government members felt no affinity with them and, up until recently, no need for their votes.

 

Invalid retirees are, let’s face it, unsightly sick people who are best kept tucked away in their suburban hideyholes or in hospital and medical waiting rooms. We are invisible and inaudible. We discomfort people with our pain and feebleness, our gait, our impaired speech, our smelly wounds and all the rest of it.

 

People in nice Country Road outfits out to enjoy themselves don’t want to be confronted by those who, as Ian “Spasticus” Drury would have put it, “wobble when they hobble and dribble when they nibble”. Ian knew only too well that the worst regarded were those disabled and invalid who didn’t cave in and, instead, attempted some kind of self-assertion.

 

Australia is an egalitarian society, but there are real votes in keeping invalids down, if you have the right touch. A good way of locking people away is to cut them off at the knees financially. That way, they tend not to go out much. Not as much as Ian Drury, anyway.

 

But as well, APRA, the body which collects statistics on the self-funded retirees of the 3,000-odd larger superannuation funds, openly admits that it has no idea how many Australians receive self-funded invalidity retirement benefits. That practice must be damned convenient, politically, but it is neither prudent nor authoritative.

 

It is, in fact, extraordinarily remiss of the agency neither to collate this data properly, nor to relay any kind of epidemiological, regional, environmental or even fraudulent trends to government and other interested parties.

 

Maybe this is why Mr Costello has signally failed to tackle the issue, and why his colleagues can affect so little interest in it. Setting aside common decency, which is hardly a paying horse in any kind of political race, public interest should demand that the numbers be made known.

 

If, for example, for epidemiological reasons, there was a jump in invalidity retirement among a few funds and it was misinterpreted as a mere blip but turned into a groundswell, the regulatory agency could another bushfire on its hands. Surely the risk of a few uncomfortable headlines about invalidity retirement gripes (and trends) would be easier borne than that. The figures would also give a disparate group of often quite ill people some idea of their standing in the community and tell them they were not alone.

 

But you don’t have to be a crack epidemiologist to work out the effect on the health and life expectancy of Australians facing the daily issue of how to spend very limited income on drugs, medical services, surgical aids and similar luxuries, or on feeding their kids.

 

And don’t forget, these blockheads will vote before they cash in their chips. Somebody should let the Treasurer know before it’s too late.

 

 

SORRY DAY

 

FIONA KATAUSKAS

 

DISCLOSURE: PS: I’m a cartoonist who used to work mainly for the SMH on Stay In touch. I met you when I was flu-addled at the last National Young Writers’ Festival in Newcastle last year.

 

About a month ago, I was thinking about how the word “sorry” has become such a political tool, poisoned by those who seek to portray it as a word of blame and exclusion. It is, in effect, a prisoner of John Howard.

 

However as reconciliation activities like the Sea of Hands and the walk over the bridge have shown, many Australians believe in an apology and would like to say sorry themselves but don’t know how. They see the word as a symbol of hope and of the start of a better future for Australia- an expression of optimism, not negativity.

 

Anyway, after a long, drunken dinner party, a bunch of mates and I got together and started the “No Regrets” campaign, to reclaim the word “sorry”. The gist of it is this- we basically want the word to get as broad exposure as possible, spontaneously and nationwide on the day of the 26th. I designed a graphic for “Sorry” in the same font style as “Eternity”, written on the streets of Sydney for so many years.

 

With the help of the Nik Bueret of Octapod/Newcastle Young Writers’ Fest) we set up a website with our manifesto, some stencils and print-outs and simple instructions. We’re encouraging people to take to the streets on the night of the 25th and spread the word- chalk it, spray it, print it off and stick it to telegraph poles and make stickers to hand out to people.

 

I’ve distributed several hundred to shopkeepers on Oxford and King Sts in Sydney so that supporters of Reconciliation can stick them in their windows on the day of the 26th. Hopefully we’ll also get some bands playing on that night to hang up A3 versions of the “sorry” behind them on stage.

 

I ran the idea past the National Sorry Day Committee who gave it their thumbs up, and have contacted many community organisations, activist groups and unions. However it’s a non-partisan campaign and the more mainstream it is, the

better. If the young liberals took it on board, I’d be over the moon.

 

The website for the campaign is – www.octapod.org.au/noregrets. It’s a symbol, but an important one, and I think that real reconciliation needs a blend of both symbolic and practical action.

 

Sorry is a start.

 

 

ABC BANANA

 

PETER DYCE

 

Mass demos, forums, trying to visit the local member, letters to the editor – I have started to think it’s time for a change of tack.

 

These pollies and other enemies of an independent media aren’t interested in engaging in debates. They don’t want to be reasonable or rational. They don’t want the ABC because it keeps showing them up for the pack of greedy shonks they are.

 

When we try to engage them in discussions all we end up doing is talking to ourselves. The other side really don’t want to know. We have had some big rallies and that is important but massive demos are a hell of a lot of work and last about ten nanoseconds in the average punter’s mind after the news clip is played.

 

It’s about time we started taking a few leaves out of the books of other political activists. Let’s use the 5 second sound bite; the 10 second news clip. The Pollies don’t want to talk or listen so let us get go out and embarrass the hell out of our so called leaders.

 

It’s time to start thinking of guerilla tactics. I am thinking of the young men who who got into the papers during the Ryan by-election by wearing Banana suits and just getting out there and in the news. Lets do the same thing NATIONALLY. We have to be in the public eye, not taking to each other.

 

We have to make the pollies know that we aren’t going to lie down. We have to make them look foolish in the eyes of the electorate.

 

I reckon that with a little effort and a few Banana suits we could make these pollies a laughing stock. Every time they stop in front of a doorway or get out of a car somewhere there is a Banana in Pajamas in the back ground. If there is one thing I know, it is pollies hate being laughed at.

 

The great thing is it only needs to be one or two people! each time. Bs in PJs could pop up and harass pollies anywhere, anytime. We need banner headlines. THE LONE BANANA STRIKES AGAIN. Get the student unions around the country involved. WE NEED BANANA HIT SQUADS. Hell we could make the banana a symbol of national dissent or rebellion!

 

Send bunches of Bananas to your least favourite polly. Write messages in each banana. Get greengrocers and shops to sell labelled bananas. Pelt pollies with rotten Bananas. Send bad Bananas through the mail to J Shier. I will leave the rest to your imagination.

The tie-up deal between Network Ten’s Big Brother show and News Limited is just the latest in the descent of our major media groups into advertorial without disclosure. News Limited sponsors the show and runs Ten articles verbatim, despite Press Council guidelines banning advertorials being presented as news. The agreement mandated that News would show “ongoing editorial interest” in Big Brother. Simple really – news is just a commodity to be bought and sold.

 

Anne Davies investigated and wrote the story (Herald, May 2) and that was it.

 

I’ve been writing for some time that we in the media have to establish tough, consistent self-regulation or suffer government regulation. But it seems media moguls are so powerful that the rights and interests of readers don’t matter. Our society is recklessly creating a monster – media power without responsibility.

 

According to standard theory, there are four pillars of a vibrant democracy. They are the executive government (Prime Ministers, Premiers and ministers), Parliament (comprised of the supposedly freely elected representatives of the people) the judiciary and the media.

 

Of each pillar save for the media it is required that conflicts of interest be disclosed. The Prime Minister enforces these in the Cabinet room, and if a member of the executive does not disclose a conflict of interest and the media finds out, there is sheer, utter hell to pay. The politicians in Parliament can be tossed out every three years if they play fast and loose. Judges must stand aside from hearing a case if they have a conflict of interest, and if they fail to disclose a conflict their decisions can be overturned on appeal.

 

We in the media investigate, judge and crucify politicians and judges for conflicts of interest and other unethical behaviour. Yet when we are guilty, nothing happens and we mostly move on without angst or penalty.

 

In my view, like the other pillars of democracy the media grounds itself in an implied compact with the people. The compact would go something like – we will make news judgements on stories based on the available space each day. We might have a biased news judgement, one way or the other, but we will make it without the influence of commercial or political considerations. There will be a clear delineation between the news we deliver and the advertisements we publish.

 

Now that’s idealistic nonsense, right? Right, although the media companies do mouth platitudes like the public interest when it suits them. Media moguls have always influenced their papers on matters of editorial policy and on suppression of stories which concern them. This is why a group like Fairfax – which has been without “a proprietor” since young Warwick Fairfax destroyed his inheritance and for many years before then had a proprietor with a hands-off policy – is always under the political gun.

 

For the same reason the ABC is despised by both Labor and Liberal governments. Governments like media companies to have an owner because they are by nature control freaks. They like the idea of doing a deal.

 

What I could never understand is why they never realised that the proprietor always wins in the end, because he can switch sides when it suits his commercial interests. A longer term view would see government policy strongly in favour of media ownership diversity, because a diversely owned media will ensure that the media, as an entity, scrutinises the media proprietors, thus helping to keep the system honest.

 

This is a big reason why Packer and Murdoch want to sew up the ownership of our media – it is in both their interests to shut down criticism of them both. And are they even notionally independent of each other, now that they’re going into joint ventures like Onetel and Foxtel?

 

A factor dramatically increasing the need for diverse media ownership is that the Packer dynasty has spread its tentacles beyond the media to casinos and telecommunications. The Murdochs control a worldwide media company with interests in satellite TV, movies, ecommerce, television and newspapers. Who will scrutinise them? Your ABC? Fairfax? How long will these groups last?

 

With concentrated media ownership and the increasing ability for proprietors to use their media assets to cross promote their business interests, it is obvious that the media must now be regulated. As a society, we just cannot leave it to those much maligned people, the journalists. We, a subset of the people, are fighting against impossible odds to stay free and independent. And for thanks, you guys dump on us.

 

 

Journalists are, in general, not well paid. Their most basic impulse is to find stories that haven’t been told yet, for the thrill of the scoop, the desire to expose corruption or matters of public interest, and because of the competitive pressure to beat the opposition. One of the ugliest bits of rhetoric used by Howard to justify his attempt to hand Fairfax to Packer in his first term was that we needed a national champion to take on the world. The result would have been little or no competition within Australia, and that’s fatal to a healthy 4th estate.

 

In Western Australia, there has been only one daily newspaper for a long time, which damages the competitive impulse, and makes it just about impossible for a journalist to take a stand on principle. Brisbane and Adelaide joined WA when, in a despicable decision, the then treasurer Paul Keating allowed Rupert Murdoch, a foreigner, to take over the Herald and Weekly Times newspaper group. The then Trade Practices Commission let the bid through on the basis that Murdoch managers would buy HWT papers in those cities to compete with the Murdoch papers. Surprise, surprise, those papers were quickly closed down.

 

Sure, we’ve got our code of ethics, recently beefed up by the Media Alliance. But that is our professional association’s code, to which the media companies are not bound. Which young reporter would say no to an unethical request? Which young reporter would complain at a big-brother type scam? How on earth can we expect them to? Do you think journalists like being forced to be lackeys churning out advertorial rather than real journalists? If you do, you’re wrong.

 

To me, there is almost no alternative. A brave State government or a suicidal federal government should enact a law similar to the model for lawyers. There should be statutory backing for a media ethics body to hear and adjudicate complaints, with the power to apply penalties.

 

The Herald has spent years coming up with an internal ethics code, to which everyone in editorial would be bound but an enforcement mechanism is yet to be agreed upon. To me, the code is there to protect us in working for our readers. The reader must therefore have the right to complain on a breach of ethics. I would like the Herald to appoint an ombudsman, preferably a senior retired journalist, to handle complaints, make regular findings and write a regular column.

 

It is a very big decision to regulate the media, because State regulation raises the spectre of State control. But since the industry itself has become so arrogant, to the detriment of its readers and its journalists, that we should seriously consider a hybrid model. The media must keep control. What I’d suggest is that each big newspaper appoint an ethics monitor. If any question of ethics arises in the production of, or publishing of stories, the monitor would be consulted and express a view, possibly after consultation with ethics monitors in other media. If an ethical complaint arises, the matter would go to the full ethics committee, comprised of ethics monitors in the industry. This is just an idea. Any others?

 

**************

 

Today is media day, and doing a sort of Q & A with contributions I’ve been saving up from Andy Latta, Andrew Elder, Alex Pollard and Don Arthur. Jack Robertson’s Meeja watch, on the news value of the leaked Stone memo, will kick it all off and a wonderful piece from the US online site The Nation, sent in by Con Vaitsas, will complete the trip.

 

The dairyupdate has three new entries. Walter Graham (entry 30) tells us why regulation happened in the first place – we weren’t producing enough milk for our own needs. He also believes competition policy was irrelevant to dismantling deregulation, and that the federal government was the patsy here, not the bogeyman. It’s a fascinating read. Tim Dunlop (entry 29) goes to town on David Eastwood’s insistence that democracy means majority rule. Tim believes, as I do, that the essence of democracy is the quality of its treatment of minorities. Its an old debate being passionately contested in the context of our dairy debate. Rick Pass (entry 31) tosses in yet another factor into the debate, arguing that Victorian farmers – who’ve pushed deregulation – benefit from grossly subsidised irrigation water as compared to their NSW and Queensland colleagues. The government, after spending a whopping $1.7 billion of our money to compensate the farmers, has just announced a $140 million top-up. Dairy deregulation must be hurting the Coalition very badly.

 

To those of you still stirred up by pollies super, public submissions on Peter Andren’s private members bill to start cleaning it up close on June 1st. The address is The Senate Committee on Superannuation, Parliament House Canberra, ACT 2600. You can get the detail from Webdiary entry Winning by sacrifice, or at www.peterandren.com

 

MEEJA WATCH

 

When politics is empty, leaks are irrelevant

 

By Jack Robertson

 

What is a political leak? Hard news? A scoop? Is it information our politicians didn’t want us to see, but thanks to a Free and Effective Press, we did?

 

Political leaks are none of these things. As far as I can see, the leak is now indistinguishable from any other political Press Release or spun Party message. Such is the blurring of the lines between political pack, quack, flak and hack, that I doubt a political leak can even truly be called a leak anymore.

 

A political leak, the Stone leak say, is information delivered by a political insider to us via the Press, and is thus no more valuable, as hard news, than any other party-delivered information. That such leaks are invariably intended to hurt certain politicians and help others is mostly irrelevant – unless you are a political insider yourself.

 

Political leaking rarely involves matters that affect us, but is invariably part of the power gaming that is increasingly turning us all off politics itself. And as Howard’s improved rating in the wake of the Stone leak suggests, the only people really interested in these power games work in Canberra.

 

Journalists urgently need to re-assess the leak (and other inside mechanisms) as reportage tools. Politics is the business of selling competing messages, and when the substance of the messages are the same, it becomes the business of presenting the message more seductively than the other guy.

 

In the early days of policy convergence, politicians still did this in reasonably straightforward ways. A Bob Hawke or a Paul Keating, while embracing what is now the centrist orthodoxy, could woo the electorate with old-fashioned political weapons like charisma, personality, heartfelt oratory, public gestures, the vision thing. Even in the 80s, if you faked all that well enough it could still get you elected.

 

The difficulty now is that we don’t cop surface stuff anymore. We are far too Meeja-savvy to take anything at face value. Thus the clout of the truly professional spinner – the sub-textual, post-modernist, second, third and fourth-guessing spinner (the Alistair Campbell, the James Carville).

 

We are now so primed to disbelieve everything our politicians say upfront that making the message sufficiently seductive requires great sophistication from spin doctors. In a post-Lewinsky, post-X-Files, post-reality TV world, the Public Arena operates on a weird inverse principle – the only time we are even vaguely likely to believe something involving politicians is when it comes in some sort of conspiracy package – a leak, an inside story, an off-the-record wink-and-nod, even a scandal.

 

The spinners know this better than anyone – it’s their job to invent new ways of selling information. Got a message you want delivered? Well don’t merely deliver it in public – if anything, deny it in public. Want to send a signal? Then signal exactly its opposite in public. Want to soften the blow of a forthcoming tough policy announcement? Then leak an even tougher one first, so the Minister can magnanimously knock the sharp edges off it when releasing the real policy.

 

A fundamental requirement for these subtler forms of message delivery is a Press willing to play along, happy to foster close off-the-record relationships with politicians. Yet such has been the Meeja’s acquiescence that the prospect of truly independent investigation has been overwhelmed by the ensuing symbiotic cosiness. (MARGO: There are honourable exceptions. The Herald’s political correspondent Laura Tingle has done great investigative work on nursing homes, the tendering process for the job network and the behaviour of charities since they’ve become quasi-government agencies. I agree it’s getting harder, especially as journalist numbers are being squeezed in Canberra and bosses are often unwilling to give a political reporter time to collect the evidence or enough space to report the story. Another factor is a trend towards blandness in newspapers, with packaging perceived as more important than content.)

 

Every journo ferociously nurtures their inside sources, striking a series of mildly Faustian Pacts in which both politician and reporter regard the other as the Devil, yet both are damned to Eternal Irrelevance in the eyes of an increasingly bemused public.

 

Journalists will argue that such mechanisms as leaks and off-the-record chats have always been central to political reportage. However, such is now the degree of sophistication with which our political operators try to tweak the Meeja, that these staples have surely become hopelessly compromised.

 

These days a leak is more likely to be an integral part of a Party’s sanctioned campaign strategy than an attempt at subversion, much less altruistic truth-telling. Even Margo mused – albeit dismissively – on the possibility that Howard himself authorised the Stone leak. The truth is, Canberra is now so thoroughly Byzantine that news and spin are impossible for even a Laurie Oakes to untangle, much less explain to us out here.

 

And this is what Canberra journos need to confront. These long-nurtured insider mechanisms are now so ubiquitous as to be effectively worthless. The public is just as sophisticated about information as reporters are, after all. Weve all watched enough Survivor and Big Brother to know one thing, at least, when it comes to Machiavellian Meeja gamesmanship – believe nothing.

 

This is a dangerous corner for the Canberra Pack to have painted itself into. The phrase is not Free Press, its Free and Effective Press, and the increasing passive reliance on the likes of the Stone memo, in place of pro-active investigation, suggests that our capitals journalists will soon represent little more than just another information outlet, undistinguishable, in the publics eyes at least, from a PM Press Officer or a Beazley electioneerist. The likelihood is that we will then simply choose to ignore them completely, too.

 

I found the Meeja coverage of Stonegate slightly sad, even a tad desperate, as if journalists were trying to convince themselves that the story was the Real McCoy, that theirs is still the Number One Political Patch in town. Yet I suspect that even the most cloistered of Canberra correspondents is beginning to sense an awkward truth: when the political rhetoric from all sides is already utterly empty, you can leak to your hearts content, but it won’t stop people looking elsewhere for something real to drink.

 

 

ANDY LATTA

 

I’m interested in a small point your comment on April 10 (Webdiary, Natasha, Cheryl and Pauline), that you were “still surprised at how much of a tedious, arid, turn-off the political debate is from outside the Canberra hothouse, including its media presentation”.

 

I can see why it would be an enthralling environment to report in if you were swimming around in it, and would be interested if you could elaborate on the differences you now find (as you are now like the greater majority of us in being physically disconnected from the Canberra environment).

 

I’ve visited Canberra many times and often feel like a fish out of water – unlike the feeling I get when I visit any other capital city. There seems to be an unidentifiable “x” factor in Canberra. Speaking to Canberra ex-pats, the best explanation they can come up with is that Canberra is very “cliquey”

 

Maybe this is one of the reasons why you are now noticing the difference? This “rarefied” type of environment and it’s attendant reporting is the only thing that most of us get to see. so what are the differences, and how do they relate to the spin that politicians use?

 

 

MARGO: Canberrans constantly rail against reporters saying “Canberra did x, y, z”. They insists that it’s not the city making the decisions, it’s the bloody politicians from the rest of Australia. I take no notice of these complaints, because Canberra was built to house our federal government, and government is what Canberra does. It is a place of policy and politics. The journalists of the press gallery, and there are more than 100 of them, are here for one reason – to report policy and politics. The senior public servants live here, and talk policy and politics. With all the outsourcing, privatisation and decentralisation going on, you might think Canberra would be a shrunken little thing by now, but it has boomed since the election of Howard in 1996. Big law firms have moved in, to grab the outsourced legal work. Lobbying has become more lucrative.

 

The world of government is jam packed with political staffers, journalists, public servants, lobbyists and companies doing, thinking and talking policy and politics.

 

I’ve written about why the media-politician mix in Canberra has become dysfunctional and what can be done about it in the Webdiary entry ‘Hansonism: Then and now’. The danger is that politics can become an intellectual game of finding, deconstructing and interpreting spin. Both sides are guilty in this corruption of process, because the media’s news judgement is about finding conflict, inconsistency and evidence of disunity. Cynicism from politicians feeds journalists which feeds readers which worries politicians who blame journalists who blame their bosses who blame them. Readers tune out.

 

As a result, interesting political questions such as those raised by Kernot about the role of young people in political parties are crushed by disunity stories. Simon Crean’s sin in raising the need for more superannuation savings is pounced on by Howard as proof that employers will be slugged.

 

Political journos are trapped by cliched, formulaic writing styles. Experimentation is needed. They also find themselves looking out from the centre of political power, not outside looking in, where they should be if they are to serve their readers.

ANDREW ELDER in Petersham NSW

 

Now that some time has passed since the death of Mr Peter Nugent MP (see Webdiary entry A loss to Liberals) we can see how the media has missed some of the big issues in this matter and will keep doing so unless something radical happens.

 

Peter Nugent was a decent man pursuing noble causes in a sick-and-tired government, a government of, by and for the self-absorbed and the unimaginative. You rightly said something similar, but elsewhere he was given short shrift. Most of the Herald article announcing his death concentrated on the impeding byelection: to read that article it was almost as though Mr Nugent had died just to spite the government.

 

In this initial period we should, as they say in funeral orations, reflect on the man’s life and be grateful that he was here at all. He was the political equivalent of the Wollemi Pine, and only those with a bit of perspective (yourself, Michelle Grattan) picked this up.

 

There’s plenty of time to go into all that in-depth street-by-street analysis. The byelection won’t be for two months yet. By that time the good voters of Aston will be interviewed, direct-mailed, phone-polled and focus-grouped within an inch of their lives.

 

By that time – when the swinging voters in Aston and the generally interested outside it begin to take a real interest – the straight commentary will become stale for the media. By that time the major parties will have chosen worthy but dull candidates to contest the seat, and if you can dismiss Peter Nugent in a par or two what hope will the Lib and Labor people have?

 

Just before the byelection the media will be reduced to reporting on wacky independents, colourful locals, the dress sense of various personalities involved – anything but the real meat-and-potatoes analysis that will be in high, unspoken demand, but in abysmally low supply.

 

Major media will try any marketing strategy in this period except:

 

a) proper respect for the departed, and

 

b) straightforward explanation of the options before Aston voters, both of which would be so newsworthy and so unusual of itself that we could only hope for a news organisation to practice strategy of such a high order.

 

Instead of news strategy we have a meandering, blundering herd of media, avoiding some issues, trampling others. This is the real casualty of concentrated media ownership – as the number of players become fewer the consequences of breaking from the pack become too high for mere mortals. You may say this is too long a bow to draw on the reporting of this one issue – but after the voters of Aston choose a new Representative, revisit this email and see how it stands up.

 

 

MARGO: Part of the problem is a lack of corporate memory in the gallery, with more young people being posted here for only a short time. They don’t get a feel for the history, and where the players stand. Cheap and superficial cynicism can flourish in such an environment. However, in my view the reason why Nugent was pronounced dead as a forward to racy coverage of the latest problem for Howard is that news editors didn’t want an obituary. I believe their news judgement is wrong on this score. I’ve had several emails expressing the same distaste as you. Political reporting is nothing without context and flavour.

 

After he sent his email, Andrew sent me the following from the Private Eye website in Britain. We must move on from this forumla!!!!

THE EYE’S TOP TEAM — BRINGING YOU THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE ELECTION COVERAGE EVER

FROM TODAY Private Eye will be running an extra 94 pages every issue to guarantee up-to-the-minute round-the-clock first-past-the-post in-depth behind-the-scenes in-your-face cut-out-and-throw-away reportage of tomorrow’s events today.

 

This is the A-team who will deliver the nation’s most indispensable election news before it even happens.

 

Man with glasses. With over 40 years’ experience at the cutting edge, the man with glasses will provide analysis and comment.

 

Woman you haven’t heard of. Reporting from the key marginals, the woman you haven’t heard of will write thousands of words about the ups and downs of the campaign trail.

 

Young bloke. With no experience at all, young bloke will be giving a unique Generation X viewpoint on the issues that concern first-time voters.

 

Man with bowtie. One of Britain’s top psephologists, man with bowtie will be conducting a daily poll of polls to keep you abreast of all the latest percentages.

 

Someone amusing. With his unique brand of wry humour, someone amusing will be taking a wry sideways look at the lighter moments of the election battle.

 

Another woman. To make the team look bigger and more balanced in gender terms, another woman will be getting a picture byline as well.

 

Alastair Campbell. Top government spokesman Alastair Campbell (Tony Blair’s press secretary) will be coming up with our stories, writing our headlines and telling us what to put in the editorials (some mistake surely).

 

More Top Team tomorrow

 

ALEX POLLARD

 

Margo, you mentioned on Late Night Live that the press had been chucked out of an ALP function. You referred to the press as “the public’s representatives”. Where did you get that idea from? Who elects opinionators and journos? No-one, they’re appointed by editors, who are employed by big media companies.

 

MARGO: This question is so hard. You have to get back to the basis on which the media has a privileged position in our society. Why are the journalists our bosses choose able to go to a press conference and ask hard questions? Why are we accommodated in the system? The only answer can be that in some sense we do represent the people. The phrase I use is that we’re here to scrutinise the powerful on behalf of the people and to bring the concerns of the people to the powerful. We can’t do the latter if we’re in the power club, and we can’t do the former if we’re under pressure from bosses to look after THEIR interests, if we’re not sufficiently informed to ask the tough questions, and if when we do ferret out answers bosses don’t want to run them or want them spun or beaten up.

 

So Alex, that’s where I get the idea from. I know its untenable, but I still believe it. It must be faith.

DON ARTHUR, former public servant, now a PhD student and our politics of ideas writer.

 

I’ve spent years watching public servants following a kind of code – a sense of what’s on and not on in the job. Most bureaucrats I know are outraged if they even suspect they are being asked to compromise their professional integrity (eg cook a selection process for a grant for political reasons).

 

Surely journalists are the same? I know we’re all supposed to be hyper-cynical these days but I’m guessing there are things most journalists can’t do without feeling like they’ve sold their soul – not just what’s in the formal codes, but something in the culture of the job. As a consumer of news I need to have faith in something like this – I can’t check every single story myself.

 

I’d love to see you write something on this. Can we trust journos? What kind of things chew away at their professional integrity? What questions should we be asking?

 

Or maybe the ad that offers “news you can trust” is just the info-product equivalent of “New Blixo-superwash – now with grime-busting enzymes” – one more scrap of unverifiable marketing hype. Maybe all it means is the serious looking TV anchor polls well on the “someone you can trust” question in a market research survey. Journalism inside out?

 

MARGO: We do feel just as outraged. Because Fairfax journalists cling to a culture that’s not quite dead – we have more ability to stay no. I have no criticism of News journos here – they just haven’t got the capacity in general, although you’ll note that when push comes to shove, they will leak the material to Fairfax or the ABC, or even the Australian’s media section (an interesting case study in a publication once scrupulous in giving News Limited organs the same scrutiny as the rest, but now descended into promoting News and critiquing the rest – what a shame that Amanda Meade got taken off the media gossip column after she correctly described Rupert Murdoch as a foreigner.)

 

It’s a brutal, harsh game, journalism. Most of us fight hard every day to get what we think is important into the paper, without being beaten up or otherwise spun. There is no doubt in my mind that credibility will be a media organ’s most valuable asset in this decade. Many of us are fighting for that credibility. We’re losing.

CON VAITSAS brings us this from The Nation, http://ssl.thenation.com

 

May 7, 2001

 

 

Journalism & Democracy

 

By Bill Moyers

This article is adapted from Moyers’s speech to the National Press Club on March 22, hosted by PBS (The United States’ public broadcasting system) to observe his thirtieth year as a broadcast journalist. The chemical industry’s trade association did attempt to discredit the March 26 documentary, “Trade Secrets” (see “The Times v. Moyers,” April 16), accusing Moyers and Jones of “journalistic malpractice” for inviting industry participation only during the last half-hour of the broadcast. Moyers replied that investigative journalism is not a collaboration between the journalist and the subject.

 

Hi. My name is Bill, and I’m a recovering Unimpeachable Source. I understand “Unimpeachable Source” is now an oxymoron in Washington, as in “McCain Republican” or “Democratic Party.” But once upon a time in a far away place – Washington in the 1960s – I was one.

 

Deep Backgrounders and Unattributable Tips were my drugs of choice. Just go to Austin and listen to me on those tapes LBJ secretly recorded. That’s the sound of a young man getting high…without inhaling. I swore off thirty-four years ago last month, and I’m here to tell you, it hasn’t been easy to stay clean.

 

I can’t even watch The West Wing without breaking into a sweat. A C-SPAN briefing by Ari Fleischer pushes me right to the edge. But I know one shot – just one – and I could wind up like my friend David Gergen, in and out of revolving doors and needing to go on The NewsHour for a fix between Presidents.

 

But I’m not here to talk about my time in the White House. I haven’t talked much about it at all, though I do plan to write about it someday soon. During the past three and a half decades, I have learned that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.

 

Unless you’re willing to fight and refight the same battles until you go blue in the face, to drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you’ve got it right, and then to take hit after unfair hit accusing you of having a “bias,” or these days even a point of view, there’s no use even in trying. You have to love it, and I do. (All lines in bold are my emphasis)

 

I always have. Journalism is what I wanted to do since I was a kid. Fifty years ago, on my 16th birthday, I went to work at the Marshall News Messenger. The daily newspaper in a small Texas town seemed like the best place in the world to be a cub reporter. It was small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy, happy and learning something new every day.

 

I was lucky. Some of the old-timers were out sick or on vacation and I got assigned to cover the Housewives’ Rebellion. Fifteen women in Marshall refused to pay the new Social Security withholding tax for their domestic workers.

 

The rebels argued that Social Security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that – here’s my favorite part – “requiring us to collect [the tax] is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage”. They hired themselves a lawyer – Martin Dies, the ex-Congressman best known (or worst known) for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1930s and 1940s.

 

Eventually the women wound up paying the tax–while holding their noses. The stories I wrote for the News Messenger were picked up and moved on the Associated Press wire. And I was hooked.

 

Two years later, as a sophomore in college, I decided I wanted to become a political journalist and figured experience in Washington would show me the ropes. I wrote a man I had never met, a United States senator named Lyndon Johnson, and asked him for a summer job. Lucky again, I got it. And at summer’s end LBJ and Lady Bird offered me a job on their television station in Austin for $100 a week.

 

Looking back on all that followed – seminary, the Peace Corps, the White House, Newsday, PBS, CBS and PBS again – I often think of what Joseph Lelyveld, the executive editor of the New York Times, told some aspiring young journalists. “You can never know how a life in journalism will turn out,” he said.

 

It took me awhile after the White House to learn that what’s important in journalism is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality. Journalism took me there: to famine in Africa, war in Central America, into the complex world of inner-city families in Newark and to working-class families in Milwaukee struggling to survive the good times. My life in journalism has been a continuing course in adult education.

 

From colleagues – from producers like Sherry Jones – I keep learning about journalism as storytelling. Sherry and I have been collaborating off and on for a quarter of a century, from the time we did the very first documentary ever about political action committees. I can still see the final scene in that film–yard after yard of computer printout listing campaign contributions unfurled like toilet paper stretching all the way across the Capitol grounds.

 

That one infuriated just about everyone, including friends of public television. PBS took the heat and didn’t melt. When Sherry and I reported the truth behind the news of the Iran/contra scandal for a Frontline documentary called “High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” the right-wing Taliban in town went running to their ayatollahs in Congress, who decried the fact that public television was committing – horrors – journalism. The Clinton White House didn’t like it a bit, either, when Sherry and I reported on Washington’s Other Scandal, about the Democrats’ unbridled and illegal fundraising of 1996.

 

If PBS didn’t flinch, neither did my corporate underwriter for ten years now, Mutual of America Life Insurance Company. (MARGO: PBS is part public, part private funded.) Before Mutual of America I had lost at least three corporate underwriters, who were happy as long as we didn’t make anyone else unhappy. Losing your underwriting will keep the yellow light of caution flickering in a journalist’s unconscious. I found myself – and I could kick myself for this – not even proposing controversial subjects to potential underwriters because I had told myself, convinced myself: “Nah, not a chance!” Then Mutual of America came along and the yellow light flickers no more. This confluence of good fortune and good colleagues has made it possible for us to do programs that the networks dare not contemplate.

 

Commercial television has changed since the days when I was hired as chief correspondent for CBS Reports, the documentary unit. A big part of the problem is ratings. It’s not easy, as John Dewey said, to interest the public in the public interest. In fact, I’d say that apart from all the technology, the biggest change in my thirty years in broadcasting has been the shift of content from news about government to consumer-driven information and celebrity features. The Project for Excellence in Journalism conducted a study of the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, the nightly news programs of ABC, CBS and NBC, and Time and Newsweek. They found that from 1977 to 1997 the number of stories about government dropped from one in three to one in five, while the number of stories about celebrities rose from one in every fifty stories to one in every fourteen.

 

Does it matter? Well, as we learned in the 1960s but seem to have forgotten, government is about who wins and who loses in the vast bazaar of democracy. Government can send us to war, pick our pockets, slap us in jail, run a highway through our garden, look the other way as polluters do their dirty work, take care of the people who are already well cared for at the expense of those who can’t afford lawyers, lobbyists or time to be vigilant.

 

It matters who’s pulling the strings. It also matters who defines the news and decides what to cover. It matters whether we’re over at the Puffy Combs trial, checking out what Jennifer Lopez was wearing the night she ditched him, or whether we’re on the Hill, seeing who’s writing the new bankruptcy law, or overturning workplace safety rules, or buying back standards for allowable levels of arsenic in our drinking water.

 

I need to declare a bias here. It’s true that I worked for two Democratic Presidents, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. But I did so more for reasons of opportunity than ideology. My worldview was really shaped by Theodore Roosevelt, who got it right about power in America.

 

Roosevelt thought the central fact of his era was that economic power had become so centralized and dominant it could chew up democracy and spit it out. The power of corporations, he said, had to be balanced in the interest of the general public. Otherwise, America would undergo a class war, the rich would win it, and we wouldn’t recognize our country anymore. Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government. The White House, the Congress and, increasingly, the judiciary reflect their interests. We appear to have a government run by remote control from the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. To hell with everyone else.

 

What’s the role of journalism in all this? The founders of our nation were pretty explicit on this point. The First Amendment is the first for a reason. It’s needed to keep our leaders honest and to arm the powerless with the information they need to protect themselves against the tyranny of the powerful, whether that tyranny is political or commercial. At least that’s my bias. A college student once asked the journalist Richard Reeves to define “real news.” He answered: “The news you and I need to keep our freedoms.”

 

Senator John McCain echoed this in an interview I did with him a couple of years ago for a documentary called “Free Speech for Sale.” It was about the Telecommunications Act of 1996, when some of America’s most powerful corporations were picking the taxpayers’ pocket of $70 billion. That’s the estimated value of the digital spectrum that Congress was giving away to the big media giants. (MARGO: Surprise, surprise, that’s what Howard did for the TV networks here, too.)

 

Senator McCain said on the Senate floor during the debate, referring to the major media, “You will not see this story on any television or hear it on any radio broadcast because it directly affects them.” And, in our interview, he added, “The average American does not know what digital spectrum is. They just don’t know. But here in Washington their assets that they own were being given away, and the coverage was minuscule.”

 

Sure enough, the Telecommunications Act was introduced around May of 1995 and was finally passed in early February of 1996. During those nine months, the three major network news shows aired a sum total of only nineteen minutes on the legislation, and none of the nineteen minutes included a single mention of debate over whether the broadcasters should pay for use of the digital spectrum.

 

The Founders didn’t count on the rise of mega-media. They didn’t count on huge private corporations that would own not only the means of journalism but also vast swaths of the territory that journalism should be covering. According to a recent study done by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press for the Columbia Journalism Review, more than a quarter of journalists polled said they had avoided pursuing some newsworthy stories that might conflict with the financial interests of their news organizations or advertisers. And many thought that complexity or lack of audience appeal causes newsworthy stories not to be pursued in the first place.

 

I don’t mean to suggest there was a Golden Age of journalism. I told you earlier about covering the Housewives’ Rebellion in Marshall, Texas, fifty years ago. What I didn’t tell you is that it was the white housewives who made news with their boycotts of Social Security, not the domestic workers themselves. They were black; I wasn’t sent to interview them, and it didn’t occur to me that I should have.

 

Marshall was 50 percent black, 50 percent white, and the official view of reality was that only white people made news. I could kick myself for the half-blindness that has afflicted me through the years – from the times at the White House when I admonished journalists for going beyond the official view of reality in Vietnam to the times I have let the flickering yellow light turn red in my own mind on worthy journalistic projects.

 

I’m sure that growing up a Southerner and serving in the White House turned me into a fanatic – at least into a public nuisance – about what journalism should be doing in our democracy. In the South the truth about slavery was driven from our pulpits, our newsrooms and our classrooms, and it took the Civil War to bring the truth home. Then the truth about Jim Crow was censored, too, and it took another hundred years to produce the justice that should have followed Appomattox.

 

In the White House we circled the wagons, grew intolerant of news that didn’t comfort us and, if we could have, we would have declared illegal the sting of the bee. So I sympathize with my friends in commercial broadcasting who don’t cover the ocean they’re swimming in. But I don’t envy them. Having all those resources – without the freedom to use them to do the kinds of stories that are begging to be done – seems to me more a curse than a blessing. It reminds me of Bruce Springsteen’s great line, “It’s like eating caviar and dirt.”

 

But I am not here to hold myself up as some sort of beacon. I’ve made my own compromises and benefited from the special circumstances of my own good luck. But the fact that I have been so lucky shows that it can be done. All that is required is for journalists to act like journalists, and their sponsors – public or private – to back them up when the going gets a little rough. Because when you are dealing with powerful interests, be they in government or private industry, and bringing to light what has been hidden, the going does – inevitably – get a little rough.

 

Let me give you a couple of examples of what I mean – why the battle is never-ending. Some years ago my colleague Marty Koughan was looking into the subject of pesticides and food when he learned about a National Academy of Sciences study in progress on the effects of pesticide residuals on children. With David Fanning of Frontline as an ally, we set about a documentary.

 

Four to six weeks before we were finished the industry somehow purloined a copy of our rough script – we still aren’t certain how – and mounted a sophisticated and expensive campaign to discredit the documentary before it aired. They flooded television reviewers and the editorial pages of newspapers with propaganda.

 

A Washington Post columnist took a dig at the broadcast on the morning of the day it aired – without even having seen it – and later admitted to me that the dig had been supplied to him by a top lobbyist in town. Some station managers were so unnerved that they protested the documentary with letters that had been prepared by industry. Several station managers later apologized to me for having been suckered.

 

Here’s what most perplexed us: Eight days before the broadcast, the American Cancer Society – a fine organization that in no way figured in our story – sent to its 3,000 local chapters a “critique” of the unfinished documentary claiming, wrongly, that it exaggerated the dangers of pesticides in food. We were puzzled: Why was the American Cancer Society taking the unusual step of criticizing a documentary that it hadn’t seen, that hadn’t aired and that didn’t claim what the society alleged?

 

An enterprising reporter in town named Sheila Kaplan later looked into this question for Legal Times, which headlined her story: “Porter/Novelli Plays All Sides.” It turns out that the Porter/Novelli public relations firm, which has worked for several chemical companies, also did pro bono work for the American Cancer Society. Kaplan found that the firm was able to cash in some of the goodwill from that pro bono work to persuade the compliant communications staff at the society to distribute some harsh talking points about the documentary that had been supplied by, but not attributed to, Porter/Novelli.

 

Others used the society’s good name to discredit the documentary, including the right-wing polemicist Reed Irvine. His screed against what he called “Junk Science on PBS” called on Congress to pull the plug on public broadcasting. PBS stood firm. The report aired, the journalism held up (in contrast to the disinformation about it) and the National Academy of Sciences was liberated to release the study that the industry had tried to cripple.

 

But there’s always the next round. PBS broadcast our documentary on “Trade Secrets.” It’s a two-hour investigative special based on the chemical industry’s own archives, on documents that make clear, in the industry’s own words, what the industry didn’t tell us about toxic chemicals, why they didn’t tell us and why we still don’t know what we have the right to know. These internal industry documents are a fact. They exist. They are not a matter of opinion or point of view. They state what the industry knew, when they knew it and what they decided to do.

 

The public policy implications of our broadcast are profound. We live today under a regulatory system designed by the industry itself. The truth is, if the public, media, independent scientists and government regulators had known what the industry knew about the health risks of its products–when the industry knew it–America’s laws and regulations governing chemical manufacturing would be far more protective of human health than they are today. But the industry didn’t want us to know. That’s the message of the documents. That’s the story.

 

The spokesman for the American Chemistry Council assured me that contrary to rumors, the chemical industry was not pressuring stations to reject the broadcast. I believed him; the controversy would only have increased the audience. But I wasn’t sure for a while.

 

The first person to contact us from the industry was a public relations firm here in Washington noted for hiring private detectives and former CIA, FBI and drug enforcement officers to do investigations for corporations. One of the founders of the company is on record as saying that sometimes corporations need to resort to unconventional resources, and some of those resources “include using deceit.” No wonder Sherry and I kept looking over our shoulders.

 

To complicate things, the single biggest recipient of campaign contributions from the chemical industry over the past twenty years in the House has been the very member of Congress whose committee has responsibility for public broadcasting’s appropriations. Now you know why we don’t take public funds for reports like this!

 

For all the pressures, America, nonetheless, is a utopia for journalists. In many parts of the world assassins have learned that they can kill reporters with impunity; journalists are hunted down and murdered because of their reporting. Thirty-four in Colombia alone over the past decade. And here? Well, Don Hewitt of 60 Minutes said to me recently that “the 1990s were a terrible time for journalism in this country but a wonderful time for journalists; we’re living like [GE CEO] Jack Welch.” Perhaps that’s why we aren’t asking tough questions of Jack Welch.

 

I don’t want to claim too much for our craft, but I don’t want to claim too little, either. The late Martha Gellhorn spent half a century observing war and politicians and journalists, too. By the end she had lost her faith that journalism could, by itself, change the world. But she had found a different sort of comfort. For journalists, she said, “victory and defeat are both passing moments. There is no end; there are only means. Journalism is a means, and I now think that the act of keeping the record straight is valuable in itself. Serious, careful, honest journalism is essential, not because it is a guiding light but because it is a form of honorable behavior, involving the reporter and the reader.”

 

And, one hopes, the viewer, too.

Sex and race politics and the conflicted intersection between the two if you’re an Aboriginal woman. This is a debate we never had in Australia, but it has raged for decades in the United States.

 

Remember the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court Judge? A black woman accused him of sexual harassment, black women divided, with many supporting Thomas over their sister. Remember O.J.Simpson’s trial for the murder of his white wife? Most black women supported him.

 

The Geoff Clark allegations and Pat O’Shane’s extraordinary response marks the beginning of the debate here, and not before time.

 

How difficult it must be to be an Aboriginal woman. Which comes first – loyalty to your race, or your gender? If you are oppressed by your own culture, do you suborn the injustice of your treatment to the betterment of the race you belong to, even if that betterment perpetuates discrimination against you?

 

This dreadful dilemma goes to the heart of the controversy over Pat O’Shane.

 

Today, I received an email from an Aboriginal woman and lawyer who used to work for ATSIC. She fears repercussions if she uses her real name, and has chosen the nom de plume Rhonda Dixon.

 

I have just read your excellent article “Rape and racism”. Thanks for speaking up on these matters. As an Aboriginal woman I feel very cheated by our so-called leaders, and in particular the high profile Aboriginal women who travel the circuit (or circus) speaking about community and sexual violence who continue to remain silent about the misogyny extant within organisations such as ATSIC.

 

For some of these Aboriginal women it is a matter of survival that they remain silent, but for others it is most likely that they have made a conscious decision to remain silent purely out of self-interest and career mobility.

 

Unfortunately it seems to be the case that Aboriginal women in ATSIC manage like men or at least play the same machiavellian games as their male counterparts.

 

Sadly, in our community there is often resounding silence whenever the sexual predatory behaviour of some of our Aboriginal leaders is questioned. Personally I found it sickening whilst working in ATSIC to be hit upon by men in the organisation. In my working life the only men that have made sexual advances towards me in the workplace have all been Aboriginal men with high profile ATSIC positions.

This is telling of the structure and culture of the organisation. Again thanks for having the fortitude to write that piece, as it really needed to be told.

 

Pat O’Shane’s decision to reject the testimony of three Aboriginal women and to back the Aboriginal man they accuse of rape is consistent with her long term approach to the conflict between gender and racial identity.

 

Twenty five years ago, O’Shane wrote a piece in Refractory Girl called “Is there any relevance in the women’s movement for Aboriginal women?”

 

She argued that since the colonisation of Australia, Aboriginal women often occupied positions of dominance in the family and leadership in Aboriginal communities, and that because “Aboriginal men have lost both their status and self respect” their status was rock bottom.

 

“Is this the price that we, as women, want to pay for our (seemingly) greater status? The enslavement of men! What has happened and is happening is that Aboriginal women are being held to ransom. What white society does is strip the Aboriginal man of any human dignity and then appears to elevate the role of Aboriginal women – in white society.

 

“It is often said by Aboriginal women that racism is the greatest problem facing them in this society. I must add my voice to theirs. The discussion as to the apparently higher status of Aboriginal women vis-a-vis white society is part of the whole question of how racism is practiced.

 

“The problem of racism is one that all women in the women’s movement must start to come to terms with. There is no doubt in my mind that racism is expressed by women in the movement.

“It appears to me that, whereas for the majority of women involved in the women’s movement, sexism is what the fight is all about, for Aboriginal women – when they look at all the medical, housing, education, employment and legal statistics – it becomes very clear that our major fight is against racism.”

 

It could be that O’Shane’s view that the publication of the claims against Clark were racist overrides any sympathy she might have for the three Aboriginal women involved.

 

The Clark story and the O’Shane reaction have triggered polarised responses from readers. Today, Bill Hartley, Graham Daniell, Fiona Ferrari and Martin Williams have their say.

 

BILL HARTLEY

 

Disclosure: Bill is a former AMWU Media and Publicity Officer, Victorian ALP State Secretary and ALP National Executive member. He clashed with Bob Hawke over the Palestinian issue, and was expelled from the ALP in the late 80s. He is a contributor to community radio station 3CR in Melbourne. This is a letter he wrote to The Age which was not published.

 

May I quote the guidance clause from the journalists’ code of ethics, as developed by the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) and adopted by the Guild’s membership?

 

“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.”

 

In my view, the Editor of The Age should reprint the full code of ethics so the public can by journalistic criteria judge the performance of the paper and my colleagues in the Guild (I have been an MEAA member since 1958) in the case of Geoffrey Clark and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC).

 

I have The Age or Sunday Age thrown over my fence every morning while cable provides a world television view via channels like CNN. It’s been one hell of a week for media junkies. For hours on hours CNN voyeuristically glued its cameras onto every sordid detail of the Indiana killing of Timothy McVeigh.

 

For some sub-editor to headline (columnist) Terry Lane’s self-congratulatory indulgence “The Geoff Clark story was simply great journalism” was truly beyond the pale.

 

The Age – which clearly has a problem – reminds me of the regular signature line used by the once popular cartoon characters, Katzenjammer Kids: “They brought it on themselves”.

 

GRAHAM DANIELL

 

I have to disagree with you over this one. This is about whether any person, no matter who they are, can make a statement of belief without being shouted down on the basis of nothing more than political correctness.

 

Pat O’Shane has committed the Cardinal Sin as far as feminists go – she has defended a man against unsubstantiated claims by women.

 

If she had said that in her opinion, men often abuse women, what criticism would she have received? Would there have been calls for her removal or banning her from hearing rape charges? If not, why is there a difference?

 

Please explain.

 

MARGO: Entrenched gender bias against women and in favour of women in the legal system is in the process of being broken down. We’re talking about the group in a weaker position, structurally and often formally, in terms of a lack of power, the lack of a voice, and the lack of money. That is the difference. If, as I said yesterday, she had effectively accused Clark of rape by saying “most rapists lie about what they’ve done”, she would be equally guilty of prejudging the issue. But she would not be feeding into the fears of many women that it’s no use reporting rape because the victim invariably loses.

 

FIONA FERRARI

 

I was shocked at Pat O’Shane’s diatribe on Lateline last week. I always thought she was a feminist. I remember seeing her about 10 years ago at a Reclaim the Night march in Sydney arguing passionately for the need for separate community-based legal services for indigenous women because women were not being adequately served by the generalist Aboriginal legal services.

 

O’Shane is just way off the mark – I can’t believe she can be so cruel to those women who have come forward with their stories.

 

On the decision to publish, Fairfax got it right. Women who have been raped do not get justice under our legal system-most are deterred from reporting to the police and very few proceed to court due to the prospect of a ‘second rape’ by prosecutors and the low conviction rate of those accused of rape.

 

That means the media must sometimes fill the gap so women can get some justice. I commend the editors of the Age and the journalist who wrote the story. It was courageous but they did the right thing.

 

MARTIN WILLIAMS

 

Disclosure: White, male, Capricorn. Other categories available on request

 

“The case against O’Shane,” you state, “is open and shut.” What case? The case for her sacking, or for something else? You don’t seem to be willing to say as much though you imply it with words like “This prejudgment is intolerable behaviour for any self-respecting lawyer, let alone a magistrate.” Could you clarify?

 

(MARGO: I don’t think she should be sacked. I believe she has betrayed a core judicial principle by prejudging the truth of the allegations. Her legal credibility, in my view, is in tatters. However, the bedrock principle of judicial independence is more important. Sacking should be eschewed except in extreme circumstances such as the commission of a criminal offence, persistent failure to pay tax or failure to do the job.)

 

O’Shane has set herself up for a fall in the most bemusing manner, yet I find it impossible to believe that she consciously attempted to fall on her sword. She may have just thrown caution to the wind and decided to have a spray over the decided opportunism of the media on these issues. Maybe it took ill-considered words from someone inside the judiciary to ram home the point.

 

If the case against Clark is so strong and so convincing then why debilitate any legal resolution for everybody concerned with an extra-legal investigation at the hands of Fairfax? Why was new evidence not referred to the police again and left with them until the police could provide a conclusive decision on the prosecutablility of the case? At least there could have been a prospect for a fair trial. All of this wouldn’t be because the sexiness and freshness of the story was under threat, would it?

 

This is a colour-blind issue in theory, but O’Shane no doubt sensed a colour problem in its execution – and she has a point – and flew off the handle. And unlike dinosaur male judges who 30 years ago (as well as very recently) opined in such a way and on a regular basis and, crucially, whose judgments reflected such bias, O’Shane’s words come from a completely different corner and from an entirely different motivation.

 

Besides, any truth in her assessment of women in her courtroom has not been challenged and certainly not in your comments. She said “a lot” of women make up stories, but you paraphrase her as saying “commonplace”. Did O’Shane say or imply – indeed, does she believe – that “a woman’s version of events should be doubted as a matter of course”? For God’s sake! You state and seem to seriously believe that O’Shane is consciously and deliberately attempting “to take us back to the days before women won respect for their rights on being raped.”

 

O’Shane may have been desperately clumsy in her delivery, but do you seriously accuse her of a

philosophical and professional bias against women and black women in particular? I’d like to see you two have that conversation. After using words like these, I feel you are almost morally obliged to secure a personal interview with her to thrash this one out. She is entitled to a right of reply in this forum, and who knows, after she gets sacked or resigns you may just have the opportunity to find out where she was coming from.

 

Noone, but noone, has referred to her judicial record. Surely such discrimination against women, and particularly black women would stick out like a sore thumb if she was genuinely malevolent (femalevolent?). Do you seriously think that black women across Australia can now identify their ultimate enemy in the judicial system as Pat O’Shane?

 

How about speaking to some black women and getting their opinions on the matter. I’m interested not just in a “feminist” opinion; I’m also interested in the opinions of the same black women O’Shane is alleged to have sold out, the same women who a large chunk of white Australian feminists have ignored or taken for granted for decades – and there are black female academics who will tell you this in no uncertain terms.

 

By the way, you say, “Sure, a few women fabricate rape, about the same proportion as allegations on non-sexual matters.” What research are you citing here?

 

If Clark has dug his own grave, then so be it. If he did these things, then prove it and punish him. I just find it really interesting that although O’Shane may have contributed to her own downfall with politically and professionally ill-chosen words, there are a whole bunch of people – I think the self-appellation of some of these people is “feminist” – whose fight for gender justice is going to be sullied by their enthusiastic attacks and for not realising that there might be times when, for people like Pat O’Shane, it hurts more to be an Aborigine than to be a woman.

 

The beauty of all of this is that the assimilationists among us, the right wing, the Haslucks, the Howards, the Herrons, the Ruddocks and their ilk, can sit back and chortle with barely concealed delight as some in the left and some “feminists” manipulate or otherwise fail to look beyond a literal reading of the words O’Shane used, and do what dirty work they can to defend their own ideological territory.

 

Your critique of O’Shane is almost largely valid and I think passionately sincere, yet there is something very important missing here.

 

Funnily enough, after all the debate and hand-wringing and accusations, which part of the community is going to suffer most from the grubbiness of the attempted destruction of two of the most important Aboriginal figureheads and power brokers and from the effective damage to black participation in the upper establishment? Aborigines, of both sexes.

 

Reconcile that.

After the storm, silence. In the Canberra press gallery, the phones have stopped ringing their heads off. A fractured government drags itself off the floor and goes on. As it must, for on May 9, 1901, the national parliament opened for business in Melbourne, and on May 9, 2001 the parliament returns to Melbourne for a commemorative sitting.

 

The commemorative election promises to be a brutish affair, with a discredited government resorting to low blows and an aimless, meta-cynical opposition resorting to cheap shots. There is, however, the chance of an autumn blessing.

 

At the Save our ABC rally in Sydney the weekend before last, Former ALP national president Barry Jones said his work on producing a blueprint for a knowledge nation was complete. He heads a committee of mega-brains working on the topic for Beazley, and he said that at their final meeting, they decided the draft had to be radicalised because the task was now urgent. The document would be presented to Beazley this month, he said, and released for public comment. Let’s hope it is. It may give us hope. It could even bring Elen Seymour’s dream of a return to Sydney’s sun from Canada winters a little closer to reality. She replies to her critics on the need for foreign investment in Australian R&D at the end of this entry.

 

Your reaction to the Stone incident was intriguing. Some told me to do a diary entry on it pronto, others complained when I did that I’d been seduced back into the game. Peter Gellatly in Canada wrote tartly: “Your brief stint back in Canberra hasn’t been good for your perspective. Who gives a damn about this? Isn’t public titillation adequately served by the “National Enquirer” and “Survivor”?”

 

“Fiona Ferrari has it absolutely right: “This is the typical conflict-based story the media loves…… when are they going to grow up and allow party members to publicly express discontent?”

 

“Amen! And so what if Howard survives or Costello replaces him? This is not a celebrity divorce case (which would be puerile enough), its about something that should be utterly mundane: either the Libs’ record in government stands the test or it doesn’t. The career ambitions of individual party aspirants are no doubt of vital importance to them; but why should we care? Drop it – it’s not worth writing or reading about.”

 

Mark Halliwell was of the same mind. The question wasn’t who leaked and why but “Who cares, and Can we trust these people?”

 

“When I see and hear the most senior people in our government making comments about not putting pen to paper on issues concerning peoples’ opinion and the conveyance of those opinions to the Prime Minister so that he might finally get the message, I get very worried! What else is being said or done in the corridors of power that we don’t know about? The remarks of Costello and Stone et al suggest that we, the people, are to be kept in the dark at all costs. It’s a worry.”

 

I know the content of the Stone memo was no surprise to voters – they already know the government is mean, tricky and out of touch and they’ve said so at two State elections and the Ryan byelection. But the leak has given Beazley and co great ammo, not least in election advertising. It has also triggered the public display of what had previously been subterranean leadership tensions. Sorry guys, but you can’t take the politics out of the journalist. There’s nothing like the adrenalin hit of a Liberal leadership story.

 

An anonymous contributor has a diabolical theory for the leak. He says Howard leaked the memo to help him win the election! “It can be buttonholed as the classic manoeuvre that attack is the best method of defence Where is opposition leader Kim Beazley? Last weekend I scanned Saturday’s Herald and could not find one story attributed to Beazley. In a week punters following the scam will turn off and declare the coalition as being a party that listens. Howard, as already stated, is following the Peter Beattie strategy nearly to the letter. If Beattie were to lead Labor into the federal elections he would carry the nation by panels of fencing. Instead Beazley is going to lose the unloseable election and Howard will resign midway through next year.”

 

Well, if that’s the case, wouldn’t Howard have got Stone to type up a letter to leak which didn’t dump on Costello? Why rub a wound raw? Beazley’s silence was deliberate. Lie low, let the Liberal disunity dominate the news. DON’T make the whole thing party political. Let Liberal voters stew in their party’s juice.

 

Lisa Summerhayes joins Fiona Ferrari in shock at my preference for Costello over Howard.

 

Margo,

 

Sometimes your views certainly surprise me. I remember you admitted that in the 93 election you voted for Hewson because you thought he was a ‘social progressive’; This was big of you to admit, as it seems somewhat naive. (MARGO: I voted Labor in 1993 and Liberal in 1996, on the ground that after 13 years, it was time for a change. I wanted to vote for Hewson in 1993, but Howard’s industrial relations policy turned me off.)

 

I know you are a libertarian – as many of us are – but this continued faith in social progressivism in the Liberal Party is a not only idealistic, but misguided. (MARGO: I’m not idealistic about this at all – for years my work has recorded with sadness how the moderate tradition of the Liberal Party has withered to almost nothing.)

 

The two guys you support in recent Libs leadership battles – Costello and Hewson – may not be the Lyons Forum-style 1950s social conservatives Howard and his ilk are, but that doesn’t mean they’re progressive by any normal standards either. Fiona Ferrari, Webdiary Friday, is right – where is the evidence for Costello’s progressiveness?

 

He is a religious man whose life thus far has indicated adhesion to two things – a moderate but still conservative view of society, and the belief in Friedmanite/Thatcherism style extreme dry economics.

 

Which leads me to point two: not only are you favourably judging these guys compared to their truly right-wing comrades, but you provide no evidence of their commitment to libertarianism. The reason you can’t provide any proof is that the whole party is beholden to dry economic hegemony.

 

So the important point here is that even if you could illustrate that these guys are good on some social issues, the point is moot, as such a an approach will always be overruled by the dries, who in this case are the same guys anyway. There is no automatic reason why the Adam Smith/Friedman tradition of economic freedom can’t be combined with Mill-style liberty in the social arena. As pollies like Kennett show, it can be done in part, and is more philosophically consistent.

But in federal politics it has yet to be done (the Fraser government was of the Keynsian variety, combining moderate social and economic policies). The dry part of Costello will always win against any social wetness he may harbour. (MARGO: Except on the republic and, maybe, saying sorry. And except on the Woodside decision! Stone’s memo to Howard clearly shows that Costello was doing his best to make wealthier people actually pay their fair share of tax – all his efforts since put in the bin under pressure from the core Liberal constituency.)

 

I can only imagine you being a “Costello supporter” in relation to the other option in the Liberal Party. If you really support him over Beazley – as your last entry implied – you are truly a perverse social progressive indeed. I know Costello looks like Bob Brown next to Howard on social issues, but let’s not kid ourselves – Labor has and has historically had more progressive social policies than the Coalition. Labor is more able to allow a little progressivism in the form of actual government programs into the equation because they are not – QUITE – as beholden to dry liberalism these days as the Libs.

 

Don’t let your personal dislike – and your issues with leadership weakness – of Beazley to, outweigh common sense about the political traditions these guys come out of. I know you don’t like to be seen as traditionally ‘left’ and beholden to the Labor party, but…

 

MARGO: This is my position. In a leadership contest between Howard and Costello, I would support Costello. The fact that he is still an enigma with regard to much social policy is in his favour. Howard is not an enigma, and I hate what he stands for.

 

As you know, I despair of Labor. My current voting intention is to vote for the Greens and put the major parties as low as possible on my voting forms for the Lower House and the Senate. I will put Labor before the Coalition simply because they’ve done enough damage and there’s a chance Labor will repair some of it. Given that I believe Labor will win the election, I’d like to see a replay of the Greens’ balance of power when Keating was Prime Minister. The Greens would keep Labor honest by forcing it to articulate its reasons for compromises on principle. I have invariably voted Democrats in the Senate, but believe that they would be too nice to a Labor government.

 

I’ll take no pleasure in voting this time, for the choices are odious. I anticipate my pleasure will lie in helping to create and maintain our online election site, which we’ll get down to seriously after the budget.

 

Now to our David Svenson , our crusty engineer in Ryan, a Liberal who returns to the diary with some comments on some of you.

 

“The egocentric who asks why he should contribute to the web diary is an obvious nut-case & needs to consult a psychiatrist before he does himself & /or others some serious damage.

 

“David Davis is right about the loss to the Libs of Peter Nugent. He is quite wrong about small l liberals not being welcome in the Liberal Party by the vast majority of us – far more welcome than the likes of that far right winger ex Senator from WA!

 

“What a brilliant young lady is Elen Seymour. She has, and I hope will continue to raise the standard and soften the tone of debate in your web diary. She has obviously cast off the left wing leanings of the young and grown wise.

 

“Jack Robertson has exposed, somewhat laboriously, the lack of substance in the free market theory and noted that the Royal Anglo-Dutch oil men won’t desert Oz because they know that Oz is a good place to make a quid in the bucketfuls required to sustain their voracious appetite for lucre (provided, of course, that the punters are not stupid enough to allow the ALP another turn at their cookie jar in Canberra!

 

“We must be indebted to Con Vaitsis – a self-confessed member of the rorter’s party. In claiming that most politicians are just ordinary workers without outstanding skills, Con can only be describing his own party politicians, who were lured into politics because it is such an attractive job.

 

“In my view, politics is an extremely onerous calling. A good politician should really be well educated, intelligent, tolerant, patient, indeed a paragon of every virtue. Little wonder that good politicians are hard to find. We should be satisfied with those mature ladies and gentlemen who have been successful in their working lives, have demonstrated their community spirit and have secured their financial future, so as to be unconcerned about the lurks and perks of office. Unhappily all too few meet such criteria.

 

“Margo, your charter does you credit. Your points that the future lies in the collaboration between journalists and the readers of newspapers which have lost their connection with the readers they serve are all too true. However thinking readers (mostly the only people still reading newspapers) tend to be contemptuous of Oz Media reporters who too often lack intellect and an in-depth education – probably why they have been brain-washed by Marxists & sundry other useless socio-political-economist experts!”

 

Welcome back, David. I missed you. You’ll recall that Imre Salusinszky’s column of last week on M1 provoked an impassioned response from Kelsey Monroe and David Teh. This week, Don Arthur bites back at Imre’s piece today, on the dairy debate. This could become a regular thing. Then it’s onto the globalisation debate triggered by M1, with Jenny Forster, Peter Gellatly, and our politics of ideas man Don Arthur. To end, David Svenson’s wise woman in Ottowa, Elen Seymour, continues the increasingly constructive foreign investment debate.

 

DR DRY DOES DAIRY

 

By Don Arthur

 

Imre Salusinszky, scourge of moist-thinking people everywhere, has finally joined the dairy debate (SMH 7/5). Dr Dry doesn’t seem to see much difference between openly reactionary Hansonites and supposedly progressive Kingstonites like Tim Dunlop. In the desiccated world of Imre Salusinszky there are only two kinds of people – those who believe in freedom and progress and those who don’t.

 

The trouble is I can’t figure out which kind of person I am.

 

Soggy, reactionary people are supposed to be in favour of taxpayer-funded university places – free education. Instead I’m a big fan of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). I don’t have any in-principle problem with people part-paying for their degrees (human capital) any more than I have a problem with farmers having to pay for their land and equipment (physical capital).

 

What I’m most against are barriers to opportunity. Education plays a huge part in establishing the social pecking order. I don’t want a funding system which selects for wealth over academic ability. It wouldn’t do a lot to promote equality of opportunity. You’ve all heard the line about med students who come from the economic cream of society – rich and thick. No thanks.

 

But maybe Dr Dry thinks that using government money to promote equality of opportunity is inefficient or involves some kind of infringement of personal freedom. If so it’s time to speak up. Perhaps he’d like to abolish payment of the Youth Allowance to students whose parents can’t afford to support them through school and uni. Word up Dr D – I’m listening.

 

Soggy sods like me are also supposed to be opposed to genetically modified organisms. My solidarity with fellow citizens of the soggysphere must be failing. I’m finding it hard to feel threatened by cotton that doesn’t need to be sprayed with quite so much pesticide. Maybe I’m missing the technophobia gene.

 

As a denizen of dampness I’m also supposed be against importation of books and CDs. But again I’m confused. I buy a lot of my books from the US because I can’t find a bookstore here that stocks what I want. Could it be that I’m in favour of free trade? Golly!

 

What about those bastards who make DVDs that won’t play on Australian bought machines – are they in favour of free trade or just in favour of high prices? They don’t want you to play US-bought DVDs on an Australian player but they refuse to press the titles the titles you want on discs coded for you zone. But they’re capitalists aren’t they – and as Big Tony says, ‘capitalism’ is just another way of saying ‘freedom.’

 

Our hydrophobic columnist also gives a useful definition of ethnophobia – it’s the opposite of free trade. Bob Menzies might have wanted to keep funny coloured foreigners out of the country but he was all for selling pig iron to the Japanese – no ethnophobia there obviously. Am I ethnophobic if I get nervous about selling uranium to countries that make nuclear weapons? I guess so. I must be an illiberal bigot.

 

And before Con Vaitsas writes in telling me not to bother with crazed columnists like Dr D or Mr PP I’ll come right out and admit it – I love reading these guys. I want them to keep writing. Every now and then they push my buttons and I get to find out where they are.

 

 

I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW

 

By Jenny Forster

 

I’ve been outside for a few months, tie-dying some sheets, growing some plants and scraping the rust off my fondue set, and notice David Davis from Switzerland is still on the site.

 

David, I’m amazed to see you have become disenchanted with the Liberal party’s laissez-faire capitalism, where the user pays for everything and if you can’t afford to pay then bad luck. It seems the global expansionist policy spreading across the world is leaving a lot of pain and misery in it’s wake. Governments keep telling us “There’s no gain without pain”, but people in rural Australia and the working poor in the outer suburbs of the large cities are screaming ‘Ouch’ and looking around for someone to blame.

 

David, you and I might yet end up in voter limbo together because I think the other mob is going to be just as stuck for money and answers.

 

Take the pharmaceutical benefits scheme (PBS) . During the capitalist boom times of the 50’s 60’s and 70’s it was a great safety net. Now it’s costing a fortune due to the price of drugs and the pressure from drug companies to get their product on “the list” .

 

Late last year the Liberal government disbanded the PBAC which monitors what goes on the PBS and appointed 10 new members (including a former industry lobbyist), thus removing the ‘memory’ of the PBAC . The multinational drug companies want to see our PBS disbanded as it is too good a model for developing countries – the population is provided with appropriate drugs at appropriate prices. The South African government was taken to court by a group of global drug companies to prevent the supply of generic HIV Aids drugs at a fraction of the original cost.

 

John le Carre has abandoned the cold war and taken up the multinational drug companies as the bad guys.

 

For an old left-leaning, green, feminist, Fairfax and ABC loving hippie like myself it is very complicated as the argument seems to have moved off shore.Very far out.

 

Here’s a free kick for you David: in the 60s and 70s when capitalism was still in expansion mode it was easy for us to demand health care, abortion clinics, child care, free universities and women’s rights, and to drop out (with our records, stereos, vans and plentiful cheap share houses). The system could accommodate us .

 

As the song says, I can see clearly now. Seems we both can.

 

PETER GELLATLY

 

I wanted to illustrate Don Arthur’s point about economic theory and values. Don said: “Economics is great for creating the kind of world many economists seem to want to achieve, but the theory doesn’t even mention the variables I really care about.”

 

A week or so ago an article in the Economist lauded moves towards retail spot pricing of electricity in the UK. The intent apparently is to install new electricity meters which continuously display the retail spot price – thus enabling consumers to alter their electricity consumption patterns to minimise cost.

 

Of course no-one wants to sit staring endlessly at the meter, so this initiative will no doubt spawn a new market for computer controlled appliance timers, thus fraudulently adding to GDP.

 

What a crazy perspective. If this wacky scheme is implemented, instead of the smooth clockwork of Monday to Friday drudgery, chaos shall reign. Home at six, but wait: dinner’s not ready because the oven timer has sensed a price peak and not switched the oven on. The roast is still raw!

 

The whole point, surely not so easily forgotten, of building a national electricity grid was to provide the populace with reliable and price-stable energy, thus permitting people to attend to their other needs. Ditto for other utilities: using these is not in any way akin to taking a discretionary vacation during the low season, or buying a new stereo at an after-Xmas sale.

 

How much GDP shall be lost (ie if we count the unnecessary diverted activity as negative, which we should) by this deliberately crafted mayhem? And in any case, why is the solution to fluctuating electricity demand not the responsibility of the supply industry?

 

Imagine McDonalds pricing its breakfasts at a premium between 8am and 8.30am because that’s when most people want to eat. What’s next? Such insanity only makes sense on pretty, full-colour supply and demand graphs. I’m with you, Don!

 

 

F2 on economics

 

By Don Arthur

 

Fiona Ferrari is amazed at “how straight economics has come to infiltrate all our powerful institutions- the media, the bureaucracy and political parties- and to become the dominant ideology strangling our thinking.”

 

I’ve been pretty impressed too at the way the economic mindset has been making ground over the past couple of decades.

 

Just to get things straight – I’d leave the country if all the economists in treasury were replaced by innumerate cultural studies graduates or the place was taken over by green-tinged professional ethicists like Peter Singer – I’m not going to argue for that. I’m not calling for a war against economics and economists and I don’t want to abolish capitalism.

 

It’s interesting that Milton Friedman (the most famous of all neo-classical economists) agrees with Fiona about the falseness of economic assumptions. He thinks it’s a good thing. He disagrees with Cathy Bannisterthat false assumptions necessarily lead to false predictions (and I think he’s right). All Friedman demands from economic theory is that it make accurate predictions. On this account we don’t need to actually believe that people are rational and selfish, we just assume they are when we’re making economic predictions.

 

So far so good. I don’t know what all this ‘correspondence to reality’ business is all about anyway – if theories make good predictions about things I care about then I’m for them.

 

It’s in the next step where I start to have a problem with ‘positive’ economics – it’s just a short move from assuming that ‘if people were rational utility maximisers…’ to suggesting that they actually are or ought to be. One of the things rationalist technocrats like to do is to improve the fit between theory and reality by simplifying reality so it’s more theoretically manageable.

 

For example, in agriculture it is easier to predict outcomes when fields have a regular size and shape, where all the plants are genetically identical, and where the inputs are uniform (sun, water, nutrients ). Technocrats are frustrated by the messiness of reality – they want to make it simpler, more predictable and more tractable. Econocrats are no different.

 

Economic thinkers have moved into the law (Richard Posner), into public administration (William Nihkanen) and into political science (James Buchanan). All these domains are now at risk of becoming simpler and more manageable for economists.

 

Economic theorists argue that if we assume that people are rational and selfish in the economy we ought to assume they are the same way everywhere else. Since they are rarely encouraged to study psychology or sociology they are often unaware that people can and do behave differently in different social roles.

 

It’s a short step from making assumptions about people’s behaviour to creating institutions which actually demand that people act in this way – reality starts to change to fit the theory.

 

One example is where a public service moves towards performance-based pay. The idea is that bureaucrats will try to serve their personal interest rather than the public interest. The new more-money-for-meeting-targets plan is an attempt to bring self interest and public interest together (eg managers could make money by cutting programs that don’t work). Pretty soon bureaucrats get the idea that they’re mugs if they don’t go after the cash and promotions. After making that mental leap it’s not such a big step to meeting targets by undermining your colleagues – er, sorry – internal competitors. After all, it’s not your job to look after the department’s larger goals if senior management are too dumb to connect those goals to your interests. Your job is to look after yourself – senior management said so.

 

So the end result might be simpler and more manageable, but there’s no guarantee it will deliver more of what we value.

 

 

MARGO: Excellent! I’ve never seen performance pay so ruthlessly exposed for what it is – in the public and private sectors. I shall test the thesis of making people fit the program when welfare reform is announced in the budget.

 

 

ELEN SEYMOUR

 

Going Global

 

The story so far: The Woodside decision has appeared regularly in the webdiary but debate heated up after Costello turned down Shell. It begins with my comment in “Costello Toasts Woodside”. In “A loss to Liberals”, the Herald’s resources writer Jane Counsel analyses the decision and Marc Pengryffn thought it was all about Costello’s leadership ambitions. In “What’s the point?” Jack Robertson analysed media coverage of the issue and Elen Seymour, a tax lawyer, made the case for more foreign investment. In “Dairy, drugs and David Davis”, Marc strongly disagreed strongly with Elen’s stance. in “Taking it to the streets”,Tim Dymond and Paul Pagani tore strips off Elen, who engaged most constructively with Marc. In “M1” Tim and Mart returned the compliment.

 

I am motivated to respond through fear that people will think they have vanquished me, the capitalist pro-globalisation demon!

 

If my arguments seem economic determinism it is because I thought I was discussing economic issues. I reject the idea that just because I drone on in a “rationalist” manner that I am attempting to distance my economics from my politics. Instead I thought I was displaying my political leanings quite clearly!

 

What I am trying to do is widen the political debate beyond simplistic ritualistic fights between good and evil. Additionally, I am sorry if people believe that national pride means fanatically keeping things at the status quo of what it means to be Australian. One of the things I love about Australia is how Australian it is to be ever-changing and to have many faces!

 

I get the sense that quite a few of you think I am promoting a free for all into Australia for corporations, to come in, exploit us then nick off once our ground is empty and our people slaves. Quite often the spectre of exploited “third world” countries is raised in the hope of spooking me and presumably other people from agreeing with me.

 

However, being the devil incarnate myself (I did mention a law degree did I not?) I am not so easily frightened. My rebuttal is this.

 

First – how come no one ever talks about the revival of the economy in Ireland in this debate? Ireland has a roaring economy – so much so that the IMF in its recent report World Economic Outlook has commented that the recent downturn in the global economy is likely to be a good thing for Ireland, to stop it being burnt by inflation. How did Ireland become this economic powerhouse? It lowered its corporate taxes and offered massive R&D concessions.

 

Canada too offers huge R&D concessions to companies which has been so successful that they now have “Silicon Valley North” in Ottawa. As a flow on result the housing sector is booming, franchises are panting to get in the door, service jobs are advertised everywhere and although there are (as in Ireland) some social upheaval to do with dealing with massive population explosions and some of the usual “bloody immigrants”, no one is talking about raising corporate taxes to stop the flow of capital and people into Canada.

 

I concede there is some truth in the apocalyptic vision of a stripped, bare-bones Australia at the ravenous hands of multinationals. This is because like so many of third world countries we are a commodities based economy – we sell what we dig up or grow.

 

Where this becomes problematic is that organised co-operative nations party to agreements such as the European Union and NAFTA seek to control the entry of commodity products into their protected regions. As mad cow/foot and mouth has shown, almost nothing can force the US or Europe to lower such barriers.

 

So sticking to what we do best *now* in the name of national interest – and not doing anything else – we achieve the opposite effect to our intentions. We are at the mercy of groups who will be able to dictate to us how much we sell and at what price and to whom.

 

It is this path that may force us into prostitution to the big players. It might be that we will then have to disband our labour laws and sell our children to corporations at any price or be the hole in the ground the US takes its commodities

from and craps in when its done.

 

By taking action now we may be able to avoid this hellish path. It is better to dictate some terms than none! This is my optimism, Marc, that if we act soon we will fare better in the globalisation game. If we act too late we may become the third world nation people tried to avoid by refusing to let multinationals in!

 

So what I am advocating is not free trade. It’s a mistake to confuse free trade with taxation-based corporate incentives ? They are opposites. Can I suggest that Australia is hurting now because it picked free trade instead of protectionist policies combined with low tax?

 

The US understands this point and defends voraciously its right to be a low tax regime. The US sees this as being in its national interest and a question of national sovereignty. Why is it Australia sees its national interest and sovereignty as being tied to discouraging capital from flowing into Australia?

 

It does not have to be about tax. I just happen to understand tax and how it affects corporate decisions. I agree with Tim Dymond when he says “To conclude on the basis of a single decision to keep an important resource in local hands that Australia no longer welcomes foreign investment is ridiculous”.

 

It’s not that any single decision by Costello leads to decisions by multinationals to not invest in Australia, it’s the old thousand cuts scenario.

 

Australia has an aggressive tax authority. Australia has expensive labour. Australia has a small market. Australia has a high corporate tax rate with little relief by way of subsidies. Australia has a government that wishes to keep things ‘Australian’. Each on its own is insufficient to deter a multinational, but cumulatively its just ‘too hard’ to invest.

 

I would rather see tax incentives than cheap labour incentives. If this is kotowing to the forces of globalisation (ok, it is!) then so be it. By embracing the devil maybe we can get some devilish powers ourselves!

 

And really, how many of you would still be against globalisation if it was MeatPies TM rather than McDonalds TM or the rivalry was between Apple computers and MicroAussie computers?

 

How many of you would instead be whinging about countries that won’t allow BigAussie Pty Ltd to buy up its national resources?

 

And how many of you will refuse to work at the Australian branch of BigAmericaCo or stop your kids from working there?

 

Or is it that you think that to be truly an Australian means never being global?