Articles – Page 62

Free Speech Means The Right To Obscene Speech, Too

The French philosopher Voltaire never actually said the words he is best known for: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” His biographer invented the saying to explain Voltaire’s views on free speech. Still, it’s a great line.

But how many people agree with it? How many people would be willing to go to the barricades for racist, sexist or obscene speech – the sort of stuff that exists only in the deep bowels of the internet? Probably very few.

But if we are concerned about free speech at all, we need to defend some people saying some pretty terrible things.

When debating politics, few people would favour locking up their opponents, no matter how ill-informed or distasteful their views may be. There’s a big difference between strongly disagreeing with somebody’s opinion and insisting that they are banned from expressing it.

The solution to bad speech is simply more speech – one cannot successfully rebut an argument without first allowing that argument to be expressed.

This is the reason that David Marr’s Quarterly Essay – which argued that the Howard government was somehow suppressing dissent – was so popular last year. Political censorship is abhorrent. Almost everybody is happy to let others rant and rave about any political point they like – monarchy, capitalism, foreigners stealing our jobs, the phallocentric patriarchy etc. So there is legitimate anger when the government tries to silence even the most ridiculous opinion about politics.

Nevertheless political censorship is so rare that it is hardly a pressing issue in Australia. Commentators trawl the papers trying to charge the government as an opponent of political dissent. Every possible infringement – real or, more often, imagined – gets highly publicised.

But if we really want to defend free speech in 2008 – if we believe that free speech is a right that we are born with, not a limited gift given to us by politicians – sometimes we may need to make common cause with extreme pornographers, racists, misogynists and other very dislikeable individuals.

Last Tuesday, a 38-year-old Brisbane man, William Reimers, received 12 months probation for possessing five fictional stories about child abuse that he had downloaded from the internet.

Unlike Bill Henson’s famous photographs, there is no ambiguity about the purposes of these stories. With titles like “Daddy’s Best Little Girl”, they were clearly not art. Reimers was charged under laws that consider descriptions of children in sexual activity as child pornography.

Cate Blanchett and her 2020 team will be unlikely to rush to the defence of somebody downloading dirty stories from the internet. But in many ways, Reimers’ arrest is more worrying than the controversy surrounding Henson. Where there are legitimate concerns about Henson’s artistic practice – at what age can somebody “consent” to nude photography? – there are no such concerns with Reimers.

The stories he collected were entirely fictional. In fact, as far as we know, nobody was harmed at any time while they were written, put on the internet, downloaded, or read. And there doesn’t appear to be any indication that the stories were incitements to commit violence. Sure, the stories were the products of a sick mind. But would the arguments presented in the case against Reimers also apply to non-fictional – and non-erotic – descriptions of child abuse? This is a slippery slope.

Having to defend people with repellent views and beliefs is the grimy side of standing up for civil rights. In the US, which has a richer tradition of liberty than Australia, doing so is widely recognised as part of the job. The American Civil Liberties Union has defended not just the uncontroversial rights of religious liberty, immigrant rights and gay rights, but also the rights of neo-Nazis and the Man-Boy Love Association to express their views. Nobody in the union would agree with the views of these groups, but they defend their right to express them.

If we think that the right to free speech stops where perversion starts, then we allow judges and politicians to impose their views of morality upon the rest of us. A right which is limited by the opinions of a conservative legislator is no right at all.

Not Fascist At All

Shane Cahill’s cheap attempt to brand the war-time Institute of Public Affairs as sympathetic to Japanese fascism (‘This fascist mob’, Overland, 189) fails on every count.

The first indictment Cahill presents is drawn from a letter written by an anonymous Air Force officer to the IPA, and a subsequent investigation of the IPA by the Commonwealth Security Service (the precursor to ASIO). This letter condemned the IPA as ‘more vile and sinister than any Jap’ for opposing the Curtin government’s proposal to continue economic regulations after the war. The officer also argued that opposition to Curtin’s policies was a gross abuse of freedom of speech.

The CSS investigation – instigated after a copy of the letter was sent to the Deputy Prime Minister – predictably found nothing of interest. Nevertheless, Cahill describes the CSS file in the most conspiratorial of terms, implying that a higher power spiked the investigation before it could uncover some nefarious secret. Perhaps the conspiratorially-minded might be more interested in how an anonymously written, angrily ranting screed sent to the Labor government managed to spark a serious security investigation. After all, the IPA was Labor’s political opponent.

Cahill’s second indictment tries to condemn the IPA with the old Communist Party canard that the United Australia Party and some senior business leaders were fascist admirers and appeasers, and points to two founding members of the IPA who were also listed as supporters of the pre-war Japan-Australia Society.

The accusation that membership in the Japan Australia Society signaled an otherwise unstated sympathy for totalitarianism is an old one, appearing most recently in Rupert Lockwood’s War on the Waterfront and Drew Cottle’s The Brisbane Line. But neither of these books can produce any documentary proof, relying almost entirely on oral recollections; and, more suspiciously, both claim that the necessary supporting documents have been destroyed in two unrelated fires.

Instead, during the Depression Japan was Australia’s second most important trading partner. The society should be seen as a reflection of that economic relationship, rather than a signal of ideological sympathy for fascism – at least in the absence of contrary evidence. Trade with Japan in the 1930s no more indicates support for fascism than trade with Cuba in 2008 indicates support for communism.

Nevertheless, it is on this feeble evidence that Cahill bases his argument. But the wartime IPA’s support for democracy and the finer points of democratic theory was impeccable, in contrast to the many on the Left who embraced the Nazi-Soviet Pact when it was seen to be in the best interests of international communism.

Looking Forward, the IPA’s first major publication, contained a defence of the sovereignty of parliament against the executive branch. It also argued that a planned economy – which it unmistakably opposed – required a dictatorial government. It is hard to argue that the early IPA was sympathetic to totalitarianism; after all, this was the stick it used to beat its ideological opponents.

But perhaps more revealing, the Harris Family radio show transcript contained in the same CSS file that Cahill investigated clearly contradicts his argument. The Harris Family’s dialogue is just as critical of totalitarianism as it is of excessive government regulation. Papa Harris sums up: ‘we people of Australia will never forego our free democratic rights for an illusory politician’s paradise’. If, as Cahill clumsily infers, the IPA council was trying to sow the seeds for Japanese-style fascism in Australia, sponsoring a radio show that condemns totalitarianism and centralised government seems to be a strange way to go about it.

Shane Cahill’s piece goes to show that demonisation is as common a tool in political debate as it was when the IPA was founded. His disingenuous manipulation of the historical record seems little more than an excuse to carry the word ‘fascist’ in an article about the Institute of Public Affairs. And, by trying to equate an organisation that opposes government interference into the economy and society with fascist totalitarianism and militaristic nationalism, Cahill does little more than reveal himself as someone happy to abuse history to take a cheap partisan shot.

Don’t Strangle Communications Networks

The marriage of politics and commerce is a destructive one. This is a lesson the Labor Party should be learning as it tries to work with the telecommunications industry.

Despite Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s promise that his broadband plan would cut through the barriers holding back a national fibre-optic network, the grand soap opera that is telecommunications policy doesn’t look as if will be ending any time soon. Bidders for the Government’s tender are required to lodge a bond by Friday and provide their full proposals by late July. But Telstra’s rivals have been claiming the carrier is not providing enough information about existing infrastructure. And the G9 consortium is pushing hard for a five-month delay in the tender process so it can get its proposal together.

There has been aggressive and highly public criticism of the tender process, the cost of the bond required to tender and the regulations that will govern this still hypothetical network.

Telstra, AAPT and Optus have even been holding talks to negotiate a broadband settlement, as if they were great world powers preparing a ceasefire agreement. After a decade of government subsidies, regulatory gamesmanship and legislative inaction, the Australian telecommunications industry has never been so highly politicised. But while the fibre-optic network debate has dominated headlines for more than a year, the real action in broadband is elsewhere.

Compared with the lumbering environment of rent seeking created by the regulations that apply to our fixed-line network, Australia’s mobile networks are a paradise of laissez-faire entrepreneurship. In the mobile sphere, there is the rapid innovation and the large-scale investment federal governments have long desired.

Optus modestly announced earlier this month that it was expanding its 3G mobile network to challenge Telstra’s Next G mobile broadband network.

Both Telstra and Optus plan to upgrade the speed of these mobile networks to 42 megabits per second – significantly faster than the fastest wired broadband available at the moment – in the next two years. Both these networks will dramatically exceed the Labor Party’s broadband promise, which it says will provide a 12Mbps internet connection. And it plans to use $4.7 billion of taxpayers’ money to do so.

This pattern of innovation and investment in mobile networks while highly regulated fixed-line networks are bogged down in politics and regulation is repeated throughout the world. In many developing nations, entrepreneurs are bypassing state-owned and corrupt monopoly carriers to build mobile networks instead.

The consequence, widespread mobile ownership, is fundamentally changing these emergent economies for the better. Small producers can easily communicate with their suppliers and customers thanks to the ubiquitous communications networks that the state-run carriers were too incompetent to provide.

The situation in developing nations and Australia is disconcertingly similar. Recall that part of the reason Telstra originally decided to build its Next G network was out of frustration with poor regulations affecting fixed-line services. But just because Australia’s mobile networks are relatively unregulated at the moment, this doesn’t mean the regulatory wolf isn’t howling at the door. The political games played earlier this year over the shutdown of Telstra’s CDMA mobile network illustrates how comfortably the Government can threaten this energetic commercial environment.

Back in the late 1990s, Telstra received $400 million from Canberra to help extend its CDMA network into otherwise uneconomical rural and regional areas. For everyone involved at the time, this seemed like a win-win deal. The government was able to claim it was providing something akin to the universal service that Telstra is compelled to provide for the home phone network. And Telstra received hundreds of millions of dollars to expand its market share. But, at the time, Telstra owned the GSM mobile service as well as CDMA.

When Telstra announced in 2007 it was going to replace both with the snazzy new Next G service, the embattled Coalition government altered the CDMA licence to require Telstra to keep it open until the new network provided equivalent coverage. The result is that the Next G network, and likely any future mobile network that Telstra would choose to replace it, is subject to an unspoken but very real universal service mandate.

Regrettably, having been vested with the power to set the terms and conditions of the spectrum licences that all mobile networks require to operate, politicians cannot resist manipulating Australia’s telecommunications for their own political purposes.

But hopefully the federal Government can draw the right lessons from the success of Australia’s mobile networks. Where politics is absent, there is innovation and investment.

If the federal Government wants Australia to have world-class broadband and mobile networks, it needs to get the politics out of the telecommunications industry.

Don’t Close The Door On Our Envied Bar Culture

Premier John Brumby probably wasn’t expecting a backlash this big.

Nearly 30,000 distressed drinkers have signed just one of the many Facebook petitions opposing the 2am lockout — the Victorian Government’s new policy that will ban entry to bars, pubs and clubs in the inner city after 2am. And more than 6000 people have promised to angrily party on the steps of Parliament when the ban goes into force on June 3.

The lockout is being vigorously debated in street magazines and online music forums that would never think to debate the finer points of more “traditional” policy concerns such as means-tested baby bonuses or first-home buyers’ grants.

There is good reason for these protesters to be upset about the 2am lockout. It is a dramatic restriction on our freedom to go to our favourite venues that, in turn, want to have us as customers. The Government is obviously worried that the word “curfew” sounds a little too much like they fear a coup d’etat.

But even if you’re not convinced that we have been endowed with an inalienable right to party, the 2am lockout is still bad public policy.

Certainly, a lockout has precedents across the country. Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast has a lockout at 1.30am, Mackay locks patrons out at 2am, and Newcastle introduced a 3am lockout in March this year. In Victoria, Ballarat, Bendigo and Warrnambool all have lockouts in place.

In many of these cities, police claim that late-night violence has been reduced. But Brisbane has had a 3am lockout since 2005, and the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital told a documentary film crew that it had seen no reduction in total assaults since the ban was enacted. The correlation between bar-hopping and violent assault may not be as simple as the Government would like.

In the absence of a clear model of cause and effect, the policy aims to restrict the behaviour of a huge number of Melburnians in the questionable hope that doing so will set off a chain reaction that ends in the pacification of a few violent idiots. But wishful thinking and guesswork rarely result in good policy.

The evidence from other cities reveals that violent behaviour late at night is clustered only around a few hot spots. In Wollongong, 67% of violent incidents are attributable to just six pubs. Identifying and closely policing these places would be a far more effective strategy to combat the violence than a lockout could ever be.

Unfortunately, haphazardly targeting all late night venues is clever politics. Whipping up fear in the community about violence in the street has always been an effective strategy to build political support. And imposing a lockout doesn’t require the Government to devote any extra resources to the problem. Lockouts don’t affect the state budget at all — the burden of administering the lockout falls squarely on the venues.

Furthermore, changes to liquor licences and lockouts target a group of people who do not have a strong electoral voice. Young people are not known for their skills as lobbyists.

While the 2am lockout has received the most media attention, it is only one part of the Government’s assault against late-night venues. Consumer Affairs Victoria quietly announced earlier this month a “freeze” on granting liquor licences that plan to trade after 1am.

This means that, at least for the next 12 months while the freeze is in place, there will be no new bars, clubs or pubs opening in the inner suburbs that can pour a late-night beer.

And any already operating venue that needs to alter its licence in some minor way — to build an outdoor smokers’ area, for instance, since smokers will no longer be able to go outside pubs after 2am without being locked out — will only be able to apply for a new licence that is loaded with the 1am limit.

Like many regulatory increases, these sorts of burdens disproportionately hurt small businesses, which do not have the resources to lobby for exemptions or the financial slack to adjust to the new regulations.

It all adds up to a major attack on Melbourne’s hole-in-the-wall bar culture — a culture that only a few months ago Sydney was enviously eyeballing.

It would be sad if in the future we had to fly to NSW to find the nightlife we have so long been enjoying at home.

Put A Cork In It, Mr Rudd – You’re Missing The Point

Very quickly, Kevin Rudd has set the tone for his first term. His is a government that doesn’t just want to govern, it wants to parent.

Health Minister Nicola Roxon announced earlier this week that the taxes on alcopops – canned or bottled spirits premixed with soft drink – were to be doubled.

The tax increase was announced as a response to the 2007 National Drug Strategy Household Survey. But the survey reported that not only has binge-drinking among young females remained steady over the past few years, but the number of those who were endangering their long-term health had actually decreased slightly. If there is a binge-drinking crisis, as the Government claims, then it appears to be one which is resolving itself.

Nevertheless, since the federal election, booze has become a bread-and-butter issue of high politics. But the Government’s policy is based on a big leap of logic. Why will raising the price of alcopops result in healthier teenagers? Invariably, government policies have consequences unintended by the politicians who design them.

Certainly, the tax increase might reduce the amount of alcopops sold. Like most products, the demand for alcopops is elastic – that is, if the price goes up, some people who would have bought the drinks at a lower price may now choose not to. But those customers for whom the pre-mixed drinks are now too expensive can easily replace them with other alcoholic beverages. There is no shortage of choice in your average neighbourhood bottle shop.

After all, for a teenager looking to spend an evening drinking with friends, the choice isn’t between alcopops and a healthy glass of water. Would, for instance, the Federal Government prefer teenage children to try to mix their own drinks? It is not easy to estimate the safe ratio of spirits to soft drink while you are at a loud and crowded house party, slightly tipsy and leaning over a kitchen bench trying to pour cheap vodka into a plastic cup.

When alcohol is bottled in premeasured quantities, it is easy for teenagers to gauge just how much they are drinking. The Federal Government might be making it harder for teenagers to regulate their own alcohol consumption. If even a single teenager has to get their stomach pumped because they now have no idea how much they’re drinking, this policy will have been an abject failure.

When teenagers are unable to afford pre-mixed drinks, they will move on to their next choice of alcohol. If politicians increase the tax on every alcoholic beverage – as the Government’s advisers are publicly recommending – then teens may move to taking other, non-alcoholic drugs when they are socialising.

There is another possible unintended consequence of the tax increase that is even more worrying. When a new range of pre-mixed drinks was released earlier this decade, alcohol manufacturers asserted that young drinkers felt safer drinking out of bottles because they were harder to spike with date-rape drugs.

That claim may or may not be true. But it should at the very least remind us that when teenagers choose to buy their alcohol pre-mixed, they often do so for complex and personal reasons – not merely because they have been conned into doing so by stylish ad campaigns.

The alcopop tax increase is the first to come into effect of the many sin taxes that have been flagged by the new Government and its advisory bodies. The federal preventative health task force has now called for taxes on all alcohol to be increased by 300%, and a similar increase to be imposed on tobacco taxes. And the best and brightest summiteers were eager that the Government tax junk food.

When you add to this list last month’s proposed bans on alcohol and candy advertising, it becomes clear that few individual decisions are immune from the disapproval of the Rudd Government.

The left used to ridicule John Howard’s attraction to the moral universe of the 1950s. But the Labor Party is trying to introduce a new moral code that is just as severe – one which is designed to scare parents into supporting the Government’s policies. Don’t worry – Kevin Rudd is working just as hard to look after your children as you are.

But this anti-binge drinking campaign is not very well thought out. Artificially changing people’s behaviour isn’t that easy. Too often it makes the original problem worse.

IPA Review Editorial, May 2008

It’s always interesting to see how newly elected leaders respond to stimuli. And Kevin Rudd gave a clear indication of his tolerance for criticism at the beginning of April.

The Prime Minister’s trip abroad had a peculiar schedule. He was to visit China, which had just reemphasised its military control of Tibet. But he was to shun Japan, whose only crime seemed to be that its citizens like dining on whales. Rudd’s implied priorities-that whales are more important than human rights-is sadly indicative of the warped moral calculus of the modern environment movement. And it is worrying that the Australian federal government is taking its diplomatic cues from environmental populism.

This strange diplomatic decision was identified by Tony Parkinson, writing in this edition of the IPA Review. As he writes, ‘any hint Australia is into the business of picking winners, giving undue priority to one over another, would be contrary to the national interest.’

The Institute of Public Affairs’ Executive Director, John Roskam, referring to Parkinson’s upcoming piece, wrote in The Age on March 26 that this contradicted Labor’s election campaign line that the ALP would pursue a gentler, nicer, more loving foreign policy: ‘Australia would do more to uphold international standards of human rights, and we wouldn’t acquiesce so easily to alleged human rights violations committed in the pursuit of the war on terror.’ China’s activities in Tibet, surely, fall under some of those categories. Andrew Bolt in Melbourne’s Herald Sun on the same day, and Greg Sheridan in The Australian on March 27 made similar points.

And so, just a few days later, the Prime Minister announced that he had changed his plans, and was now going to go to Tokyo in June. Parkinson, Roskam, Bolt and Sheridan are excellent writers. Their critiques of Rudd’s initial decision to shun Japan were eloquent and well made. John Roskam’s was particularly good. (He is, after all, my boss).

But: seriously? Australian diplomatic strategy was unable to endure the withering onslaught of four disapproving columnists? Is that really all it takes to change federal policy?

Winston Churchill once said there is no such thing as public opinion – there is only published opinion. But it’s not even as if Rudd was castigated across the board by the commentariat. Other columnists defended Rudd, arguing that China will be a far more important trading partner than Japan over the next few decades. Perhaps this is fair enough-perhaps our relationship with Japan should be sacrificed for the sake of the Labor Party’s green vote.

Kevin Rudd is proud of his diplomatic background. But decisions made as a foreign affairs bureaucrat are very different from the highly public and highly scrutinised diplomatic decisions made as a Prime Minister. Avoiding Japan and flattering China may be great diplomacy-the nuances of high geopolitics are, we are told, a Rudd speciality. But foreign affairs is as much about domestic politics as international diplomacy. As John Kunkel, John Howard’s former speechwriter, reflects in his retrospective of the Howard Project in this issue of the IPA Review, Rudd’s predecessor understood the necessity for foreign policy to be just as democratically minded as domestic affairs. With his Japan stumble, Kevin Rudd may have begun to realise that.

This edition of the IPA Review continues our ‘What Next for Liberalism?’ feature, asking whether it is ever going to be possible for government to be shrunk, considering that no Australian government has ever managed to do so. Sinclair Davidson, Des Moore and Alan Moran look at the strategies for reducing the size of the state and its powers. Christopher Pyne argues that only major reform to the Liberal Party’s approach to selecting candidates and leaders will re-engage the party’s supporters, and John Pyke crunches the numbers to find a startling level of support for the republic amongst those who voted against it nearly ten years ago.

Richard Allsop reveals how the left have managed to convert the sporting field into yet another battlefield for the culture wars. Greg Melleuish looks at why smart people believe stupid things, and Scott Ryan looks behind the health debate to the health providers who are holding back reform. And of course, the usual book reviews, regular columns and cultural snippets that have helped the IPA Review become Australia’s longest running political magazine.

The Patriot Games

Is there anyone, anywhere, who believes Olympic bureaucrats when they declare that the Games are about athletics, not politics? Even the athletes themselves — standing upon the winners’ podium, draped in their national flag and singing their national anthem — must realise that the Olympics are actually undisguised geopolitics and taxpayer financed publicity stunts.

One need only look at the opening ceremony to realise that the Olympics are little more than an excuse for nation states to preen in front of each other like ostriches in mating season.

By August, the three largest totalitarian states of the 20th century — Nazi Germany, the USSR and China — will all have been Olympic hosts. Certainly, China’s appalling human rights record has improved since the Great Leap Forward. But providing dictatorships with a pre-packaged marketing program is hard to reconcile with the Olympic charter, which argues that the Games are to reflect “universal fundamental ethical principles”.

But everybody knows the torch relay has its origins in the Nazi Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Everybody knows how the USSR seized upon the Moscow Games, proclaiming that it was an acknowledgement of their fantastic record of maintaining world peace.

The relationship between totalitarianism and the Olympics is old news.

The modern Olympics have always been a potent mix of late 19th century nationalism and elite athleticism. The Olympics may now sparkle with the glitter of cutting-edge telecommunications infrastructure and high-performance sports apparel, but the Games have never quite shed their legacy of stern pseudo-militarism.

Even when peaceful liberal democracies host the Olympics, they are drenched with propaganda. As everybody remembers from last year’s federal election, democratic governments are always happy to spend gigantic sums on public relations. The Olympics are a publicity stunt on a colossally expensive scale.

Few of the other justifications for staging the Olympics stack up. Whatever jobs are “created” during the two weeks of events are quickly extinguished when the flame is.

Some Games supporters claim that staging the Olympics provides an opportunity to make much-needed infrastructure upgrades, particularly in transportation. Those who still hold this view clearly haven’t been to Sydney recently.

Others claim that the Olympic publicity encourages international tourism once the festivities are over. But we only ever hear politicians predict tourism bonanzas when they can’t think of anything else to say. What potential visitors were unaware of the existence of Athens, Beijing or London until they heard that those cities would be Olympic cities?

Whatever economic spillovers hosting the Games can bring, they nowhere near justify the enormous cost. If there is an economic benefit to staging the Olympics, then the economy hasn’t heard about it.

Looking at the impact of the announcement in 1993 that Sydney would host the Games, a group of RMIT economists concluded that the stock market didn’t budge at all. Only building firms saw their values rise.

The two biggest beneficiaries of the Olympics are politicians hoping to bask in the loving glow of the international media, and property developers looking for stadium contracts.

In Beijing, Chinese taxpayers have to support an event designed to glorify the Communist Party that has ruled over them for more than half a century.

But boycotting the Beijing Games is no more likely to pressure China into repairing its human rights record than granting them the Olympics did in the first place. There have been dozens of Games boycotts over the past century, and none have had any significant political impact.

In fact, political controversy has shared the stage with athletics at almost every modern Olympics. Even innocent Melbourne in 1956 was marred by boycotts — China withdrew because the Games committee recognised Taiwan, three countries withdrew because of Israel, and another three withdrew in protest at the Soviet invasion of Hungary. When the USSR played Hungary in water polo that year, the match resembled a pub brawl.

Boycotts and underwater fisticuffs may be rarer since the end of the Cold War, but politics still infuses every aspect of the Games.

The official website of the Chinese Olympic Committee is unambiguous about Beijing’s ideological content, advertising its National Fitness Program, which has been hard at work since 1995 “promoting mass sporting activities on an extensive scale, improving the people’s physique, and spurring the socialist modernisation of our country”.

In the same breath — or, at least, on the same page — the website laments the attempted politicisation of the Beijing Games by “some Western forces” and “separatists”.

Remember the tedious controversy about non-Australian marching bands in the Sydney opening ceremony? Every moment of the Beijing Games will be stage-managed to shed the best light on a dictatorship that has more than 4000 domestic political prisoners.

So, rather than pretending that politics can be hidden under the woolly feel-goodness of the officially prescribed “Olympic Spirit”, we should encourage the Games’ politicisation.

The Chinese Government is welcome to its publicity stunt, but while the country is under the full glare of the world’s media, there is probably no better time for demonstrations and counter-stunts.

Despite their lofty ambitions, the Olympics have never brought world peace. Nevertheless, if the press corps manages to outflank China’s propaganda machine, they might be able to turn this expensive political advertisement into something good for human rights.

Don’t forget — it’s not about the sport.

Come On, Aunty, Time To Work Out Where You’re At

Management guru Peter Drucker famously asked the chief executive of General Electric two simple questions: “If you weren’t in the business you’re in, would you enter it today? If the answer is no, what are you going to do about it?” Has our ABC ever asked itself these questions?

The GE chief took Drucker’s questioning as an opportunity to radically restructure the company and re-examine its core business. The ABC should use the challenges brought on by new media and the internet to do the same.

A poorly kept secret of Australian libertarian and conservative politics is that when we complain about bias, it’s usually only because we faithfully watch and adore the ABC.

The network’s nickname – Aunty – makes it seem more like a kindly relative who has cats and loves having you over for quiche than a major government program that employs 4500 people and receives nearly $1billion dollars of taxpayers’ money.

Aunties don’t have to justify their own existence; government programs do. Certainly, the broadcaster has a charter. But that charter consists of little more than vague platitudes towards diversity, community and “awareness of Australia”.

Unfortunately, the reforms announced over the past month – the introduction of a 24-hour news-gathering service, a few local websites, and some shedding of in-house production staff – do little to clarify the ABC’s proper role.

But that is hardly surprising. In fact, in her 76 years of operation, Aunty has never really known what she is for. Australia has public broadcasting primarily because our pre-WWII federal government didn’t trust the commercial radio stations to sufficiently educate the lumpen masses on the finer points of Brahms and Shakespeare.

Since everybody in parliament agreed that Britain’s BBC was really cool, the government set up an Australian version. But unlike the original BBC, the ABC has tried to be “for all Australians” and tried to compete with commercial broadcasters, adopting an uncomfortable mix of highbrow and lowbrow programming.

But a core foundation of liberal democracy is that the government should not do anything that society can do itself. The government should not directly compete with the private sector.

What then would the ABC be doing now if it took Drucker’s advice?

There seems little reason for the network to have a commercial arm – should the ABC be directly competing with bookstores? Why, too, should it be broadcasting highly popular sporting events when there is no lack of private networks willing to do so? As a rule, the ABC should never out-bid another broadcaster for programming.

ABC director Mark Scott argued that not only can the network provide local news and commentary to remote and rural communities, but it could also provide a digital “town square” for community engagement.

Among public broadcasting advocates, this view is popular – it is a convenient way to imagine a role for the ABC far into the online future. But it is again indicative of the ABC’s drifting purpose. Why should taxpayers be paying the government to imitate the thousands of bulletin boards and forums that already pepper the internet? And genuine communities are built by individuals, not governments.

There are, unquestionably, roles for which the ABC is necessary. Government is responsible for broadcasting political events such as Parliament. And the ABC has an enormous back catalogue of Australian history it should be immediately digitising.

Its cultural role needs to be examined in the context of the entire broadcasting market – in particular, the Australian content regulations that apply to commercial channels. If government is convinced that artificially promoting Australian culture is vital even in the age of media abundance, then that may be a task for public broadcasting alone.

But these are unasked questions. The ABC is seen by commentators from the left and the right as a sort of gift from the government for the politically obsessed, rather than a major public policy initiative of the Federal Government.

All media organisations across the world need to go through similar soul-searching. But because the ABC is insulated from the punishing winds of the market, it has consistently avoided tough decisions about what services it should provide. If it is to adjust to the future, that will need to change.

Nanny State Ad Bans Won’t Stop Kids Liking Junk Food

It used to be that if the government didn’t like something, it would ban it. Now, if the government disapproves of a product, it just bans it from being advertised.

A Senate committee is currently examining the feasibility of restricting advertisements for alcohol, and Kevin Rudd has expressed interest in making such a measure part of his binge drinking campaign.

Similarly, the Australian Medical Association wants to ban junk food advertising during children’s TV shows. Advertising restrictions are the new coolest thing for paternalistic policy-makers and their nanny state.

But are we that easily manipulated by brand managers and advertising firms? Does the Government have to step in to protect us, and our children, from harmful ads? Advertising is, at its core, just the simple delivery of information. Those who oppose it are essentially arguing that this information is too challenging for individuals to process safely; that, if told the wrong thing, they will be unable to resist self-harm.

The anti-capitalist Naomi Klein famously took this argument one step further when she decried the psychological power of corporate brands – we are all, apparently, oppressed by tyrannical graphic designers. Mining would be finally recognised as the environmental catastrophe it is if only everybody wasn’t so disorientated by BHP’s trendy looking bubble logo.

This view does not just reduce us to the level of dumb automatons, passively waiting for advertising executives to beam their instructions directly into our brains, it also creates a profound dilemma for democratic politics. If we don’t have free will in the shopping centre, we certainly don’t have free will in the voting booth. And figuring out which political party would be better for interest rates is far more complex than figuring out which brand of shampoo to buy.

Nevertheless, most people acknowledge that adults are sensibly sceptical about marketing claims.What is surprising is just how advertising savvy children are.

Minors are depicted by policy-makers as unable to defend themselves against a well-planned onslaught of marketing. However, as the new book Prohibitions published by Britain’s Institute of Economic Affairs shows, children as young as five form preferences about their favourite TV programs. And by the age of 11, children demonstrate a pronounced scepticism about claims made in ads.

During the federal election campaign, anti-advertising rhetoric took a decidedly surreal turn. In response to the Labor Party’s dislike of Shrek-themed merchandising, the Howard government promised to fund a new ABC channel for children completely free of junk food ads. It was a bizarre train of thought that led Liberal policy-makers to think that the best way to combat childhood obesity was to make sitting on the couch and watching TV more appealing.

The belief that an individual’s free will is crushed under the jackboot of catchy advertising jingles is, of course, nonsense. We have just as much autonomy over our personal decisions as we did before an ad break.

So what, then, is advertising for? It informs us that new products are available in the marketplace. We may, after having watched an ad, have a different idea of what our next purchase may be. But that isn’t because we have been manipulated by a ruthless marketing department.

An ad that informs us that McDonald’s now sells salad only interests those people who would probably like to buy a salad from McDonald’s. If the preference for salad doesn’t already exist, then no ad, no matter how brilliant, is going to be effective.

This logic is fairly obvious. What child is going to abandon chocolates and lollies when their ads disappear off television? Kids will always like junk food. Any parents who think that a government ban will make walking up the chocolate aisle less stressful are deceiving themselves. And anybody who thinks that teenagers will refuse the next “alcopop” just because they are no longer being specifically marketed to under-25s has forgotten a lot about their youth.

Politicians and activists are attracted to the theory that advertising manipulates consumers. It gives them yet another reason to regulate the media, and a way to appear to be doing something about the latest health scare. But they won’t change our behaviour. Instead, politicians should face the hideous truth – people are smarter than advertisements.

Pedestal To The Metal

The car is doomed announced two Melbourne academics in The Age last week. According to them, carbon emissions targets compel us to reduce automobile travel by 80%. And the State Government should probably stop building new roads. We won’t need them anyway.

Sure, it’s easy to criticise research that is little more than media bait. But after years of abuse, the humble car still can’t catch a break. And the reasons the car still has a long, healthy life ahead of it highlight the biggest problem in the debate over public transport. When people choose to drive, they do so because it is more comfortable and more convenient than the alternatives. No public transport policy is going to change that.

A lot of factors stack up in favour of the car. As Roads Minister Tim Pallas pointed out on Wednesday, public transport may be convenient for those living in the inner suburbs, where the average distance to a train station is less than a kilometre, but in the outer suburbs that distance expands to 10 kilometres.

A more critical issue is that only a small, declining percentage of journeys are from the suburbs into the city, as workplaces move out of the CBD. And it is these journeys that are the most suitable for public transport – when everybody is travelling the same direction it is easy to map out a new train line.

The remaining suburb-to-suburb journeys are exponentially harder to service, not least because the origins and destinations are dispersed. It is impossible for transport planners to account for the huge variety of journeys taken every day in modern Melbourne.

To put it simply, people like having a car. For most Australians, owning a car means having the freedom to travel wherever you want, whenever you want – just ask any giddy teenager with their newly acquired driver’s licence.

The urban historian Graeme Davidson describes how the automobile was a major impetus behind postwar gender equality in Australia, as women recognised that the freedom to drive also meant the freedom to do a lot more things. And, for a young person, owning a car – or even just being able to borrow their parents’ car – has long represented a degree of personal autonomy.

No matter how many billions the Victorian Government spends on public transport, it will never be able to challenge the independence provided by an automobile.

You don’t have to wait for your car to arrive, unlike public transport. There is ample room to put your bags of shopping or new flat-packed furniture. Your children can’t run wild in your car like they can in public transport – after all, they’re strapped down. And, unlike a tram, there is no chance that your car will be so full of fellow commuters that you have to hang halfway out the door with someone’s armpit in your face while the driver yells indiscriminately over a damaged loudspeaker.

These objections may seem trivial in comparison to the grave importance of saving the planet. Public transport fantasists – like all radicals who want to change our behaviour – dismiss such considerations as minor. But it is these sorts of minor considerations that inform our everyday transport choices.

In the trade-off between environmental concerns and the importance of the automobile, the Federal Government is trying to have it both ways.

Eager to placate its traditional union support base, but also wanting to be seen as concerned about the environment, Labor is happy to pay $500 million for more cars to be produced in Australia. But it only wants hybrid cars. Industry assistance is getting awfully picky.

A similar mixed message greeted the announcement of the Indian Tata Nano, the world’s cheapest car. The chance that personal motorised transport was suddenly within the reach of some of the poorest people in the world was described by one prominent environmental scientist as a nightmare.

In the developed world, the automobile has been one of the most important sources of social freedom in the 20th century.

How can we think of denying such freedom to the developing world?

For some journeys, public transport is indispensable. Melbourne’s experience since privatisation has shown how trains and trams can be better used – patronage has gone sharply up with the new management.

Similarly, when building new roads, the Government has been aware of the increasing popularity of bicycles. For nearly a decade now, more bikes have been sold each year than cars. New dedicated bicycle lanes may have had some influence on this.

But cars continue to sell in increasing numbers.

The Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries reported last week that monthly sales have been up nearly 10% over last year’s figures. Sales of the much-hated SUVs have gone up even more.

Cars have been getting cheaper and cleaner almost since they were first invented. But the hard reality is that no matter how many train lines or bicycle paths the Government builds, people will continue to use the transport method that they believe best suits their needs. And for most trips in Melbourne, that will continue to be the car.

A responsible government will therefore continue to spend money building roads and relieving traffic congestion – just as taxpayers seem to want it to.