Articles – Page 38

Secular World Has A Christian Foundation

The contemporary atheist movement has a scorched earth strategy – chop down Christianity, root and branch. I don’t believe in God either, but this strategy is entirely counterproductive.

Not satisfied to point out that elements of Christian belief are historically implausible, or that religion is scientifically unsubstantiated, the New Atheist movement wants to prove something more. That Christianity has been a force for bad, that there is something fundamental about religious belief that holds back progress, approves of oppression, and stokes hatred.

Yet virtually all the secular ideas that non-believers value have Christian origins. To pretend otherwise is to toss the substance of those ideas away. It was theologians and religiously minded philosophers who developed the concepts of individual and human rights. Same with progress, reason, and equality before the law: it is fantasy to suggest these values emerged out of thin air once people started questioning God.

Take the separation of church and state – a foundation of the modern secular world, and a core of the political philosophy that atheists should favour above all else. It was, simply, a Christian idea.

Early Christian philosophers thought seriously about what Jesus’s words, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” meant for the formation of political society.

St Augustine, writing as Rome fell, saw the City of Man and the City of God as clearly separate. For Augustine, the religious and secular worlds were disinct. The long conflict between the papacy and medieval European kings over the ensuing centuries reinforced this division.

When the father of liberalism, John Locke, argued for religious liberty, he noted there was no such thing in the gospels as a “Christian Commonwealth”. The Bible insisted on states “with which the law of Christ hath not at all meddled”.

So, by the time Thomas Jefferson devised the formula of a “wall of separation between church and state”, he was drawing on 1500 years of Christian thought. The basic philosophy of modern secular democracy – that religious belief is a matter of individual conscience, not government – is a Christian idea. Even more central to our modern identity is the idea that all individuals have human rights, that simply by virtue of being human we have basic liberties that must be protected by law.

This idea too has a deep theological origin. Such mediaeval philosophers as Thomas Aquinas and his follower Francisco de Vitoria married biblical study with classical philosophy.
By doing so, they developed the concept of rights as we understand it today. For these Christian thinkers, “natural” rights originated from God. Humans formed societies in order to defend those rights.

Yet many modern human rights activists seem to believe that human rights sprang forth, full-bodied and with a virgin birth, in United Nations treaties in the mid-20th century.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The idea of human rights was founded centuries ago on Christian assumptions, advanced by Biblical argument, and advocated by theologians. Modern supporters of human rights have merely picked up a set of well-refined ethical and moral arguments.

Of course, it could not be otherwise. The modern world is shaped by 3000 years of philosophical evolution. And for half that time the dominant moral philosophy in the Western world has been a Christian one. For most of our history, all the great thinkers have been religious. So our secular liberalism will inevitably owe a huge amount to its Christian origins.

Ideas do not exist in a vacuum. If we imagine they were invented yesterday, they will be easy to discard tomorrow. So why are modern atheist agitators so eager to shed Western civilisation’s Christian legacy? Their reasoning – that atheism is attractive not only because it’s accurate but because religion is morally bad – ironically resembles the simplistic good-versus-evil propaganda of history’s most dangerous religious fanatics. Yet many Christians defend their faith by simply citing the good works of their co-religionists.

Not only does this prove little (of course, some people are good, and some people are bad) it almost always ends in the tit-for-tat, your-team-killed-more-than-my-team debate. Was Adolf Hitler a Christian? Would an answer be at all meaningful? Both sides do this. Richard Dawkins claimed on ABC’s Q&A last Monday that Christians were missing in action in the fight against slavery. This is clearly wrong. Has he not heard of the Christian abolitionist movement or William Wilberforce? But it’s a revealing error.

Surely, to argue for atheism, there is no logical need to denigrate past Christian accomplishment.

The anti-slavery argument that all humans were of equal moral worth won the day, and this was, to all concerned, a Christian argument. To acknowledge the religious heritage of the modern world is to say nothing about religious “truth”. But while our age may be secular, it is, at the same time, still a deeply Christian one. If atheists feel they must rip up everything that came before them, they will destroy the very foundations of that secularism.

The Real Reason for the Tragedy of the Titanic

Published in ABC’s The Drum as ‘Regulatory Failure of Titanic Proportions’, 11 April 2012, and in the Wall Street Journal as ‘The Real Reason for the Tragedy of the Titanic‘, 12 April 2012.

In the 1958 Titanic film “A Night to Remember,” Captain Smith is consulting with the shipbuilder Thomas Andrews. After the two realize that the Titanic will sink and that there are not enough lifeboats for even half those aboard, Smith quietly says “I don’t think the Board of Trade regulations visualized this situation, do you?”

In the run-up to the 100th anniversary of this tragedy this weekend, there’s been a lot of commentary about who and what were to blame. Left unsaid is that the Titanic’s lifeboat capacity is probably the most iconic regulatory failure of the 20th century.

The ship had carried 2,224 people on its maiden voyage but could only squeeze 1,178 people into its lifeboats. There were a host of other failures, accidents, and mishaps which led to the enormous loss of life, but this was the most crucial one: From the moment the Titanic scraped the iceberg, the casualties were going to be unprecedented.

Yet the Titanic was fully compliant with all marine laws. The British Board of Trade required all vessels above 10,000 metric tonnes (11,023 U.S. tons) to carry 16 lifeboats. The White Star Line ensured that the Titanic exceeded the requirements by four boats. But the ship was 46,328 tonnes. The Board of Trade hadn’t updated its regulations for nearly 20 years.

The lifeboat regulations were written for a different era and enforced unthinkingly. So why didn’t the regulators, shipbuilders or operators make the obvious connection between lifeboat capacity and the total complement of passengers and crew?

It had been 40 years since the last serious loss of life at sea, when 562 people died on the Atlantic in 1873. By the 20th century, all ships were much safer.

Moreover, the passage of time changed what regulators and shipowners saw as the purpose of lifeboats. Lifeboats were not designed to keep all the ship and crew afloat while the vessel sank. They were simply to ferry them to nearby rescue ships.

Recent history had confirmed this understanding. The Republic sank in 1909, fatally crippled in a collision. But it took nearly 36 hours for the Republic to submerge. All passengers and crew—except for the few who died in the actual collision—were transferred safely, in stages, to half a dozen other vessels.

Had Titanic sunk more slowly, it would have been surrounded by the Frankfurt, the Mount Temple, the Birma, the Virginian, the Olympic, the Baltic and the first on the scene, the Carpathia. The North Atlantic was a busy stretch of sea. Or, had the Californian (within visual range of the unfolding tragedy) responded to distress calls, the lifeboats would have been adequate for the purpose they were intended—to ferry passengers to safety.

There was, simply, very little reason to question the Board of Trade’s wisdom about lifeboat requirements. Shipbuilders and operators thought the government was on top of it; that experts in the public service had rationally assessed the dangers of sea travel and regulated accordingly. Otherwise why have the regulations at all?

This is not the way the story is usually told.

Recall in James Cameron’s 1997 film, “Titanic,” the fictionalized Thomas Andrews character claims to have wanted to install extra lifeboats but “it was thought by some that the deck would look too cluttered.” Mr. Cameron saw his movie as a metaphor for the end of the world, so historical accuracy was not at a premium.

Yet the historian Simon Schama appears to have received his knowledge of this issue from the Cameron film, writing in Newsweek recently that “Chillingly, the shortage of lifeboats was due to shipboard aesthetics.” (Mr. Schama also sees the Titanic as a metaphor, this time for “global capitalism” hitting the Lehman Brothers iceberg.)

This claim—that the White Star Line chose aesthetics over lives—hinges on a crucial conversation between Alexander Carlisle, the managing director of the shipyard where Titanic was built, and his customer Bruce Ismay, head of White Star Line, in 1910.

Carlisle proposed that White Star equip its ships with 48 lifeboats—in retrospect, more than enough to save all passengers and crew. Yet after a few minutes discussion, Ismay and other senior managers rejected the proposal. The Titanic historian Daniel Allen Butler (author of “Unsinkable”) says Carlisle’s idea was rejected “on the grounds of expense.”

But that’s not true. In the Board of Trade’s post-accident inquiry, Carlisle was very clear as to why White Star declined to install extra lifeboats: The firm wanted to see whether regulators required it. As Carlisle told the inquiry, “I was authorized then to go ahead and get out full plans and designs, so that if the Board of Trade did call upon us to fit anything more we would have no extra trouble or extra expense.”

So the issue was not cost, per se, or aesthetics, but whether the regulator felt it necessary to increase the lifeboat requirements for White Star’s new, larger, class of ship.

This undercuts the convenient morality tale about safety being sacrificed for commercial success that sneaks into most accounts of the Titanic disaster.

The responsibility for lifeboats came “entirely practically under the Board of Trade,” as Carlisle described the industry’s thinking at the time. Nobody seriously thought to second-guess the board’s judgment.

This is a distressingly common problem. Governments find it easy to implement regulations but tedious to maintain existing ones—politicians gain little political benefit from updating old laws, only from introducing new laws.

And regulated entities tend to comply with the specifics of the regulations, not with the goal of the regulations themselves. All too often, once government takes over, what was private risk management becomes regulatory compliance.

It’s easy to weave the Titanic disaster into a seductive tale of hubris, social stratification and capitalist excess. But the Titanic’s chroniclers tend to put their moral narrative ahead of their historical one.

At the accident’s core is this reality: British regulators assumed responsibility for lifeboat numbers and then botched that responsibility. With a close reading of the evidence, it is hard not to see the Titanic disaster as a tragic example of government failure.

Offence Against Free Speech

No question: in the Western world, offence is gradually trumping free speech. Consider four separate incidents, all of which occurred in the last week.

Back in 2008, News Limited’s Perthnow.com.au published a series of articles covering the deaths of four Aboriginal boys, who had stolen a car and died in an accident shortly after. The mother of three of the boys took legal action over comments published below the articles.

The Australian Federal Court found last Tuesday a number of those comments breached the Racial Discrimination Act.

Absolutely, the comments were cruel. They should not have been posted. One read “if you’re hopeless at mothering, recognise you are hopeless and don’t breed”. Another told law makers to “get out of thier [sic] ivory towers and start dealing out real punishment… instead of the 5 star treatment they get in prison”.

News Limited was ordered to pay $12,000 compensation for “offence, insult and humiliation”.

There has been one report (published in Fairfax papers) about this trial. Compare that to the outpouring of commentary about the Andrew Bolt case late last year: Factiva counts 333 separate pieces in newspapers alone.

Yet the Perthnow finding draws heavily on precedents set by the Bolt case. Sure, the Racial Discrimination Act found its current language back in 1995. But the act’s substance is only now being tested, and that substance suggests that the limitations on freedom of speech which it sets are very broad indeed. This is an evolving – and expanding – area of law.

For instance, notice that nothing in the comments quoted above makes reference to the fact that the boys were Aboriginal. The Federal Court decided, given the context of the news stories, the comments should be considered racial hatred nonetheless.

Much more attention has been given to the Kyle Sandilands episode – not least because of the extraordinary outcry when Sandilands originally aired his bizarre rant against a critic of his television show in November 2011.

Many people have suggested the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s response to Sandilands has demonstrated how weak the regulator is. But obviously a regulatory agency does not have the power to sack an employee of a private company.

And the new license condition which ACMA intends to impose on Sandiland’s station 2DayFM is actually quite significant. These new conditions provide a pretext under which ACMA could take away the station’s licence.

The conditions stipulate that 2DayFM cannot broadcast material which “demeans or is reasonably likely to demean women or girls generally and/or any woman or girl in particular”. Read that last clause carefully. For a speaker to “demean” any person who happens to be female is now forbidden – at least if they speak on 2DayFM. Sure, “Juliar” is in bad taste, but is it something that really needs to be regulated?

This is a dangerously illiberal path we are walking. And it’s a path other Western countries have travelled further along.

The conviction last Tuesday of a 21-year-old student in England for a stream of racist tweets provides no better illustration. Liam Stacey has been sentenced to 56 days jail for the sort of obscene trolling which is unhappily common on Twitter.

What Stacey wrote was foul, but his is an extraordinary punishment. Stacey was apparently drunk, and hastily deleted his tweets.

Of particular importance is the law he was prosecuted under. The UK Public Order Act 1986 prohibits “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour”, which it places under the heading “fear or provocation of violence”. That this has evolved to become the criminalisation of idiocy shows how apparently modest laws can become tyrannical ones.

Even further along the path is France, where the perfumer Jean-Paul Guerlain was fined 6,000 euros for saying in a TV interview that he “set to work like a Negro”. Guerlain got off lightly. The French court could have imposed a six month prison term.

Obviously, Perthnow should not have published the seriously hurtful comments. Kyle Sandilands should not be such an oaf. One ought not get drunk on Twitter and hurl racist insults.

But if we are to remain free we must keep alive the philosophical distinction between things which are unlawful, and things which morally wrong but still lawful.

As governments expand their regulatory reach, they appear unable to conceive of the latter. Perhaps that’s no surprise. Legislators, lawyers and judges see all social issues through the prism of law.

But this legalism means we are losing confidence in society to police itself; to maintain its own standards. 2DayFM saw its sponsors drain away and its audience shrink. Liam Stacey was shouted down by others on Twitter and recanted his hateful words.

Indeed, the judge in the Stacey trial said something accidentally revealing while delivering his sentence: “I have no choice but to impose an immediate custodial sentence to reflect the public outrage at what you have done”. The power and effect of that public outrage goes unremarked here. Obviously, state regulation seems intent on supplanting society’s ability to ostracise and condemn.

And a society that drags people into the courts for nothing but offence is a deeply unhealthy society.

Westerners Consumed By Tech Toys Wallow In Misplaced Guilt

Nothing demonstrates how self-absorbed Western moral sensibilities are than the recent controversy over working conditions at the Chinese manufacturer Foxconn.

Foxconn makes Apple products. And culturally, Apple’s iPad and iPhone are no mere gadgets. They symbolise high-tech consumerism. Apple’s brand is like a squeaky-clean combination of Greenpeace and Scientology. So criticism of Foxconn has been as much about popping Apple’s otherworldly bubble as anything else.

At least it was until this month, when the radio program This American Life was forced to retract a major “expose” of Foxconn it aired in January. In a special episode, reporter Mike Daisey admitted he had fabricated the worst stories. Daisey had never met under-age workers, never met poison victims and never saw armed guards at Foxconn factories.

But by then, the anti-corporate activists had already moved on. A petition with 250,000 signatures had been quickly delivered to Apple. (That petition was, of course, promoted by our own opportunists at GetUp!) Technology writers around the world had called for a boycott of Apple products. Yet Foxconn has better working conditions than comparable workplaces in China. Apple conducts more inspections and audits of its supplier than any other electronics company. By Western standards, most Foxconn jobs are repetitive, boring, the workers’ accommodation cramped, and there have been well-reported OH&S incidents. But by the standards of Chinese industry, they are still highly desirable jobs.

But the Foxconn story has had enormous resonance because it fits neatly into a moral tale of Western guilt. You, with your white earbuds and leather-covered iPad, are the direct beneficiary of a nightmarish, Victorian-era sweatshop. Foxconn’s 1.2 million workers suffer so Australians can play Angry Birds. It’s an alluring tale, perfect for sermons and email forwards. But think what this tale excludes. That is: sympathy for those who have failed to acquire a job at Foxconn. Sympathy for those who lack the skills to get a desirable factory job at all. Sympathy for those who produce goods not destined for First World boutique retail outlets.

So these consumer activism campaigns have a perverse result. We more pity the Chinese workers who have found the jobs that will lift them out of poverty than those who have been unable to do so.

Even more perverse is the implicit message behind these campaigns: that Western consumerism is to blame for the dire plight of Chinese workers. Sure, no one has to buy an iPad. But Chinese workers covet Foxconn jobs. The idea that we should boycott its products is counterproductive. A boycott would not raise labour standards but would deprive people of needed work. We don’t like to think about how the moral choices we make in the developed world could be stopping people in other countries from flourishing. That is most obvious when it comes to immigration.

When Tony Abbott announced he was considering subsidising nannies, feminist academic Eva Cox complained it could lead to calls for “cheap labour from overseas”. She was not alone. You’d think it’s pretty cruel to bar poor people from seeking better jobs for themselves. But somehow, such sentiments get wrapped up in the rhetoric of compassion. Perhaps Third World poverty just seems more pressing if it’s nearby. Foxconn makes high-profile products we use every day. Migrant nannies in Australia would no longer be in poor, faraway countries, but right under our noses. It’s an odd, repugnant and very modern notion of moral responsibility: that we must keep a respectable distance from poverty, even if by doing so we only exacerbate it. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s not the developed world’s fault that some countries are poor. But it is definitely our fault if we are intentionally stopping them from seeking opportunities to get rich. And is there anything more patronising than the assumption that choices made by people in the Third World are merely the result of unthinking exploitation from the West?

Global capitalism doesn’t work like that. When Australians seek employment, we hope to get something out of it. Foreigners are no different. Foreigners are morally autonomous human beings like us, with preferences and plans and intelligence. They know if they are being exploited. They know better than us their employment alternatives.

One of the revelations of the This American Life retraction was that the long hours worked by some Foxconn employees was often entirely their choice. Just as Australian workers sometimes want to work overtime, so too do Chinese workers. Certainly, not everything is rosy in Foxconn plants. But then, not everything is rosy in the developing world. Our neurotic eagerness to blame ourselves does nothing to fix that. Worse, it could easily harm the people we wish to help.

Tasers: The Non-Lethal Force That Kills

It’s time to stop describing Tasers as “non-lethal” weapons. They are quasi-lethal. At best.

That much should be clear from the death of 21-year-old Roberto Laudisio Curti in New South Wales last week.

The widely broadcast security camera footage shows Curti running away. One police officer in pursuit appears to pause, raise, and fire his Taser’s barbed projectiles at the Brazilian student. Curti stopped breathing shortly after.

If accurate, this incident would clearly be what the NSW Ombudsman warned about in a major report four years ago: Taser use is highly susceptible to mission creep. Nothing in the security footage suggests Curti presented an “extremely high risk” to officers or the public – the grounds for Taser use. From what we can tell, there was no threat or aggression.

But let’s put the specifics of this case aside. There are inquiries by the New South Wales Coroner and NSW Ombudsman which will be looking closely at those.

There is a more basic problem with the use of Tasers.

In the United States, 12,000 law enforcement agencies now carry the weapon. Assessing the evidence collected in that country, the National Institute for Justice (the research wing of the Department of Justice) found in 2011 there is “no conclusive medical evidence” indicating “a high risk of serious injury or death” from Tasers.

That sounds all well and good until you read the NIJ’s caveat: “… in healthy, normal, nonstressed, nonintoxicated persons.”

This is a particularly crucial caveat, as it is dealing with unhealthy, abnormal, highly stressed and blindingly intoxicated persons where Tasers are most useful.

One anonymous police officer wrote in the Punch after last week’s fatality he had “wrestled a lot of drug-affected people and they don’t give up easily. Often a lot of force needs to be used in order to bring them under control.”

More than half of those tasered in NSW between 2002 and 2007 were identified as having drug or alcohol problems, or having been intoxicated at the time of the incident.

A Taser is effective in such situations because it does not rely on pain, or the threat of pain, to compel compliance. The shock delivered through the darts completely incapacitates its target – the electric current overrides the brain’s control of the body and causes the muscles to spasm involuntarily.

So as a policing tool, it is most useful against drug-affected people who display “superhuman” strength.

And that is also exactly the circumstances where the research suggests Tasers are going to be at their most lethal.

This analytical disconnect allows supporters to claim Tasers are much safer than they actually are in practice.

Yet announcing the rollout of Tasers to general duties police in 2008, the Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione said “if this is but one option that gives the police officers in the streets of NSW some alternative rather than to use deadly force, rather than to shoot somebody and killing them, then this is a good option.”

Even our limited experience in Australia shows Tasers don’t replace firearms. The Western Australian Corruption and Crime Commission found they are a substitute for other tools like pepper spray.

Taser use has increased substantially over the last few years in WA, but firearm use has increased as well. This is a phenomenon overseas jurisdictions have discovered too, and it makes some sense. Depending on the environment and the officers’ training, attempts at tasering someone fail 10-20 per cent of the time. If a situation is truly dangerous, police officers use much more reliable guns.

It has been suggested the use of a Taser could have saved the life of the carjacker who was shot in a Parramatta shopping complex on Sunday.

Perhaps. But if the officers in question believed anybody was seriously at risk, a Taser would not have been their response. There is a reason officers still carry firearms.

Tasers don’t always attach to their target properly. The model in use in NSW can only fire once – if the darts miss, the officer has to reload. And in only 35 of 48 incidents studied by the NSW Ombudsman in 2008 were Tasers described as “effective”.

So yes: Tasers are less lethal than firearms, and in some circumstances would be preferable. But that is not how they are actually used. They are now, according to the WA CCC, the “force option of ‘choice'”. And, given the usual profile of individuals which they are used against, Tasers are a more potentially lethal replacement for other non-lethal methods.

Some reports have said Roberto Laudisio Curti was on drugs when he died.

The problem for Taser advocates is to devise a standard of use which recognises first, that Tasers are most useful when for dealing with highly intoxicated individuals and second, they are at their most deadly when doing so.

Newspapers Tangled In Politics… That’s Yesterday’s News

Every generation thinks the world they are presented with is unique.

Reflecting on the 1819 parliamentary session, the British conservative Henry Bankes regretted that the government had not done more to “restrain and correct the licentiousness and abuse of the press”. Newspapers are “a tremendous engine in the hands of mischievous men,” Bankes wrote.

Bankes’ complaint was old hat even then. There’s not much new in media criticism. When Ray Finkelstein argued the press fosters “inequality, abuse of power, intellectual squalor, avid interest in scandal, an insatiable appetite for entertainment and other debasements and distortions”, he may not have realised how tired a note he was striking.

The great champion of press freedom, Thomas Jefferson, lamented that nothing in a newspaper could be believed. With obvious disappointment, Jefferson wrote “the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them”. Journalists had welcomed “prostitution to falsehood”.

John Stuart Mill described the London press as “the vilest and most degrading of all trades”. Edmund Burke considered newspapers as a “grand instrument of the subversion of order, of morals, of religion and… of human society itself”.

We could go on. For as long as there has been media there have been complaints that it is biased, unbalanced, unfair, immoral, reckless, unethical, excessively powerful, and untrustworthy. An unhappy Samuel Johnson said too many journalists of his day were political partisans “without a wish for truth or thought of decency”.

So – for instance – it is hard to understand Robert Manne’s claim that in recent years The Australian has “transcended the traditional newspaper role” and become an “active player in both federal and state politics”. Newspapers have always been tangled up in politics. There is no traditional, non-political role for them to transcend.

Manne wrote in his Quarterly Essay that The Australian is a “remorselessly campaigning paper”. Is this description supposed to be damning?

One of the world’s greatest media moguls, William Randolph Hearst, claimed his newspapers “control the nation”. His New York Journal didn’t just report, it participated. It distributed welfare and disaster relief. It launched public interest lawsuits. It even broke someone out of a Cuban prison – “the greatest journalistic coup of this age,” according to the Journal.

Popular mythology reflects Hearst’s self-aggrandisement by crediting his papers with amazing political power as well. But the reality does not reflect the legend. It suits everyone to talk up the power of the media. Proprietors trade on the illusion of clout, and politicians want excuses for their own impotence. Hearst later made a series of failed political runs. Clearly he thought public office a desirable promotion.

Across the Atlantic, the mid-century press baron Lord Beaverbrook famously said he ran the Daily Express “merely for the purposes of making propaganda and with no other motive”.

Beaverbrook was being playful. The occasion for those words was his interrogation by the 1947 Royal Commission on the Press. That Commission had an eerily similar origin to our recent Independent Inquiry. The post-war Labour party was frustrated with press hostility. Labour had won the 1945 election by a landslide. But most papers in that election had editorialised in favour of the Tories. For Labour politicians egged on by the journalists’ union, this was proof the papers and their owners were dangerously out of touch.

Any semblance of historical awareness should lead us to focus our attention not on the repetitive, unchanging complaints about how venal the press is, but on what is genuinely new.
And that is the extraordinary wealth of new information, new sources, and new outlets available to media consumers in 2012; our access to the global press online, social media and ‘citizen’ journalism, the opening up of the journalistic processes, and, even, the democratisation of media criticism.

While the complaints about journalism made today are virtually indistinguishable from those made by Henry Bankes in 1819, the environment in which the media operates is totally different.
The Finkelstein Inquiry was given two tasks. The first was to look how the internet challenges newspaper business models. The second was to look at press standards and quality. One of Finkelstein’s biggest failures was not coherently joining the two tasks together – what the second task meant in light of the first.

Finkelstein’s proposed News Media Council is strikingly similar to the 1947 Royal Commission’s recommendation that British newspapers be governed by a General Council of the Press. (The Royal Commission’s threat of statutory regulation led the industry to form the UK Press Council.)

It’s as if nothing has changed in the meantime.

The Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon and made it to the office of prime minister – few were more respected and influential than Wellington – but he privately complained to his family that Britain’s real rulers were “the Gentlemen of the Press”.

It is a professional pastime of politicians to complain about newspaper influence and the grubbiness of journalism. We do not have to treat their whining as novel. And we must not believe it is anything more than the traditional antagonism between government and press.

We’re Bombarded With Swearing But Who #@%! Cares?

“I like swearing; I think it’s very healthy,” Ewan McGregor told a celebrity gossip magazine last week. Good for Ewan. He could have added: swearing is so common it’s mundane. It can make you more persuasive. And it’s less offensive now than ever.

No one apparently cared when actor Jean Dujardin yelled “putain!” in his 2012 Oscar acceptance speech. “Putain” literally translates as “whore” but means “f— yeah!”. And remember when the Gillard camp released that video of Kevin Rudd swearing before the federal leadership spill? Nobody could even pretend to be offended. How refreshing. How honest. But really, any other stance would have been rank hypocrisy.

The leading scholarly authority on swearing, US psychologist Timothy Jay, estimated in a 2009 paper “The Utility and Ubiquity of Taboo Words” that the average speaker of English utters around 80 to 90 swear words every day. That’s only about half as frequent as we use first person plural pronouns such as “we” and “us”.

Certainly, the offensiveness of swear words varies. Jay found 10 words dominate. Some of them are gentle: “goddamn” and “sucks”. But the F-word is both the most common and the most extreme in the top 10. So it’s entirely possible the former foreign affairs minister swears less than most people do.

Yet we seem to think people are swearing more often, and more harshly. It isn’t true. There’s no statistical evidence to suggest swearing has increased over the past few decades. Studies of recorded speech demonstrate swearing has remained steady and we’re using the same words we did 30 years ago.

But swearing is more public, more frequent in film, television, on radio and in print. It’s been normalised. The prevalence of swearing hasn’t changed, but its cultural status has.

The result, as a New South Wales magistrate noted in a ruling in 2002, is that the F-word “has lost much of its punch”.

We don’t blink at French Connection UK’s acronym “FCUK”. The name of the new snack “Nuckin Futs”, approved by Australia’s trademarks examiner in January, is playful rather than obscene. If profanity can sell nibbles and knitwear, can it be considered profane at all?

This is all surely a good thing. More swearing doesn’t mean society is becoming less polite.

One can be deeply racist or sexist or homophobic without swearing. On the other hand, we have all met friendly and well-intentioned people who pepper their speech with profanity. The former (racism, sexism) has become rightly unacceptable, and the latter is becoming innocuous. This is great. Any moral compass that treats mere words on par with malicious intentions is a badly calibrated one. That’s why the N-word is now much more offensive than the F-word – it indicates racist intentions.

Traditionally, swearing has also been governed by a double standard: men would curse freely among other men but bite their tongue around women out of patronising respect. Gender equality has eroded that anachronism.

Nor does the “think of the children” mindset offer any clear restraint on profanity.
As Ewan McGregor said: “I like hearing my kids swear, and I’ll pretend they’re not allowed to … but actually I think it’s quite funny.”

McGregor shouldn’t bother pretending. Jay points to findings that parental sanctions have no effect on how much a child swears when they reach adulthood. The scholarly evidence tells us children learn rude words from kids, not adults.

Last year, research psychologists established that swearing can help with pain relief. A 2006 study published in the journal Social Influence even found swearing “significantly increased” the persuasiveness of an argument. As the authors wrote, “the use of obscenity could make a credible speaker appear more human”.

When the Baillieu government introduced on-the-spot fines for swearing in June last year, there was an understandable outcry. Almost everybody swears, and swears a lot. Punishing extremely common language is obviously a bad idea. Something so banal should not be a police matter. Even prime ministers do it, after all.

Foreign Investment And The Whims Of Politicians

In September 2009, economics officials from the US embassy sat down with the then-head of Australia’s Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB), Patrick Colmer.

The record of this meeting is one of the gems in the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables. Colmer confirmed to the embassy that the Government had changed the foreign investment guidelines in order to address “growing concerns” about Chinese investment in Australia.

New guidelines introduced in the second half of 2009 relaxed the mandatory review threshold to make small private investments easier. But, the US embassy reported back to the State Department, by excluding state-owned businesses from the relaxation, the policy was specifically designed to “pose new disincentives for larger-scale Chinese Investments”.

This, of course, was contrary to everything the Government was saying at the time.

The Trade Minister, Treasurer, and Foreign Minister had lined up to claim the changes had nothing to do with China (perhaps they could have let the FIRB know).

So we shouldn’t take on face value the comments made by Craig Emerson in the Australian on Monday, arguing that his Government is eager to attract more Chinese investment.

After the post-Rudd reshuffle, Emerson is now Minister for Trade and Competitiveness. But the FIRB reports to the Treasurer, not the Competitiveness Minister (whatever the hell that is). Furthermore, the Treasurer has a veto over the FIRB’s decisions: he can, and does, ban investments even when the FIRB has recommended they be approved.

In other words, if Emerson wants to open Australia up to Chinese investment he won’t have to convince readers of The Australian, but Wayne Swan, who sets the rules.

Well, ‘rules’ is a generous word. The foreign investment guidelines are infamously inscrutable: Stephen Kirchner of the Centre for Independent Studies had to submit an FOI just to obtain a copy of a speech that merely suggested how the FIRB would treat investments. As Kirchner wrote in February 2010, “Foreign investors cannot be expected to understand a policy that the government itself cannot properly articulate.”

The foreign investment mess is a deliberate creation of government. If Emerson is able to elbow his way into the FIRB, convince his colleagues that investment – from China or anywhere else – is to be greeted not resisted, and then clean up the mess, that would be a great thing.

But don’t hold your breath. Emerson told ABC radio on Monday he was “not so much in the camp of easing” foreign investment regulations.

So while talking about how you want foreigners to put their money in Australia is lovely, allowing them to do so would be better.

There is no reason to believe that foreign investment is a threat to Australia’s food or resource security, our sovereignty, or contrary to our national interest. Even when that investment is made by firms which are state owned.

Investors in Australia have to obey Australian law. And we have a great deal of law, covering everything from competition to environmental standards, all which treats investors equally, regardless of their nationality. That really should be all there is to it.

Every other part of this debate quickly descends into absurd hypotheticals about World War III, outright xenophobia, or trite meaninglessness. People who talk about ‘protecting food security’ should be forced to explain how limiting access to foreign capital would do anything but harm the agriculture sector.

Yes, foreigners may not prioritise Australia’s ‘national interest’ when making business decisions. But so what? Neither will Australians. The great thing about market capitalism is that they don’t have to. As Adam Smith said, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”. The pressures of competition will make sure resources are put to their most productive use.

And (it seems strange to have to write this) limiting foreign investment means the Australian economy gets less money. Australian businesses that have to sell up will have fewer potential buyers, lowering the final sale price.

But to be fair, the Government’s doublethink on foreign investment is miles better than the outright hostility of the Coalition.

The Opposition wants agriculture to be considered as “sensitive” a sector as defence and the media – and face even greater investment restrictions as a result. This has been an over-riding obsession of the Nationals, and they seem to have been given carte blanche to write the Coalition’s agricultural policy.

For all the contradictions of the Government on foreign investment, the Opposition’s policy would be far, far worse – seriously shutting Australian agriculture off from Asian capital.

Few other areas of public policy are as governed by the whims of politicians as foreign investment approvals. If Craig Emerson would personally like to liberalise it: brilliant. But he’ll have to look at the obstacles within his own Government to do so.

Regulating From A Distance: Finkelstein, Politics, Power

The structure of the News Media Council proposed by Ray Finkelstein is complicated.

The council would consist of a chair and 20 other members. Half of those members are to be drawn from the public. The other half would come from the industry, but they cannot be managers or shareholders. The chair should (of course) be a judge or an “eminent” lawyer.

The council would be appointed, not by parliament, but by a separate, independent body comprised of three senior academics, the Commonwealth Ombudsman, and the Commonwealth Solicitor-General. The three academics would be chosen by a board of university vice-chancellors from across the country.

So that’s one independent body, appointed by another independent body, most of whom will be appointed by a third independent body.

This elaborate composition is supposed to demonstrate maximum impartiality and objectivity.

After all, it would not do to have any whiff of politics near something as sensitive media regulation. The risk of impropriety – or just the impression of impropriety – would be too great.

This allows Finkelstein to write in his report that, beyond its funding and powers, “government should have no role”. It’s a curious claim.

Do not imagine, as his language implies and some have since suggested, that his proposals are just industry self-regulation with a little bite. Finkelstein describes his scheme “enforced self-regulation” – a term drawn from the regulatory theory literature but one which is virtually meaningless.

An independent regulatory agency is the Government. Sure, the News Media Council wouldn’t directly answer to Julia Gillard. It wouldn’t be democratic. But it would have coercive powers, would be funded by compulsory taxation, and its journalistic codes of conduct would be mandatory. This is the very definition of ‘government’. Any limit on free speech it imposed would be a limit on free speech imposed by the state.

The idea behind independent regulatory agencies is simple, and superficially attractive: to get the politics out of policy and compliance. Rather than having politicians oversee the decisions made by regulators – with all the risks of corruption and political manipulation that would create – the agencies are separated from the rest of the government. They are delegated their powers by parliament, but they are not responsible to parliament.

Independent regulatory agencies are relatively new to Australia and Europe. There were virtually no such bodies in the 1960s. Governments of the early and mid-20th century were vast public utilities, owning industries and enforcing cartels.

The untold story of the “neo-liberal” reforms of the last few decades is how privatisation and trade deregulation was matched by an extraordinary explosion of new regulation. And to enforce this huge corpus of new law and regulation, state power was spun off into dozens of independent bodies. The responsibility for regulation was moved out of ministries and into agencies.

Along every measure government has grown. Government has expanded its reach and ambition and brought more activities into its web.

At the same time government has become less democratic. That is a feature, not a bug. Those who call for regulatory independence worry parliamentary representatives could interfere in technocratic decision-making.

It’s a reasonable concern. Politicians are driven by politics. They have political motives, political aims, and use political tactics. They are the last people you’d want in charge of regulation.

Yet we seem reluctant to over think the implications of this change. Certainly, there are other undemocratic parts of government – the courts and the police are the most obvious. But regulatory agencies are one of the fastest growing areas of government power.

And these agencies make government policy. Parliament provides the general legislative framework within which those agencies operate, but leaves them to refine their goals. The regulators are free to pursue their own agendas and set their own direction. In a very real sense, they shape (within the limits of parliament’s legislation) the law of the land.

Outside the democratic spotlight, the independent agencies are highly susceptible to regulatory capture – that phenomenon where special interests manipulate the regulatory process to favour their own interests, rather than the interests of the public.

In Finkelstein’s proposal, the News Media Council itself would write the code by which the media is governed. This would avoid the taint of partisan politics, which is good, but would at the same time have the limits of democratic debate circumscribed by a committee appointed by university vice-chancellors.

It is well to imagine regulations which might, if perfectly and uniformly enforced, change things for the better.

But the choice which modern advocates of greater regulation offer is unappealing: give power to politicians, and risk the corruption and politicisation of public policy, or give power to independent regulators, and allow unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats to govern economy and society.

The Greeks have been rightly upset that their government has been replaced, virtually wholesale, with European technocrats.

As independent regulatory agencies blossom, we might start thinking about what it means for democratic control to be eroded as government expands.

Free Press To Be Sacrificed For Political Retribution

Freedom of the media is too important to be controlled by government.

The Independent Media Inquiry has proposed just what was expected: an outrageous attack on freedom of speech and the press.

Its 470-page report, written by inquiry chairman Ray Finkelstein and released on Friday, concludes Australia needs a mandatory ”News Media Council” that would have coercive powers to regulate what it deems is ”fairness”, ”accuracy”, ”balance”, and ”quality” in the press.

This new independent regulator would have power to compel newspapers to publish responses from people who feel aggrieved. And it would have the power to censor: it could, for instance, force media organisations to delete stories from their websites that regulators feel aren’t up to standard.

But it wouldn’t just regulate newspapers. As if to emphasise just how radical his proposals are, Finkelstein says websites that get more than 15,000 hits a year should be brought under the council’s jurisdiction. That’s just 41 hits a day – in other words, pretty much every website publishing anything that could be described as ”news, information and opinion of current value”.

The new body would also regulate every magazine with a print-run above just 3000 copies. That would be the entire magazine industry, from the street press upwards. With such ambition, one might ask why Finkelstein excluded books, email newsletters, and Twitter from his regulatory web.

The specifics of Finkelstein’s proposals are bad enough. But they represent something more concerning: a reversal of the principle that it is not the role of governments to stand in judgment of public debate. The report may insist that this government-funded body will be independent, but in reality, it is a government body. And, when it comes to freedom of speech, the state should be subordinate to society – not the other way around.

This principle that has taken centuries to develop should not be abandoned just because some politicians don’t think they get a fair shake from newspapers. The media inquiry was obviously political retribution against critical journalism.

The Greens and the government have long believed newspapers report the carbon tax and the national broadband network unfairly (these issues are specifically raised in Finkelstein’s report). More broadly, they claim the press has an anti-government bias. Labor senator Doug Cameron said in November: ”The Murdoch press are an absolute disgrace, they are a threat to democracy in this country and we should absolutely be having a look at them.” Cameron was angry about leadership speculation printed in The Daily Telegraph. Of course the speculation turned out to be entirely true.

Recall that Bob Brown opportunistically used the News of the World phone hacking scandal in Britain to suggest that the Australian government should license journalists and newspapers. But to be fair to Brown, perhaps licensing was not as far-out an idea as it seemed at the time, given Finkelstein’s conclusions.

If Finkelstein’s proposals are adopted, all news websites, newspapers and magazines would have to sign up to and comply with the News Media Council’s standards of conduct. If they refuse, they would be taken to court and punished ”in the usual way”. This might not be called ”licensing” but it is virtually the same thing.

What happens if a blogger rejects the standards or refuses to delete something? Eventually, after contempt of court proceedings, they could be jailed. Nor are Finkelstein’s proposals unprecedented. The News Media Council would apply to newspapers, websites and magazines the same sort of regulations that at present oversee radio and television broadcasters. Problem is, those regulations are frequently used by political partisans as a weapon to attack controversial broadcasters.

Late last year Alan Jones was taken to the Australian Communications and Media Authority because he had described New South Wales bureaucrats as ”scumbags that run around preying on productive people”.

The authority, in its wisdom, decided Jones had not made ”reasonable efforts” to air other ”significant viewpoints”. And in response to a complaint by GetUp!, it is holding a formal investigation into whether Jones interviews too many climate sceptics. If we value free expression, these are not judgments any government body should be making for us.

Yes, there is good journalism and bad journalism. Newspapers should offer rights of reply and letters pages.

We should reject Finkelstein’s proposals, not to defend the media but to defend a fundamental liberal principle: no government should have power to decide what constitutes ”fair” or ”balanced” speech. Freedom of the press is just too important.