Tag Archives: Australian Senate

It’s time to fix our media laws

22 Feb

By Dr Stewart Hase

You have to admire, at some level, the brass of Paul Fletcher and Josh Frydenberg claiming that the new media code will contribute to more fact-based, rigorous news content. In the background Scomo is nodding his head like one of those little plastic dogs in the back window of a Kingswood. While the ‘code’ is probably the right step forward, let’s not let it gloss over the role of media in shaping public opinion.

The Murdoch empire has over many years provided trillions of dollars of free advertising to the Liberal Party, massaging the editorial stance of every paper Murdoch takes over. It’s impossible not to laugh hysterically at the adverts for Sky News, in which they say that it offers the only truly balanced view, reporting ‘all sides’ as Alan Jones, Peta Credlin, Andrew Bolt, Paul Murray et al stride onto the screen. You wouldn’t buy a used car from any of them.

Mind you, in the interests of balance in this blog, you know what you are going to get when you read the Guardian, the Huffington Post, The Washington Post, the Sydney Morning Herald and the New Daily, for example. Any student of cognitive bias, in which reality is distorted to remain consistent with one’s attitudes, values and beliefs, will tell you that true independence would be a small miracle. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’ Not sure many of us do that and is a skill that needs to be taught in school.

The issue of media bias would probably be fine, since it mirrors the predilection of the human brain, were it not for scope. Kevin 07, like a candle in a gale force wind, argued to a Senate inquiry last week that News Ltd has a monopoly in Australia (Murdoch owns 70% of media in Australia and in Queensland, nearly 100%). In exhibit 1, a recent edition of the Daily Telegraph, Kev showed how five pages of text was no more than an opinion piece, rather than news. His view was nicely and ironically reinforced by the Telegraph, which has run a campaign of vilification about Kev not seen since their attacks on Julie Gillard-nothing to do with news and everything to do with suppressing a voice.

And Facebook, as Kev notes, is another demonstration of what can happen when a monolith with too much power can hijack information. One can only marvel at the prescience of George Orwell in ‘Nineteen-Eighty-Four’-a world in which information is manufactured, controlled and meted out at the whim of ‘Big Brother’.

The debate over the code, and Facebook’s demonstration of power, has brought into stark relief the issue of media ownership in this country. We need our Federal government to fix what is a threat to democracy and ensure we have the opportunity to have real news, not just opinion, real facts not manufactured reality, and journalists that can report what is really happening, to speak truth to power when necessary: nay, when essential. Most of us are cynical about politics and the news that surrounds it. So, now is the time to act and put pressure on government to fix this travesty, even as Murdoch signs a deal with Google to transmit even more of his bile.

Stewart is a psychologist with a special interest in how people adapt and also learn. He’s written widely in these areas. He continues to consult, and annoy people who misuse power.Twitter: @stewarthase

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Random political concerns

17 Mar

Political Greed

 

1. Is the taxpayer funding Treasurer Joe Hockey’s defamation case against Fairfax Press?

Nobody seems to be able to get a satisfactory answer to this question, so this morning I sent Mr Hockey a tweet:

If the taxpayer is not funding Mr Hockey’s action, why doesn’t the government simply come out and say so, thus laying the speculation to rest? Things are bad enough for them, one imagines, without further unnecessary public grumblings.

I do hope the Treasurer has time to spend on the budget, given his preoccupation with savaging Fairfax in court for allegedly making him look “odious.” Fairfax also allegedly made Hockey’s dad cry, and caused his daughter to ask him if people were trying to buy him.

Just as well Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd never took up arms against the Murdoch Press, otherwise they’d have spent their entire political careers in court. The idea of politicians suing media for defamation is mind-bogglingly stupid but as Treasurer Hockey claims as justification: “The only thing you walk out of politics with is your reputation.”

Ummmm….. He was being ironic, right? Right?

2. With the next budget due in about eight weeks, why is Prime Minister Tony Abbott still reassuring us that he is “listening” to our concerns about the last one, rather than looking to the future and giving us some indication of what is in store? Instead he seems intent on adding to the list of “backflips” he’s had to make since last May, and once again we find ourselves in country that has become all too familiar since Abbott took leadership of the LNP, the Land of Unrelenting Negativity. Is there anything more negative than backflips?

I was right yesterday and today I have totally changed my mind and I am still right, otherwise known as the Christopher Pyne patented olympic gold backflip, heralds a new low in egregious LNP spin. The Education Minister was forced to de-link higher education reforms from the funding of scientific research, an abhorrent linkage that should never, in anybody’s wildest dreams, have existed in the first place. Somewhere in all the sound and fury Pyne managed to add that it is all Labor’s fault.

The explanations and excuses for this spectacularly bizarre method of governance are that it continues to be the fault of Labor, that Abbott is “learning” from his mistakes, that Abbott is “listening” to the people’s discontent, and that everything jaw-droppingly frightful he says is taken out of context, nevertheless he stands by it and if he doesn’t, everyone makes mistakes and anyway, anyway, it’s all Labor’s fault.

A Prime Minister still in the potty-training phase is a frightening prospect for a country. Abbott has been in politics for decades, served as a Minister in the Howard government, and as Leader of the Opposition. He is by no means a political novice, and yet we are being asked, almost daily, to give him another chance to adapt to his new responsibilities.

If he is still attempting to grasp the nature of his job by now, he needs to resign from it, because no country can afford a leader who this far into his first term still has no idea what he’s doing and where he is going.

If, like me, you are finding it difficult to keep up with Abbott’s horrible mangling of just about everything, Sally McManus has thoughtfully set up a “Tracking Abbott’s Wreckage” page right here.

3. In case you are confused by Senator George Brandis’s tumultuous, some might even allege abusive relationship with the proposed metadata laws, here’s what he said this morning. Bloggers, he declares, are not journalists, so we are not covered by the amendments that will protect those who are “journalists by profession.”

The debate over whether or not bloggers are journalists continues to exercise legal and media minds in Australia, while the issue is far more clear-cut in the US and New Zealand. Essentially in Australia bloggers will not be protected by the same metadata amendments as are professional journalists, in that we have to reveal our sources whilst they do not. This would likely affect a blogger such as the indefatigable Wixxyleaks, who continues to do a sterling job exposing the HSU/Kathy Jackson shenanigans.

Essentially, metadata retention laws create a situation in which we are all assumed to be guilty of something in our online lives. The ramifications of the state taking such an attitude towards its citizens are many, and I don’t believe it’s what governments are designed to do in a liberal democracy. The utter spinelessness of the ALP on this matter ought to make us vote for anyone but the major parties, because there’s not, as I might have said before, a bee’s dick of difference in their policies on this. Governments are not granted power in order to turn it against citizens, en masse and if they do, they can expect that one day the citizens will, en masse, turn against them.

Civil Disobedience

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Censured: The problem is Brandis not Triggs.

3 Mar

George Brandis

 

Yesterday’s Senate censure of Attorney-General George Brandis for his treatment of Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs, has no direct constitutional or legal consequences. It is important, however, that the censure motion is on record as an example of attempts to bully into silence the head of a statutory authority the Attorney-General is obliged, in his job description, to defend against malicious attack.

If the government of the day is dissatisfied with the performance of the head of a statutory body there are presumably procedures in place to deal with that situation. I doubt very much that one of them is instigating personal public attacks. At the very least, the Attorney-General should be aware of the proper way to go about addressing perceived performance failures, and follow those guidelines.

Professor Triggs was entitled to natural justice. Instead she was subjected to an appalling attack by the very person who is obliged to ensure her right to natural justice is honoured.  This alone is just cause for censuring the Attorney-General, who could not have more blatantly failed to carry out his duties.

An Attorney-General who behaves in such a manner has gone rogue. He is not upholding the principles and duties of his office. He is making up the rules as he goes along. He is supported absolutely in his feral abrogation by his Prime Minister, Tony Abbott.

This is our problem. It isn’t Gillian Triggs. It’s a government that has scant regard for any statutory body, any procedure, any law that doesn’t suit their ideological ambitions. The HRC is an anathema to the Abbott government, not least because one of the Commission’s responsibilities is to monitor and report on the actions of that government. What better way to demoralise and disempower the HRC than to publicly and ferociously go after its head?

 

 

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Pyne’s advertising campaign is long-term LNP propaganda

9 Dec

anti_public_education_propaganda_by_8manderz8-d5xz1cjOnly days after the education reform bill was defeated in the Senate, the government has launched what it describes as an “information” campaign, funded by tax payers, that claims to educate the public about the failed proposed reforms to higher education.

The campaign to promote understanding of the failed bill is funded by taxpayers. The Abbott government justifies this by claiming the campaign meets all necessary guide-lines to qualify not as political advertising, but as information that is in the public interest. Obviously, the campaign was prepared in anticipation of a Senate defeat.

Shadow Education Minister Kim Carr claimed this morning on ABC Radio National’s early AM program that the advertising is deliberately misleading, and falsely claims that the government will pay “around half of your undergraduate degree.” Carr has fact checked this claim with universities in Western Australia and Queensland and depending on the discipline, students will pay between 57% and 88% of the costs of their degrees.

This is a job for the ABC’s Fact Check unit, if it still exists.

The government’s goal is to create a narrative in which the LNP is struggling to introduce reforms that are positive for students financially (good) and is being thwarted in its efforts by an uncooperative opposition and minor parties (bad). In other words, the Abbott government is striving to gives us what’s best for us against a relentless opposition that doesn’t care about us.

Their goal, I imagine, is to ignite resentment and discontent in the electorate towards an obstructionist ALP and minor parties, a narrative we can expect to see strengthen in the next two years as we approach the next election.

The fact that this is a dud reform quite rightly prevented from realisation is irrelevant. There is also no mention of proposed cuts to universities in the campaign.

Tony Abbott, his ministers and backbenchers take every opportunity to persuade us that all their troubles are the responsibility of the previous Labor government. There is only so long a government can use this tactic to distract from its own incompetence. I’d suggest the Abbott government has long since passed that time limit.

The government is engaged in an ongoing election battle that began years ago when Abbott became LOTO. This most recent taxpayer-funded “information campaign” is yet another sign that Abbott is not so much concerned with good governance as he is with winning the next election. The education reform bill advertising is long-game propaganda, and contributes to Abbott’s over-arching narrative of governmental good intentions thwarted both by Labor’s legacy, and its alleged ongoing obstruction.

 

 

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