Here’s a strange little story I picked up in Byron Bay on the weekend which makes me wonder whether there are is any lines between public service and private profit any more.

There’s a big new nightclub in the town called CMOOG, and it’s distributed a glossy magazine which announces that on New Year’s Eve “Triple J presents CMOOG’s genrebust. Welcome in the New Year with a musical mystery tour through all the genres of dance, featuring ….”

The Byron community will go troppo for its own reasons: It’s overwhelmed with tourists for New Year’s eve every year, doesn’t know how to cope, wants as little publicity as possible, and has had a community committee working on safety on the night for several years since a notorious NYE riot some years ago. Today the mayor and a councillor cried foul, foreshadowing a motion to council to ask Triple J to pull out because the promotion breaches its gazetted NYE ‘crime prevention plan’.

I’m more interested in the Triple J’s commercial role in all this. When the story broke this morning, the club’s financier, one Simon Page, immediately threatened legal action. He’s threatening to sue the council for $150,000 in damages if Triple J pulled out, being the lost value of advertising and promotion which the club would have extracted had it done the gig. His grounds: Triple J surveys showed a majority of young people list Byron Bay as their ultimate destination and the Triple J cache would mean they’d come to the club when they came to Byron.

That means that a nightclub run for private profit will get a significant economic benefit via the reputation and crowd-pulling capacity of the Triple J brand.

The ABC Charter bans it advertising private product/services, but what about the private sector profiting from the ABC brand? My first thought was – what does Triple J get out of it? And since the nightclub is effectively claiming the endorsement of Triple J for its club – and using it as it’s big NYE attraction – what steps has Triple J taken to ensure the club is an OK place to go to?

I spoke to Triple J program manager Linda Bracken late today. She said the club hadn’t even signed a contract with Triple J yet. She said that despite what I’d read as the clear message of the magazine that Triple J would be there on NYE with bells on, what was planned was something much lower key. A techie person would attend to feed the music through, and that’s all, which is why Triple J thought increased crowds wouldn’t be a problem.

She also said Triple J had not given permission for its logo to be used by the club, and that if permission was given in the future, it would be on the basis that the artwork was vetted by Triple J before publication to ensure it wasn’t connected with commercial sponsorships. Which raises the question: Does Triple J insist on any quality control over the uses to which its (ie the taxpayer’s) brand is put? And if the use of its logo is unauthorised, and the advertising pitch misleads Triple J’s fans, what will Triple J to do about it? Does it give a damn anyway?

Ms Bracken didn’t say whether Triple J would get monetary gain from the arrangement – if it went ahead – but did say Triple J’s motivation was to showcase Byron Bay and Sydney DJ talent on NYE. “If we’re not welcome there, we won’t go,” she said.

Why should a for-profit company profit from its association with an ABC radio station? On the other hand, why on earth would Triple J do this unless it got a fee for selling its brand for advertising and promotion? Surely the ABC wouldn’t allow its brand to be used for private profit with nothing but potential downside for the brand if the product it’s advertising isn’t up to the mark?

I’ll try to speak to ABC corporate affairs and its legal department tomorrow. I’ve tried to contact Simon Page, but had to make do with an email which I’ll chase up tomorrow. On the face of it, there’s something weirdly blurred about all this. A nightclub sueing a local council for lost profit because it convinced a public broadcaster not to do something in the public interest is pretty darn strange.

***

Last week the ABC’s Radio National program Night Club asked me on after a piece in The Age included me in a discussion on weblogs despite the fact that I’m not a weblogger. (The reporter did not contact me.) The weblog thing has been going a while in Australia but I know little of it except for a few political/war weblogs. I offended some weblog pioneers with a remark that Tim Blair got the scene going here. He didn’t. So today,Graham Freeman and Anthony Hicks set the record straight, as it should be – too many times the trailblazers of the next big thing get forgotten when others popularise it. By the way, the first weblog I noticed was that of pioneer Neale Talbot. His excellent weblog is at wrongwaygoback.

Graham Freeman

I was particularly intrigued to hear your version of the history of how weblogging in Australia: “The person who started the weblog scene in Australia is a right-wing warblogger called Tim Blair, and he sort of helped other people who wanted to get into it, left and right.”

Wrong.

Tim Blair happened to get in amongst the post-9/11 rush to rant about turning the Middle East into glass. He had his journalistic skills and some contacts (a big help), and consequently he happened to be in a position where he could plug it somewhere in a respectable print publication. He had something to say, he said it well, if perhaps a little disingenuous about it, and he was savvy about it. Fair enough.

However, to give him the credit for starting weblogging around here? Ha-ha! No. I don’t bloody think so.

It was I, along with Anthony Hicks, who started his a year before me in 1998, and a few others who ceased blogging even before the diminutive “blog” was coined. It wasn’t all hardboiled political opinionating, but we called them weblogs, and we knew what the term meant. Weblogging in Australia, as elsewhere, took off during 2000 as more and more people discovered the damned things, and a fair number of those, including mine, certainly had political content amongst the writing, even if they weren’t as one-note as some of the current favourites.

The truth is, I started thumping out near-daily instalments of uninformed opinionated dreck (and stuff about music) a good two years before Tim Blair discovered Blogspot. I don’t know why he’s still hanging around Blogspot rather than getting his own domain and the technical jiggery-pokery behind it into gear, as everyone else seems to be rapidly doing, as they realise that having “blogspot” in their address is tantamount to wearing a big sign around their torso saying “I Am A Crank!”.

Regarding your remark about the lack of gender balance in the blogging world in general, before mindless aggression became the flavour of the month again, weblogs were one of the most gender-balanced aspects of the internet, and still are. It’s just that a small but noisy segment that finds the format ideal for promulgating their simple and wrong ideas have gotten most of the attention in the past twelve months, and that of course is extraordinarily blokey.

Fortunately, as you’ve well realised, there’s also been a corresponding increase in the number of weblogs maintained by people who actually some idea of what they’re talking about.

Am I bitter? You bet. Having been somewhat of a pioneer with the bloody things, at least in the local scene, it’s been galling to have media drone after media drone send an email saying “can you talk?” and when I finally get around to responding, they’ve already filed the report, in the same samey samey fashion – usually along one of three things:

“Weblogs are radically changing the face of the media.”

“Weblogs aren’t radically changing the face of the media.”

“Weblogs are passe.”

So it goes. Even though I have a mild distaste for self-promotion, as I regard hyping up something as marginal as a weblog as a bit crass, my ego doesn’t agree and has demanded that I join the empty-headed “look at me!” brigade.

My main point is Australian weblogging certainly did not start with Tim Blair, he just happened to catch the wave that grew from the ripple that I helped to start.

***

Anthony Hicks

I just wanted to set the record straight on the origins of weblogging in Australia. Actually Tim Blair came into the scene quite late (2001 according to his archives). When I started the Aussie Blogs webring in early 2000 I found around 70 Australian weblogs, many dating back to 1999. I started my blog back in March 1998, and the online diary/links/commentary form has been experimented in Australia since the beginning of the web, they just weren’t called weblogs.

I’ve seen this claim that Blair kicked off Australian weblogging a few times now, but only by journalists. I think it comes down to the fact that for journalists Blair’s blog is the first widely read Australian weblog they see, and therefore conclude his must be the first or most influential. Certainly for his topic area he is popular, but most certainly cannot be said to have “kicked weblogging off in Australia”.

Humbly, if anything, I have donated hundreds of hours of my time to hundreds of Australian webloggers since 1999 to help create a community and to help them get online and find other weblogs through the Aussie Blogs web ring (currently listing 320 sites – with more than 600 sites over its history), and I certainly do not claim to have kicked off blogging in Australia.

anthonyjhicks

aussieblogs

NSW opposition leader John Brogden won’t say what he did to earn $25,000 a year for several years from a big-four accounting firm while supposedly representing the people (for the background see Pocket politics: it’s about who’s in whose pocket, webdiaryNov14).

His defence is the one most often used by desperate men – to divert attention from the substance by questioning the motivation of your accuser. Brogden is right to say his problem is handy for a Labor government mired in corruption allegations, but the fact remains that there are matters of substance Brogden must answer satisfactorily if he is to rescue his shattered reputation.

This is what Brogden told Parliament last week during the censure motion against him for failing to detail how he earned his money from PriceWaterhouse:

“The Government wants to know the details of the relationship…no letter of engagement was signed; a verbal agreement was entered into regarding a monthly retainer that could be cancelled by either party on one month’s notice. That is a standard arrangement…

“It is incumbent upon the Government to prove what it is yet to prove: that there is any conflict of interest. It has failed to do so; it is throwing mud, but it is not sticking. … As I indicated in the letter to the Clerk, the advice received from PricewaterhouseCoopers was that I provided general public affairs advice upon request. I move:

“That the motion be amended by deleting all words after “censure” with a view to inserting the following words: ‘the Premier for his failure to stand down the Minister for Fisheries (Eddie Obeid) after serious allegations that he sought a $1 million bribe for the Australian Labor Party and for his failure to uphold parliamentary standards of propriety and integrity with other Ministers and members of Parliament.’

Government members are trying to throw mud this way when one of their own is facing the Independent Commission Against Corruption on one of the most serious accusations this State has heard: that he asked for a $1 million bribe.

The Sydney Morning Herald of Friday 8 November ran the headline, “Million on the table at Oasis lunch”. Two witnesses have already indicated to the ICAC that Mr Arthur Coorey came to them at a lunch, where he had been with Eddie Obeid, who had asked for a $1 million bribe to smooth the Oasis project. Under pressure, the Labor Party tries to turn the attack and avoid the fact that after eight years in government it had in Cabinet a rotten, corrupt Minister whose history on matters of arson would suggest that he should be on the New South Wales Fire Brigade’s watch list. The claim against Eddie Obeid is that there are 154 separate failed declarations on his pecuniary interests register. And where does it end? It ends in the ICAC. Two witnesses have indicated to an ICAC investigation that Mr Arthur Coorey came to them at a lunch and said, “I have just been with Eddie, and he said $1 million dollars will smooth it all over.” What a coincidence! It is just like the good old days of the Labor Party. They cannot help themselves.

The old Wran problem of 1983 has come back to haunt them again. It is all too cute. For the 2002 season Labor has crippled one of the best rugby league teams in this State through its corruption and through the involvement of Eddie Obeid in seeking a $1 million bribe. The ICAC will bear out the truth. An article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald reads:

The former Bulldogs Leagues Club chief, Gary McIntyre, has confirmed he discussed a $1 million political donation to the ALP with fellow director Arthur Coorey, but said it occurred in a discussion on how the hotel industry had achieved such favourable treatment from the Carr Government.

What the Government has sought to do over some time is pretend that this is all about poker machines, when it has always been about land and about forcing a decision. Half of the members of the front bench have been involved in briefings – including the Minister for Transport, the Attorney General, the Minister for Health, the Minister for Land and Water Conservation, the Minister for Agriculture and, of course, the Minister for Public Works and Services. We all recall that he went very red and was very quiet when the questioning started.

They will all rue the day. In one day, at the request of this House, I have provided more information than Eddie Obeid offered to the upper House privilege and ethics committee. He obfuscated; he refused to provide information. The fact is that the Obeid matter is wide and deep, and it goes to the core of corruption in this Government. The Labor Party is the party of corruption in New South Wales, and it always has been. The Government’s grubby attempt today to censure me – with three to four sitting days left this year and four months until the election – is entirely predictable. But in four months time the people of New South Wales will make a decision based on who can better run our schools, who can make our streets safer, and who can provide better health care and transport services in this State. These grubby attempts by the Government will be forgotten because they are unproved and they are lies, lies, lies from Labor.

***

Oh dear. Dear John, when a perceived conflict of interest is revealed, it’s the duty of the person whose credibility is in question to show there is NOT a conflict of interest, not for others without the information – which happens to be in your possession, not theirs – to prove you’re guilty. Just as it’s your POSITIVE duty to transparently disclose financial arrangements, not hide behind technicalities to avoid disclosure of where your money’s coming from as you did with your PriceWaterhouse windfall. It’s called transparency. It’s called taking your obligations to the people seriously.

I can see two reasons why Brogden won’t say what he did for his $25,000 a year. He either did stuff that would be tricky to explain, or he did nothing. I reckon the likelihood is that he did nothing, which is worse, in a sense, than giving special help to his private sector employer while employed to work full time for his constituents in particular and the people of NSW in general.

Money for nothing would mean Brogden had sold his name, his “brand” in the parlance of sports stars, for a mere $25,000 a year. Too cheap, John. Way too cheap. (A ‘gift’ from the big firm might also raise tax deductibility questions, as John Brogden is not a charity.)

The gift could be a nice little deal among the Liberal mates to look after John Brogden financially on the way to the leadership, or it might mean the odd attendance at a cocktail party. The value for Price Waterhouse is to enhance the status of its brand – it knows the right people.

It’s sort of like Mark Waugh and Shane Warne taking cash from bookie for a pitch report. No worries in that, except that you do end up owing something, somehow, someday. John Brogden, Premier, would answer the door to Price Waterhouse, you’d think, and give them his time, at the very least.

Brogden is damaged goods, all the more galling for him and the Liberals because he was well into a brilliant long-term campaign to win government on the back of Labor’s unholy, unhealthy alliance with developers. Labor’s relentless attack on Brogden last week was about making him look as dirty as it does, thus neutralising development and general back-scratching between Labor and Sydney’s money-men as an issue.

Bob Carr’s behaviour has been interesting. He didn’t lead the debate against Brogden, but left it to his deputy. I reckon this is because Carr still thinks he’s got political mileage left as a ‘clean’ leader – the bloke who doesn’t get his hands dirty. To maintain this crazy farce – doesn’t being the leader mean the buck stops with you? – he can’t be in Parliament taking the flak for his constant, complete backing of Eddie Obeid despite his flagrant failures to disclose his financial interests and private companies, and his refusal to stand Obeid down while serious allegations of corruption concerning him are aired at the ICAC.

Instead, Bob Carr comes out on the weekend announcing he’ll ban “sponsorship” deals of politicians:

Mr Carr said private companies or corporations should not be allowed to sponsor their “favourite MP”, and this was effectively what Mr Brogden’s $25,000-a-year consultancy with the legal arm of the global firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, represented. He warned that if the practice was allowed to continue, it could degenerate into MPs of either side announcing sponsorships by ‘big mining companies’.

Mr Carr said the issue was no longer an argument about pecuniary interests. “I’m determined to nip in the bud any notion that might linger out there … that politicians of either side that you can be engaged as consultant on public policy,” he said.

“The role of a Member of Parliament is public policy. It is advice on public policy. That is the role of the Member of Parliament. But to enter a non-specific relationship with a private company and its clients. To get paid for advice on public policy. Now that is fundamentally wrong.”

Mr Carr said he would not pursue a ban on politicians having second jobs, arguing that might preclude farmers or lawyers or small business people from pursuing political careers.

The debate should be about whether the practice in which companies put MPs on the payroll should be allowed.

This could gradually become the norm, he said. “You could have an MP sponsored by a big PR and lobbying firm, an MP sponsored by a big merchant bank an MP sponsored by the advertising companies,” he said.

“And not far behind, you would have mining companies and infrastructure companies. It is intolerable. One way or another, I will get it ruled out.”

Mr Carr said he would ask Cabinet Office to investigate amendments to the legislation banning MPs from such agreements, or perhaps investigating whether any similar business relationship involving an MP should require a contract.

“There is too much obfuscation going on,” he said. (The Herald last Saturday)

Where does Bob Carr get off? Notice he’s careful not to mention sponsorship by developers. When Paul Keating and Frank Sartor suggested in strong terms last year that developers be banned from donating to political parties, Carr said it couldn’t be done except on a national level, because if he banned it in NSW, money would come in from interstate. The same reasoning applies to the sponsorship scandal. The Victorian branch of Price Waterhouse could pay Brogden.

In reality, the solution is clear, on both counts. Make it an offence for a NSW politicians or the NSW Branch of any political party to RECEIVE a donation from a developer or sponsorship money of any sort. Then it wouldn’t matter where it came from.

One thing is certain. The NSW election in March will be very dirty, very bitter, and generally rancid. Stand by for sensational revelations in the Herald tomorrow about a senior NSW Labor figure.

Carr might think that exposing Brogden as just another compromised man-about-town will neutralise corruption and Labor coziness with developers as an issue. It’s a standard political tactic – when your party’s caught looking bad, ensure the other party is exposed as bad as well. No election issue on that, so diffferentiation must occur on safer ground.

But what say people finally feel enough’s enough and curse both houses by putting in community independents or Greens? These plays are settling into place right now on the ground, using the template of Cunningham. It’s happening in Labor and Liberal seats, where both major party candidates aren’t trusted, aren’t good enough, have identikit views (especially on development) or don’t respect their community enough to live in it.

The double wedge play relies on voters not “exhausting” – ie only voting for one candidates and leaving all other boxes blank – but cross preferencing.

Say you’re in a safe Liberal seat. The Greens put up a solid community candidate who attracts about 10% on anti-development feeling. A well known conservative local with a strong with a strong pro-community stand on local development stands, getting 25% The Greens and the independent have enough in common on hot local issues to agree to swap preferences. With this left-right wedge in place, the Liberal MP’s vote collapses to 30% and Labor’s to 35%. The Greens candidate goes out first, putting the independent on 35%. The MP goes out, and his preferences elect the independent!

For this play to work, as it did so well in Cunningham, you need a strong, activist local community whose denizens talk across partisan political lines. You also need hot issues which unite the left and the right. Untrammelled development is one. Integrity in politics is another.

If this play looks like it will work, we’ll start to see the major parties closing ranks and actually preferencing each other in certain seats – Labor/Liberal preference deals – to ensure their hegemony remains intact. Which is what they did with One Nation, in essence. But wouldn’t it look bad, and wouldn’t it make voters wonder what their major parties really stood for, apart from power?

You’ll recall that we had a discussion on ethics recently: See Ethics, webdiarySep9, Your ethics, webdiarySep10, The pursuit of virtue, webdiarySep13. I agree with Webdiarist Noel Hadjimichael that “If the Liberals want to be fair dinkum about transparency and governance they need to look at this issue as a priority. If Labor want to clear the decks before March 2002 they need to act now, before further ICAC time elapses. The major parties dominate only when voters are broadly accepting of their fitness to govern and their preparedness to take tough decisions.”

I doubt if either party would be game, even if either wanted to, to promise to clean up politics. That leaves the media as representative of the people on this one.

I suggest that each local paper around the state questions all relevant candidates in its local seat on ethics and publish the answers or refusals to answer. Anyone know of a pro forma questionnaire that would do the job? It would ask whether the candidate would earn all his or her income from the job of politician if elected, and if not, what other income would be earned and how would actual or perceived conflicts of interest be avoided. If elected, what would the candidate put on his or her pecuniary register if he or she wished to fully inform their constituents of their assets and income – ie wished to comply with the spirit as well as the letter of the law. Would the candidate guarantee not to participate in debates where he or she had a personal financial interest in the outcome?

Most importantly, I’d like to see questions along these lines: What does the word “ethics” mean to you? What do you believe would be your ethical duties to this community if its voters chose you as their representative? How do you intend to fulfil those duties?”

Finally, a word on the former Victorian Liberal treasury spokesman, Robert Dean. Buried beneath the rubble of his career is the smell of deliberate misrepresentation to his voters. Dean faced a tough preselection battle for the seat of Berwick. To avoid accusations that he didn’t live in the electorate, he rented a place there. He won’t say whether he ever lived there, but he did enrol as living there. We do know returned to the much more leafy suburb of Hawthorn, outside his electorate, once he won the preselection, and not only didn’t change his enrolment, but told his Party when asked that he was enrolled in Berwick still. The truth, before the Electoral Commission threw him off the roll when it became clear he wasn’t living there, but a lie to the electoral commission that Berwick was his residential address.

I’ve been amazed that media coverage has portrayed this tactic as smart politics, and that his stupidity was in not doing the paperwork right. You have to wonder whose side some journalists are on. What Dean did was lie to his voters. He lied because voters want their MP to live in their community, because his or her job is to represent that community. He perpetrated the lie when he told his Party he was enrolled Why would he, or anyone else, WANT to live elsewhere? I’d would have thought it would be a matter of great pride to be elected to represent your community. How can you do that if you don’t live there and experience it on a daily basis? Dean’s behaviour is just the latest example of the big con many major party politicians engage in. They’re in politics for themselves. That’s all.

John Howard’s response? Nothing, except that it was “yesterday’s story”. When will a political leader have the guts to call a spade a spade and condemn MPs in their party who think nothing of cheating their voters and demeaning themselves – all for the sake of NOT living in the area they represent? When voters punish them until they do.

***

Harry Heidelberg (nom de plume)

We now live in an environment where we are justified in being ferocious on ethics and disclosure. Too much has been done and too many people have been harmed to have anything other than a zero tolerance attitude. We need ethics champions in our society. If we don’t, the downward spiral will continue. The disconnect and discontent will simmer on, perhaps with the temperature gradually increasing. No wonder boiling point is reached from time to time and the electorate explodes in anger.

Some large businesses know and understand the new environment. They don’t just give it lip service, they recognize it as an asset. I work for a well known, large US listed company. It is not a company that has been involved in any scandal to date and desperately wants to avoid such a situation.

I am learning more and more about my company and its plans to institute a whistle blowing procedure. It’s better than I thought. All employees will have access to a third party who can be contacted regarding ethical matters. Privacy will be protected and there will be a process to ensure action is taken and disclosure of the action made. I think it’s going to be quite revolutionary in the corporate world.

What about Brogden though? He can’t be an ethics champion. He can’t be part of a modern movement to throw away the bad old ways, because He can no longer be trusted, due to inadequate disclosure and involvement in a deal he should never, ever have allowed himself to be associated with. Am I alleging any wrongdoing in fact? No. I am alleging poor judgement and a failure to recongnise the impact on perceptions his actions would create.

I end up feeling bemused at the stupidity of our elected representatives. For many $25,000 a year is a lot of money. Particularly for those receiving benefits or whatever. For Brogden though, I would suspect such an amount makes no material difference to his life. You have to figure that half of it would have gone in tax so the end amount in his pocket would hardly have made him rich.

This is where the stupidity, the duplicity and all the reasons we hate politicians comes in. It is like Reith and the Telecard. This sort of behavior is so unnecessary and so infuriating.

Why is it infuriating? It is because it is an example of someone selling their name and reputation cheaply. A man who could have changed Liberal politics becomes a man diminished in reputation.

Its only perception but people will wonder. What does the deal with PWC say about Brogden, what implications did it have?

If he wanted to swan around at cocktail parties and get to know the movers and shakers, well and good. Networking and all the rest of it should be part of politics. A beer here, a glass of wine there, a canape somewhere else, well and good. But money changing hands? I think not.

I’m not always comfortable with business donating to political parties and I am even less comfortable with a direct payment to a politician. I am actually quite sure it is all above board but it just sounds so shabby and unfortunate.

Indeed, he sells himself and his party short …. and in the process we are all cheapened.

It also cheapens his appeal and makes us listen less. He marketed himself as some kind of new Liberal. Modern, open, pragmatic, socially responsible, inclusive and all the rest of it.

Now I have an image of a man who would hold a glass of fine wine on the 22nd floor of the PwC building or similar, looking out at the sun setting on the Western Suburbs, hermetically sealed, cosy, comfortable and complacent. The setting may be modern but the mind set is outdated (at best).

Therein lies the disappointment. He’s not in tune with the times. This is a terrible shame because he seemed so promising.

For a week now I’ve been tracking the progress of the story that’s resulted in injuries to a journalist on Sydney streets today, but the inevitability of the denouement makes makes me feel no less sick at the behaviour of NSW police minister Michael Costa.

Images of the worst of times in Queensland under Sir Joh keep flashing through my mind. A police officer caught on video repeatedly bashing a protester walking, just walking, in the front line of a march. Sir Joh said onya. Division on the street – regular people with a cause pitted against hundreds of police with batons. No respite, no reason. I fled ultra-conservative Queensland for a place where people’s democratic rights were respected. Now history repeats itself in Labor-run NSW via a police minister who used to head the State’s union movement and now apes a Queensland Premier hated by unionists. Many unionists are protesting today against the WTO meeting. Costa puts hundreds of police on the street to face them, after frothing at the mouth for days on how evil they all are, creating a hyped media event from nothing. It can’t be… It is.

Today, a comment piece I wrote for smh.com.au on the tragedy, extracts of Michael Costa’s mouth-foaming rhetoric of hatred in Parliament yesterday, and an AAP report on his response to today’s tragedy.

The people and corporations whose interests are being represented at the meeting are rich, powerful and well connected, and want to increase their dominance over world affairs. Whether they’re right or wrong, the people outside wanting to protest are virtually powerless, have little money, and aren’t being paid for their commitment. To see them as “David” against Goliath is a gross understatement. Costa’s demonisation of ordinary citizens is despicable. He’s inciting violence on the streets to literally feed off people’s fears and anxieties for his political advantage.

***

Shove polling: copping it tough before an election

by Margo Kingston

I feel like I’ve been transported back to the days when it was frightening to dissent from government policy in Queensland. The then Premier, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, banned protest marches and condoned police violence against people who marched to protest the ban in order to win and keep conservative voters.

It’s hard to believe that a modern Labor government is blatantly using the Sir Joh precedent more than 25 years later in what looks like a deliberate policy to foster and politically profit from violence on the streets.

The lead-up to today’s injury to a journalist when mounted police charged into protesters in the Sydney CBD is chilling.

It began, ironically enough, when Greens Upper House member Lee Rhiannon asked this question of NSW police minister Michael Costa October 31:

“Will the Minister, as a responsible Minister, ensure that police on duty at the protest planned against the world trade organisation to be held in Sydney next month do not perpetrate violence against protesters, as we witnessed by some police at the S11 Melbourne protest in 2000 and some M1 protests in Sydney? Will the Minister ensure that police exercise their duty of care to protesters in such a way that protesters who infringe any law are arrested and not brutalised by police using their horses, batons or wedge chargers?”

Costa not only refused to give such a guarantee, but called on Rhiannon to resign for hosting – with the permission of Costa’s Labor colleague, Senate president Meredith Burgmann – a forum on civil disobedience to be held in parliament house that Friday. Without a shred of evidence, Costa accused Rhiannon of condoning and promoting violence on the streets.

“I believe that every member of this House, other than Lee Rhiannon and maybe a couple of the nutters that support her on the cross benches, would be appalled by this move by Lee Rhiannon. She speaks very sanctimoniously in the House about things that other members of the House do, yet she is blatantly involved in a process that could lead to violence at the WTO meeting. It is a disgrace. She ought to resign.”

Civil disobedience, as Costa would know as the former head of the NSW Labor Council, is about using non-violent means to make a political statement. Having witnessed the May Day blockade of the Sydney Stock exchange last year, I can personally attest to the discipline and focus of protest organisers to dissuade the few outlaws who sometimes hijack these events from causing trouble. If events were allowed to take their normal course this week the police would have had the cooperation of protest organisers and the great bulk of participants to arrest those with a violent agenda.

The planned protest march against the agenda of the World Trade Organisation meeting in Homebush this week was backed by many unions, Christian social justice groups, environmental groups and many other respectable community organisations Costa now condemns as condoners, if not perpetrators, of violence.

Ms Rhiannon asked a supplementary question: “Minister, will you confirm that, if any protester breaks the law at the WTO meeting in Sydney, they will be arrested and the police will not use inappropriate and illegal tactics?”

Costa’s reply chilled me to the bone. “Let us be clear: People are coming here to have a violent confrontation with the police. Let me say to you: The police will be prepared and I will back the police in what they do.”

The next day, Costa went to town. After getting the Daily Telegraph on the rampage with a page one scream, Costa talked to the shock jocks, led by Alan Jones, to kick the can even more. The police commissioner then accompanied him to Homebush for another rave. Create and incite hysteria, suppress peaceful dissent, and what do you get? Perhaps exactly what you want.

At last Friday’s parliament house forum, rumours began to circulate that routine negotiations with the police to arrange a march permit for the city to protest the WTO meeting (such permits are issued as a matter of course) had suddenly come to a halt. Instructions from “higher up” meant there’d be no permit, junior police started saying. Why on earth would this be so? The march would be miles away from Homebush, where no marches were planned.

On Tuesday, the commander of security for the WTO meeting, one Dick Adams, suddenly announced a black ban on march permits from yesterday to Saturday, when the WTO meeting wound up. I spoke to one of Costa’s people that day. Yes, he’d heard that Adams had just announced a ban, “but that would be an operational decision taken by the commander – we wouldn’t get involved in that”.

Yeah, yeah. The Adams action was nothing short of incendiary. It meant that the only way for dissenters to the WTO agenda to make their point to the public – a street march – had been outlawed. He trashed fundamental civil liberties in the state of NSW. Naturally, the WTO protest organisers decided to march anyway. Costa had set the stage for the violence he claimed he wanted to avoid.

Today, the inevitable result. The protest march took on enormous symbolic importance, heightened emotions on both sides, and probably attracted the attendance of outlaws who mightn’t have bothered to turn up if the cameras weren’t guaranteed by Costa’s actions to be there.

Police let the march happen, in which 1500 people took part, including “scores of media” and “hundreds of police”. That’s right, hundreds. Then the violence – by the police, not the protesters, from reports so far – and an horrific injury inflicted by police on a reporter from the Australian. (At first it was thought that the reporter had broken her pelvis, but doctors later ruled this out.)

“The only injury so far has been Patricia Karvelas, a journalist from The Australian, who was trampled by two police horses. Witness Sally Quilter, a 57-year-old nurse, said: “Somehow she fell to the ground and these two great big horses at the end of the line came out and charged and trampled on her. “There were two big men on them, so that’s a lot of weight. They just rushed into the crowd. I can’t believe they weren’t told to. I can’t believe what I saw.” Ambulance officers treated Ms Karvelas before taking her to hospital with a suspected fractured pelvis.”

What provoked this police action? Superintendent Glen Harrison said there was a small element of the march “committed to provoking violence”.

“Fifty or sixty of the protesters have been pushing and shoving and trying to provoke the police and cause disruption to police and traffic,” he said. Notice he makes no allegation of protester violence. Protesters simply provoked the police into violence. Nice one. Be careful, all NSW citizens. The police under Michael Costa are ready to do violence if “provoked” by a push or a shove.

What a sad way to try to win an election. What dangerous games are being played, what civil liberties are being trashed, to keep this disreputable, cynical government in power. Pity the police on the street who did nothing to encourage this disgusting spectacle, yet got enmeshed in it on the orders of their superiors after their minister’s orchestration.

***

NSW Parliament, Wednesday, November 13

Ms LEE RHIANNON: My question is directed to the Minister for Police. What possible justification is there for banning peaceful protest methods such as walking and holding banners at the World Trade Organisation [WTO] Sydney meeting? Does the Labor Government want to protect Trade Ministers from reading banners critical of WTO policies? Is a banner an offensive weapon? Is walking violent? Does the Minister concede that the heavy-handed policing methods planned for the WTO are counterproductive and designed to discourage people from attending and exercising their legitimate civil rights peacefully?

MICHAEL COSTA: I am getting sick of Ms. Lee Rhiannon leading with her chin but she has once again taken the opportunity to do precisely that. Part of her question could have been reasonably intelligent. I would not have minded explaining what the WTO stands for and giving intelligent critiques of the problems associated with some of the policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. There are some good critiques in that regard that people should read. But Ms Lee Rhiannon did not ask that question so we cannot go into policy issues.

… Ms Lee Rhiannon focused on the rabble who are seeking to take control of our streets and to use a legitimate vehicle in our democracy – the right to protest – to carry on in a ratbag manner. I have already outlined to Parliament several times the sorts of people who are associated with WTO protests. They are open about their actions: Their views are on the web site. I have the details in front of me. These same people recommend that protesters purchase metal baseball bats because they are lighter than wooden ones to use against police or to purchase paints “to throw on pigs”that is a direct quote from the web site. The list goes on and on. These people have signalled clearly that they are coming to Sydney to cause problems not only for the community but for delegates who will attend the WTO meeting. I understand that those delegates will, for once, discuss issues to do with global poverty and how we can stabilise international trade. They are important issues about which some community elements have important views, many of which are not positive regarding the WTO’s actions.

That should be dealt with intelligently. I have not heard Ms Lee Rhiannon say anything intelligent other than to talk about civil disobedience. As honourable members know she has defined civil disobedience very precisely, that is, the right to break laws that she does not agree with.

Would Ms Lee Rhiannon explain which laws of this State are oppressive and people have a right to civilly disobey? The fact of the matter is her proposition is that civil disobedience is the way forward because of unjust laws – and that is a legitimate tactic – but Ms Lee Rhiannon has never identified the laws about which people should engage in this sort of action. Is it the law to peacefully protest? Police will permit people to go to a number of venues in the city and peacefully protest but that does not entitle them to run down the streets and cause mayhem, targeting commercial and government businesses and other institutions that they label as being against their ideological views.

Ms Lee Rhiannon has a major problem. She needs to do a number of things. Firstly, she must give the commitment that I ask for: that people associated with the protest will not be involved in violence. She has not given that guarantee. Secondly, I ask Ms Lee Rhiannon to apologise for what the ratbags in the Greens did on Remembrance Day in Victoria, about which she has been silent. She has the hide to constantly accuse our police prospectively of being involved in police brutality. That is a nonsense; she has no evidence to support that claim. She ought to do the right thing and apologise to the groups she has offended. She should take the opportunity tomorrow and on Friday to urge restraint, caution and a peaceful protest.

***

Dr ARTHUR CHESTERFIELD-EVANS (Democrats): Did the Commissioner of Police issue a memo asking police officers who are to be involved in crowd control operations at protests against a meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Sydney on 14 and 15 November to remove identification badges from their uniforms?

MICHAEL COSTA: I am not aware of the issue raised by the honourable member. I am happy to determine whether any such memo exists. However, knowing the record of the Hon. Dr Arthur Chesterfield-Evans, it would not surprise me if he made this up. I am glad that he asked me this question because it gives me an opportunity, once again, to reiterate the position of the Government, NSW Police and all sensible members of this House: We have no problem with people engaging in peaceful protests. We acknowledge that it is a fundamental right to engage in peaceful protest. However, we have a real problem with people arming themselves to go and confront police in a violent demonstration.

Rhiannon: Where’s the proof?

Costa: The proof is there.

Rhiannon: Where?

Costa: If the member had been in the House earlier she would have heard me answer a question about web sites that advocated violence.

Rhiannon: Who put it on the web sites? Your mates?

Costa: It is completely absurd for the Hon. Lee Rhiannon to interject in that form, given that last week she used Parliament House to hold a forum on civil disobedience. By her own definition, civil disobedience is about breaking the law when she believes it appropriate to do so, so that she can gain personal benefit. I was amazed to hear her say that it was appropriate to break the law. That is precisely the issue we are discussing: the right to peaceful protest versus arming for violent confrontation, which is not civil disobedience is a bunch of ratbags taking advantage of democratic rights and principles, and abusing those democratic rights and principles.

It is a shame the Greens are taking this attitude. The Greens ought to explain to this House whether they condone the actions of some of their party members who protested yesterday, Remembrance Day, in Victoria. It was disgraceful. Yesterday two Greens candidates, Robyn Evans and Pamela Curr, were among a number of demonstrators who used Remembrance Day to make an anti-war statement in a manner that was offensive to the veterans who were present at the ceremony. One person involved in that demonstration said she believed that the ceremony was an horrific experience that glorified war, particularly when four vintage planes flew over and a cannon was fired during the service. That is the sort of person we are dealing with! On a day on which we were paying respect to our war veterans, the people who fought for the democratic rights that the Greens want to abuse, they ran a campaign against Remembrance Day. Steve Bracks, the Premier of Victoria, has asked the two Greens candidates to apologise. I ask Ms Lee Rhiannon and the Hon. Ian Cohen to apologise for their actions in this House and to not accuse our police of potentially engaging in violence and to not desecrate the honour of our war veterans and everything else that this country stands for.

Chesterfield-Evans: I ask a supplementary question. Will the Minister assure the House that police officers will wear their identification badges when on duty so that they can be seen to be accountable while at the meeting of the World Trade Organisation?

Costa: I assure the honourable member that our police will take action to ensure that the community can go about its business on 14 and 15 November without harassment from the hypocrites who come into this House and make unsubstantiated allegations against our police officers before the event. The only evidence that such harassment is likely follows on from the demonstration of 1 May, when demonstrators threw marbles under police horses in an attempt to bring them down. Those hypocrites have the gall to make allegations about our police officers, but the people that they support have been involved in confrontation with our police. They sought to disrupt the New South Wales community, and on Remembrance Day they had the gall to denigrate the memory of those who died protecting the very rights that they seek to abuse. They are a disgrace. The real question is: Will the Greens apologise for the disgraceful effort of their candidates, during the Victorian election campaign, on Remembrance Day? If not, they stand condemned as the hypocrites that they are.

***

NSW: Costa to table report into journalist WTO protest injury WTO Costa

 

SYDNEY, Nov 14 AAP – NSW Police Minister Michael Costa will provide a full report after a journalist was injured today by a police horse at an anti-World Trade Organisation (WTO) protest.

Mr Costa agreed to make the report public after he was questioned by NSW Greens MP Ian Cohen in the upper house today.

Patricia Karvelas, a journalist from The Australian newspaper, was rushed to hospital with a suspected fractured pelvis after being stood on by a horse when police charged to arrest protesters.

“I’ve asked for a report from police about it, let me say that I think everyone in the house, including myself and the police involved, acknowledge and send our condolences to her for her injuries,” Mr Costa said.

“She is there, as are many people in the media, to cover events. She is obviously a person who was injured in the course of her work as opposed to somebody that went there illegally to demonstrate like the honourable Ian Cohen.”

Mr Costa said Ms Karvelas was only there because an illegal demonstration was being held.

“And that illegal demonstration was being conducted in the face of police, government and other concerns about the likely outcomes of those sorts of activities in the city,” Mr Costa said.

He disagreed with Mr Cohen’s claim that police action had vilified protesters, saying certain websites by action groups indicated their plans for violent confrontation this week.

“The fact of the matter is that these sites have been advocating violence against the WTO meeting and clearly our police are charged with the responsibility of maintaining social order,” Mr Costa said.

He said protesters were “very sophisticated” and technology was being used to cause “maximum chaos in the city”.

“They are running an SMS messaging service and that service allows people involved in the demonstration to contact and be informed of where they should do something called spin the bottle,” he said.

“The spin the bottle blockade takes on the WTO in a no-holds-barred fight to the finish, and you can join them.

“They come and pretend they’re running peaceful protests – if they wanted a peaceful protest they would go to the ones that have been permitted by the police.”

Mr Costa said he had asked police to detail the cost of the WTO meeting and the cost of all precautions that had to be taken due to the threat of violent protest action.

Margo: The nerve of this appalling person knows no bounds. Police banned all marches from yesterday to Saturday, for the duration of the WTO meeting. The march was illegal because police refused to issue a march permit, out of the blue, after Costa had begun his fear and loathing campaign against protesters. The bill for the cost of putting hundreds of police on the streets today should be sent to Costa: he set the whole thing up.

Ever wondered why politicians didn’t get hot under the collar over the cash for comment scandal? You know, the one where Alan Jones and John Laws got caught red-handed selling their “opinions” to the highest bidder.

Two reasons. The big two shock jocks are powerful and the pollies won’t take on power, in whatever form it takes. They’d prefer to kowtow to it. Underlying this, however, is the fact that the major parties sell access for cash, and, in many cases, are mere salesmen for the interests which fund them. Big companies sponsor their annual conferences these days, and in return get private hearings with the salesmen who’ll represent their interests to the detriment, if necessary, of the public interest. They also sell access at fundraisers.

Here’s a sample of the evidence at the Independent Commission against Corruption hearing into the ‘Oasis” development yesterday. Gary McIntyre, the Bulldogs bloke who was having trouble getting State government help to make his venture super-profitable – ie more pokies and a transfer of Crown land – gave evidence of a conversation he had with one Arthur Coorey, a bloke with, they all say “impeccable Labor connections”.

“I had heard rightfully or wrongfully that donations had been made by the hotel industry prior to the last election…and they had been going alright.”

“He (Arthur) said to me: ‘Well, if you give a million dollars to the party you’ll probably also get what you want at Liverpool.”

The Herald’s CBD business column revealed a corker of cash-for-access abuse last week, an abuse so prevalent that the pollies don’t even make a secret of it any more. Andrew Refshauge is the NSW deputy premier and the planning minister, the one who’s been falling over himself to win back public support for Labor since Cunningham. He announced recently that he’d “call in” all sensitive coastal development to ensure our coastline got the protection it deserved. And we know from Alvin Stone’s piece in Rage in the suburbs that Refshauge as planning minister can and does declare many projects of “state significance” thus overriding local councils and local communities to get them happening, whatever the cost to the community.

So he’d want to appear independent so the public could confidently trust that his judgment would be made on the merits after taking into account all relevant facts, wouldn’t he? Not on your life.

CBD, last Friday

That well-known leftie, Deputy Premier Andrew Refshauge, is getting back to basics for his latest fundraiser next week.

The event is being held at that well known Bolshevik hang-out, Aria, at a very proletarian $1250 a head.

That other well-known eastern suburbs socialist (when he’s not a socialite flirting with the property market), Dr Robert Hampshire, is organising the do, along with the help of the former secretary of the NSW Labour Council, Michael Easson.

Left-wing location, left-wing price and left-wing organiser. How very convenient. Refshauge is also in charge of planning in NSW, which is why it makes sense to have a property developer plan the do.”

So what do you do? Kick out the Labor Government and put in John Brogden’s Liberals to clean up NSW and deal the public back into the game?

You’ll get more of the same if you do. On Wednesday the Herald blew the lid off the carefully constructed good-guy image of Liberal leader John Brogden, showing he’s just as much part of the disintegration of trust in the political system as everyone else.

The people vote in politicians and they pay them well. Brogden, as an elected representative, let alone a major party frontbencher, now leader, is supposed to represent them full time, carefully weighing competing interests to produce a result on the merits. It is imperative that he not be paid by anyone else. So what does Brogden do?

At a time when he was in the most sensitive portfolio possible, that of planning, he signs up with Price Waterhouse, earning $25,000 a year – $110,000- between 1997 and 2001 – for what? Something “very minor”, says Brogden, “just general public affairs advice”. Money for nothing, John? Spare us. It sounds to me like Price Waterhouse bought the Brogden name cheap to parade him at cocktail parties to enhance the power and influence of the Price Waterhouse brand.

The conflict-of-interest perception problems are legion. I’m not saying Brogden was corrupt in any way, but he’s bound to get caught out on perception. The Herald reported that as planning spokesman he asked two parliamentary questions about a development with which Price Waterhouse was involved.

If that’s not bad enough, John Brogden, front-man for an Opposition looking to win government by exploiting the failings of a pro-developer ALP and convincing voters he’ll do the right thing by them, didn’t tell the truth in his pecuniary interest register.

The regulations for declaring pecuniary interests state that MPs must declare income with a “description sufficient to identify the person from whom, or the circumstances in which, the income was, or is reasonably expected to be, received”.

Pretty simple really – make your disclosure transparent so any potential conflicts of interest are fully revealed. Brogden’s response? He declares “dividends from shares” from his family company Northmist. Price Waterhouse paid Brogden through Northmist. Brogden’s ‘disclosure’ was meaningless.

Then, after a journalist started nosing around last year, Brogden changed his declaration to read “consultancy income from Price Waterhouse Legal through Northmist”. He revealed yesterday that straight after becoming leader in a coup, he sought advice from a top barrister on whether he was obeying the disclosure rules. Why not tell the whole truth, John? You afraid of something? The last refuge of a bloke with something on his conscience is to bring in the lawyers and argue technicalities.

So, the alternative premier of NSW supplements his income with an ill-defined consultancy ripe with conflict of interest problems then avoids his ethical obligation to disclose it to the people who voted for him.Do you trust this man?

The Brogden scandal comes hot on the heels of Labor protecting one of its ministers, Eddie Obeid, from any consequences for multiple, serial failures to fully disclose his company interests for several years. First Carr scuttles a full investigation by an upper house committee, then he accepts Obeid’s latest apology. This is the same Eddie Obeid accused before the Independent Commission gainst Corruption of offering to fix problems with the Oasis development in return for a $1 million donation to the ALP. He denies it, but Carr has not even seen fit to stand him down until the inquiry reports. To top it all off, the bloke who Carr chose to lead the charge against Brogden in Parliament yesterday was none other than Andrew Refshauge!

The contempt with which Bob Carr treats the people of NSW is breathtaking, but is Brogden a viable alternative?

Liberal voter Noel Hadjimichael calls for urgent action by both parties: “The reports about John Brogden’s consultancy fees require a quick and clear answer. The reports about Labor’s Mr Obeid’s family business dealings require some additional thoughts. If the Liberals want to be fair dinkum about transparency and governance they need to look at this issue as a priority. If Labor want to clear the decks before March 2002 they need to act now, before further ICAC time elapses. The major parties dominate only when voters are broadly accepting of their fitness to govern and their preparedness to take tough decisions.”

What can we do? All I can think of to lodge a massive protest vote. If a big slab of us vote for a community candidate we can look in the eye on the street and trust, or a Green who similarly passes the eyeball test, maybe we can frighten the majors into taking their responsibilities seriously. You’ve got a choice after that – to just vote one, or to preference either of the majors. I reckon the maximum impact play is to preference the party which DOES NOT hold your seat. We’d see a massive turnover of MPs, and the realisation by the majors that no seat is safe, that the right to represent people has to be EARNED.

Voters don’t ask for representatives who parrot their views. They want honest, untainted representation. As independent Peter Andren showed in his conservative federal seat of Orange, a minority view, sincerely held, is respected by the electorate, not punished. Peter opposed the post-Tampa refugee policy of Howard. He was returned with an increased majority in last year’s federal election. Peter is honest, intelligent, a strong local representative and a crusader against politicians’ rorts. He’s passed voters’ trust test, and he’s in for as long as he wants.

Is it possible to break through our malfunctioning – perhaps non-functioning “democracy” or do we give up? Webdiarist Jozef Imrich is a librarian who’s been interested in democracy and how to clean it up for a long time. He advises that a few people who care about this unfashionable topic have set up a website called www.opendemocracy.net as a forum for issues pertaining to campaign funding, electoral law and parliamentary and congressional ethics.

“Susan Richards, the editor-at-large is like you a fearless woman … (smile). Democracy, after all, is like woman’s work it is never done … as I am typing my wife is still pottering around and it is rather late …,” Jozef wrote.

The media must play a big part in trying to shame the bastards in charge of our political process into at least trying to restore trust. We’ve got to highlight all their excesses, all their institutionalised conflicts of interest, their capitulation to the interests of big business with big money. We’ve got to stop doing what we’ve been doing for a while – accept that this is the way the game is played and not write the stories any more, or the comment pieces, because it’s not NEW any more.

For a start, where do the majors get off banning cigarette advertising and sponsorship for everyone but themselves? Both parties take cash from Phillip Morris to sponsor their conferences and fundraising events. The Canberra Press Gallery should be writing yarns exposing the scandal of big companies “sponsoring” political parties, and editors should be campaigning on the topic. We’ve also got to get stuck into governments on their secrecy – the insidious practice of refusing to reveal information because it’s “commercial in confidence”.

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Hi. OK, we’ve started to get into what this World Trade Organisation meeting in Homebush Bay, Sydney, next week is about – discussion of GATS, a proposed general agreement on trade in services.

In Explaining GATS: An attempt (smhNov5), Brian Bahnisch told us what the critics are on about. Lest it be thought that the critics are mere outsiders to power banging on with crazed conspiracy theories, the annual conference of the NSW Local Government Association passed a resolution of strong concern late last month. Local councils fear the GATs will see the privatisation of water and all sorts of other services. Marrickville Council, my local, passed a GATS unanimously before the conference endorsed it in substance (see below). The final wording should be up on the site of the Local Government Association (lgov) soon.

As far as I know State governments haven’t played a part in this debate so far. NSW Police Minister Michael Costa certainly hasn’t – his contribution has been to accuse people wanting to protest against GATS at Homebush – many of whom are unionists whose leaders will speak at the protest – of being terrorists, and to condemn any civil disobedience at the event (See Labor’s new crime: Civil disobedience, smhNov1).

As you’ll recall, Costa went troppo in Parliament early last week about a seminar to be hosted by the Greens MP Lee Rhiannon in NSW Parliament last Friday – authorised by Upper House president, Labor’s Meredith Burgmann – on the history and practice of civil disobedience in the lead-up to planned protests against the WTO meeting. Costa alleged the seminar was really about discussing violence at the WTO meeting. He had no evidence – in any event, it would be crazy to discuss violence at an open, public meeting – but that didn’t stop Michael Costa. After getting his message out through the Daily Telegraph, he took the police minister along to Homebush for more propaganda. This is reminiscent of Joh Bjelke-Petersen in the days when his police minister Terry Lewis did Sir Joh’s bidding.

I went along to the seminar for a little while on Friday, and, of course, no violence was discussed. Civil disobedience is, by definition, about non-violent protest. It is about breaking the law, peacefully, to make a political statement, and thus it’s about taking the risk of being arrested and fined for that activity.

My only personal experience of civil disobedience was in the late 1970s, when Sir Joh banned the right to march by telling police to refuse to issue any march permits. In response, I joined hundreds of others in King George Square outside City hall in the middle of Brisbane. We faced an ampitheatre – the street was surrounded by onlookers, and more than 700 police stood ready to defend the patch of street in front of the square. When we walked onto the street we were arrested and put in jail until someone – in my case my mother – arrived to bail us out. I was chucked into a tiny cell with about 20 others, where I worked out pretty quickly that this was not my scene. I also worked out that I had nothing but respect and admiration for people who could take all this to confront the system with its own injustice. Several ALP members who went on to become State government ministers were arrested in the right to march protests.

To see the NSW police minister playing Costa’s game fills me with dread and foreboding. I don’t know what Costa is up to, apart from creating hysteria, but I don’t like it.

At the seminar, rumours circulated that Costa’s police boys were refusing march permits for a couple of marches planned for Sydney city during the WTO talks. I couldn’t confirm these rumours, but the Australian on Saturday reported them, although the report was confusing. I hope like hell it isn’t true. If Costa wants a police state imposed before the State election, it’s a nasty turn of events from an increasingly nasty government. The effect of a ban on street marches would, of course, be to provoke confrontation and even violence. If that’s what Costa wants, he’s unfit for office.

The papers presented to the civil disobedience forum will be available soon at internationalactivism. In the meantime, Sydney University of Technology academic James Goodman, who organised the seminar, has complained to the Press Council about the Daily Telegraph’s coverage. The Press Council has accepted the complaint and written to the paper for a response.

Here’s the complaint:

A. Complainant Information

Name: Dr James Goodman

Address: Co-Convenor of the Research Initiative on International Activism, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Technology Sydney PO Box 123 Broadway NSW 2048. Phone: 9514 2714, Fax: 9514 2332, Email: james.goodman@uts.ed=u.au

B. Publication Details

Daily Telegraph, 1. 1/11/02, Headline ‘In Your House’, front page.

C: Contact with Publication

Yes. In two ways:

(i) Face-to-face interview with the Daily Telegraph reporter who was writing the story. He had not at this stage submitted his story to the paper. The interview was held at the paper’s offices in NSW Parliament House, from approximately 7.30 pm to 8pm on October 31st.

The interview was conducted in the presence of Lee Rhiannon, Member of the Legislative Council of the NSW Parliament. At the end of the interview the reporter informed me that my comments could not be taken on board, and that he would have no influence on the headline for the piece.

On leaving I was told I should prepare for a difficult day tomorrow: it seemed to me that the paper was intending to publish an attack on the meeting, and was fully aware of the controversy it would be creating.

(ii) In view of this I returned to work on the evening of the 31st, and wrote up my rejoinder in the form of a lengthy email letter. This was sent at 2am, 1 November, when the article appeared on the Daily Telegraph’sWebsite with the headline ‘Anarchy in the House’.

Response received: No mention of the interview nor correction of the story. No response to email letter as of 5 November 2002.

D. Principles Breached

Breach of Principle 1 and Breach of Principle 5, in particular, the requirement of “not misrepresenting or suppressing relevant facts”.

E. Specific Reasons for the Complaint

Personal association: I have a direct association with the matter raised in the complaint. The Research Initiative, of which I am a part, is the organiser of the meeting that was referred by the Daily Telegraph in their front-page article of the 1 November. The Initiative was specifically mentioned in the article and was maligned and discredited by the article.

The paper had spoken with me and knew its story to be a misrepresentation, yet it went ahead and printed the accusation of the Initiative having organised a ‘training session’ for ‘violence’, as fact. The Daily Telegraphreport has been widely condemned by other media outlets. An ABC reporter, Jean Kennedy, for instance, stated on ABC Radio 702 on the afternoon of the 1 November that the Telegraph’s story had been “dubbed ‘the beat up of the year’ by members of the press gallery”. That “beat-up” has had a significant negative impact on the reputation of the Research Initiative.

Complaint details: The paper was informed by the organiser of the meeting (myself) that it was not a ‘training’ session to ‘create violent situations’, as had been claimed by the NSW Minister for Police. Yet the paper went ahead and quoted his accusations as fact: The paper’s headline states ‘Guess where the people who protest like this are holding their next training session…’. This headline appeared alongside a photograph of police on horses at a demonstration in May 2001. The Daily Telegraph knew this to be a misrepresentation of the facts, as he had been told as much by me before the story was submitted. In view of this I believe theDaily Telegraph wilfully misrepresented the facts. It printed information in the form of a front-page headline, that it knew to be false.

***

I’ve expressed strong views on the Press Council process in the past, and repeat them here. I’ve been up before the Council once, about a story I wrote about a Senate Privileges Committee report into alleged interference with a witness to the Wik inquiry, the head of the Australian Law Reform Commission, by Attorney-General Daryl Williams and his Department.

A member of the public complained that my report was inaccurate and biased. Invariably a bureaucrat of the media company concerned fronts up and runs an abstract sort of case, but I insisted on turning up myself to argue my own case. I felt this was important as the reader who complained could do so to the reporter direct, and hear her case in reply, rather than be faced with a corporate suit who knows nothing of the background to or context of the story. It was a long hearing, the reader and I went toe to toe on several points, and I was able to explain the language ‘codes’ Senate committees use when they’re criticising fellow members of the club. At the end of it we shook hands and the reader said he was satisfied he’d got a fair hearing. I won – just.

There is another reason for the reporter turning up. When the media representative is a suit, the Press Council doesn’t find out what went on in the processing of the story,and instead gets a bland justification. I have no inside knowledge of what happened in this case, but I would be unsurprised if the reporter was powerless to stop the story being distorted out of existence by an editor. If the reporter turns up, the truth can come out, and the blame – if there is any – put on the person who is at fault.

I’d also like the hearing of Press Council complaints to be in public, not in private as at present. It’s about time the media started being at least a little bit accountable. At the moment, our self-righteous claim that we are here to ensure accountability is so screamingly hypocritical it’s our credibility that’s shot to pieces.

Today, the Marrickville Council resolution on GATS, Karen Jackson in Gympie, who started the GATS ball rolling in Green idiocy (smhNov4), suggests ways to get GATS into the mainstream media. Brian Bahnischgives details of protest activities next week in Sydney to coincide with the WTO meeting – Michael Costa might care to note the unions involved – and James Woodcock recommends more sites for more info.

Max Phillips is ready to put his energy where his heart is: “Bravo Brian! I was questioning whether I’d bother to try and get off work to protest the WTO – now there is no question, I’m already there! Thanks!”

***

Unanimous resolution of Marrickville Council

That Council:

1. believes public policy regarding the regulation, funding and provision of essential services should be made democratically by governments at the national, state and local level;

2. calls on the Federal Government to fully consult with state and local government about the implications of the GATS negotiations for local government services and regulation;

3. calls on the Federal Government to make public the specific requests it made to other governments in the GATS negotiations which were due on 30 June 2002;

4. calls on the Federal Government to make public its specific responses to requests from other governments which are due on 30 March 2003;

5. calls on the Federal Government to support the clear exclusion of public services from the GATS, including local government community services and water services;

6. calls on the Federal Government to oppose any proposals which would open up the funding of such public services to privatisation;

7. calls on the Federal Government to oppose any proposals which would reduce the right of local government to regulate services, including the application of a “least trade restrictive” test to regulation;

8. writes to the Minister for Trade concerning the above; and

9. submits the above motions for adoption by the Local Government Association of New South Wales at its 2002 Annual Conference with an additional motion that they be submitted for adoption by the Australian Local Government Association at its 2002 Annual Conference.

Background

The current negotiations on the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) being conducted by the Australian Government and other governments in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) could have serious repercussions for Australian local government.

GATS rules are binding on all levels of government but there has been little if any consultation with local government about the negotiations and their implications.

A recent study by the Canadian Environmental Law Association (found at www.policyalternatives=.ca) identified areas of local government services and regulation which could be affected by the GATS negotiations. The services identified included:

* Water and sewerage services

* Waste management

* Road building

* Land use planning

* Library services.

Changes to GATS rules on regulation of services could mean that local councils could face complaints about their regulation through the WTO complaints system. Governments can complain about the laws or regulations of other governments to a panel of trade law experts. The winner can ask that laws or regulations be changed and can ban or tax the exports of the loser.

Governments are being asked to increase the range of services included in the GATS agreement. Requests in the negotiations from the European Union, for example, include water services, which in rural areas are often local government services. There are also proposals in the negotiations to change GATS rules to reduce the right of governments to regulate by declaring that some regulation of services should be “least trade restrictive.” There are also proposals to define funding of government services in GATS rules as “subsidies” to which transnational corporations should have access, resulting in privatisation.

***

Karen Jackson in Gympie, Queensland

Disclosure: Karen is a member of the Democrats

Thanks for publishing my little piece on GATS. Since the Dems went haywire I’ve been apathetic about politics; it felt as though my desire to help change the world had been torn to shreds by a small Machiavellian suicide squad and it wasn’t worth bothering anymore. But I knew the GATS meeting was coming up, and it’s too important to just sit back and watch it happen.

Brian Bahnisch’s piece was excellent, but I think it also answers my question about why GATS rarely gets a look in – it takes time and effort to understand what’s going on. What we really need is some quick, snappy Daily Telegraph headlines to generate interest.

Such as…

China’s standards good enough for our police: New NSW Police CEO

Coca-Cola takes 51% stake in Sydney Water

Domestic water tanks banned(Subheading: Sydney Water CEO claims they are undermining earnings and anti-competitive)

Building industry welcomes new international standards (Subheading: Cost of occupational health and safety halved)

Post to Bourke, Broken Hill end December 31 (First para: Australia Post spokesperson says competition with the cheaper US Postal Service means funds need to be freed up for advertising.)

Perhaps I’m being a little facetious with these, and they may be a little over the top, but this sort of thing gets attention. Alan Jones’ river plan may have been ridiculous but it nonetheless succeeded in stimulating debate about how we use our water resources.

In any case, I hope that the debate in Webdiary is the start of a larger tide of media attention on this issue.

***

Brian Bahnisch in Brisbane

Here’s the AFTINET (Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network) PR material for next week: If I had the money I’d come to Sydney!

STAND UP FOR GLOBAL JUSTICE

STOP THE WTO AGENDA

PEACEFUL RALLY

Thursday 14 NOV 2002 12 Noon

HYDE PARK FOUNTAIN

COG performing live

Speakers include Allen Madden, Metropolitan Land Council; Doug Cameron, National Secretary, Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union; Joy Chavez, Focus on the Global South, Philippines; Father Brian Gore, Jubilee Drop the Debt Campaign; Shane Rattenbury Greenpeace; John Robertson, Secretary, NSW Labour Council; The Rev Dr Ann Wansbrough, Uniting Church Minister.

FAIR TRADE NOT FREE TRADE: A BETTER WORLD IS POSSIBLE

Today 2 billion people live on less than US$2 per day with little access to health, education and water services, and continued destruction of the environment.

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) sets the global rules for trade, is dominated by the most economically powerful governments, and is heavily influenced by corporations. The Australian government has invited only 25 of the 144 WTO Members to a meeting in Sydney November 14-15, 2002. The meeting is designed to pressure developing countries to support an agenda which includes:

* treating essential services like health, education and water as commercial goods, opening them to privatisation

* reducing governments’ right to regulate trade and investment in the public interest, and to support local jobs and development

* further tariff cuts regardless of their impact on job losses and economic insecurity

We oppose this agenda and support fair trade regulation through open and democratic processes:

* Trade agreements should support, not undermine, human rights, labour rights and protection of the environment.

* Essential public services should not be included in trade agreements.

* Governments should retain full rights to regulate for social and environmental reasons, and to have industry policies to support local jobs and development.

* Corporations must conform to United Nations standards on human rights, labour rights and the environment.

Supported by: Action for World Development, AID/WATCH, APHEDA-Union Aid Abroad, Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific, Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens, Australia Tibet Council, Australian Catholic Social Justice Council, Australian Coalition for Economic Justice, Australian Council of Social Service, Australian Council for Overseas Aid, Australian Council of Trade Unions, Australian Democrats (NSW), Australian Education Union, Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network, Australian Greens, Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, Australian Nursing Federation, Australian Services Union, NSW Services Branch, Bougainville Freedom Movement, Catholic Commission for Justice, Development and Peace, Community and Public Sector Union (PSU Group), Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union, Economic Reform Australia, Fire Brigade Employees Union, Flight Attendants’ Association of Australia- International Division, Friends of the Earth Australia, Greenpeace, Indigenous Social Justice Association, Jubilee Australia, Labor Council of NSW, Labor For Refugees, Mercy Foundation, National Tertiary Education Union, National Union of Students, Northern Territory Environment Centre, Now We the People, NSW Retired Teachers’ Association, NSW Teachers Federation, Politics in the Pub, Progressive Labour Party, Rail Tram and Bus Union, Research Initiative on International Activism, The Grail, Search Foundation, Socialist Alliance, Stop MAI (WA), Tear Australia, Victorian Trades Hall Council, UnitingCare NSW.ACT, Women’s Electoral Lobby (WA) Inc, Workers’ Health Centre, WTO Watch Canberra.

***

James Woodcock

Disclosure: James is a member of the ALP

I recommend the New Internationalist online, particularly the back issue newint, Inside Business, on how transnationals work and their role with GATS.

Also go to newint and download about 4 megs of leaked GATS documents for interesting reading.

The current “hard” issue (not online yet) has a great article on how the US is privatising its “public” education system. Entitled Oh no you don’t it shows how corporate pressure can override public opposition, and this is obviously the type of “public-private partnership” that GATS wants to see in all countries.

I recommend the New Internationalist as a great alternative to the mainstream media. While its main purpose is to highlight the imbalances between rich and poor nations (It was originally sponsored by Oxfam/Freedom from Hunger), the NI reports on virtually everything of global concern.

They were talking about the MAI (the now dumped Multilateral Agreement on Investment, of which GATS is the successor) ages before Pauline Hanson or the Greens raised it. It is a great educational tool as it explains these complex global issues and has lots of useful charts and graphs that demonstrate the stark differences between the rich and poor.

Best of all the NI shows being concerned about globalization is not the exclusive jurisdiction of some perceived violent looney fringe.

Hi. I had a go at pulling together the record of the NSW Labor Government on development in the Herald today – my thesis is that Carr could be the architect of his own downfall. As a political journalist, I’ve learned cynicism the hard way, but delving into the Carr government’s record on development since Cunningham has been a disheartening, sickening, and shocking experience.

Whether he’ll be called to account by the people in March remains to be seen, but the signs are there that Opposition leader John Brogden is ready to offer voters genuine choice on development policy in Sydney and on the coast for the first time in a long time.

Today my piece, a brilliant 1997 speech by Liberal MP for Hawkesbury, Kevin Rizzoli opposing Labor’s legislative ode to developers, and a fascinating 1999 piece from the archives which shows why Brogden is on the money on this issue and how Labor abuses voter concerns to manipulate their votes then betray them without qualm.

To end, another archive piece, Driving a Carr through the environment, which details Carr’s betrayal of the public interest, local communities, homebuyers and the environment in development policy and the resulting hegemony of developer interests in our State. The developer bias is so extreme that even when conditions are put on developments to accommodate community concerns, they are not monitored and are breached at will with impunity.

Disempowered, frustrated communities watching their quality of life being ripped apart by a government which condones effectively lawless developer behaviour will, in the end, be forced to do unthinkable things to be heard. Enter Cunningham. And it won’t end there.

NSW Labor’s self-destruct button moved to Victoria today, when the safe inner urban seat of Melbourne today became even harder for Labor to hold. Melbourne is the Greens’ most winnable seat due to voter outrage at Labor’s Kennettesque decision to build the Commonwealth Games athletes village on the Royal Park site rather than return it to the people for open space. An ALP councillor has just resigned to stand as an independent. Shades of Cunningham, again. I’m beginning to think we really are witnessing the beginnings of a split in the ALP. It will be fascinating to see how the Libs respond – will they not run an official candidate and put up an independent Lib to preference the Greens, as they did in Cunningham? I’d love comment from readers in the seat.

ALP Defect

By Susan Murdoch

MELBOURNE, Nov 7 AAP: Labor’s chance of holding the key seat of Melbourne has been dealt a blow with high-profile city councillor Kevin Chamberlin announcing today he would contest the seat as an independent.

Cr Chamberlin said he would quit the ALP and stand against Community Services Minister Bronwyn Pike for Melbourne.

Preferences could be crucial in Labor’s campaign to hold onto the seat –

currently held by a 12.4 per cent margin but considered vulnerable to a

protest vote to the Greens.

Cr Chamberlin said inner-Melbourne residents had been let down by the major parties. Labor had become riddled by factional warfare and was no longer concerned with representing the people, Cr Chamberlin said.

The former Lord Mayor said he would direct preferences to other candidates before Labor and the Liberals but had not decided if they would go to Greens candidate Richard di Natale. “I’ll be the underdog, but at least we’re providing an alternative,” he said. “Even if we make Melbourne marginal, it’s going to make them sit up and listen.”

Cr Chamberlin said one of the key reasons behind his departure was the Bracks government’s decision to build the Commonwealth Games village at the Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital site, which he says should be returned to parkland.

Melbourne is one of a number of inner-city ALP strongholds targeted by the Greens.

***

Labor’s too little, too late on development

Previous actions make proposed reforms seem about as genuine as the emperor’s new clothes, writes Margo Kingston.

The Cunningham by-election revealed that Bob Carr is naked on the crucial state election issue of city and coastal development. The result: palpable panic in the ALP. The Planning Minister, Andrew Refshauge, is throwing backdowns, reforms and new policy to bitter voters like confetti.

The Premier – who endorsed the Sydney Lord Mayor, Frank Sartor, for Rockdale – admitted Labor corruption on Rockdale council meant “the electorate would have eaten us alive” if Labor had put up the local branch pick, the Rockdale mayor. Sartor is a trenchant critic of Labor development policy.

Carr has rejected passionate advice from Paul Keating to clean up Labor’s act on development. “I think we would be better off if developers were forbidden from donating election funds to municipal candidates and to political parties,” Keating said last year. Sartor agreed: “They donate to both sides and I think it’s a pity. I think it makes it very difficult.”

Public interest and the community have been forgotten or frozen out in today’s developer-driven NSW ALP. Rockdale opened the can of worms, and yesterday the ICAC began hearings into the Oasis development at Liverpool. The ALP minister Eddie Obeid and the Labor mayor of Liverpool, George Paciullo, will be key witnesses.

Refshauge’s bag of post-Cunningham tricks include a moratorium on the Sandon Point development after Labor’s refusal to act helped deliver Cunningham to the Greensand reversing Labor’s sell-off of part of Callan Park in Sydney’s inner-west for development.

He also acted on coastal development after eight years of inaction. In 1995, Carr promised the Greens he’d commission an in-depth scientific study of our coastline as a precursor to a comprehensive coastal protection plan. He’s since presided over an invasion of Gold Coast development from the north as planning ministers sat on their powers to call in sensitive developments. Refshauge said that, from last Friday, all such developments would be called in automatically, and that Labor would begin a three-year study of our coastline. But the policy isn’t ready. Refshauge’s department will be inundated with development applications, yet only three new people will be employed to cope. The criteria for regional offices – where staff numbers have been slashed to the bone – to send applications up the line or return them to councils for decision are not decided. The taxpayer, not the developer, will foot the bill for State Government supervision because Refshauge hasn’t decided whether to make them pay.

Refshauge’s core post-Cunningham announcement nails Labor’s disastrous performance on planning and environmental protection – a sleeper issue uniting Liberal and Labor voters which the Opposition leader, John Brogden, picked and ran with long before Labor realised it had no clothes. He’ll keep running, with the centrepiece – the Coalition’s first-ever coastal protection policy – ready to go when the time is right.

In 1997, then planning minister Craig Knowles ignored warnings from Sartor, greenies, surveyors, local councils and many Liberal MPs to pass without amendment a pro-developer revolution in planning and environment law which has triggered an angry voter backlash.

Knowles cut developers loose from many planning controls by stripping local communities of input and stripping home buyers of government protection against shonky builders. He allowed private operators – paid by the developer – to certify building and safety standards, ignoring warnings from the ICAC that this raised “new opportunities for corruption to occur”. The then deputy opposition leader, Ron Phillips, offered support for amendments, saying the Opposition “shares local government and community concern that private certifiers employed directly by developers could have their capacity for independent decisions compromised.” Knowles said no. The developer lobby cheered.

After the Herald exposed the tip of an iceberg that will give NSW homeowners nightmares for decades and has triggered class actions by distraught apartment owners living in fire traps, the Upper House forced Labor into an inquiry.

Post-Cunningham, Refshauge trumpeted “tough new measures to stamp out shonky building certifiers” to help “prevent improper relationships between developers and certifiers where the person supposedly acting as watchdog agrees to turn a blind eye in return for a regular flow of work”.

Not a shred of shame. Not a whiff of an apology, let alone financial help for the legal bills of citizens whose trust Labor so deliberately betrayed. And Knowles? Asked if he’d learnt any lessons, or had any regrets, his spokesman said: “He hasn’t been involved since 1999 [when he stopped being planning minister] and he hasn’t followed it since then.”

Any other potential NSW Labor premiers learnt anything?

***

NSW parliamentary debate on the Environmental and Planning Assessment Amendment Bill, 1997

Kevin Rozzoli (Liberal, Hawkesbury,November 14, 1997)

I take a somewhat different view from that expressed by my colleagues. I do not support the legislation. In fact, I think it is a fairly appalling document which does not advance the cause of environmental planning and assessment in New South Wales. I suspect that, over time, it will fall even further behind.

I have been a member of this House long enough to have seen the original legislation; it is a subject in which I have taken a close interest. In the time that I have been a member of Parliament I have been closely associated with the development of the original legislation. Although I was in opposition at the time, I worked closely with the then Minister and with his chief advisers, Sir Neal Bignold, who is now a justice in the Land and Environment Court, and John Whitehouse, who was then working for Minister Landa.

I have great respect for the original legislation. It has its faults and it probably needs amendment after all these years, but it is interesting, well-constructed legislation that was well thought through. That is about the last appellation I can put on this mishmash of material which has been placed before us today.

Various members have waxed lyrical about the fact that this legislation will speed up the small development process. It may or it may not. It will not deliver better results for the community. It may well speed up the process, but there are so many loopholes that I fear for the communities that will be subject to the process that it will inflict on them.

This legislation, despite its 226 pages and its explanatory notes, is simplistic; it has no depth or substance and it tells us very little. It is process driven and in no way, shape or form has any grounding in environmental planning concepts. That may be excused by the fact that it still carries with it a number of the provisions and concepts of the original legislation, but it sets aside the potential efficacy of a lot of the provisions in the original legislation and I suspect that it will not solve the problems that have been identified by other speakers in this debate. I think it will result in a lot of unhappy adjacent landowners throughout the community.

What has gone wrong with the planning process since the introduction of the original Act in 1979? One must look beyond the legislation to the councils and to the Department of Urban Affairs and Planning to determine why planning in this State has gone awry.

The State planning department has gone through a multitude of names and a multitude of superficial changes, but of all the government departments it has stayed truer to its original philosophy and bureaucratic structure than any other department. No matter what is done to it, it always survives and comes out looking the same in the long run. It is probably trite to say – but for those who know me it is a well-known one-liner of mine – that one thing the department of planning has never done is plan the State. It has failed in its fundamental charter to set in place the parameters by which New South Wales can develop. Without those basic parameters for the smaller elements of the State, whether they be regions, local council areas or other small areas, the rest of the planning system cannot be expected to fall into place.

The department of planning has failed miserably in relation to the structure of State and regional environmental planning policies, as identified in the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act. After five years of excruciating pain, last Friday the second amendment was made to Sydney regional environmental plan No. 20. I happen to have had a close association with that process, which is quite a benchmark in the development of regional environmental plans. It is a tragedy that it has taken too long to produce that plan and subsequent REPs, which have been developed with some of the principles embodied in them. It is a tragedy that it has taken that long for the department of planning to come to terms with regional environmental plans. State environmental planning policies are mostly worthless documents. I do not think they fulfil the original charter which was in the minds of those who conceived the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act in the late 1970s.

On top of the department’s failure to address a fundamental charter and its obsession in and involvement with the minutiae of State planning are the general malaise, incompetencies and other problems associated with a council’s implementation of its LEPs. I know that I am talking in strong terms but I have to; I want to put forward another angle to the ones that have been suggested by other honourable members. That is not to say that every council and the department of planning have failed. I pay tribute to the many officers in the department of planning at a regional level for whom I have the highest respect. I respect their integrity and their competence. I am not talking of people in the department today; I am talking about people who have worked in the department over many years. They have often spoken to me of their frustrations about a system that has not allowed them to do what they wanted to do.

By the same token many councils and planners on councils have done some good work over the years; but, by and large, they have failed to develop their full potential under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act. The initiatives that were there to achieve better and more prescriptive results for planning have been ignored. This bill does nothing to advance fundamental principles that will guide sound and proper development in the future. As I said earlier, this legislation is process driven. It is all about process; it is not about environmental planning. It gives us no guidance for what might be the outcomes of the legislation. We could include in the title Environmental Planning and Assessment Amendment Bill the word “Pro-development” because the bill facilitates development.

If one assumed that all development was good development, that would be a good thing but, unfortunately, I have come from the community side of the track. I have been a community advocate all my parliamentary career and I believe in the fundamental wisdom of community opinion of what is good for an area. It is no wonder that environmental and community groups have concerns about this legislation. It is not that the legislation does not embody the problem; it is that it does not address the problems. It does not give any clear guidance, as did the original Act, to the community on the outcomes. In this debate honourable members have talked about long delays in the processing of development applications. This legislation confirms the original philosophy of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act that if consent to the development application did not issue after 40 days it was assumed that the development application was rejected.

That may sound like an appropriate principle because a council should not approve an application if it is not satisfied with the development. But if the intention of this legislation is to try to facilitate speed of process in terms of small development, and I strongly emphasise small development, it may have been better to reverse the onus and state that if the development application was not dealt with within 40 days, the development was deemed to be approved. That would put the onus on the council to determine small applications within a 40-day period.

If it was deemed that 40 days was an unrealistic time frame, it might be appropriate to extend that time. Another 10 or 20 days may not be harmful if an applicant knows that at the end of that period and in the event of the council not making a decision the application would be consented to in the terms applied for. If that onus were put on the council, the council would make sure, as it is perfectly capable of doing, that it dealt with minor developments within 40 days, or whatever period was deemed necessary.

This legislation endeavours to bring together a number of issues which it is considered superficially will speed up process and facilitate the consideration of certain matters. I agree with the intention to expedite process and to make it more streamlined, but there are better ways to do it than those addressed in this legislation. For example, there is a considerable concern about the provisions relating to integrated development. I have looked at this question in some depth and I have great concern for developers who have to not only obtain development consent from a council, a process which is appealable to the Land and Environment Court, but may also have to make an application under the current water, mining or other Acts or obtain a licence under the environmental protection legislation.

It is poor process to have a system in which each of those elements is interwoven but separately and independently appealable. Some time ago I looked at ways and means under the water Act to bring together the provisions of licensing approvals for developments which required consent under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act. There was the absurd situation of having two separate processes, both appealable to the Land and Environment Court and under different time frames and different circumstances. That was very frustrating for developers.

There certainly is a need to integrate that development. But this legislation gives no indication that the process will be brought together efficiently or will be in the interests of the developer and other members of the community. The processes that are spelled out in the legislation do not give the guarantees that the community seeks, that is, that the assessment of the separate matters which have been deemed by the community and confirmed by this legislation to be matters of individual consideration is carried out in a way that allows community input to the expert body that is issuing the approval, whether it is the Department of Urban Affairs and Planning or the Minister. If the expert body makes a determination, an objector should have a chance to test the veracity of the decision before it is lumped into the full process of consideration.

The legislation provides that the Minister or the council, depending on the classification of the development, must seek approval from the various bodies. If that approval is not forthcoming, consent cannot issue. The developer may be concerned because the approval may have been withheld by the expert body on unreasonable grounds. Conversely, if approval is granted, in the community’s view the approval may have been granted on unreasonable grounds. Apart from challenging the matter in an in globo fashion well down the track, there does not appear to be a process by which the elements of individual approvals can be tested in a way in which the community would have confidence.

That is not to say that sometimes consent will not be right; of course sometimes it will be right. But this type of legislation is concerned with the protection of the rights of the community. It might be said that under section 123 of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act there is a fundamental principle that any person in New South Wales can apply to the Land and Environment Court about a breach of environmental law. However, that is a momentous procedure to go through because the process has failed to provide an opportunity for examination much closer to the circumstances that are being determined. I have no objection to the appeal process ultimately being rolled into one and there being one hearing of a matter before the Land and Environment Court. But it is absolutely important with integrated development that those other areas of concern which are being brought into this process are clearly set out in the legislation.

The legislation fails to achieve that particular element, as it also fails with complying development. Virtually all we are told is that complying development is development that complies. There are other suggested parameters for the determination within a local government area of what is complying development, but that is a one-hit operation. There is one opportunity to make submissions to the process by which the complying development is identified. However, many people do not focus on these issues until they are affected personally. No-one can look into a crystal ball and determine problems that will emerge later. In fact, a district may evolve in such a way that problems appear that did not previously exist.

Whilst the intention of the concept of complying development is probably noble and honourable, the form in which it is presented in this legislation is grossly flawed. My advice to the Minister is to take the legislation out of the Chamber now, go back to the drawing board, construct and develop the legislation in a way that makes more sense – certainly more sense to the community – and come up with something more transparently accountable, more honest and more responsible. At the end of the line the people who are basically concerned with environmental planning outcomes are members of the general community. The developer does his development and takes his money and runs, and moves on to the next development. The poor people in the community who live next door to the development are there suffering long after the developer has gone. The legislation is very poor and should be thrown out.

***

Development backlash

By Linda Morris, SMH, 5.10.99

Urban density has emerged as a big issue in suburban Sydney, but it remains to be seen whether the politicians have got the message, writes Linda Morris.

IN SOUTHERN Sydney, the Empress Gardens is seen to represent the worst excesses of overdevelopment. Approved by Kogarah Council in 1994, it rises six storeys above the Hurstville CBD – 150 one- bedroom apartments with undercover parking beneath Woniora Gardens.

Disparagingly known as the “pink towers” for its salmon pink paintwork, it has become a rallying point for local residents against overdevelopment.

Such was the controversy that the Liberal-controlled Kogarah Council resolved three months before the State election to put up a billboard distancing itself from the development.

It also commissioned a full-page advertisement in the influential St George and Sutherland Leader, pointing to six developments refused by council but subsequently approved by the Land and Environment Court.

The message, which tried to deflect blame for overdevelopment on the State Government’s urban consolidation policy, however, did little to boost the prospects of the Liberals’ State candidate, Sam Witheridge, in the marginal seat of Kogarah, and backfired on the Liberals in Miranda and Menai, which all fell to Labor on March 27.

In council elections in southern Sydney last month, ratepayers recorded an even stronger protest, sweeping to power the ALP and an array of Independents who had campaigned on a platform of grassroots representation, controlled development and the preservation of neighbourhood amenity.

The anti-development pattern was repeated across Sydney during the local elections, with many areas recording protest votes against the major parties.

In Sutherland, the Liberal Party lost control of the council to a rejuvenated ALP and a group of Shire Watch Independents in a campaign which focused almost entirely on issues of overdevelopment and the quality of development.

In middle-class Ku-ring-gai, the Ku-ring-gai Preservation Trust won seven seats on the council, and captured the mayoralty, in a campaign which made a virtue of community opposition to the State Government’s targets of urban consolidation.

In Willoughby, where on the eve of the local council elections the council had rejected the advice of its own planning officers and applied to relax foreshore development controls, three Independents were elected.

Urban consolidation is a name given to the planning policy designed to halt the suburban sprawl to Sydney’s south, north and west and encourage the building of new homes in ready-made communities closer to the CBD.

Two years ago, the Government told all councils to identify areas that could take higher densities by using the State Environment Planning Policy (SEPP) 53 to force change.

While the principle has been sound, Dr Glen Searle, a senior lecturer in planning at the University of Technology, Sydney, says the practice has been less than ideal.

In effect, urban consolidation has meant concentrated development of apartment blocks, townhouses and villas in streets where the quarter-acre block has long held sway. This has exacerbated problems of traffic congestion, putting pressure on open space and led to complaints of overshadowing and loss of privacy.

“There have been some good examples of urban consolidation and some bad,” says Searle. “It’s been a fairly patchy picture.”

The Government maintains that SEPP 53 has slowed the urban sprawl, with new development in fringe areas now accounting for only 30 per cent of new homes, compared with 40 per cent five years ago.

But the medium-density housing push has been concentrated in the council areas of Kogarah, Hurstville and Sutherland, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, with more than 5,000 townhouse, villas and multi-storey developments approved by southern councils, the highest number in the metropolitan area.

By contrast, the northern councils of Ku-ring-gai, Hornsby, Pittwater and Lane Cove have escaped the worst of the development pressures.

The wave of anti-development sentiment comes as no surprise to the major parties, which had furiously sparred over the issue in the State election. In southern Sydney, discontent over the pace of such development reflected in the poor showing of the Coalition in the State seats of Miranda, Georges River and Menai.

In the weeks before the State election, issues of urban quality were identified as a significant issue in qualitative polling prepared by the Liberal pollster Mark Textor for southern Sydney seats.

Textor’s research showed that crime was of greatest concern to 23 per cent of voters. A further 18 per cent considered the local environment an issue and 16 per cent specifically identified overdevelopment. Combined, the urban environment was a voting issue for one in three voters, far more than law and order.

Says one Liberal: “The Textor research showed people were ballistic about it. But it was never identified as an issue and then incorporated in the general campaign. We didn’t drive home what was emerging from the focus groups. It was a particularly Sydney problem, but it was never understood.”

As in the council elections, Labor’s key campaign tactic sought to turn resentment about overdevelopment back onto the Liberal-controlled councils of Kogarah and Sutherland and to blur the lines of responsibility.

Said one Labor campaigner: “The unrestricted growth of high rise had been a big issue in Hurstville and Kogarah. It was an open invitation for the Labor Party. It said, ‘Here’s my jaw, stick it out and let them hit it.’ And we did.”

In hindsight, the defeated Liberal MP Ron Phillips says that while overdevelopment was not the main reason he lost his seat of Miranda, it was the only local issue to move votes: “It came down to the ability of the Labor Party to make overdevelopment its own issue, even though it was an issue of their own making.”

The strength of the political backlash at local and State level is now forcing a policy rethink for the NSW Opposition. At the start of the State election campaign, the Coalition promised to repeal the SEPP 53 legislation, but it was a badly timed announcement and received only postage-stamp treatment in the media.

Reflecting on the State and local election results, the Opposition’s urban affairs and planning spokesman, John Brogden, says councils have been unfairly blamed for implementing State Government policy: “It is ironic that one of the issues the Labor Party campaigned on in 1995 was dual occupancy and here we are with a planning strategy with much worse consequences.

“We’ve got to look at the whole role of urban planning over the next few years, but the Opposition has huge sympathy for residents where there is an increase in density and not a concurrent increase in infrastructure.”

To date, the Minister for Urban Affairs and Planning, Andrew Refshauge, has been unmoved by the council election results, proposing little more than consultation and resisting calls for substantive amendments to the Government’s urban consolidation policy.

The former Liberal Sutherland mayor, Kevin Schreiber, says that sooner or later, ratepayers will realise that it’s State planning policy, not councils, that’s driving development.

Notably, the first priority of Sutherland’s new Labor mayor, Ken McDonell, is to revise development codes formulated 30 years ago and to argue for amendments to the State Government’s urban consolidation policy.

Schreiber predicts a more belligerent council will have little impact on the pace of development, only wasting ratepayers’ funds contesting challenges from developers in the Land and Environment Court.

“The new council will turn around and reject development applications and the developers will off and go to the Land and Environment Court at a cost of $30,000 for ratepayers, and all for the same result,” he says.

In North Sydney, a group of anonymous developers trying to push through large-scale projects in the North Sydney CBD took the unusual step of hiring a public relations firm to urge pro-development ratepayers to overthrow the conservative North Sydney Council.

Barry Hyland’s publicity agency, PR+Communications, organised a letter-writing campaign in local daily newspapers, arguing that North Sydney Council is unnecessarily holding up $200 million in new development projects and has spent $5.5 million since 1995 fighting development and building applications through means such as the Land and Environment Court.

The campaign paid unintended dividends for the Independent Genia McCaffery, who was returned as mayor with 66 per cent support, up from 48 per cent four years ago.

“I don’t think the developers picked the mood and understand how much residents are concerned by levels of development and the constant onslaught of their communities,” McCaffery said.

“I know this because . . . every time I go to the supermarket I get badgered about it. Nobody is saying orderly and well-planned development . . . is not a good thing, but the imposition of urban consolidation policies and their poor implementation has angered people.”

Hyland says that in most cases, the developers win in courts because the council gives undue weight to residents’ concerns, despite the council’s own planning rules that often provide for, and encourage, greater densities.

“Not all development is good; some of it is hideous, but most of the projects we are talking about are earmarked for areas where the cityscape has already been set.”

If anything, McCaffery says, the council elections proved one thing: “Governments who ignore their communities end up in trouble.”

***

Driving a Carr through the environment

Bob Carr used environmental laws to climb to the top of the State political tree, but once there proceeded to trim it limb by green limb. Tim Bonyhady assesses the damage.

SMH Spectrum, January 29, 2000

WHEN Bob Carr was a journalist on The Bulletin 20 years ago, he was one of the redeeming features of a magazine long past its glory days. Almost every week, Carr would produce another sharp political piece, occasionally addressing the national stage he aspired to join as a Labor politician, more usually fixing on State or union issues. The most significant, given both Carr’s subsequent political career and his recent environmental pronouncements in the Herald, was a profile of Paul Landa, Neville Wran’s first minister for planning and environment and one of Carr’s own role models.

While Landa’s reputation in 1980 was very mixed, Carr’s admiration for him was manifest as he dwelt on how the minister had not only given Wran’s “cautious government some real reformist glamour” but also marked himself out as a potential party leader through his handling of the environment portfolio. One key was Landa’s “radical upgrading of the planning and environment function – the department went from being a Cabinet poor sister to an equal of the big developmental departments”. Carr predicted that this change was “irreversible”.

But Carr also made much of Landa’s success in extending the area of national parks by 40 per cent. Carr reported that “Landa had pursued extension of parklands so ruthlessly and single- mindedly that some younger Caucus members were heard to complain that he was leaving nothing for any future occupant of the office to achieve”. Carr made even more of Landa’s Environmental Planning and Assessment Act, which he recognised as the most advanced in Australia.

As Carr put it: “The reforms represent Landa’s main legislative edifice. Previous State planning law was just a rewrite of the 1932 English Town and Country Planning Act, enacted in NSW in 1945. Landa’s updated bill broadened the whole scope of planning to encompass ecological and social factors and, in addition, gave citizens the right for the first time to object to developments.”

This judgment is particularly significant as the act reaches its 20th birthday, because Carr has probably had more influence than anyone else over what has become of this legislation. Just a year after entering State politics as the MP for Maroubra in 1983, Carr became minister for planning and environment when Landa’s death resulted in a Cabinet reshuffle.

A year later Carr began dismembering Landa’s reforms when he introduced the first major amendments to the Environmental Planning Act. Far from extending its environmental requirements or expanding its provisions for public objection and appeal, Carr reduced them.

So Carr has proceeded since he led Labor back into power in 1995 – the first and still the only NSW politician to use planning and environment as a ministerial step to the top of the political ladder. Both the 1996 and the 1997 amendments to the Environmental Planning Act extended the State Government’s powers while curtailing public rights, environmental protections and the power of local councils.

Meanwhile, Labor has repeatedly sidestepped Landa’s legislation. The Wran Government started in the early 80s when it legislated to exempt a swath of major developments from the environmental planning system. It continued while Carr was minister in order to authorise such projects as the monorail and the Harbour Tunnel. Labor under Carr has done the same with last year’s Walsh Bay legislation, authorising Mirvac to demolish a wharf that had been subject to a permanent conservation order, just the most recent example.

As is often the case with such legislation, the Walsh Bay Act was designed to stop a legal challenge even starting. On the day the National Trust was due to begin testing the legality of this development in the Land and Environment Court, the NSW Government announced that it would be legislating in Mirvac’s favour. As a result, the judge adjourned the hearing. A month later, the legislation was in place, stopping the trust invoking either the Heritage or Environmental Planning acts.

Yet the Carr Government has also intervened, even more dramatically, between when a case under the act was heard and decided. After Rosemount Wines mounted two successful challenges in the Land and Environment Court in 1995 against the Bengalla open-cut mine near Muswellbrook, Bengalla took the second case on appeal. The Court of Appeal duly heard both sides’ arguments. But before the court could hand down its judgment, the Government legislated to approve the mine.

The result, says Justice Paul Stein, who spent 12 years on the State’s Land and Environment Court, has been the gradual erosion of almost everything Landa set out to achieve. Stein maintains that as a result of the Environmental Planning Act’s amendment in 1997, “the last vestiges of traditional planning and genuine public participation have been largely abandoned”. Despite all the political rhetoric, ecological sustainability is “seldom applied in practice”. The norm is now “ad hoc decision-making, often at the behest of individual entrepreneurs who court State or local government politicians”.

This negation of Landa’s reforms is all the more significant because Bob Carr’s image combines the bushwalker conservationist, keen to experience the Blue Mountains or Budda-wangs in the company of the late Milo Dunphy, with the armchair conservationist quick to show off his book learning. Neither the Prime Minister nor any other premier would have thought to start the year by triggering a debate in the Herald about the environmental challenges of the new millennium.

So why has Carr been not just a silent party but an active participant in the negation of Landa’s reforms? What does it say about the extent of his environmental concern? Is he a better talker than doer, more adept at talking up a big issue such as population control, which is more or less outside his political control, than addressing issues within his own bailiwick where he has immediate power?

One answer is that Carr’s environmental record is much better in some other areas, although still very mixed. A key example is the Wilderness Act which he introduced with much fanfare in 1987. According to Carr, he offered Parliament “a historic choice”. Either Australians could “continue to destroy, piece by piece, the great natural areas of this country” or they could “resolve that the very fibre of this continent should be treated with greater respect, that our much-diminished wilderness should be protected, and that our country should earn a reputation for excellence in its approach to conservation”.

In fact, Carr’s act was toothless. The problem was that while any member of the public could nominate an area for wilderness designation – and the director-general of National Parks then had two years in which to respond to this nomination – the Government had an unlimited period in which to accept, reject or ignore this advice. As a result, the Wilderness Act was a dead letter during the first term of Nick Greiner’s Liberal-National Party Government.

But since then, the act has had some bite. By the time the Coalition lost office in 1995, it had declared 650,000 hectares of wilderness, a significant achievement given the opposition of some sections of the National Party. Now there are more than 1.5 million hectares, or almost 2 per cent of the State, including 520,000 hectares last year, the most ever. Just as Wran is remembered for protecting the State’s rainforests, Carr may be credited with preserving its wilderness.

Carr’s handling of the Environmental Planning Act has been very different because it has affected a very different bundle of political and economic interests, some of which Labor has wanted to accommodate regardless of the environmental costs. The Wran Government became set against Landa’s legislation simply because it achieved what it set out to do in exposing the environmental flaws of a range of major projects.

Had Carr been right when he predicted that Landa’s upgrading of the planning and environment ministry was irreversible, he might have been able to maintain the integrity of Landa’s act. In fact, Graham Richardson has been the only environment minister in either the Federal or State arena who matched Carr’s image of Landa. While Carr was minister, he could not pack such punch, even if he wanted to.

At least as significantly, Labor soon found that for all the uproar excited by its special legislation, it could get away with these interventions. The press could accuse it of treating the Environmental Planning Act “with contempt”.

The late Jim McClelland, the former Whitlam minister and first chief judge of the Land and Environment Court, might have charge his old Labor mates with a “cynical abuse of power”. But there was no electoral backlash. As McClelland noted in 1987: “Wran taught his successors that they could get away with brush-ing any court aside.”

Yet, particularly since Carr won office in 1995, his Government has also been influenced by more recent political currents which have put environmental planning laws into retreat across the country. The Kennett Government characteristically went furthest as it used special legislation to authorise its favoured projects, such as the Formula One Grand Prix in Albert Park and the City Link freeway, and savaged the public’s rights under Victoria’s Planning and Environment Act. The Liberal government of Dean Brown in South Australia was most explicit about its changes. From 1982 until 1993 South Australia had a Planning Act. Now it has a Development Act.

While partly a manifestation of the traditional developmentalist ethos of government in which environmental protection has long been cast as an impediment to private investment and job creation, these changes have been fuelled increasingly by the rise of economic rationalism. Privatis-ation, national and State competition policies and contracting out have all contributed to the diminution of local government and the exclusion of public participation. The recent introduction by the NSW Government of the private certification of development proposals is just one manifestation of this trend.

The limited success, if not failure, of some of these changes may force the Government to rethink. Carr’s 1997 amendments to the Environmental Planning Act, which introduced “integrated development assessment”, is an example. While designed to free developers from the uncertainty of having to secure multiple approvals over an extended period, it appears they are resulting in development applications taking longer to approve, increasing developers’ costs.

But in so far as the Carr Government has simply followed fashion in running down its environmental planning controls, it might also look to Victoria. Since the readiness of the Kennett Government to override local planning regimes was one of many factors that contributed to its defeat last year, the new Bracks Government has begun offering a new approach to planning decisions. As part of its successful campaign in the December by-election for Kennett’s old seat of Hawthorn, Labor’s Minister for Planning, John Thwaites, announced that he would be constraining his own powers.

The focus of Thwaites’s announcement was ad hoc State intervention in planning decisions, which has also been such an issue in NSW. Where Thwaites’s Liberal predecessor, Rob Maclellan, had been widely criticised for his interventions, which often involved seemingly trivial issues, Thwaites announced that he would call in decisions only after the parties had tried to resolve the dispute. Where Maclellan had run foul of the State’s auditor for generally failing to maintain adequate documentation justifying his interventions, Thwaites promised to explain his reasons publicly in writing.

This measure is just a small step towards restoring the integrity of Victoria’s Environment and Planning Act. The Bracks Government would have to do much more to live up to Thwaites’s boast that he was ending “ad hoc ministerial intervention”, let alone that henceforth councils would “have a lead role in planning” and the community would “be heard and their values and needs reflected in planning decisions”.

Yet even the mere statement of these goals presents a challenge to Carr. After all, these goals are just what Landa aspired to 20 years ago when he introduced the NSW Environmental Planning Act.

Tim Bonyhady’s books include Places Worth Keeping: Conservationists, Politics and Law.

Several readers have asked me to publish Justice Michael Kirby’s speech at the Gay Games opening ceremony in Sydney last weekend. Justice Kirby has kindly agreed.

Courage

by Michael Kirby

Under different stars, at the beginning of a new millennium, in an old land and a young nation, we join together in the hope and conviction that the future will be kinder and more just than the past.

At a time when there is so much fear and danger, anger and destruction, this event represents an alternative vision struggling for the soul of humanity. Acceptance. Diversity. Inclusiveness. Participation. Tolerance and joy. Ours is the world of love, questing to find the common links that bind all people. We are here because, whatever our sexuality, we believe that the days of exclusion are numbered. In our world, everyone can find their place, where their human rights and human dignity will be upheld.

This is a great night for Australia because we are a nation in the process of reinventing ourselves. We began our modern history by denying the existence of our indigenous peoples and their rights. We embraced White Australia. Women could play little part in public life: their place was in the kitchen. And as for gays, lesbians and other sexual minorities, they were an abomination. Lock them up. Throw away the key.

We have not corrected all these wrongs. But we are surely on the road to enlightenment. There will be no U-turns.

Little did my partner Johan and I think, thirty years ago, as we danced the night away at the Purple Onion, less than a mile from this place, that we would be at the opening of a Gay Games with the Queen’s Representative and all of you to bear witness to such a social revolution. Never did we think we would be dancing together in a football stadium. And with the Governor. And that the Governor would be a woman! True, we rubbed shoulders on the dance floor with Knights of the Realm, such as Sir Robert Helpmann and with a future Premier, such as Don Dunstan. But if an angel had tapped us on our youthful shoulders and told us of tonight we would have said “Impossible”. Well, nothing is impossible to the human spirit. Scientific truth always ultimately prevails. So here we are tonight, men and women, indigenous and newcomers, black and white, Australians and visitors, religious and atheist, young and not so young, straight and gay – together.

It is put best by Corey Czok, an Australian basketballer in these Games:

“It’s good to be able to throw out the stereotypes – we’re not all sissies, we don’t all look the same and we’re not all pretty!”

His last comment may be disputed. Real beauty lies in the fact that we are united not in the negatives of hate and exclusion, so common today, but in the positives of love and inclusion.

The changes over thirty years would not have happened if it had not been for people of courage who rejected the common ignorance about sexuality. Who taught that variations are a normal and universal aspect of the human species. That they are not going away. That they are no big deal. And that, between consenting adults, we all just have to get used to it and get on with life.

The people of courage certainly include Oscar Wilde. His suffering, his interpretation of it and the ordeal of many others have bought the changes for us. I would include Alfred Kinsey. In the midst of the McCarthyist era in the United States he, and those who followed him, dared to investigate the real facts about human sexual diversity. In Australia, I would also include, as heroes, politicians of every major party, most of them heterosexual. Over thirty years, they have dismantled many of the unequal laws. But the first of them was Don Dunstan. He proved, once again, the astonishing fact that good things sometimes occur when the dancing stops.

I would also add Rodney Croome and Nick Toonen. They took Australia to the United Nations to get rid of the last criminal laws against gay men in Tasmania. Now the decision in their case stands for the whole world. I would include Neal Blewett who led Australia’s first battles against AIDS. Robyn Archer, Kerryn Phelps, Ian Roberts and many, many others.

But this is not just an Australian story. In every land a previously frightened and oppressed minority is awakening from a long sleep to assert its human dignity. We should honour those who looked into themselves and spoke the truth. Now they are legion. It is the truth that makes us free.

I think of Tom Waddell, the inspired founder of the Gay Games. His last words in this life were: “This should be interesting”. Look around. What an under-statement.

I think of Greg Louganis, twice Olympic gold medallist, who came out as gay and HIV positive and said that it was the Gay Games that emboldened him to tell it as it was.

I think of Mark Bingham, a rowdy Rugby player. He would have been with us tonight. But he lost his life in one of the planes downed on 11 September 2001, struggling to save the lives of others. He was a real hero.

Je pense a Bertrand Delanoe, le maire ouvertement gay de Paris, poignarde a l’Hotel de Ville au course de la Nuit Blanche. Il a fait preuve d’un tres grand courage – et il est un homme exceptionnel. When the gay Mayor of Paris was stabbed by a homophobe he commanded the party at which it happened to “Dance Till Dawn”. Do that in his honour tonight. And in honour of the Cairo 52; the Sister movement in Namibia; Al Fatiha – the organisation for Gay Moslems and many others struggling for their human rights.

And I think of all of you who come together on this magical night to affirm the fundamental unity of all human beings. To reject ignorance, hatred and error. And to embrace love, which is the ultimate foundation of all human rights.

Let the word go out from Sydney and the Gay Games of 2002 that the movement for equality is unstoppable. Its message will eventually reach the four corners of the world. These Games will be another catalyst to help make that happen. Be sure that, in the end, inclusion will replace exclusion. For the sake of the planet and of humanity it must be so.

Amusez-vous bien. Et par l’exemple de nos vies defendons les droits de l’humanite pour tous. Non seulement pour les gays. Pour tout le monde.

Enjoy yourselves. And by our lives let us be an example of respect for human rights. Not just for gays. For everyone.

Should we join a strike on Iraq or is there a better response to the terror? Big question. Webdiarists David Makinson and John Wojdylo began debating this matter a while ago. Then came Bali. John argued strongly for a unilateral strike in Saddam’s heart of darkness (webdiarySep26 and webdiarySep26. David took him on in It’s about judgement, not belief (webdiaryOct1)and John replied in Loving Hitler(webdiaryOct2). Then came Bali. David’s response: Searching for hope. John’s response: Desiderata . Both are republished below, before David’s latest, Fools and fanatics. *** Searching for hope By David Makinson This is an extract from a letter I wrote to a friend (of socio-political bent) last night. I usually try to be constructive, but I cannot find it in me at the moment. I think I am beginning to despair. It surprises no-one I suppose, but it still defies belief, that commentators from across the political spectrum are using (yes, “using”) the Bali atrocity to score points off their rival pontificators. It is deeply sickening. So now it’s definitively established to those of the right that the bleeding hearts have been exposed as fools, whilst it’s equally clear to those of the left that here is proof-positive that the macho, militaristic posturings of the right continue to rain catastrophe upon us. I want to scream: Wake up, people! These horrible events prove neither faction right. Surely it’s obvious by now that we’re all wrong? Our romanticised assessments of what we define as good and evil, and our yearnings for the simplicity of black and white solutions, are delusions. The world lurches from futile rhetoric to ineffective response and still our people are dying. Unnecessary deaths. Politicians and commentators of all persuasions will seek to portray their particular cause as noble because we have lost our friends. We must reject this cynicism. Be clear that these poor, poor people died for nothing – a tragic symbol of an abject failure of leadership. Politicians failed to protect them. The experts of right and left have had no effect. We must not reward them by jumping on any of their various bandwagons. Just cry and cry and cry for the wasted victims and the torment of their loved ones. The left says our government’s public support of the US makes us a target. We sense the truth in this. The right says that it is folly to think that a passive stance will protect us. We sense the truth in this. The right says a military solution is the only solution. They may be correct. The left says violence begets violence, and they too may be correct. Neither group can recognise the merits in each other’s case, and so the true, far more complex solution eludes us. President Bush said, in the seeming long ago, “You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists”. Wrong, George. We’re against both of you. We wonder if perhaps you deserve each other, but we’re certain we have done nothing at all to deserve you. We, the cannon fodder, oppose you. We are the innocent people of Australia, the US, Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, the world, and we are opposed to you. It’s not as simple as us and them. It’s about all of us. For myself, every instinct I have says we need to seek an active path of peaceful action and engagement if we are to have any chance of working through these troubles. I believe this is the test of courage we need to confront – to engage these people at the root of their grievances and hurts – both real and imagined. I am not optimistic that we can pass this test. I fear our bravery does not run that deep. The pragmatist in me recognises that we will resort to force. We will dress this up in words of action and purpose, and imagine it a considered and effective response. We will convince ourselves it is necessary and just. It is neither – and it will not work. It is a dark time. I fear for my children. I am conscious that I offer no solutions. Doubtless the right and the left will have many. Let us pray that somewhere amongst the dross is a kernel of constructive thought which can be built into hope. *** Desiderata By John Wojdylo I will engage this Islamist idealism – or this nihilism, so alien to Islam – even when they swear they hate my way of life and vow to destroy it. My love and humanity will change their hearts. Their grievances and hurts will be healed. They will not murder my people anymore. I will build schools for their children, give their families food when they need it, educate them about my way of life, help them build the society of their dreams. I will undertake peaceful action and engagement. I will take it upon myself to atone for the evils inflicted upon them by people acting in my name, by the “system” I live under that is beyond my control. When my people die I will forgive the Islamists. It is the hardest thing, but I’ll will forgiveness. I cannot live hating or confronting anyone. It is self-destructive for me. I will be Saint Sebastian, the innocent one slain by 100 Islamist arrows. I will ceaselessly subject myself to self-criticism, to root out my failures, and to try to understand what more I can do to see things from their point of view and make them stop hating me and my people. I will even try to imagine their imagined grievances against me, so that I can persuade them – through my humanity – that we’re really all just human beings, can all live together irrespective of our deeply-held ambitions and will to achieve them. I will weep lamentations that politicians and commentators of all persuasions disgustingly seek to portray their particular cause as noble because we have lost our friends, and then I will seek to further my particular noble cause. I will be the innocent one who refuses to comprehend the realities of power and madness; madness is too tiring to think about, too debilitating to even begin to comprehend. Too tragic – because there is no hope with madness. With madness, there is no hope, just darkness. Like death. I will refuse to understand the power I wield, particularly that exerting compelling force wisely in the face of madness is both a duty and a good. I will, at all costs, resist comprehending the portents of incorrigible and embittered irrationality, resist using my power wisely not to confront or engage or change hearts but to guide them away from the abyss. And in those cases when guiding is impossible I will banish the thought that the day is coming when an attack will not only destroy a building and 200 lives, but an entire city. Because for the Islamist fascist, it can make no material difference. He feels the power of God when his finger is on the detonator; and in a self-referential narcissistic loop, flush with hate for the ants around him, he senses imminent deliverance for himself and “his” people from this world of suffering: “God is great!” Because he is God. *** Fools and Fanatics By David Makinson Just re-read Wojdylo’s latest and realised he’s actually had another go at me – stealing my words and using them for his own ends! First my knowledge is “paltry”, next I “love Hitler”, now he’s using my material. A vengeful guy! I think I am actually pissed off. My critique of his “Desiderata” is below. The tone is consciously aggressive, though I can’t get the hectoring and condescending tone of that awful “Loving Hitler” piece – I bow to the master. “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.” Bertrand Russell It was interesting to see some of the feedback concerning the writings of John Wojdylo. The man attracts both friends and foes, it seems, but not a lot of neutrals. I’ll declare myself a foe, if only because he seems to have designated me as one of his, presumably for having the temerity to question his wisdom. John accused me recently of objecting to the style, rather than the substance of his offerings. I’ll wear that. The style is certainly deeply objectionable. His Loving Hitler piece is downright offensive. Doubtless I’ll object to the substance too, if I ever find some. People should bear in mind that John is biased, and take this into account when evaluating his offerings. This is not (only) my opinion – it is self confessed. John calls it “willed bias” and believes there should be more of it. It is “all too rare”, he states with calm conviction. This disturbing confession is towards the end of Loving Hitler, the piece in which he accused me and others of loving Hitler (at least I think he did, it’s all terribly convoluted). Remember: ” Willed bias”. Prejudice and bigotry can sometimes be forgiven, because they are blind and may be cured with knowledge. But there’s a special place in hell for people who do it deliberately. I read John’s Desiderata with interest and realised it has to be refuted, and just a little ridiculed – in case anyone is gullible enough to think it is of any substance or merit. Here at last we see John’s true colours, rather than his endless and deeply selective regurgitation of other people’s views. I suspect most people reading Webdiary are not taken in by this tosh, but I want to be on the safe side. I also realised that I didn’t need to look very far for support for a whole list of contrary positions – John’s house is already riddled with the termites I need. So I found myself a whole list of facile, baseless, plain old-fashioned stupid, positions – and just changed a few words. Sound familiar? I should note that unlike John I don’t necessarily accuse him or anyone else of taking these positions. My intention is only to demonstrate the poverty of thinking and the cynicism which underpins the original effort. I begin to wonder if it’s not much more that some kind of word game to John, one where he gets to prove how much smarter than the rest of us he is. Perhaps he is smarter, who knows? Who cares? In sanctifying the use of military force on the grounds of his version of morality and duty, John is arguing the logic that Israel applies to Palestine. He is also arguing the logic the suicide bomber applies to Israel. And regardless of where you stand on the rights and wrongs of that particular issue, next time you read about a suicide bombing remind yourself – both Israel’s and Palestine’s approach just doesn’t work. (Before I’m lambasted for condoning suicide bombers or loving Arafat, or loving Sharon for that matter, let me unequivocally refute those and any other similarly ludicrous claims). I could stoop to John’s level at this point and say that because he talks such a clearly terrorist book, he must love terrorism. But that would just be silly, so I won’t. It is absolutely critical that we find a more intelligent way to address terrorism – both the symptoms and the causes. I do not claim to know what that way is. John does of course, but I cannot summon that quantum of arrogance. What I am certain of is that the more we listen to John and his fellow fools and fanatics as they preach a way that is so clearly wrong, the less likely we are to find a path that is right. John – you may wish to ponder this – from a man whose morality, unlike yours or mine, is not in question: “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?” Mahatma Gandhi. See – I can trundle out quotes too. They’re just shorter. I have begun to believe and hope that it in the smallest of symbolic gestures we may be planting the seeds of constructive change. It may be the only way that people like us can hope to make any kind of difference. Confronting John is a tiny act, I admit, but it’s got to be done, because he is a tiny part of the problem. Here’s my response to Desiderata, with apologies and thanks to John Wojdylo *** Contra Desiderata By David Makinson I will not engage this Islamist idealism. I will not wonder why they hate my way of life and vow to destroy it. My love and humanity will be put to one side, reserved exclusively for those I call my own. Their grievances and hurts will be ignored. I will have them murdered as they murder us. I will not build schools for their children, give their families food when they need it, educate them about my way of life, help them build the society of their dreams. I will use military force and make sure the wounds go ever deeper. I will turn a deliberate blind eye to the evils inflicted upon them by people acting in my name, by the “system” I live under because I do not care. When my people die I will send the young of my nation to kill theirs. It is the easiest thing, and there can be no forgiveness. I cannot live without hating or confronting someone. It is essential to me. I will be endless vengeance, and slay a hundred of them for every one I lose. I will never subject myself to self-criticism, I will ignore my failures, and I will not try to understand what else I can do to see things from their point of view and make them stop hating me and my people. I will never try to imagine their imagined grievances against me, so that I can persuade them – through my humanity – that we’re really all just human beings, can all live together irrespective of our deeply-held ambitions and will to achieve them. I endorse the politicians and commentators who portray my cause as noble because we have lost our friends. I applaud this necessary manipulation. I will be the corrupt one who can comprehend the realities of power and who will foster madness. Madness is a tool to be used for my ends. Without their madness, and my own, I have no substance, and no-one will listen to me. I understand the power I wield, particularly that using weapons of mass destruction against those who have done nothing to me is perfectly acceptable. I will not seek out the actual criminals. I will revenge myself with indiscriminate acts of mass murder. I will be like them, because I am like them. I will, at all costs, pretend I do not see the mirror which shows in my own face the portents of incorrigible and embittered irrationality, and I will use my power gratuitously to force more and more people in their worlds and my own towards the abyss. By my conscious acts, I will sow the seeds of an attack which will not only destroy a building and 200 lives, but an entire city. I will respond to this with ever greater violence. Because for a Wojdylo, it can make no material difference. I feel the power of God when my finger is on the keyboard; and in a self-referential narcissistic loop, I will dismiss all contrary views even as by my own words I prove their validity. Because I am right and they are wrong.