Month: November 2008

Neutering The Net Is About Repression, Not Protection

It seems like only yesterday that the country was prosperous and the Labor Party was going to make everyone’s internet faster.

But now the Federal Government’s great broadband gift is floundering in the waves of the financial crisis and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is pushing ahead with an internet filter that will dramatically slow Australian internet speeds.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority conducted tests earlier this year on six filters that could be imposed on internet service providers. Five slowed internet speeds by at least 20 per cent. And two of them crippled speeds by more than 75 per cent.

And this is before we look at their habit of falsely blocking legal sites. A 1999 trial of internet filtering (censoring the internet has long been a bipartisan goal) even accidentally blocked some government websites. Filters have improved since then but, as ACMA’s test revealed, it is a certainty that some sites will be incorrectly blocked – let’s be honest, the technology to efficiently and effectively censor the internet isn’t quite ready yet.

Nevertheless, technology has a habit of getting better, given enough time. It’s more than just technical issues that makes internet censorship a terrible idea.

Last year, Mr Conroy said that: “If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.” Fair enough. But to claim the filter is designed to eliminate child pornography is too tricksy by half.

After all, child pornography is already illegal. And imposing an elaborate filter on every Australian internet connection is unlikely to have a significant impact on the child pornography trade – as everyone who has sent an email or tried to download a song is aware, there is a bit more to the internet than static web pages. Child pornography isn’t just sitting on openly accessible websites waiting to be downloaded – from what we know about it, it is traded clandestinely by abhorrent individuals. It takes police work and forensics to uncover those sorts of criminals. The dark recesses of the internet won’t be disturbed at all by the new filter.

Who knows, perhaps accusing the entire country of being potential child pornographers polls really well in telephone surveys?

Nevertheless, the biggest problem with the filter isn’t technical and it isn’t its likely failure to reduce child pornography.

The biggest problem is a little word that Mr Conroy slipped out in the middle of a Senate committee hearing. The pilot filter program will not only target the existing blacklisted sites, most of which are child pornography, but will also target “unwanted” content, whatever that means.

The Government has developed a secret list of 10,000 unwanted sites (there are only 1300 on the current blacklist).

But what the Communications Minister wants on the internet and others want on the internet are likely to be two very different things. Nick Xenophon doesn’t want online gambling. Stephen Fielding doesn’t want hardcore pornography and “fetish” material – if Mr Fielding gets to wield his senatorial power over the filter system, expect shares in www.feet.com to slump. If the Government gets the power to control internet content, legal pornography, gambling and violent images will all be candidates for online censorship.

Of course, whenever the censorship of legal material is raised – with its massive implications for freedom of speech in Australia – the Government immediately tries to bring the discussion back to child pornography.

It’s a bit embarrassing that we’re discussing censoring the internet at all. What does it say about Australian politics that the reaction of both major parties to such a liberating technology is to demagogue about its dangers? Our politicians rave about evils online more than any other liberal democracy. As a consequence, the Federal Government’s proposal is far more extensive than any other internet censorship scheme outside the totalitarian world.

There is a certain element of Australian political culture that sees censorship and banning as the panacea to almost every social and policy question. But wowserism dressed up in concerned rhetoric about the sanctity of childhood is still wowserism.

Politics And The Top Cop

Being the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police sounds like a terrible job. In the aftermath of Christine Nixon’s announcement to step down as Victoria’s top cop, her political masters have been full of praise, but her colleagues in crime fighting have been less complimentary. The upper echelons of the police force seem to be drenched in personal animosity and rivalry.

Some of Nixon’s critics really deserve to be ignored. In the wake of her resignation, the Victorian Police Association chose to emphasise that the most important thing the next chief commissioner should possess is a birth certificate from Victoria. Fair enough – unions are paid to look after their members first. But they could at least pretend not to have naked self-interest as their only focus.

Nevertheless, in March Nixon will leave Victoria Police with a mixed record at best. High-profile corruption scandals, the gangland killings, internal police reforms, her approach to domestic violence and community-based policing strategies have dominated the discussion about her successes or otherwise. The Government’s effusive praise of Nixon, however, ignores the increasing problems of basic law and order that have developed under her stewardship.

Yes, in aggregate, crime has gone down in recent years. Since 2001, when Nixon was appointed Chief Commissioner, the total crime rate has dropped by nearly 25%.

But the word “crime” is so broad as to be almost useless. If we look closely at the official police statistics, the Nixon legacy is much less impressive. Since 2002, crimes against the person – that is, homicide, rape, sex offences, assault and abduction – have jumped from fewer than 36,000 to nearly 43,000 incidents a year.

Instead of tackling this dramatic increase in violent crime, Victoria Police has been focusing on aggressive “blitzes” against utterly banal offences like jaywalking – that ridiculous crime committed by nearly everybody every day.

Show me someone who has never jaywalked and I’ll show you someone who has never left the house. Sure, the police should try to enforce every crime on their books, but they should also be a bit sensible about it.

The State Government could quadruple the number of police on the streets and still not successfully eliminate the scourge of jaywalking.

Can they really justify deploying Victoria Police’s limited resources on Swanston Street at 8am on Monday mornings when there is a violence problem on King Street at 4am every night?

Criticising the police force’s periodic jaywalking crackdowns might seem petty, but it actually raises some important questions about the rule of law in Victoria. Jaywalking is the sort of crime that most police would ignore, except for those times when there is a “blitz”. Enforcing one of the State Government’s most ridiculous social regulations does little more than annoy otherwise entirely law-abiding pedestrians.

Victorian police are proud that there has been an increase in the rate at which crimes are being solved. But much of this is because of cultural changes that have encouraged individuals to report cases of domestic violence and rape that have historically gone under-reported.

It is, of course, wonderful that Victoria’s thugs are being identified and caught after they assault someone. But from the victim’s perspective, it would be better not to be assaulted at all – no amount of detective work will encourage bruises to heal quicker.

The vast majority of Nixon’s highly publicised drop in overall crime rates is found in the category of crime against property – you are certainly less likely to be burgled or have your bike stolen than you were five years ago. But again, Victoria Police cannot really take too much credit for the increased use of bike locks, or the prevalence of storefront security guards, or for the increased popularity of home alarm systems.

If we look even closer at the crime statistics, the true state of Victorian crime becomes more worrying. Over recent years, crimes against the person have increasingly been seen in public, rather than private, locations – on public transport, in open spaces, on streets and sidewalks; the sorts of places that require regular patrolling.

It is these crime patterns that form the basis of the recent panic about violence in the city – a rare occasion in politics when there actually is fire where there is smoke. The 2am lockout may have been inept, ill-considered and unpopular, but it was actually trying to tackle a genuine problem: there just aren’t enough police on the streets to prevent crime.

Unfortunately, Nixon has chosen to emphasise that the violence in the city has been “booze-fuelled” – a description that tries to shift the blame for the sharp increase in urban violence off the police and on to Melbourne’s bars and pubs. No matter what fuels violence, it still needs to be dealt with by the police on the street. Liquor licence changes will never be a substitute for more cops.

But since 2002, patrol hours have decreased by nearly one-quarter. The numbers of sworn operational staff have declined as a percentage of the total police force. It seems that much of the State Government’s increase in police resources has been absorbed by administrative staff and bureaucrats. No wonder the Police Association, when it is being more sensible, has argued that Victoria’s police force is understaffed by at least 3000 officers.

With a rising rate of assaults and urban violence, Christine Nixon’s biggest legacy may simply be making law and order a political issue once again.

IPA Review Editorial, November 2008

Isn’t it great when events confirm your political prejudices?

If Kevin Rudd’s widely reported speech in early October is any indication, then the Prime Minister sees in the financial crisis the seeds of a grand, epoch-defining work program for the Commonwealth Government. Having come to national prominence claiming his opposition to the ‘Brutopian’ philosophy of Friedrich Hayek – as muddled as his understanding of Hayek’s actual writing was – Rudd has announced that the financial crisis was all the fault of ‘neo-liberalism’, and ‘a political and economic ideology of extreme capitalism’:

this crisis bears the fingerprints of the extreme free-market ideologues who influence much of the neo-liberal economic elite, free-market ideologues who have a naive belief that unrestrained markets are always self-correcting and that markets left to themselves will always achieve optimum outcomes.

It is a bit odd to criticise the ‘naive belief’ that markets self-correct while we all watch the financial market self-correct in the most dramatic of fashions.

Nevertheless, will historians be able to neatly split Kevin Rudd’s first term as Australian Prime Minister as defined at first by deregulation – his government, after all, appointed the first Australian Minister for Deregulation, not that it’s done much good – and then by a period where pro-regulatory forces were in the offence?

One could be forgiven for believing that the era of small government is over, if only we could remember when it had started.

In his October speech, Rudd recalled the character Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street. It is somewhat disconcerting that Kevin Rudd is trying to build his political narrative off the dramatic licence of Stone – someone who may be an extremely talented filmmaker, but is also an anti-capitalist of the most lunar left. Stone, after all, thinks the Cuban dictatorship is just swell, and that the US Government is competent enough to kill its own President and keep it a secret for nearly half a century.

Unfortunately, the Prime Minister sees the financial crisis as a cheap morality play-greed caused the crisis, not bad regulations, or poor risk management, or bad decisions. According to his narrative, it is the role of the government (the good guys) to punish the finance industry (the bad guys). The same left-wingers who ridiculed the simplistic dichotomy of the War on Terror-remember George Bush’s apparently ‘inflammatory’ statement, ‘you are either with us or against us’?-are more than happy to jump aboard their own simplistic dichotomy when it comes to the evil and greedy traders on Wall Street.

Of course, we have to be careful seeing any hint of the future in a speech by this Prime Minister. If we could, then we would also be proud of our role as the founding members of the Asian franchise of the European Union, proud that it was our diplomacy that finally managed to enforce nuclear disarmament around the globe, and proud that our ‘moral leadership’ on climate change had managed to convince China and India to forego economic development and instead help fulfil Labor’s election commitment to save this fragile world.

In the middle of a financial crisis, it is particularly appropriate that this edition of the IPA Review leads with a piece on former Labor Prime Minister, Paul Keating. In many ways, the Labor Party is still a post-Keating party, and Kevin Rudd’s Government is a post-Keating Government. But as Greg Barns concludes, ‘Australia’s various and numerous challenges as a nation today require Keating boldness, not Rudd timidity’. The events of the last few weeks have shown us how true that really is.

The Dark Mind of the Copywriter

A review of Novels in Three Lines by Felix Fénéon (NYRB Classics, 2007,176 pages)

Ernest Hemingway once said that his best story was his shortest story, deliberately limited to just six words – ‘For sale: baby shoes, never used’ – an exercise in radical economy which manages to imply a lengthy and tragic back story, without being predictable or hackneyed. Hemingway’s ‘novel’, and the self-imposed restraint which inspired it, has been justly praised and imitated.

But eloquence under word limitations is a skill which has been practiced by working journalists almost since printing was invented. Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines demonstrates just how much literary power that can be achieved in an intimidatingly small space.

Novels in Three Lines – a play on the French title, Nouvelles en trios lignes, which can also be translated as ‘news in three lines’ – is a collection of 1,220 tiny dispatches published in the Parisian newspaper Le Matin, all during 1906. They were printed unsigned in an obscure corner of a Le Matin page. Their topics are mundane, covering crime, death, celebrations and local controversies which would not deserve any more space in the paper than Fénéon’s column would grant them.

Nevertheless when collected together, as Luc Sante has done in this appropriately thin volume, Fénéon’s skill as a literary compositor and the artistry of his dispatches becomes clear. Novels in Three Lines is a remarkable portrait of regional France in the first decade of the twentieth century, and a work of unacknowledged brilliance.

Félix Fénéon may have had a relatively anonymous job in 1906 when he wrote for Le Matin, but he occupied a central place in the artistic community of turn-of-the-century France. He was a prominent art critic, whose writing on Georges Seurat was partly responsible for the latter’s success – indeed, Fénéon was the first owner of Bathing at Asnières. He was a theorist of Pointillism, the post-impressionist movement for which Seurat has become the historical touchstone.

Fénéon was a serial magazine founder, writing journalism anonymously and criticism under his name. When Picasso once asked Fénéon his opinion on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon he responded dryly: ‘you should stick to caricature.’

He was imposingly tall and contemporaries described him as enigmatic. When Paul Signac, a follower of Seurat, painted Fénéon surrounded by garish proto-psychedelic abstraction, Fénéon was deeply unhappy with the portrait – the publishers of Novels in Three Lines have used a much more stoic-looking photograph of Fénéon taken from French police archives, a decision which presumably the author would have preferred.

Fénéon’s mug-shot is, anyway, more in keeping with the volume than Signac’s painting would have been. Novels in Three Lines is a collage of brutality and violence; the vast majority of Fénéon’s dispatches concern murders, suicides and accidents, punctuated by the occasional riot, theft, or crippling inquiry. One random-chosen page describes four separate homicides, five accidental deaths, at least six major injuries, one woman committed for insanity, as well as this piece of bad luck:

Too bad! Mentré of Longwy, who revealed to us that he was the winner of the 250,000 francs in the tuberculosis lottery, seems to have been hoaxed.

Fénéon works within the conventions of journalism. He is careful to record names, locations, and more often than not, ages and job descriptions-butchers, clerks, merchants, nurses and soldiers. His ‘novels’ describe early automobile accidents, they record otherwise parochial regional arguments for a national audience (Le Matin was a Parisian paper), outbreaks of disease and building collapses. It is one of the troubles of historical investigation that the underclass only enter history in times of tragedy – most of what we know of the lives of the non-elites in early modern England comes from the proceedings of the Old Bailey. Fénéon’s dispatches are the only time that Jourdain, of Mézières, or the engineer Mahuet, or Langon, of Sceaux, or M. Jégou de Laz, of Cleden, would penetrate the historical curtain.

So much of the artistry of Fénéon’s epigrammatic journalism rides on its elaborate construction, which constantly flirts with full-blown satire:

Napoléon, a peasant of Saint-Nabord, Vosges, drank a litre of alcohol; very well, but he had put in some phosphorous, hence his death.

Mme Fournier, M. Vouin, M. Septeuil, of Sucy, Tripleval, Septeuil, hanged themselves: neurasthenia, cancer, unemployment.

Often Fénéon delays the core of his story until the very last moment, or holds back a crucial piece of information which completely recasts that which preceded it:

To get back with Artémise Riso, of Les Lilas, was the wish of romantic Jean Voul. She remained inflexible. So he knifed her.

He smuggles slightly ambiguous moral commentary within his reportage, wavering between dispassion and irony:

What?! Children perched on his wall?! With eight rounds M. Olive, property owner in Toulon, forced them to scramble down all bloodied.

An unknown person painted the walls of Pantin cemetery yellow; Dujardin wandered naked through Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône. Crazy people, apparently.

In the London Review of Books, Julian Barnes points out that Fénéon had worked in this form before, but for explicitly political ends, in an anarchist journal in the 1890s, where his black sarcasm was deployed even more aggressively:

Dead sick of himself after reading the book by Samuel Smiles (Know Thyself), a judge just drowned himself at Coulange-la-Vineuse. If only this excellent book could be read throughout the magistracy.

But in his Le Matin column, he eschews politics. Luc Sante’s introduction nevertheless emphasises Fénéon’s complicity, if not outright responsibility for, some of the revolutionary anarchist terrorism that was common to western democracies in the pre-war period. Fénéon was arrested for a bombing in 1894, and, while detonators were found in his clerk’s office at the French War Department, and he was close friends with other convicted bombers, he was released for lack of evidence. Whether Fénéon was guilty or not is sort of beside the point-Sante points out that Fénéon was a true believer in the anarchist cause, even if his printed material (he wrote, all up, very little, and even less under his own name) does not obviously reflect it.

For the turn-of-the-century anarchists, politics was as much an aesthetic practice as it was political. In a twisted variation on the famous Robespierre/Lenin line that omelettes cannot be made without breaking eggs, the poet Laurent Tailhade once defended the bombing of civilians by asking: ‘Of what importance are a few vague people if the gesture is beautiful?’ Tailhade was the sole victim of a cafe bombing a few months later-he did not repudiate anarchism, but would not describe himself as ‘vague’ either.

In Novels in Three Lines, Fénéon shares Tailhade’s nihilism, if not his incredible anti-humanism. Fénéon seems to be obsessed with the artistic potential of mayhem-the book jacket draws comparisons with Andy Warhol’s ‘Death and Disaster’ series-stripping the emotional core out of individual tragedies and recording them either with extreme passivity, or filtered through a dark irony.

So can Novels in Three Lines – which Fénéon never meant to publish, are only available in a collated form never seen by the author, and were intended at the time to be nothing more than journalistic hackery – be considered in any way literature?

The Russian theorist Jan Mukarovsky spoke of a necessary ‘literariness’, where simple communication is pushed to the background, made subservient to expression, or as Mukarovsky put it, the emphasis is given to the ‘act of speech itself.’ Indeed, it is hard to avoid the impression that Fénéon was often much less interested in the subject matter of his dispatches than he was with toying with sentence structure and the ambiguities of language. For Fénéon, the drudgery of copywriting seems to have inspired literary experimentation – having to reformulate variations of the same misfortunes over and over would get very tedious.

Fénéon may have arrived at literariness out of nothing more than boredom, but he still arrived there. Novels in Three Lines is an often comic and always disturbing snapshot of European nihilists and the world they disdained.