Articles – Page 36

The Terrifyingly Inscrutable Minds Behind Mass Murders

We still don’t have a good grasp of what drove Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to massacre 12 of their fellow students and a teacher in 1999.

The Columbine High School killing was one of the most significant domestic acts of violence in the United States in recent decades. It remains an icon of savagery. It has been studied continuously.

Every second of their killing spree has been recreated; every biographical and cultural motive canvassed. Yet as one book, Comprehending Columbine, points out, a decade later there remains “no comprehensive understanding as to why it happened and why it happened where it did.”

No doubt each boy acted for separate reasons. Harris and Klebold had markedly different personalities and different family backgrounds. But despite the enormous amount of written material the killers left for investigators, what turned them from students to mass murderers is still somewhat of a mystery.

School shooters aren’t all as enigmatic as Harris and Klebold. When Evan Ramsey killed two of his fellow Alaskan students in 1997, his motives and pathology were clearer: he had been bullied at school and abused at home.

Yet in the ranks of young killers, there are both bullies and the bullied (Harris of Columbine was in the former camp). Some have been leaders, others followers. Some shooters claim to hear voices in their head. Others are desperate to prove they committed their crimes in perfect, clear sanity.

One recent survey of school shootings concluded that “the particular circumstances of each shooter, each distinct from the last, contribute to a sense of disequilibrium”. There is no clear thread which ties these acts together. And this for a distinct phenomenon, united by a shared location (schools) and shared targets (fellow students and teachers).

Humans want to understand why things happen. We think in terms of cause and effect. But mass murders usually confound explanation.

It is unlikely we will ever fully uncover the “causes” of the massacre committed at the Dark Knight Rises premiere in Aurora, Colorado on Friday. The attempts to derive meaning from atrocities like this are understandable but futile.

It’s a 30-minute drive between Aurora and Columbine High School. The suspected killer, James Holmes, would have been 11 at the time of Harris and Klebold’s rampage.

Yet it was only his victims who lived in the shadow of Columbine. Holmes was raised in California and moved to Colorado to enrol in a PhD. He could not have felt the region’s history as keenly as those he targeted late last week.

But wouldn’t it be more comfortable to understand his actions in that frame? To believe he was the product of a traumatised community, and therefore the shooting had a discernable explanation?
Just as it would be easier to understand Columbine if the killers had been inspired by the music of Marilyn Manson, or given political purpose by an underground neo-Nazi trench coat gang, or were the products of broken homes or bullying.

None of these common explanations hold up to scrutiny. But even if any were true, there would still be Comprehending Columbine’s question of why it happened and why it happened there.

Take one popular account. Yes, Harris and Klebold were passionate fans of the video game Doom, where players shoot monsters from a first-person perspective. And Harris said their upcoming massacre would be “like playing Doom”.

But that’s not much of an explanation for their actions. An estimated 10 million people played Doom at one time in the 1990s. Why did those two boys from Colorado feel compelled to re-enact it?

These little tidbits – we will no doubt hear many about James Holmes – are superficially damning but rarely have any explanatory power.

Yet immediately after word of the Aurora shooting dripped out, there was a long list of candidates for explanations. Hurriedly cobbled together experts blamed bullying. An American ABC News reporter blamed the Tea Party. The Daily Mail blamed Occupy Wall Street. One politician blamed the opponents of Judeo-Christianity. An MSNBC talking head blamed Star Trek.

Those inanities have now ceded to a slightly more considered debate about gun control, but that too seems like an attempt to fill the gap with meaning – to draw a lesson, to impose a narrative.

Our cause-and-effect thinking flatters us that atrocities are problems to be solved. Every shocking event must be followed by a debate. Could tighter gun laws avoid such violence? Surely the best case scenario is it could reduce the number of victims.

The desire to cause horrific violence is likely much stronger than the legislative strength of Washington DC. The uncomfortable reality is these tragedies do not pivot on public policy, but rather on an insane choice, made by an individual, to kill strangers.

Mass murders are a global phenomenon (Wikipedia has a revealing list here). Compared to the United States, gun laws are strict in Norway. So Anders Breivik’s spree killing a few months later did not spark a passionate debate about gun control, despite his shared use of semi-automatic weapons.

There, the story has been about Islamophobia – as Breivik intended it. This is a narrative, imposed by the killer himself, to try to give the event a concrete meaning, and distract us from looking at Breivik’s specific, unique, individual mental world. James Holmes too may try to impose his own justification for his actions.

For some reason we do not seek to “understand” serial killers – who commit their crimes in private over time. Yet like rampage killers, they too can be drawn to their actions by the thrill, or the notoriety, or power over others.

Evil is too easy a word. Nevertheless, if there is an explanation for acts of violence like those in Aurora or Columbine, they will be found not in culture, law, or politics, but in the terrifyingly inscrutable minds of those who choose to murder others indiscriminately.

Let The Cult Begin

The Olympic Games are creepy. Sure, their creepiness isn’t immediately apparent. We have grown familiar with the pageantry that surrounds this sporting carnival. But there’s more to the Olympics than swimming, shot put and badminton.

The Games are steeped in ritual, all of which is designed to promote an unsettling ideology. They are unlike any other international sporting event. Games officials talk of an Olympic movement, an Olympic spirit, and an Olympic ideal. Its five-ring logo is imbued with a quasi-mystical significance. It even has its own ceremonial calendar: an Olympiad is a period of four years. It’s hard not to conclude that the Olympic Games are a religion, and a bizarre religion at that.

The opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics is this Friday. The official protocols dictate it will feature a sacred torch, which will carry a sacred flame, which will light a sacred cauldron. The flame is supposed to represent purity – flames come from the sun and are untainted by our material world. When the Olympic torch was lit in a Greek temple in May, there was a ceremony of dancing priestesses and men dressed as heralds performing feats of strength.

The flame ritual will be preceded by a symbolic release of pigeons. An Olympic flag will be raised. A hymn will be sung. There will be oath-taking. These rites are all very purposeful. The founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, said its basic idea was to convert athletics into “a religion, a cult [and] an impassioned soaring”.

So the entertainments and frills of the opening ceremony obscure just how odd all the Olympic rituals are.

It is really only when totalitarian states host the Games (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980, and Beijing 2008) that the cultish elements of the Olympics are fully assimilated into the opening ceremony.

For instance, what we call the ”parade” of athletes around the ceremony would really be better described as a march. Coubertin was explicit about the militaristic elitism of the Games. He wanted to showcase ”an army of sportsmen”. Olympic athletes are the peak physical specimens of all the world’s nations. They are young, fit and virile. In Coubertin’s view, physical perfection was a sign of moral purity. He wanted athletes to devote themselves to sacrifice and an “ideal of a superior life”.

No surprise when the Nazis hosted the Games in 1936, Coubertin embraced them. Berlin was the culmination of his life’s work. It was the ultimate display of ceremony and strength. Olympic ceremonies still combine a sort of fascist symbolism with Cirque du Soleil-style choreography.

Yet the International Olympic Committee is proud of Coubertin. Our Australian committee even has an award in his honour, handed to the secondary school students who best epitomise the values of the Olympic movement.

No doubt the students don’t understand how strange those values are. Presumably they believe the Olympics are focused on peace and global harmony. Because if there is one thing Olympic officials do well, it is soaring speeches about all the good they are doing for the world.

Jacques Rogge, the current Olympic president, told the United Nations in 2007 that “in a world too often torn apart by war, environmental degradation, poverty and disease, we see sport as a calling to serve humanity”. An earlier president, Avery Brundage, pronounced in 1968 that “the essence of the Olympic ideal maintains its purity as an oasis where correct human relations and the concepts of moral order still prevail”.

Their words are cheap and self-serving. Brundage made his lofty claim just five days after the Tlatelolco massacre, where the Mexican government killed dozens of students protesting the Mexico City Games. Rogge gave his speech in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics, described recently by the dissident Ai Weiwei as nothing more than propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party.

Their words are so cheap that in 1995 the Olympic committee even tossed “sustainability” into their charter. Not content with saving humanity, they wish to save the planet. It’s not clear how flying 10,000 athletes around the world every four years will achieve that goal. The sustainability platform is almost like a deliberate joke. And it reveals just how vacuous the Olympic ideal really is.

The Olympics do nothing to achieve global harmony. They arguably work against it. If harmony was the goal, athletes would compete as individuals, not on behalf of nations.

Do the Olympic ideologists honestly believe the nonsense they spout? The Games are a taxpayer-funded cash cow for all involved, and that’s probably motive enough for many. Yet Olympism offers a sense of mission. It’s not like the World Cup or the Commonwealth Games. The Olympics is a cause. It is a full-blown belief system.

Rogge said in his UN speech he wanted to place “sport at the service of mankind”. Maybe he does. But right now, sport is serving the weird ideology of the Olympics much more than humanity.

Be Sceptical Of Vague New ‘National Security’ Powers

Any proposal by the government to increase its own power should be treated with scepticism.

Double that scepticism when the government is vague about why it needs that extra power. Double again when those powers are in the area of law and order. And double again every time the words “national security” are used.

So scepticism – aggressive, hostile scepticism, bordering on kneejerk reaction – should be our default position when evaluating the long list of new security powers the Federal Government would like to deal with “emerging and evolving threats”.

The Attorney-General’s Department released a discussion paper last week detailing security reform it wants Parliament to consider.

The major proposal – although explored little in the department’s paper – is the Gillard Government’s proposed data retention laws. These laws would require all internet service providers to store data about their users’ online activity for two years. They have been on the table for some time.

But there are many other proposals. The department wants the power to unilaterally change telecommunications intercept warrants. It wants the threshold for those warrants to be significantly lowered. It wants the ability for security agencies to force us to hand over information like passwords to be expanded. There’s much more.

These reforms add up to a radical revamping of security power. They raise troubling questions about our right to privacy, our freedom of speech, and the overreach of regulatory agencies. And they suggest one of the most substantial attacks on civil liberties since John Howard’s post-September 11 anti-terror law reform.

Public policy is like comedy – timing is everything. The lack of timing here is revealing.

These proposals come nearly a decade after the first flurry of anti-terror activity, and long after most analysts have concluded that the serious threat of terrorism – keenly and rashly felt at the turn of the century – has subsided.

The government claims that a new environment of cybercrime and cyber-espionage necessitate wholesale reform of the law. These claims are massively overstated. Cybercrime exists more in the advertising of security companies than it does in reality, as I argued in the Sunday Age earlier this year.

Cyber-espionage too is worse in theory than reality. In their recent paper Loving the Cyber Bomb?, two American scholars, Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins, point out that these claims have all the hallmarks of threat inflation driven by self-interested security agencies.

As they write in the American context, “The rhetoric of ‘cyber doom’ employed by proponents of increased federal intervention, however, lacks clear evidence of a serious threat that can be verified by the public.”

Certainly, our Attorney-General’s Department offers no such clear evidence. Perhaps there is evidence. But most of the Government’s case is presented as innuendo and hypotheticals.

Brito and Watkins suggest this hyperbole has a parallel with the sort of threat inflation that led up to the Iraq War. The conclusion – more power – leads directly from the premise – an evolving threat. But we’re a long way from the realm of evidence-based policy here.

Yet even if we took the government at its word about the dark and dangerous online environment, there would still be much to be concerned with.

Fairfax papers reported in April that ASIO now privately believes environmentalist groups are more dangerous than terrorists. This surely says more about the diminished status of terrorism than the rise of green activism. But it also underlines the often political nature of national security enforcement.

The line between lawful and unlawful political dissent is less clear at the margins than we like to admit. Enthusiastic agencies and thin-skinned governments can easily forget there is any difference at all. (During the Second World War, John Curtin’s Labor government even directed ASIO’s predecessor agency to investigate the Institute of Public Affairs – its ideological opponent, and an organisation that was urging the formation of a non-left political party.)

ASIO isn’t the only agency we have to worry about. There are at least 16 Commonwealth and state bodies approved to intercept telecommunications right now. Even the scandal-ridden Office of Police Integrity in Victoria would benefit from these new powers.

Ministers in the Gillard Government have jumped to defend the Attorney-General’s proposals. And the Coalition is “examining the issues carefully”.

Yet given the bipartisan submission to the previous government’s expansion of the security state, it would not pay to be too optimistic.

This is largely because governments are usually passive recipients of the phenomenon of threat inflation, not the drivers of it. Security agencies are easily able to convince politicians they need more support and power, and that any scepticism about pressing national security matters is reckless, even negligent.

The scepticism, unfortunately, has to be left to the public whose civil liberties are at stake.

Freedom Of Association Lost In The Moral Panic

“You are the sort of man this act aims at,” Magistrate Laidlaw told a 30-year-old Sydney man, George Harris, as he sentenced him to six months’ hard labour.

The Vagrancy (Amendment) Act 1929 had been passed by the New South Wales Parliament just a year before. Laidlaw thought the act was fantastic – a “very desirable piece of legislation”, he said in a separate case.

George Harris had violated the act by “habitually consorting with reputed criminals”. He’d consorted with them at Central Station, and he’d consorted with them at Randwick racecourse. Not only had Harris consorted all over Sydney, Laidlaw hastened to point out, but he had been observed consorting “at various times of the night”.

So what sort of man was George Harris? He had a police record more than a decade old, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. That record was spread across Australia and New Zealand.

Yet his offences were relatively minor – theft, vagrancy, and “being a suspected person”. Harris may have been a bad sort, and may have hung around with other bad sorts. But in February 1930, the state of New South Wales imposed six months’ hard labour upon him for mere association. No need to prove that he had stolen anything or assaulted anyone. His relationships were crime enough.

Consorting with convicted criminals was made unlawful in the midst of Sydney’s moral panic over the ‘razor gangs’ – that era of crime luridly but forgettably depicted in Underbelly.

The tabloid newspapers had aggressively called for a crackdown on consorting in order to tackle the gangs. Introducing the anti-consorting laws, the colonial secretary claimed it was a necessary tool to deal with the many people “from other parts of the world” who were “engaged in an orgy of crime in this city”.

But the crime of consorting was, in reality, a catch-all crime that gave police discretionary powers to pull up whoever they liked. The police had to give one warning and then that was it. As the University of New South Wales’ Alex Steel has written, “once the police decided that a person was a criminal, they might proceed to arrest him or her for consorting on any convenient ground.”

This unjust law gave police the power to criminalise what should be protected under freedom of association. It remained with its original strength for half a century, until the New South Wales government tightened up some of its excesses in 1979.

But consorting laws are back. The O’Farrell Government amended them earlier this year to give them more bite. They did so ostensibly to deal with bikie gangs and the recent drive-by shootings. Now even regular email with someone who was once found guilty of an indictable offence is now considered consorting.

Certainly, the amended law offers a few defences against a charge of consorting. For instance, it is legal to consort with someone if you are their lawyer or doctor. But that’s not much consolation. The defences are extremely narrow, and the circumstances in which you could be found to have illegally consorted are extremely broad.

The NSW Young Lawyers society has pointed out consorting would even include football clubs where some members of the team have been convicted of assault. Police could disband a club with one warning. Any players that continued to fraternise with their team mates would face jail. Even if you assume police are at all times noble and dutiful, such powers are obviously – ludicrously – excessive.

The first person was convicted under the amended laws last week. Yet he was not a bikie, but a 21-year-old man the NSW police admits has no link with motorcycle gangs.

It was the same in the 1930s. The police found consorting laws useful to clear the streets of prostitution, but not so useful in clamping down on razor crime. Consorting laws are good for smoothing the wheels of prosecution – if you think the goal of a legal system is to maximise prosecutions. But its ability to prevent or punish serious criminal activity is limited.

Consorting laws are clearly unjust for those accused of consorting. But they are cruel for those who have been convicted and punished for a crime. A malicious police officer could eliminate a released criminal’s freedom of association simply by issuing his friends with a warning.

When governments face law and order problems, the urge to “do something” must be overwhelming. The newspapers call for action. Talkback radio calls for crackdowns. Police call for more police power.

But police and prosecutors already have a long list of offences they can charge, and they have ample powers to do so. Nobody seriously believes motorcycle gangs are an unprecedented threat that a modern legal system is powerless against, yet for some reason everybody acts as if they are.

Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Freedom of association – a freedom that extends even to those who have in the past been convicted of a crime – is one of those essential liberties.

Schools Might As Well Tell Students Who To Vote For

The draft shape of the National Curriculum’s ”civics and citizenship” subject was released last month. It is blatantly ideological. It displays its progressive, left-of-centre politics like a billboard.

The National Curriculum was announced by Julia Gillard in 2008 and is forecast to be implemented in Victoria and New South Wales sometime after next year. The curriculum authority is rolling out one subject at a time.

But from the start, the curriculum’s politics were obvious. In its own words, the National Curriculum will create “a more ecologically and socially just world”. The phrase “ecological justice” is rarely seen outside environmental protests. Social justice is a more mainstream concept, but it’s also solidly of the left – it usually refers to “fixing” inequality by redistributing wealth.

Civics is a small subject in the curriculum, but a crucial one. The National Curriculum wants to sculpt future citizens out of today’s students. So the emphasis civics places on certain political ideas will echo through Australian life for decades.

And when a group of education academics try to summarise the essential values of our liberal democracy, we should pay attention. After all, they hope to drill them into every child.
So what are our nation’s values? According to the civics draft, they are “democracy, active citizenship, the rule of law, social justice and equality, respect for diversity, difference and lawful dissent, respect for human rights, stewardship of the environment, support for the common good, and acceptance of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship”.

It’s quite a list. Some of the values, such as democracy and the rule of law, we all should agree on. But most are skewed sharply to the left.

Where, for instance, is individual liberty? The curriculum describes Australia as a liberal democracy but doesn’t seem comfortable with what that means: a limited government protecting the freedom for individuals to pursue their own lives.

Conservatives should be troubled that ”tradition” is absent from the civics draft. Our democratic and liberal institutions are the inheritance of centuries of experiment and conflict. To respect tradition is to value those institutions. Yet tradition only pops up when the civics draft talks about multiculturalism. It’s part of “intercultural understanding”. In other words, we are merely to tolerate the traditions of others, not value our own traditions.

And liberals should be appalled at the emphasis on ”civic duty”. The curriculum could have said that individuals and families living their own lives in their own way is virtuous in itself. After all, people who do things for others in a market economy contribute to society as much as the most passionate political activist.

But instead the civics subject will pound into children that they should work for international non-profit groups in order to pursue “the common good”.

This may be uncontroversial to the left, but it is political dynamite. Liberals are sceptical of the common good because throughout history it has been used to justify nationalism, oppression, militarism, intolerance and privilege. It’s one of the reasons liberals support small government. But the common good has been tossed absent-mindedly into the civics draft, alongside that other vague and loaded concept, social justice.

It gets worse. The suggestion we have a duty to be “stewards” of the environment comes straight from green political philosophy. It reduces humans to mere trustees of nature. This directly conflicts with the liberal belief that the Earth’s bounty can be used for the benefit of humanity.

Politics drenches the entire curriculum. Three “cross-curriculum priorities” infuse everything from history to maths. They are: sustainability, engagement with Asia, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures.

Perhaps on first glance the priorities don’t seem too political. But the history curriculum will offer perspectives on “the overuse of natural resources” and “the global energy crisis”. The English curriculum will teach students how to “advocate … actions for sustainable futures”. The ideology here is so flagrant teachers might as well just tell the kids who to vote for.

And imagine the priorities were, instead, material progress, the Australia-US alliance and British culture. There would be an uproar. Progressives would line up to condemn the curriculum’s reactionary politics. Remember the outrage over conservative bias in John Howard’s citizenship test? And that was just for migrants. The curriculum is for every Australian child.

The irony is that this iteration of the National Curriculum wasn’t Labor’s idea. The Howard government set the ball rolling. The Coalition was unhappy about how terribly left-wing state curriculums were.

So people who are pleased with the curriculum as it stands should think how it could be when an Abbott government takes over. We may hear again the same dark warnings about ideologues taking over the education system that we heard during the Howard years.

In theory, teaching all students the virtues of liberal democracy is a good idea. But if educationalists can’t do so without imposing their own political values, we may be no better off than when we started.

Abbott Should Focus On His Second Day As PM

On his first day of government, Tony Abbott will phone the president of Nauru to reintroduce the Pacific solution and will start repealing the carbon tax.

The obvious question is what he would do on his second day.

Not what he plans to do. (If he runs the campaign anything like he did in 2010, the new prime minister will need a long sleep.) But what he would do. How would Abbott react to the unexpected?

The Labor Party and its supporters have been demanding the Coalition release a full suite of election policies immediately. Their motives are transparent. They are looking for something – anything – to tie a WorkChoices-style campaign to. You can just see Hawker Britton itching feverishly to roll one out. No surprise there. Labor’s friends are nostalgic for a time when their party wasn’t despised.

But the art of governing is not simply implementing previously determined policies and then waiting until the next election. George W Bush rightly described himself as The Decider. When we vote, we are not voting for a dot-point list of new laws and taxes, but for a team we trust to make future decisions that we will have no chance to vote upon individually.

Labor should understand this. The public’s current disillusion is not solely because the government broke a promise, but because it turned out to be a very different beast to what was first offered.

Recall that Kevin Rudd’s team promised in 2007 to be even more fiscally conservative than John Howard’s team. Rudd’s attack on Howard-era economic management was “this reckless spending must stop”. Yet when the Global Financial Crisis struck, Rudd flipped, declared the end of neo-liberalism, and instituted one of the biggest stimulus packages in the developed world.

Julia Gillard suggested in 2010 she would slow Rudd’s frenetic activity. Among other things, she would shunt the carbon tax out of sight, out of mind to a citizens’ assembly. But her government has spiralled further out of control.

Voters can forgive a change in priorities. They cannot forgive a change in character.

This is what Tony Abbott needs to be thinking about.

We’ve got a very good idea of what policies Abbott wants to implement. He has spent the last two years in opposition doubling down on his 2010 election promises. The Coalition will stop the boats, axe the tax – you know the rest. But as for Abbott’s philosophy, his image of Australia’s future … that’s less clear.

If Abbott wants his government to be stable and successful – to avoid the trap which Rudd and Gillard fell into – he needs to spend the next year not talking about what he plans to do on his first day, but articulating what he thinks a good government looks like. The opposition leader needs to give voters a vision of an Abbott government five years down the track, not one day in. We need some hint of how the prospective prime minister will react to unforeseen events.

After John Howard’s 2007 defeat, there was a belief in liberal and conservative circles that centre-right politics needed intellectual renewal.

A few dreary terms in opposition offered just that opportunity. But events intervened. Labor became disorganised and vulnerable. Discussion about the future of liberalism was postponed indefinitely.

It’s easy to proclaim the times suit a second coming of Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. But the world those leaders faced is very different from ours. Reagan and Thatcher had to dismantle the nationalised behemoths that had built up over the past half century, to close down the government industry cartels, and reintroduce competition into the biggest sectors of the economy.

Our modern world is the fruit of that labour. Yet the great nationalised industries were not replaced with free markets but with a dense web of regulation and supervision. Governments no longer run railways but instead prepare seven-step risk-assessment processes for street parties in accordance with joint Australian/New Zealand risk-management standards. How a centre-right party navigates this new reality is something that requires serious thinking.

Abbott’s book Battlelines seemed to suggest that he had done some of that thinking. It wasn’t a manifesto of small government libertarianism – quite the opposite – but it was, nonetheless, a sketch of what a modern, updated, yet distinctly conservative party might look like.

But Battlelines was written well before he became opposition leader. In his current role, there has been little of the characteristic thought of his book.

Since the last election, Abbott has offered up a series of “Headland” speeches. They have been disappointing. He has just repeated his well-worn, itemised critique of Labor. It’s worth reading John Howard’s original 1995 Headland speech again – it’s about philosophy, not policy. Howard talked about what he stood for, not what he was going to do.

Abbott’s Headland speeches reveal little of what sort of prime minister he will be on his second day. But there is still time for him to reveal that necessary vision of what a “good government” looks like.

Another year, another failed climate summit

The 49-page agreement produced at the Rio+20 Earth Summit is unmitigated junk. I’m not going out on a limb here. It’s one of those rare universally agreed upon truths.

Greenpeace called the summit a “failure of epic proportions”. The organisers of the original 1992 Rio Summit said the document was a weak collection of “pious generalities”. Friends of the Earth described it as “hollow”. George Monbiot wrote it was “meaningless platitudes”. Richard Branson used the phrase “mealy-mouthed”.

They are all correct. The document, “The Future We Want”, is stuffed full of trite acknowledgments, reaffirmations, recognitions, and renewals. It’s like a greatest-hits album. There’s no new material.

“The need to further mainstream sustainable development” gets acknowledged, of course. The “natural and cultural diversity of the world” has its due recognition. The “importance of freedom, peace and security [and] respect for all human rights” gets reaffirmed. Also reaffirmed is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which dates back to 1948. Indeed, the word reaffirm is used 59 times throughout.

Virtually every goal of every lobby gets its due. The unions even managed to get “decent jobs” thrown into the priority list. Hell, why not? Coordinated global action on decent jobs is no more or less likely than coordinated global action on emissions reduction.

One paragraph even proudly says the signatories recognise that “Mother Earth is a common expression in a number of countries and regions”. And they say satire is dead.

Rio+20 was supposed to be the revitalisation of the global climate movement. The first Rio summit set in train everything from the Kyoto Protocol to Copenhagen. After the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen conference, and the water-treading at Cancun and Durban in 2010 and 2011, Rio was to be the spark that got climate action going again.

But now Kyoto expires at the end of this year, and the cycle of yearly climate meetings are a wash. It’s been obvious for years there would be no coherent or significant international action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Yes, there was an outbreak of optimism before the Copenhagen summit. Recall the “Hopenhagen” campaign, the sort of silliness only an alliance of the United Nations and high-price advertising agencies could produce.

For all that enthusiasm, there was never a clear explanation about why developing nations would suddenly jettison their long-term economic development goals. At the time, we were told the Copenhagen negotiations were thwarted at the last minute by India and China. This influential report in Der Speigel of the final moments of Copenhagen reads very different in retrospect – it’s plain now the negotiations weren’t scuttled by personal offence, but were doomed from the start.

That of course has been what free marketeers have been saying about global action all along. And now a sense of hopelessness is starting to seep through the green movement.

The Australian Conservation Foundation’s Don Henry told Radio National on Thursday last week that he was “very disappointed” with the Rio declaration. In his view, Rio revealed an “unusual confluence of caution”, as rich countries tended to their wounded economies, and poor countries focused on reducing poverty.

Striking the same baffled note, Martin Khor, one of the members of the UN Committee on Development Policy, said last week, “We’ve sunk so low in our expectations that reaffirming what we did 20 years ago is now considered a success.”

But the reluctance to curtail economic growth for uncertain environmental ends has always been predictable.

Certainly, these climate conferences have coincided with one of the greatest economic down turns in the past century. It is possible to blame their failure on the great recession.

But regardless of the global economy, it is in no single nation’s interest to substantially reduce emissions unless everybody else is also doing so in unison. Ross Garnaut described this as a true prisoner’s dilemma: international cooperation, he wrote, “is essential for a solution to a global problem”.

So another interpretation is that climate negotiations have plateaued because such cooperation has a natural, hitherto undiscovered, limit. It can only go so far. The failure of coordinated emissions reduction is a natural experiment political scientists will study for decades.

I argued in The Drum last month adaptation is now the main game. For green groups, this ought to be the take-home message from Rio. And if they focus on adaptation, they might find surprising allies.

But to get there, they would have to drop their utopian fantasy of the planet coming together to achieve a shared goal. And that realisation may be much more disappointing than their discovery the Rio agreement is nonsense.

Just Be Grateful Airlines Can Feed You At All

Nobody, it seems, is happy with the food served on planes. But it may surprise you to learn that it’s our own fault. The customer is to blame. Biologically, humans just aren’t designed to fully appreciate flavours while travelling 800 kilometres an hour, 36,000 feet in the air, enclosed in a pressurised cabin, partly dehydrated and breathing in less oxygen. (Flying, never forget, is bloody awful.)

But just as importantly, we don’t appreciate just how amazing it is we get food on planes at all.

Flight catering is one of the most complex businesses in the world – it is 90 per cent logistics and just 10 per cent catering.

In an episode of MasterChef last week, the contestants were overwhelmed by the task of feeding 450 guests at an Indian wedding. Poor them. A single Boeing 747 can carry more than 500 people and all the food is heated and served from a tiny galley by flight attendants who double as passenger safety co-ordinators.

An airline catering firm has to supply dozens of those flights. The typical industrial airline kitchen produces more than 40,000 meals a day. The world’s biggest, Emirates Flight Catering Centre in Dubai, does 115,000 a day. Inflight food is a huge task, and one which we pay no attention to – unless we’re complaining about it.

This is capitalism’s big public relations problem. If it is working properly (if products are exactly where we want them, when we want them, at a price we are happy to pay), we don’t notice how much human effort and ingenuity goes into even the smallest things.

Inflight service wasn’t always this complex. The first meals were sandwiches, made on the ground and served in the air with tea and coffee. In the 1920s Imperial Airways (an ancestor of British Airways) had 14-year-old cabin boys in monkey jackets serve passengers. The boys had to weigh less than 40 kilograms. The planes were small and underpowered. Forty kilograms was all the extra load they could carry.

The first proper flight attendants were hired in 1930 by a predecessor of United Airlines. They were all qualified nurses. The flights were bumpy and there was no pressurised cabin. It’s been estimated one in four passengers were physically sick on each journey. The nurses took the food out, then cared for the diners when it was brought back up again.

But it was not until the wave of airline deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s that serious attention was paid to the great problem of inflight food: we can’t really taste it. The low humidity and high altitude make taste buds 30 per cent less effective. So all meals served in the air are what we’d describe on the ground as heavy and rich – cream, pasta, stews and lots of sauce. The wines are full bodied. There’s no prize for subtlety inflight.

Cooking in such volume, airlines can certainly save large amounts of money by skimping on ingredients. And in an effort to wrestle prices down further, many airlines now charge for food. Still, it’s not heartless neoliberal bean-counting that makes the food so unappealing. It’s our frail human palate.

The dishes are better in first class and business, but even in economy plane food isn’t anywhere as bad as we imagine.

Most great innovations in the modern world are completely out of sight. They concern not the products we buy or the services we use, but how we get them.

When politicians try to describe progress they talk of tangible things such as iPhones and synchrotrons – things that can be manufactured and photographed. But they ought to talk of supply chains, digital inventories and logistics.

Complex supply chains are behind the success of Amazon.com and Walmart. One of the greatest inventions of the 20th century was the humble shipping container, which allowed the rise of just-in-time production. Now even modern manufacturing should be seen less as a “good” and more as a “service” – products are the end result of taut lines of supply.

What we eat in the air is a perfect example of our modern logistical genius. Dishes such as “Italian-style braised beef with pumpkin” are refined to within an inch of their life. They are made not so much according to recipes as blueprints.

The marvel of inflight dining is not its taste, but how it got there. Airline food is a sliver of modern capitalism we consume quickly and, just as quickly, forget about.

Should Governments Protect Independent Journalism?

We already subsidise journalism heavily. The ABC’s budget for 2011-12 was $995 million. SBS got $223 million in the same period. And Parliament has specifically nominated the vast bulk of this money to “inform, educate and entertain audiences”.

So it’s peculiar that when media theorists devise clever schemes to subsidise journalism in order to protect democracy – such as publicly funded newspapers, or tax-deductibility for the print media – they rarely mention the money we give SBS and the ABC for that purpose.

Perhaps some people believe we should increase those broadcasters’ budgets. That’s a legitimate debate. Let’s all draw lines and argue it out. But pretending we do not already spend an enormous amount of the public’s money to inform the public is simply dishonest.

Our media debate is very provincial. Fairfax is at a crossroads. News Ltd is too, although that company is reluctant to admit it. Here, the US is about two to three years ahead of us. Their experience suggests the print media will shrink dramatically in the next few years. But it also tells us good journalism is good journalism, whether produced on paper or online.

I hope our two print giants develop new business models that suit the times. Certainly many others will. The online media in the US is vibrant and plentiful. Australian readers and writers have good reason to be optimistic, at least about the medium-term future.

If they want to be taken seriously, advocates of subsidies have to answer some basic questions. How many media outlets does healthy democracy require? We might assume more is better than fewer. But as the past year has demonstrated, many people believe some newspapers and radio stations should be run out of town. Several media critics suggest tabloids and talkback radio are hurting democracy . So just calling for “more journalism” is not much of a guide for policy-making.

Maybe the government should subsidise only “worthy” journalism, if there was a way to define such a thing. The business of the press has always been intimately connected with delivering something people want to read or watch. Right now, the case for even more journalism subsidies is little more than a thought bubble.

The Farce That Is The Leveson Inquiry

On October 7, 2009, News International chief Rebekah Brooks sent opposition leader David Cameron a text message:

I am so rooting for you tomorrow not just as a proud friend but because professionally we’re definitely in this together!

The “tomorrow” in question was the final day of that year’s Conservative Party conference. Cameron would not have been surprised by Brooks’s words. James Murdoch had told him the Sun newspaper would abandon Labour because the Conservatives would be better economic managers. During the Labour conference a week earlier the paper declared “Labour’s lost it”. So while Brooks put it in an unsophisticated way, she was right: professionally they were now “in this together”.

The uncovering of this bare little text message was the fruit of Cameron’s five hours of testimony to the Leveson inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal last week.

The message has been reported in headlines around the world, from the Huffington Post to the Calcutta Telegraph. It is, according to the Daily Mail, “explosive”, “cringe worthy”, “astonishing” and “incredibly embarrassing”.

But embarrassing for who, exactly? Cameron was the one giving testimony, not Brooks. It’s hard to see why an opposition leader securing the support of a media proprietor for an upcoming election should be cringe worthy. That is his job – to gather support where he can.

The Leveson inquiry started in November with Hugh Grant and the parents of the murdered school girl Milly Dowler. Back then, its themes were criminality and police corruption. It was surrounded by arrests and resignations and Scotland Yard. All serious stuff.

But six months later, what was a serious inquiry has devolved into a strange sort of puritanism. Participants are being judged against ethical rules unheard of before Leveson convened. For a newspaper to back a political party is apparently a breach of these novel rules. And friendship between politician and proprietor is outrageous.

The phone-hacking affair no longer has anything to do with phone-hacking. It’s trying to make scandals out of the basic practices of representative democracy.

Politicians cultivate relationships with journalists. They have to, if they want to achieve their political and policy goals. That might seem distasteful. We all share a romantic ideal about the fourth estate being implacably at odds with the first estate. But let’s not be too delicate. Democracy is about coalition-building. Journalists and editors are stakeholders. A politician that does not make friends in the media will not be a very successful politician.

But we also shouldn’t pretend Cameron’s fortunes were solely in the capricious hands of media moguls. Yes, only Brooks’s side of the SMS conversation has been released. But its clear impression is of a proprietor sucking up to an opposition leader – not, as those who imagine Rupert Murdoch has an iron-grip on politics expect, an opposition leader coming cap in hand to a proprietor.

So an ambitious Cameron convinced the Sun to editorialise in favour of his party in 2009. It’s questionable how big a coup this really was. Does anyone genuinely think Gordon Brown could have held on if he’d only had the Sun’s support? Labour had been in power for 12 years. Brown was astonishingly unpopular. And the British economy had collapsed. Tabloids have always chased popular sentiment more than they’ve led it.

In Australia, the Finkelstein Inquiry into media regulation flirted with deeper questions about the functioning of democracy. But, ultimately, Ray Finkelstein had a limited brief. His final report charged towards a single, digestible proposal for a new regulatory body. He steered clear of uncomfortable philosophical questions.

By contrast, the Leveson Inquiry lacks Finkelstein’s modesty. Lord Justice Leveson’s team has now grilled four Prime Ministers and nearly 20 cabinet ministers. They’ve interrogated them about press strategy and public relations, the use of anonymity and favouritism, leaks and friendships.

It’s Cameron’s fault. The phone-hacking was the scandal. But Cameron was embarrassed by having hired Andy Coulson, a former News of the World editor. So he gave Leveson virtually unlimited terms of reference. One of his tasks is to make recommendations concerning “the future conduct of relations between politicians and the press”, which would seem to encompass every aspect of political and government communication.

Future historians will no doubt appreciate Leveson’s forensic accounting of who had lunch with who. But it seems more designed to appeal to the coterie of media critics sure that democracy is on the slide.

There’s an absurdity that the Finkelstein and Leveson inquiries share. They both held court on the nature of democratic politics, and they were both conducted by a senior judge whose touted virtue is that they are independent and unaccountable – that is, completely undemocratic.

That Brooks’s artless text message is now seen as a scandal illustrates how farcical the Leveson circus has become.