Articles – Page 32

This Mindless Pursuit Of Scandal Belongs To The Past

One of the more peculiar literary artefacts of the pre-democratic world is the ”secret history”. These secret histories purported to expose sex, incest, murder, and conspiracy in royal courts. The first and most famous concerned the Roman Emperor Justinian. It was borderline pornographic, and endlessly imitated.

Of course, the stories they told were almost entirely fictitious. But truth wasn’t the point.

Secret histories were political tracts in disguise. Their significance wasn’t the purported scandals, but what the books tried to do: undermine the authority of the monarch. Secret histories were democratic politics for undemocratic times.

Australia in the 21st century is a modern democracy. So why are we just as desperate to discover – even invent – scandals as our ancestors?

Our political class has spent the past two years obsessing over a series of obscure controversies. Even if they had all panned out – if every allegation about Julia Gillard and Peter Slipper and Craig Thomson were true – it would hardly be Watergate.

Nobody had heard of Thomson until the Health Services Union scandal broke. Slipper was briefly significant when he was made speaker.

And the Gillard slush-fund scandal? At least it had the virtue of being about a prime minister. But then, we’re not being asked to hire Gillard as a lawyer in the 1990s, we’re being asked to vote for her to run the country in the 2010s.

Like the secret histories, the truth of these scandals is beside the point. Scandalmongering is politics by other means. In Britain, scandals engulf the entire political system. Australian politics is threatening to go down that road.

The Gillard government should be a sitting duck. In the past six months, Labor has proposed a dangerous internet data-retention scheme, radical changes to anti-discrimination law, and is mulling over whether to regulate the press.

But Coalition frontbenchers seem more interested in whether Gillard signed a mortgage document two decades ago. No wonder that even with its lead in the polls, the Coalition seems on the back foot.

Still, scandals are a bipartisan distraction. For most of the year, Trade Minister Craig Emerson has been saying the Coalition is too scandal-obsessed to question him about his portfolio. Fair cop.

But then the judgment in the Slipper case was released alleging a “conspiracy” between Slipper’s accuser, James Ashby, and Coalition figures. Now it turns out Emerson is deeply passionate about scandals, too. Emerson self-published an article last week asking what Julie Bishop knew about Ashby and when. He even complained the media wasn’t focusing enough on the affair.
Coalition supporters call it Slippergate. Labor supporters call it Ashbygate. Both sides are being equally ridiculous.

Labor showed the same political desperation during the Australian Wheat Board scandal. This was a rich enough controversy as it was. But apparently, for the ALP, the real issue when a Commonwealth authority bribes Saddam Hussein is whether John Howard knew about it.

Political scandalmongering doesn’t just damage its targets. By the end of 2012, both sides of politics have been greatly diminished.

A shadow minister who doesn’t talk about their portfolio area so they can pursue the story of the day may be rewarded with some brief media coverage. But they will have done nothing to mount a case against the government. Nor will they have endeared themselves with the electorate. Voters pay more attention to policy. Policy matters. Peter Slipper’s text messages don’t.

Perhaps the ministers who decide to spearhead scandal hunting think they are taking one for the team; perhaps they know they’ll be worse off afterwards. Then again, considering how enthusiastically our representatives jump on even the vaguest hint of scandal, perhaps not.

There’s nothing more jarring than when partisan hacks congratulate senior politicians for “taking the lead” on these absurdities, as if it matters. You have to wonder why some politicians are even in Parliament at all – at least, if they think there is more to politics than the raw pursuit of power.

Our ancestors eagerly devoured secret histories because they poked holes in the royal bubble when kings and queens claimed to rule by divine right. Stories that showed them as human undermined their legitimacy.

Our rulers are more humble now. But ever since Watergate, oppositions have been seduced into thinking they could pull a government down before an election is due. The more they indulge in this fantasy, the more they corrupt the democratic system they hope to run.

Videogame Blame Distracts From The Real Gun Debate

Before Adam Lanza murdered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, he smashed the hard drive on his computer.

That act may frustrate investigators trying figure out his motives, but it has proved to be no obstacle for amateur psychologists.

Indeed, the closest the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre came to coherence in his bizarre press conference last week was when he blamed “vicious, violent” games like Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat, and an obscure browser game called Kindergarten Killer.

There are now two competing lessons about the Sandy Hook school shooting. One focuses on Lanza’s access to guns, and one focuses on Lanza’s fondness for videogames.

A plumber who worked on his home says Lanza was “obsessed” by games. This psychological issue was apparently diagnosed in the time it took to work on the Lanza household’s pipes.

A high-school classmate says his preferred weapon in videogames was an assault rifle; a damning assessment only if you’ve never played any games at all. (Assault rifles tend to be best in-game weapons.)

Police investigators report there were “thousands of dollars” of games in the home: another tidbit which is superficially compelling if you don’t know a game can cost about $100 and most gamers acquire dozens of them.

Lanza “played videogames for hours” breathlessly reported the New York Daily News, which is not remarkable considering most games last around 10 hours.

Take these little factoids with a grain of salt. The Sandy Hook shooting was nearly two weeks ago but like all tragedies almost every piece of information is provisional. The world’s press has swept through Connecticut trying to find new angles and dig up tales about the killer.

Falsehoods become embedded in our mind when they tell a compelling story. At his press conference Wayne LaPierre listed the most violent sounding games his researchers could find, but – as far as we know – Lanza’s favourite game was StarCraft, a science fiction strategy game. This Washington Post story says he was particularly good at Dance Dance Revolution. Not many assault rifles in that game.

The charge that videogames cause violence is easy to refute. There is a large amount of research on the question and it’s compelling. To give just a taste: game sales have skyrocketed in the last decade in the United States but the rate of violent crime heading towards historic lows. There’s no obvious relationship between videogame usage and gun-related murder, as this ten country comparison demonstrates. A study published in August this year (PDF) found videogames don’t seem to have consequences – negative or positive – on adolescent aggression in the short or long term. Virtual violence doesn’t desensitise gamers to real-world violence.

On the more particular topic of school shootings, a joint report by the US Secret Service and Department of Education in 2002 found only 12 per cent of school shooters had expressed an interest in violent videogames.

Obviously, Wayne LaPierre mentioned videogames to muddy the policy waters. Far from the principled defenders of the American constitution, the gun lobby is happy to attack the First Amendment to protect the Second.

But targeting videogames allowed him to make this obscene claim: “does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment?”

This is both logical and stupid: millions of people play videogames, so millions of people are potential mass murderers. But how LaPierre thought mass panic would serve the interests of gun owners is difficult to understand. (Although you can see why gun manufacturers might be pleased.)

In a way, it’s too late. The American education system descended into security paranoia long ago.

After the Columbine shootings in 1999, many states rigidly enforced zero-tolerance approaches to violent or threatening behaviour in schools. Zero-tolerance made sense at the time. One of the Columbine killers, Dylan Klebold, had written violent essays, and it was tempting to think the massacre could have been averted if his teachers were on guard.

But in practice zero-tolerance was highly repressive. There are countless stories of children being expelled or suspended for simply drawing pictures of guns, for playing cops and robbers, for bringing a paring knife in their lunchbox to cut fruit. These tales would be laughable if they weren’t so cruel.

On top of unthinking zero-tolerance policies, we can add metal detectors at schools, massive arrays of CCTV cameras, random locker and car searches, and armed police. This recollection of education in Virginia on BoingBoing offers a glimpse of the security madness which now characterises the American public school system.

It will only get worse. In response to the Sandy Hook shooting, all 4,000 elementary schools in Ontario (yes, the Canadian province, that Ontario) will be implementing a “locked door” policy during school hours.

The NRA’s plan was to use fear – fear of videogames, of violent culture, of “the next Adam Lanza” – as a distraction from the gun debate. Perhaps they needn’t have bothered: that fear and paranoia was already there.

Memo To Government: Having An Opinion Is Not A Crime

By now we ought to have learnt this lesson: don’t let lawyers write law. At first glance, the Gillard government’s proposed changes to federal anti-discrimination law seem pretty benign. The expressed goal is to merge a bunch of acts into one omnibus act, reducing red tape and duplication. But this impression lasts for exactly as long as it takes to read the draft Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill 2012. Then it becomes clear the goal is something else entirely – to politicise civil society and tangle our interpersonal relationships in litigation.

It is an extraordinarily broad, excessive, vague and dangerous piece of legislation. To take one of the bill’s most revolutionary provisions: it would become unlawful to offend someone in a work or any work-related environment because of their political opinion. Yes, the bill actually says “political opinion”. If it became law, our beliefs would become sacrosanct. It would be against the law to insult them. The idea is absurd. Politics – the winner-take-all contest for power – is always going to be offensive to someone.

”Work-related area” could mean almost anything as well. The government says it intends to take a broad view of what counts as work-related. Even volunteering would be covered.

So, did a colleague say something disparaging against the Greens? Sue them. Not amused by a cartoon on a co-worker’s Facebook wall? Sue them. Didn’t get invited back to the bake sale after you called the Prime Minister “Juliar”? Probably discrimination – sue them all. Don’t be shy. If you disagree with someone’s politics, you can just take them to court.

Has the government really not thought this all through? Or do they genuinely want to bury society in an avalanche of lawsuits and legal threats?

Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Sure, oppositions are sometimes pressed for time, but governments bother to read their own legislation. It seems there are lawyers within the Attorney-General’s Department who believe Australians should be encouraged to take each other to court for trivial slights.

Australia’s political classes have long made a hobby of suing each other. Now the government wants the hoi polloi to share the fun.

The draft bill even reverses the burden of proof in favour of the persons saying they were offended, and ensures that they won’t be penalised if they lose. These provisions are all designed to make the process easier; to ensure more lawsuits are launched.

On Wednesday, the president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Professor Gillian Triggs, conceded the bill perhaps goes too far. “Maybe there’s wisdom,” she said, in raising the threshold for legal action above offence.

Wisdom, yes, but wisdom her organisation does not share. The Human Rights Commission’s official recommendation to government was not to ease back but to double down – to make it unlawful to politically offend anybody in any area of “public life”. This would include “access to public places”.

Still, that argument has a perverse logic. If the government thinks of workplaces as part of public life (that’s what the draft bill says) why should the ban against political offence be limited to the office or factory?

But it’s hard to think of anything more undemocratic than the exclusion of controversial political opinion from public life. Free debate is a pillar of liberal democracy. We should be resolving our political disagreements in public, not through lawyers.

The Australian Human Rights Commission has a brief to promote and protect human rights. And it’s been pushing for these changes for years. There’s no surprise there. The commission faces a specific set of incentives. Discrimination complaints go to the commission for “conciliation” before they head to court. And the more human rights problems there are, the more human rights problems the commission will be asked to conciliate.

In a 2009 paper, one Human Rights Commissioner even said the government should “moderate” the expression of religion in public. In his view, religions needed to be tamed by “the hand of government, even if gentle and gloved”.

Freedom of religion and expression are our oldest liberties. Yet in the mind of the government’s chief human rights body they ought to take a back seat to new rights such as the right not to be offended.

The commission talks about trade-offs between competing rights. These trade-offs seem very one-sided. Inevitably, the government ends up with more power and civil society ends up subject to more legal control. This bill goes to a Senate committee over the Christmas holidays. It needs to die a quick death.

2012: The Year In Political Outrage

You can still access the Facebook page for the Channel 10 talk show The Circle.

There’s a disclaimer on it now – the show was cancelled in August, and Channel 10 doesn’t want any responsibility for the page – but the page survives, its wall plastered with happy behind-the-scenes photos. It’s all a bit sad, in retrospect, but they seem like they’re having great fun.

Scroll down the Facebook timeline and that joy suddenly disappears. On February 29, a wall post titled “A message from Network Ten” officially apologised for the comments made by Yumi Stynes and George Negus about a Victoria Cross recipient, Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith on the show.

The disembodied corporate voice did not satisfy. There are 1,918 comments on that post and another 6,461 on a follow up.

“Words are cheap!” proclaimed one Facebook commenter.

“You are scum, spineless scum,” said another.

Stynes copped most of it. (The women usually do.)

“When you hear Yumi Stynes you think of stupid, gutless, low, meaningless, un Australian.”

One comment summed up the general mood:

“The nation was offended and it deserves an act of contrition from TEN that involves sacking.”

The nation got offended an awful lot in 2012. Ours was such a year of outrage that all these little episodes seem to have blurred into one: a swirling furiousness against Qantas, Alan Jones, Kyle Sandilands, in defence of Charlotte Dawson, against Charlotte Dawson, Alan Jones again, in defence of Robbie Farah, against Robbie Farah, “Twitter trolls”, Alan Jones again, and then finally, tragically, the two 2DayFM hosts.

By the time the 2DayFM hosts made their prank call, there was already a fixed outrage-on-commercial-broadcasting playbook: shut down advertising before advertisers can shut down themselves, bare your soul to the press.

But, 11 months on, can you even remember what was so outrageous about Yumi Stynes? Don’t Google. It was Negus, not Stynes, who speculated about Corporal Roberts-Smith’s sexual prowess: “what if they’re not up to it in the sack?” Hence the “dud root” comment. Stynes suggested the good soldier wasn’t that smart.

Was this a tasteless? Okay, if you want. But, really, “the nothing hosts of this second rate show MAKE ME SICK”?

The Yumi Stynes saga was a sign of things to come. As episodes of outrage accumulated over the year, they became more overwhelming.

Alan Jones’ infamous comment in September – that the Prime Minister’s father had “died of shame” – shut down political debate for weeks. The Alan Jones saga was like a centrifuge: it dragged in everything, eventually parliament itself.

We forget now that Peter Slipper was not the only “context” for Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech. There was also Tony Abbott’s thoughtless repetition of Jones’ phrase moments earlier. To the extent that Labor’s modest recovery has come by painting Abbott as anti-woman, it was a recovery forged in the winds of the Alan Jones controversy.

Australia isn’t good at talking about more than one thing at once. Our population is too small, our newspapers are too skinny, and our broadcasters are too few.

As with everything else, we are hopelessly constrained by size. When these episodes of outrage occur they submerge our tiny media sector. The Alan Jones comments were first reported on September 29. It was only after Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech 10 days later that the public debate came up for air and was able to discuss something else.

It’s wrong to blame social media for our new propensity to outrage. Certainly (as I’ve argued in the past) Twitter shapes what the media and political class imagine the public thinks. Nobody would defend the proposition that Twitter is representative but, when you’re hit by hundreds of tweets in a row saying the same furious thing, it’s hard not to feel that “the public” is talking back.

Social media and the mainstream press are interdependent. The new and old media feed on each other. We mustn’t pretend that the hundreds of columns and news stories published on Jones or Stynes or Robbie Farah didn’t happen, or to minimise them by saying they’re just a symptom of online activism.

No, outrage suits the times. It’s no coincidence that episodes of outrage have dominated during the greatest contraction in the mainstream press in Australian history. They’re easy to comprehend, they’re easy to write about, and everybody has an opinion about them.

And they are entertaining. What Alan Jones said at a private Young Liberal function is a collective cultural experience in an era where collective cultural experiences are few and far between.
Sure, outrage can be confected. No-one was really offended by Peter Slipper’s text messages. Showy moralising anger is a new weapon in the political arsenal.

But if you want to see genuine anger, take a moment to scroll through The Circle’s defunct Facebook page.

“You have lost me FOREVER Chan 10…… and I will be telling everyone else to dump you guys too.”

“Disgraceful and un-Australian! How about u go over to the gan and fight for your country and then come back and think about flappin your lips!!”

Outrage is politics packaged up for the water cooler: it’s transient, meaningless, forgettable, and, for a brief moment, intensely all-consuming.

Losing Interest In Our Rate Obsession

As the 20th century opened there were 18 central banks around the world. One hundred years later there were 173.

But none of them have as tight a grip on the political culture as Australia’s Reserve Bank.

No other country grants so much mystical significance to their central bank’s interest rate decisions. We are obsessed.

Last Tuesday the bank lowered the cash rate to 3 per cent, releasing another torrent of claims and counterclaims. Wayne Swan declared it was testimony to his great management of the economy. Joe Hockey said the rates had been dropped to “emergency levels”. Retail banks were threatened. Peter Costello’s name was invoked.

Politicians have deified the Reserve Bank. It’s unusual for a politician to publicly second guess the board’s encyclicals. Happily, commentators do not share their faith. So last week, as always, columns were written and talking heads talked. Is the bank’s board being bold, prudent, reckless, negligent? Take your pick.

We’re so used to these theatrics that we don’t realise how unusually Australian it all is.

But compare how foreign politicians and parties view their interest rate movements.

For the British Conservative Party, low interest rates are merely a feature of a healthy economy – and not a particularly central one. Here’s a Google search of the Conservative Party website. The most concrete claim they make is that their hard-won fiscal credibility keeps interest rates low.

The Australian Liberal Party’s website shows a completely different picture. Here, low interest rates are themselves the goal. Interest rates will be lower under the Coalition. They’re higher under Labor. Gillard finally admits she has forced up interest rates. And on and on and on.

We can play the same game with the labour parties, although to be fair the difference is not as stark. Here’s the ALP, and here are their British cousins.

And the Americans? Well, in the 32,000 word, 55 page Republican Party platform (PDF), interest rates are mentioned … once. Even though it’s pretty plausible that extremely low Federal Reserve rates were a major cause of the financial crisis.

So yes, Australians are a bit different. Interest rates are the bread and butter of the political contest – as Australian as asylum seekers. The federal Liberal campaign in 2004 was almost entirely structured around interest rates.

In April this year Bill Shorten even suggested that knowledge of Reserve Bank meetings was central to political leadership in this country. Yes, we smugly all laughed as Shorten tried to correct Tony Abbott’s factual error with his own factual error (the bank meets the firstTuesday of every month, not the second). But more important was why Shorten thought Abbott’s mistake was a big deal: “when you want to be the alternative Prime Minister of Australia, interest rates is just such an important issue”.

And all this rhetoric for something governments have almost no control over.

The Reserve Bank is independent; it makes its decisions in private, pretending to know nothing of the busy political world outside its boardroom. When parties take credit for rate cuts or damn their opponents for rate rises, they are simply bluffing. They have no direct control over the rates. They have little indirect either. Of all the sources of inflation in a modern, open, liberal economy, national governments can only really influence one or two.

In other words, our politicians are playing a game with pieces they don’t control, but it’s worse than that. If rates go up, mortgage holders will hate it. If they go down, then the economy may be going down as well, but the Mum and Dad homeowner will be delighted. Throw into this mix the typical contrarian lines: the economy is “over-heating”; what about retirees? Nobody can win this game, but everybody is desperate to play.

A more interesting issue has arisen in recent years: we’re learning that even the Reserve Bank has only so much power over economy-wide interest rates.

Australia grew accustomed to the big four banks dancing to the tune of the Reserve Bank’s decisions. During the Howard years rate cuts were dutifully passed on to consumers. But history may record that as an anomaly – a short decade where retail banks and the central bank were aligned.

We tend to imagine anything that lasts a few years is natural and permanent. But Australia’s banking sector is still evolving since the financial liberalisation of the 1980s. So too is the Reserve Bank itself; it only achieved full independence in 1996.

When the Global Financial Crisis came, the close relationship between banks and the central bank broke. Few regretted this breakup more than the Labor Government. Now we have the embarrassing spectacle of a Government trying to bully mortgage rates down, and an Opposition pretending they possess a magic hammer that would set the banking system straight again.

Nothing frustrates politicians like powerlessness. For much of the 20th century, governments were able to control prices across the economy. They had many levers to do so – tariffs and taxes and quotas and so forth – and the public expected governments to pull those levers.

But the 20th century was a long time ago. The Reserve Bank cash rate is one of the few centrally planned prices left, and even then it set by a body independent of the government of the day.
When the Reserve Bank cut rates last week, Wayne Swan proclaimed this was the early Christmas present Australia’s hard-working families deserved.

But if rate cuts are gifts, does that mean rate rises are punishments? Of course not. Sometimes prices go up and sometimes prices go down. Our political culture needs to stop being so futilely obsessed with the Reserve Bank.

It’s About More Than Just Phone Hacking … Unfortunately

If you want to know what actually happened in the British phone hacking scandal, you won’t find it in the Leveson inquiry report released last Thursday.

The report comprises almost 2,000 pages; it’s spread across four volumes and has 59 separate chapters. It has a lot of stuff about media history and ethics and philosophy; a lot of hand-wringing about press “culture” and personal friendships between Fleet Street and Westminster.

But not a lot about who committed what crime and when.

For instance, the fact that Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson (both ex-News of the World editors) are in court this week facing charges of corrupt payments to public officials does not inform the report.

Nor the fact that at least three public officials have been arrested for misconduct in a public office – that is, corruption.

Lord Justice Leveson is recommending statutory regulation of the press before his inquiry has gotten to the bottom of the phone hacking scandal.

Even by the woolly standards of judge-led policy advocacy, this is pretty stark. Especially considering his proposals would be a reversal of the four-century-old victory of free press over state power.

The Leveson inquiry’s terms of reference are split in two. Part 1 looks at the “culture, practices, and ethics of the press”. Part 2 investigates the specific allegations of unlawful conduct and corrupt payments between press and police.

This is the real issue, as I argued in July last year. Criminal acts are a bad thing and should be punished. But criminal acts with the assistance of police are much, much more disconcerting. Thursday’s report is Part 1. Part 2 hasn’t even started yet.

Operation Elveden – the Metropolitan Police Department’s investigation into corruption in the police force – is ongoing. Leveson writes that he doesn’t want to step on its toes. Repeatedly throughout the report, witnesses suggest serious things. For instance, unnamed senior officers are “rumoured to be corrupt”, but the story ends there, “for fear of undermining what could be an ongoing investigation”.

Still, the first report reveals a litany of errors, misjudgements and bureaucratic backside-covering that allowed the scandal to build before it exploded in 2011.

Between 2001 and 2003, the Devon and Cornwall Police discovered a ring of retired and serving police officers selling information from police databases to private investigators. The investigators were then selling that information to various clients, some of whom were journalists.

Such privacy breaches are not unusual. Over the last decade, more than 200 Metropolitan police officers and civilian administrators have been disciplined for wrongfully accessing the Police National Database. The current commissioner described this to the Leveson inquiry as a “chronic problem”.

But when the Devon and Cornwall Police cases went to court, the judges let the accused go with conditional discharges. They didn’t even get fined.

When the story surfaced again in 2006 (this time the Royal family was claiming its private phone messages were being listened to) memory of the pathetic sentences given to the earlier cases meant the London police were reluctant to aggressively push their investigations. It just wasn’t worth the effort. That, and Britain was at the height of the anti-terrorism campaign. In the wake of the London bombings, chasing privacy prosecutions was less a priority than hunting violent Islamists.

Still, one reporter – News of the World’s “one rogue reporter” – was prosecuted. As part of its investigations, the police found a huge list of potential victims, but it failed to notify them.
Three years later, the Guardian and the New York Times published allegations of widespread phone hacking. This time, the police stonewalled. The issue had already been dealt with. To admit that there was more to the case was to admit that they were wrong to draw a line under the rogue reporter in 2006.

The Milly Dowler story erupted in July 2011. The police had been in possession of seized documents with her name – and Hugh Grant’s name – since the first investigations in 2003.

I’ve dwelled on this timeline because it is the closest the Leveson report gets to an exploration of the specific failures that led to the phone hacking scandal.

It’s all well and good to wax lyrical about ethics and press culture. But if we want to link problem to solution – a basic requirement in the development of good public policy – we have to know what actually caused the events we’re concerned about.

And too much of the Leveson report is divorced from the phone hacking itself. You can understand why David Cameron offered Leveson such a wide brief – he was embarrassed about his relationship to the now disgraced Andy Coulson. But the distance between scandal detail and regulatory proposals undermines the point of the whole inquiry.

To be fair, Leveson’s effort is far better than Australia’s Finkelstein inquiry. Here, Justice Ray Finkelstein wasn’t even given a scandal to work with – he had to construct a justification for press regulation out of thin air. Where Britain had the Milly Dowler case, Australia had the vibe of the thing.

So it is not insignificant that the Finkelstein and Leveson recommendations were so similar: statutory regulation of the press disguised as “self-regulation”. In the UK this is apparently the solution to widespread criminality. In Australia it is apparently a solution to … well, what exactly? The strongest case Finkelstein could come up with was that newspapers gave an unbalanced presentation of climate science.

But there’s a vocal group of people who want a new regulator backed by government, so that’s what gets recommended. Is there anybody who didn’t think Leveson or Finkelstein would call for new regulation? The only suspense has been for the details.

Last week David Cameron rejected those details – he would not cross the Rubicon into press regulation. Hopefully, Julia Gillard and Stephen Conroy will do the same.

Addicted: The Medicalisation Of Bad Behaviour

Our ancestors used religion to ward off the things that scared them. We use medicine. There are few better illustrations of the perverse “medicalisation” of society than the claim that “video game craving is as bad as alcohol”.

We’re taking the human condition (passion, obsession, desire, pleasure) and trying to turn it into a medical condition.

The story is as follows: a PhD candidate at the Australian National University recruited 38 gamers who played an average of 10 to 15 hours of video games a week. Those who reported feelings of withdrawal or cravings to keep playing their favourite game were classed as addicts.

All participants then did a simple test: they were shown a series of differently coloured words and asked to name the colour, not the word, as quickly as they could. Some of the words were related to video games, and with those words the ”addicts” took longer to name the colour than the casual gamers.

The conclusion? Gaming addicts are as consumed by games as alcoholics are consumed by drinking. This is apparently ‘”some of the first scientific evidence that video gaming can be addictive”.

But let’s back up a bit. Ten to 15 hours of gaming a week isn’t very much. The Australian Communications and Media Authority says Australians watch about 20 hours of television a week.

Sometimes we might even suffer negative consequences from this indulgence. (“One more episode of Homeland? It’s already 10.30, but …”) We may get emotionally involved in a show. We might even crave it.

But you could say the same thing about any hobby. And nobody is suggesting the average Australian is addicted to television or fishing or woodwork. At least, not in any meaningful, medical sense.

Addiction is a notoriously slippery concept. In a 2000 study published in the journal Addiction Research, 20 senior addiction experts in the American Psychological Association were asked to define what they meant by the word “addiction”. The answers differed wildly.

Only half the experts could get on board a definition that included “physical dependence”. And that was the closest they came to consensus – except for a general dissatisfaction with the way addiction has come to mean more than dependence on chemical substances.

Yet this is the muddy, vague, uncertain, ill-defined concept that we seem desperate to stamp on every sort of abnormal behaviour. Without any firm foundation, the popular use of the word addiction is creeping into the scientific world.

Excessive shopping? Addiction. Excessive internet use? Addiction.

Yes, people can make a lot of money treating the choices as pathology. There’s always a pill available, or a specialist spruiking their professional services. But we’re as guilty as the medical profession here. The medicalisation of everything is comforting.

First, there’s nothing more appealing than a scientific veneer. If someone has a few too many boozy nights in a row, they don’t go easy for a while, no – they ”detoxify”. All those cultish detox diets offer little more than clean living. But they’re dressed up in pseudo-medical jargon.

Second, if something has a medical cause, it has a medical cure. This is an era of expertise and technological fixes. There is no problem that money and experts cannot fix. In January, a British MP called for the government to pay for the treatment of “those who suffer from internet or gaming addictions”. (But that’s not remotely silly compared with the Swedish heavy metal fan who is on disability support because of his heavy metal addiction.)

Medicalisation comforts because it suggests that our bad decisions are not our fault. Describing self-destructive behaviours as addictions is the ultimate way to shirk individual responsibility. Rather than agents of our own choices, we become passive recipients, preyed on by our surroundings. This is utterly dehumanising. One could ask why we’re so eager to dehumanise ourselves.

Sure, video game addiction looks a lot like a bog-standard moral panic. When someone dies from playing a game 40 hours straight – as a teenager did in Taiwan this year – commentators pontificate about video games, not, say, depression. Every pleasure has to have its dark side.

But society’s fear of addiction – our desperation to turn everything into a medical condition – goes to something deeper. We no longer burn witches; we diagnose them. Either way, we’re still chasing witches.

Liberals’ Legacy Of Mass Migration Is At Stake

If Tony Abbott becomes Prime Minister next year, he is going to have to make a decision: what to do about immigration?

Not asylum seekers: immigration.

After all, the size and composition of the total immigration intake is certain to shape our nation much more than the few thousand people who arrive by boat.

While the parties shout themselves hoarse over refugees, we’re at a unique juncture in immigration politics.

For the past 70 years, the party that has most embraced permanent migration in government has been the Liberal Party, not Labor.

Permanent and long-term arrival numbers vary every year; and not all of those variations are driven by Commonwealth government policy. But most are.

(For those interested in playing along, the Immigration Department offers a spreadsheet of historical migration numbers since 1945 here.)

The largest declines in our migration intake have occurred under Labor governments.

When Gough Whitlam, that darling of the progressive movement, came into power, immigration plummeted. In 1970, the Liberal government of John Gorton had admitted 185,000 migrants. The Whitlam government shrunk that to just over 50,000.

This was a deliberate policy decision. Whitlam even shut down the Department of Immigration, placing migration under the Department of Labour and Immigration.

That might seem a minor institutional change but it wasn’t: when merged with labour, immigration policy came under the influence of a traditionally pro-union bureaucracy. And unions don’t like it when the government imports foreign workers.

There’s long been a debate about whether it was Whitlam who ended the White Australia Policy or Harold Holt. Both did their part. But even though Whitlam proclaimed the end to the infamous policy, the sharp decline of total immigration on his watch meant that few non-European migrants could come to Australia regardless.

In March 1974 The Age pondered whether Gough Whitlam was doing as every government had done: “preaching tolerance while still practicing discrimination”.

Bob Hawke described himself as a “high immigration man”. But when he took government in 1983, the immigration intake dropped by more than a third. To Hawke’s credit, migration crept up over the next decade. But when Paul Keating took over, it plummeted again.

The Liberals have a much more impressive record.

Post-war immigration was at its peak under John Gorton. And Malcolm Fraser reversed the Whitlam backslide.

Under John Howard – that bête noire of pro-migration progressives – immigration jumped up well above the Gorton heights. In 2007, the number of permanent migrants arriving on our shores hit 191,000 – the largest cohort since the Second World War.

As George Megalogenis wrote in The Howard Factor, the real story was how “the former Hansonite belt … think Howard is keeping out all the foreigners, when he is bringing them here at a rate Paul Keating never contemplated”.

Yet Howard’s record-breaking immigration intake is apparently an awkward truth. In the standard text on this subject, From White Australia to Woomera: the Story of Australian Immigration, the academic James Jupp briefly acknowledges the Howard record – in one sentence. But the real issue for Jupp is that Howard was considering a temporary guest worker scheme, and such a scheme would hurt unions already battered by WorkChoices.

But then came the Rudd government, and the partisan pattern broke. Rather than immediately shrinking the intake, Rudd continued the trend upwards – hugely. More than 224,000 migrants entered Australia in 2010. And that terrifying guest worker scheme? A pilot program was eventually introduced not by the union-hating Liberal Party, but by the ALP.

Even Julia Gillard’s government – she of small Australia fame – has not appreciably reduced the number of migrants we take.

Given the showy anti-population rhetoric of the 2010 election, it is remarkable that we’re taking nearly twice as many foreigners than we did under the government of Bob “high immigration” Hawke.

There’s one obvious lesson here. Don’t trust what politicians say about immigration.

But when Rudd broke the pattern, he also broke the Liberal Party’s cover. After Labor prime ministers had lowered the intake, Liberal prime ministers were free to raise it; they gained no political benefit from doing otherwise. The Coalition could bang on about multiculturalism and refugees, but it would still bring in many more people than Labor.

Thanks to Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott faces different incentives to his predecessors. And the 2010 election demonstrated the Coalition’s willingness to play the anti-population card.

So there is perhaps an added significance to the Abbott’s announcement last week that he would reduce the Gillard government’s refugee intake by 6,000 places.

It’s one thing to call for temporary protection visas and off-shore processing. It’s another thing to actually reduce the refugee intake. His announcement was reported through the standard stop-the-boats prism but it hints at something deeper: the Coalition may sense an opportunity to rehash the 2010 themes in 2013.

Abbott has previously said that he would like to make skilled migration – that is, 457 working visas – the mainstay of a Coalition’s immigration program. But he has framed it in a peculiar way. Businesses should be able to bring in workers, “provided there aren’t Australians who could readily fill particular jobs”.

This sees immigration as a mechanism to solve problems, not way of building Australian economic strength in and of itself. And remember, 457 visas are temporary visas – not permanent ones.
Admittedly, this is like reading tea leaves. History cautions us to not take anything politicians say too seriously. The real story of immigration is only ever found in statistical appendices.
But should Abbott win government next year, immigration will be a major question for his new government.

Does he want to continue the Liberal legacy – a legacy of mass migration and population growth? Or, as he has at times unfortunately suggested, does he want to repudiate it?

The Politics Of Consensus Has A Dark Side

Memory is a funny thing. “In the days of the Accord,” Business Council head Tony Shepherd told an audience last week, “different sectors were able to agree on a common purpose and a plan to foster productivity, competitiveness and growth … there is no reason we cannot do this again.”

Shepherd is not alone. Hardly a week goes by without another CEO recalling the ambitions of past governments, and lamenting the timidity of current ones.

Their story has been repeated so often it’s become a banal cliché: in the days of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, businesses, government and unions put down their swords, held hands, and made beautiful microeconomic reform together. We need to rediscover the politics of consensus and conciliation. It’s time for an end to partisanship and to get on with … anyway. It’s boring to write, let alone read. Imagine hearing it in a speech.

But let’s be clear about what that cooperation would be in practice: institutionalised collusion between big business and big government.

This is the unacknowledged truth behind the business lobby’s complaints that Australia has left its reform era behind, or that politics is too divided to make the big historical changes.

Getting business and government around a board table isn’t necessarily a good thing. In politics, cooperation can be dangerous.

Big businesses are no fans of the free market. They only like competition in the abstract. In the real world, competition is traumatic. So when they are given the opportunity to set the rules of the game, they always try to fix it in their favour.

That’s why we talk so much about lobbyists. That’s why we talk about crony capitalism. And that’s why we talk about regulatory capture – when a business promotes regulation to shut down its competition. The politics of consensus has a dark side.

One of Adam Smith’s most famous quotes comes from his Wealth of Nations: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.”

Most people citing Smith’s warning leave it there. You can see the appeal. Business cartels are bad, said the neoliberals’ favourite economist.

But he went on: “Though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.” That is, cartels are bad – so the government should be careful not to create them.

On Monday, Julia Gillard announced that she wanted to do just that. Writing to the Business Council and the Australian Council of Trade Unions, she proposed a National Economic Reform Panel. This new body would encourage Australia’s biggest businesses, largest unions, and most well-connected community groups to build a national consensus on reform.

Happily, it won’t go anywhere. Remember Kevin Rudd’s relationship with Sir Rod Eddington, announced in a flurry of publicity in the 2007 election? It’s not clear that Eddington gave any advice, or that Rudd took any. The post-election Business Advisory Group didn’t seem to go anywhere, either. Similarly, it is doubtful historians will mark Julia Gillard’s tax summit in June this year as a key moment in Australian economic history.

We are haunted by memory of the Accord. When Hawke and Keating convinced the ACTU to restrain wages in return for social reforms in 1983, they created one of the few hero moments in Australian history. In our national mythology, the Accord was a necessary first step for the liberalisations of the next decade.

But the Accord was explicitly corporatist. It was a way to buy off the unions and (although they did not formally sign the Accord) a fair chunk of the business sector. It may have brought these bodies inside the tent, but it also gave them new influence and power over government.

Yes, many special interests gained from the Accord. But it does not follow that the Accord was in the general interest.

For instance, given Keating’s later efforts liberalising the labour market, we forget that the Accord constituted one of the most significant increases in industrial relations control in Australian history. To their credit, some unions recognised this. Not all unions signed up.

By the end of 1980s, advocates of liberalisation were arguing that, by locking the biggest unions within the policy system, the Accord was actually holding back reform. Privatisation, tax changes and tariff reduction were made harder, not easier, by the government’s newfound special relationship with labour. As Des Moore wrote in 1988, the Accord had granted unions a “privileged position … to defend their own narrow, short-term interest at the expense of the Australian community and of their own members”.

The politics of consensus is really the politics of privilege. It’s easy to understand why special interests want control over the levers of power, but it’s hard to see why we would give it to them.

The Coalition’s Impressionist Platform Paints The Wrong Picture

The Queensland state election was only held in March. But it feels like such a long time ago. Nobody would feel the distance between then and now more keenly than Tony Abbott.

After Campbell Newman’s extraordinary landslide, Abbott and the federal Coalition were being told by polls and commentators that they, too, were looking at a record win. Julia Gillard would lose Queensland-style.

It made sense. Labor was crippled by leadership questions, multiple scandals, and the imminent introduction of the carbon tax. The polls even suggested the Coalition could win the Senate. If not, then a quick, comfortable double dissolution would sort that out.

Eight months later, the polls are back roughly where they were at the last election – the one the Coalition didn’t win.

Tony Abbott is increasingly unpopular. Colleagues are telling the press he should cut down media appearances. His disapproval rating is the highest of any opposition leader since Alexander Downer.

Is this comparison unfair? Of course. Abbott has had Labor on the back foot almost continuously since 2009. Under Malcolm Turnbull, the Coalition would have been on the receiving end of a Queensland-style wipeout. But it’s not true to say Abbott is the most effective opposition leader in history. The only mark of success in opposition is becoming the government. And Tony Abbott is going to have to change tack if the Coalition wants to remain competitive at the next election.

Sure, if an election were held today, the opposition might win it. But an election is probably a year away. Victory requires more than optimism. Ask Mitt Romney. The Coalition has long believed it can win government on an impressionist platform: a few bold, strong strokes (stop the boats, axe the tax, pay back the debt) that, if voters step back and squint, offer a picture of what an Abbott government might look like. Those strokes are looking worn and colourless.

Asylum seeker policy has been so fudged that it’s not clear which party is promising to be toughest any more. More boats are arriving than ever. But in retrospect Julia Gillard irretrievably confused the whole issue with the Malaysia solution back in 2011.

The carbon tax no longer resonates as it once did. It will do nothing to halt climate change. It is designed to get more costly every year. But people are already forgetting about it. Voters tend to tolerate policies – even intensely hated ones – once they’ve been introduced. It still should be repealed, but it’s hard to see the Coalitionwinning on that alone.

And certainly, it seems unlikely the government will soon bring the budget into surplus. But few people care about the deficit, per se, they care about a government being so reckless with the public purse that it goes into deficit. So, until the opposition offers an alternative plan, the government just has to pretend it is sweating blood to fix the problem.

Yes, offer an alternative plan. Impressionism isn’t working.

One alternative would be to roll out a series of clear, detailed, and memorable policies that will stand alone long after Julia Gillard has left the stage. Nothing makes an opposition look more like a potential government than policy debate. Drafting policy is risky without the bureaucracy backing you up. It is a necessary risk. Or the Coalition could embrace abstraction, and present a fresh, philosophically driven vision of government. Even today, politics is still about ideas.

Abbott is better placed than most politicians for this latter approach. His 2009 book Battlelines is a manifesto of a modern, activist, big-government conservative philosophy.

Joe Hockey offered a different direction in his ”End of the Age of Entitlement” speech in April – a wholesale rethink of how government relates to its taxpayers.

But Abbott steers clear of the philosophy of Battlelines. And nobody grasped Hockey’s nettle. This lack of story about what would drive an Abbott government is why Coalition supporters are wrong to blame character assassination for their troubles. The polls were heading down long before Julia Gillard made the misogyny speech.

Every government says the opposition is being negative. Negativity is only a problem if it looks opportunistic. A cohesive philosophical vision is a shield against such charges.

And claims that Abbott is unpopular because he is too effective a critic of the government … well, that’s like saying in a job interview that your biggest weakness is you care too much about your work.

Personal unpopularity is not a barrier to success. Australians don’t want to be seduced by their politicians. We are not romantic about the prime ministership. Quirks are appealing. Gaffes are easy to forgive.

But right now, the Coalition has to start looking like a government, not a pressure group.