Articles – Page 32

America Fell Off The Fiscal Cliff A Long Time Ago. Now It’s All About The Landing

Karl Marx famously said history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce.

After avoiding the “fiscal cliff” a fortnight ago, the US faces yet another budget crisis in two months’ time. Yes, another one. Another round of brinkmanship, another round of negotiations.

So, Karl, what comes after farce?

The deal struck between Republicans and Democrats on New Year’s Day merely postponed what has been termed ”sequestration”: a provision in a 2011 bill that automatically cuts government spending across the board if Congress won’t reduce spending itself. But this is all more a political crisis than an economic one. The US budget drove off the fiscal cliff a long time ago. This is the fifth year in a row the budget deficit will be above $US1 trillion – that is, there is a trillion dollar difference between what the government spends and what it taxes. Out of a $3.6 trillion budget, this is an enormous shortfall. A trillion dollars is nearly the size of the entire Australian economy.

The responses are predictable. Democrats think taxes are too low, and want to raise them. Republicans think spending is too high. Yet for some reason it’s fashionable in Australia to chalk the madness of the US budget crisis solely up to nut jobs in the Republican Party. Wayne Swan called them “cranks and crazies”.

According to received wisdom, Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats are pragmatic and reasonable while trying to negotiate with gun-wielding Tea Party fanatics across the aisle. This is nonsense. The Democrats are being just as stubborn as the Republicans, just as political, and, if anything, are more delusional about what has to be done to keep the country solvent.

In the middle of the negotiations, Obama reportedly told the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, that “we don’t have a spending problem”. Really? Spending in the US budget has doubled since Bill Clinton left office. It’s grown far quicker than inflation or population growth. What on earth would a spending problem look like?

The very bill that held back the crisis on January 1 shows how ludicrous Obama’s claim is. Buried in the 157-page bill are taxpayer subsidies for all sorts of weird and wonderful things: two and three-wheeled electric vehicles, car racing, and even asparagus farming. Reckless spending is pathological. They can’t help themselves. Couldn’t the government simply ramp up taxes on the rich? The rich are always good for money. As the Cato Institute’s Michael D. Tanner has written, even if the government confiscated every dollar of income the rich of America earned in one year, there still wouldn’t be enough.

Millionaires and billionaires earned $840 billion in 2010. That money wouldn’t cover the trillion dollar budget shortfall. And even if the government confiscated everything they owned it wouldn’t pay off accumulated US debt. There’s too much.

So it has to be spending. And the only way spending is going to be reduced is if Congress insists. Thank god for multiparty democracy. But we can’t exonerate the Republicans. The Iraq war and the bank bailouts happened under George W. Bush. And the reason Republicans are desperate to avoid the automatic spending cuts is because those cuts disproportionately target the military.
As they should. A massive 48 per cent of all military spending on the planet is spent by the US. The defence budget has nearly doubled since the Cold War. There are still 75,000 US troops in Europe defending against a non-existent Soviet threat. But sophisticated Republican thinking on foreign policy has disappeared to such a degree that military spending is sacred. They won’t touch it.

So sequestration may not be too bad. Having your government cuts done automatically isn’t the best way to go about things, but at least it’s something. American taxpayers might hope the next round of budget negotiations fail.

The Nobel-winning economist James M. Buchanan died last week. Buchanan made his name by developing a theory of how public spending spirals out of control.

It’s in the interest of taxpayers to keep taxes low, and in the interest of politicians and bureaucrats and special interests to keep spending high. The only solution, Buchanan argued, was to write rules which prevented politicians from being reckless with taxpayer money.

In a way, that’s what the fiscal cliff issue is all about: constraining politicians. Same with the “debt ceiling” – a legal limit on how much the government can borrow. The current proposal to mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin is just a tricksy way to get around the limit.

But Congress will increase the debt ceiling. It always has. Buchanan would say a rule about government debt is a good idea. But you have to enforce the rule somehow.

In March, Congress will kick the can down the road again. Politicians first and foremost want to get to the next election. But the US has already gone off the fiscal cliff. We don’t know what will happen when it hits the ground.

Les Mis: A Revolution For Our Times

What do the revolutionaries in Les Misérables actually want?

This is not a pedantic question. Victor Hugo’s 1862 Les Misérables – or, at least, its 1980s musical adaptation – is now deeply embedded in the West’s popular consciousness.

Its popularity extends far past those who know anything of 19th century French history. Indeed, for many people the musical is a stand-in for the entire French Revolution, although it depicts events that occurred many decades later.

Popular culture profoundly shapes our political beliefs, and the idea of rebellion against injustice still resonates even in the democratic era. See, for instance, Occupy.

Even those who haven’t seen the musical would know its broad strokes. A former convict who has broken parole tries to build a virtuous life while on the run. The culmination of his personal struggle coincides with a doomed Paris uprising led by idealistic students.

But that uprising seems to be against… what? The monarchy? A general sense of inequality? It’s not called Les Misérables – the victims, the wretched ones – for nothing. The musical’s logo incorporates an engraving of a young girl in rags. The 2012 film has an energetic makeup artist who gives the poor of France gratuitously broken teeth and cholera.

But it’s never clear why any of the students believe economic injustice will be resolved by barricading off a few city streets. The student revolutionaries are hopelessly vague about their goals. They’re going to “cut the fat ones down to size”. There’s some suggestion of a utopian “tomorrow”.

The uprising depicted in Les Misérables was a real uprising that happened in June 1832. It was an aftershock of a bigger political upheaval just two years earlier, which had replaced the royal restoration under the House of Bourbon with a new constitutional monarchy under the House of Orléans.

Those who really fought on the 5th and 6th of June 1832 were opposed to the new Orléanist monarchy, but for many different reasons. There were radical Republicans, who wanted parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage. There were also ultra-Royalists, who wanted the reversal of all the gains of 1789, and Bonepartists, who wanted to restore French imperial glory as it was under Napoleon. With such a bizarre coalition, no wonder the people of Paris slept in their beds that night.

And France was hardly the stagnant, rotting, unchanging regime the musical suggests. Between 1796 (when our hero Jean Valjean was arrested for stealing a loaf of bread) and 1832, France was governed by no less than five political systems, from the revolutionary Directory to the monarchy after 1830.

All this politics is missing in the musical, replaced by a vague sense of injustice and a group of students with a serious martyr complex.

Sure, the musical is a musical. You can’t ask for too much political exposition in songs. It’s easier to find a rhyme for “love” than a rhyme for “chronic wealth disparity” or “post-revolutionary dynastic confusion”.

But Victor Hugo’s original novel is not a whole lot clearer. In his 2007 book The Temptation of the Impossible, Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa argues that Hugo, too, is hopelessly vague on the purpose of the revolt. One student forecasts if they succeed “monsters will have given way to the angels”. But that’s about as specific as it gets.

One way to join the dots between the poor on the streets and the students’ bloodshed is to depict the latter as proto communists. The students might be Bolsheviks dedicated to a redistributive paradise.

But the narrator of Les Misérables was hostile to communism, writing that “equal sharing abolishes competition and, in consequence, labour”.

And the cruellest oppression in the story isn’t economic. Hugo reserves his biggest criticism for the legal system. Hugo himself was a political drifter, starting as a conservative royalist and ending life, loosely, as a liberal or a social democrat. Virtually his only constant belief was opposition to the death penalty.

We think of Les Misérables as a primarily a story about revolution and social oppression. The musical does not disabuse us of this idea. But it is wrong. Hugo is more preoccupied by God than politics.

The revolutionary students do not believe their uprising will succeed. As Vargas Llosa writes, the students “know and accept that they will be annihilated because this is the role that they must play”. What comes across as a martyr complex in the musical is more for Hugo an acceptance of fate and the will of God. The entire story is a grand morality tale of fate and redemption.
Contemporary versions of Les Misérables struggle to communicate Hugo’s essentially religious message. We live in a secular age. Faith is a niche topic not a mass one.

Yet a modern reader can’t help be struck that the first 70 or so pages of the novel are a detailed profile of someone marginal to the plot – Bishop Myriel, the good priest who forgives Jean Valjean for stealing his silver. If the opening of a story sets its tone, then this is totally different from the vision of penal hardship set by the musical.

Hugo stripped the politics out of the 1832 uprising to tell a religious story. Then the musical adaptation stripped most of the religion away.

There’s not much left, except a vague exhortation to violently, pointlessly die on behalf of the poor. The students are engaged in a vanity revolution. This is insurrection as a lifestyle choice.

There’s something very modern about that. Our mature democracies are boringly practical. For us, revolution is a romantic gesture which belongs in the past.

But real, historical revolutions have been about something: tyranny or taxation or arcane theories of economic class.

In the Les Misérables musical – and our popular culture – revolution is little more than an honourable, nihilistic death-wish.

Policy Without Politics Is Pointless

John McTernan is Julia Gillard’s director of communications, a Scottish import, and, by all accounts, the man who convinced our Prime Minister to go hard on Tony Abbott’s woman problem.

In a profile in the Monthly, Nick Bryant wrote that McTernan is “renowned for his ruthlessness, and for being a hater”. He has an “all-out attack” political style. He’s usually compared to Malcolm Tucker, the iconic Scottish bruiser in The Thick of It.

But he came to Australia in a very different guise – as an “Adelaide Thinker-in-Residence”, the intellectual patronage program of former premier Mike Rann.

McTernan’s final report was belatedly released after Christmas: Are You Being Served? Toward More Responsive Public Services.

This report has to be read to be believed. It is superficial and scattershot and padded out with anecdotes. Poor old South Australians apparently paid handsomely for this collection of folksy wisdom masquerading as serious thinking about public service reform. In some parts it is actually quite funny. McTernan uses the word “synergies” not once, but twice.

Yet the report has one virtue: it exposes how barren thinking about public service delivery can be.

McTernan’s “challenge” was to revolutionise the relationship between public services and public service users.

To this he proposes the government “state and celebrate the purpose of public service overall”, seek to “foster a culture that empowers citizens and government to jointly own the problems that need to be solved”, and “establish a comprehensive state-wide approach to the development of 21st Century public service leadership”.

Those are the first three recommendations, word for word.

Only slightly more concrete is his call for “e-government”. Sure, e-government is a tantalising idea. In theory, it could link public services together, reduce administrative costs, increase government responsiveness and transparency, and make dealing with bureaucracies simple – even convenient.

In practice… well, you only need to see what the Australian Taxation Office’s eTax software looks like to see why massive government departments don’t do well in the online space.

E-government initiatives are, at their best, plodding and ineffective. At their worst they can be dangerous: government-run databases already have notorious privacy problems, and such problems multiply when those databases are linked together.

If e-government lends itself to fantastical thinking, even more indulgent is the claims made for the “open data” movement, where government releases wads of raw data for citizens to analyse and repurpose. For McTernan, open data could “increase transparency, accountability and collaboration”.

That all sounds great, but in reality, the most momentous open data success in Australia has been the National Public Toilet Map. Cute, modestly helpful, but hardly a revitalisation of democracy.

The limits of open data are obvious. The only data that is going to be released under an open data scheme is bland; anything which is controversial, potentially embarrassing, or even mildly off-message is going to be cleansed or suppressed.

Indeed, controlling the release of embarrassingly information is exactly the sort of thing that a communications director to a prime minister might be expected to do.

Public sector utopianism is always dashed upon the rocks of political expediency. That’s a worldly truth which makes most thinking about public service reform hopelessly naïve.

But in John McTernan’s report, this truth is elevated into a great irony. This supremely political person (the Monthly profile says McTernan can’t resist involving himself in internal ALP factional fights) appears not to have factored politics into his thinking.

For instance, McTernan proposes a checklist of sound policy development and implementation. (“Ask what is the problem?”, “What are the facts and do we have them all?”, “What are the solutions and do we have them all?” and so on.) That’s nice, and reminiscent of the “policy cycle” described in first year public policy textbooks.

But the policy cycle is an ideal model. It is deliberately simplified to the point of ridiculousness.

McTernan of all people knows that public policy is not developed by a steady, step-by-step process.

No, in a democracy, public policy is a compromise between interest groups brokered by politicians whose major interest is re-election. It is constrained by a lack of information and confounded by real-world complexity. It is implemented by bureaucracies driven by self-interest and it is evaluated by those who have a stake in its success.

All the problems McTernan implicitly identifies in the public service – excessive internal red tape, a lack of leadership, poor policy development – are not isolated problems to be surmounted but are innate features of the public sector. They are the natural result of the political incentives faced by all whose job it is to develop, choose, and implement policy.

Until thinking on public sector reform comes to terms with the political constraints of government action, it will always be pointlessly utopian.

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.