Censorship Standards Come From A Personal Place

The United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart gave this famously ambiguous definition for what constitutes pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

The director of the Classification Board, Lesley O’Brien, feels she has seen pornography in I Want Your Love, an American film that was due to be screened at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival next month.

The primary job of the Australian Classification Board is to give films their ranking of G, M, MA 15+, and R 18+, which allow them to be sold and exhibited.

Films shown at film festivals are exempt from the usual classification processes. But if the board’s director believes that a festival film might be rated X 18+ (pornographic, and therefore only available in Canberra or the Northern Territory) or RC (refused classification: available nowhere) the exemption is not granted. You can read the particulars here.

To give a film either of these classifications is censorship in every relevant way.

Yes, in 21st century Australia our government still censors “obscene” culture – we still employ a descendant of the system that banned James Joyce’s Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We still have bureaucrats who decide what we can and cannot watch.

It has been decided we cannot watch I Want Your Love. The film features a “six-minute montage of friends, housemates and partygoers” having their intimate way with each other. Presumably it’s a pretty graphic six minutes, worthy of the X 18+ stamp.

But so what? It’s hard to see what public purpose banning a film that was to be shown only at a gay film festival achieves. You’d expect the audience at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival to have fairly specific tastes.

The film’s supporters say the six-minute scene is a critical part of the film’s narrative. The classification board says it serves no narrative purpose. The broader question of why we want a government bureaucracy doing contextual analysis of story structure is unclear.

Is it facetious to ask what approach to narrative theory the board uses? Vladimir Propp’s? Tzvetan Todorov’s? Claude Levi-Strauss’s? Joseph Campbell’s? Christopher Vogler’s?

Now, I’m not going to pretend to have a deep understanding of narrative theory – I got that list of names here. But if narrative relevancy is being used to justify censorship then it would be nice to know more about the board’s thinking.

Either way, by bureaucratic decree, I Want Your Love is now banned in Australia.

The banning comes at a critical moment in Australian classification history.

Last February the Australian Law Reform Commission released a major report into classification. The ALRC had a brief to bring classification up to date with the wealth of media choice that has been unleashed by the internet. What does it mean to classify a film when in the age of YouTube? What is the point of banning a sex scene in a film when there are many lifetimes’ worth of pornography freely available online?

Indeed, the ALRC had a hopeless, even pointless task. No mandatory, centralised, bureaucratic classification system could ever hope to monitor all content available to Australians in 2013. Seventy-two hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. An honest reform of classification in our era would begin by rethinking its purpose, and, perhaps, throwing it all away.

Instead, the ALRC did what every inquiry before now has done. In the report’s view, the Government should try to classify “any content with an appropriate Australian link”. This seems more like a cry for help than a policy principle – how on earth could it be achieved in practice? Although to be fair it’s a better attempt than what was recommended by a 2011 parliamentary report, as I wrote on the Drum at the time.

The only real outcome of ALRC process has been the introduction of an R18+ rating for videogames. For historical reasons – pretty much just hostility of policymakers towards gaming – video games have lacked this higher classification. The new rating came into effect in most states in January.

And yet an R18+ for video games is cosmetic at best. Australian gamers have been flouting the restrictions imposed by our archaic classification system for decades. Gamers tend to be a technologically literate bunch. They’ve been importing and downloading whatever they’d like. And video games can still be refused classification – that is, banned.

The video game classification issue became an iconic battle within the gaming community. It was the quintessential “politicians just don’t get technology” story.

Unfortunately, for all their passionate defences of free speech, too many of those gamers and game-focused technology journalists have vacated the field after their minor win. The Government’s sort-of abandonment of its internet filter hasn’t helped either.

But our classification board is still acting as a censorship board. It is still a sop to the self-appointed moral arbiters. Just because some video games have had a small reprieve doesn’t mean the broader problem has been resolved.

In his 1704 essay On Obscenities, the French philosopher Pierre Bayle argued against the arbitrary nature of deciding what offends society – that is, trying to define what we would call “community standards”.

For all the verbiage poured out about community standards, censors rarely make any attempt to determine what the community’s real standards are. If they did they would be confronted with a problem. Those who, in Bayle’s words, “compose wanton verses” are surely part of that community, and contribute to its standards. Those who would eagerly read wanton verses are part of the community too.

So how can any model of community standards exclude the opinions of the people who might go to the Melbourne Queer Film Festival?

Ultimately, any censorship that tries to test a cultural work by (in the words of the Classification Act) “the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults” will be built on sand – an unstable pile of assumptions and prejudices of the officials who make the final decision.

In other words, they’ll know pornography when they see it. And that’s all it takes for censorship to kick in.

An Assault On Diet

When the National Health and Medical Research Council released its official new dietary guidelines this week, they helpfully included a sample daily meal plan.

This was a mistake. The meal plan inadvertently demonstrates how ridiculously austere the NHMRC’s ideal diet is. It’s almost comic. We’re being recommended the culinary equivalent of sexual abstinence.

For an average man, the hypothetical day begins with toast (wholemeal, two slices), baked beans (half a can), a tomato (medium size), and a glass of milk (250ml, reduced fat).

Breakfast is as good as it gets. Lunch is a sandwich (wholemeal) with 65 grams of sliced roast beef, 20 grams of reduced fat cheese and some salad. Two small coffees may be consumed at your discretion. For dinner, look forward to a tiny piece of fish – 100 grams maximum – rice, and a small, boiled potato. End your day with a glass of water. (Dinner for women: a cup of pasta, 65 grams of beef mince, kidney beans and half an onion.)

Pity those who try to follow the government’s new diet. This is self-denial pretending to be cuisine.

According to the NHMRC you mustn’t even use salt – that mineral essential to the human practice of cooking. It’s no exaggeration to say the desire for salt has shaped civilisation. To eliminate salt is to reject thousands of years of food wisdom.

Official dietary guidelines have been steadily reducing any pleasure we might draw from food. The government-endorsed diet is getting worse; more ascetic, more brutal, more surreal. It’s entirely divorced from human taste.

The CSIRO’s bestselling 2005 Total Wellbeing Diet was positively decadent compared to the NHMRC’s new rules. Male dieters were permitted between 2½ and four times as much meat for their dinner. Salt was allowed, in moderation. And the entire point of the CSIRO’s recommended diet was to help people lose weight. The spartan new guidelines are for people who already have a healthy weight.

Dietary guidelines are highly political. There are many special interests with a special interest in what we eat. Industries that find their products downgraded protest loudly.

Meat and livestock producers don’t like the idea we should eat less meat. In the United States, dietary recommendations have been forever shaped by lobbyists. The subsidised sugar industry has political clout.

But there’s a deeper ideological battle going on around nutrition.

After all, what is the point of providing ”guidelines” that are so far removed from the experiences of Australian eaters? Surely health tips should not simply be scientifically accurate, but also socially plausible.

Advice is pointless if it’s going to be ignored. If our best medical minds have decided that drawing any pleasure from food is too risky, perhaps they should rethink their goals.

In 2008, the NHMRC decided any more than two glasses of wine in a single session constituted ”binge drinking”. This decision turned the previously benign cultural practice of sharing a bottle of wine into dangerous hedonism.

But ”binge” is a moral concept rather than a scientific one – it’s just a synonym for ”bad”. Since risky behaviour exists on a continuum, this redefinition was little more than an attempt to berate people into changing their behaviour.

That was five years ago. Now public health activists are pushing the message ”there is no safe level of alcohol consumption”. Another banality pretending to be insight. There’s no totally safe level of doing anything. But expect to find ”no alcohol” on official recommendations soon.

Food and drink are deeply intertwined with cultural identity. No wonder our palate is a political plaything. Environmentalists are frustrated the NHMRC didn’t focus on sustainability. Social-justice types want more attention on equity and fairness.

In Bold Palates: Australia’s Gastronomic Heritage, the historian Barbara Santich relates the story of a Sydney doctor who in 1893 proposed a national dish in the lead-up to Federation: perhaps a ”vegetable curry”, he thought, ”or some well-concocted salad”. Such a delicate, health-focused dish was never likely to be embraced in a land of mutton, damper, and kangaroo-tail soup.

In 2013 we still don’t have a consensus national dish (why would we want one?) but the success of MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules suggests a cultural change in food and dining. Australia is the perfect combination: a rich, immigrant, and agricultural nation. Our cuisine is starting to reflect that holy trinity.

The government’s health guidelines are directly opposed to this new culinary culture. They would strip away the pleasure and meaning of food.

Indeed, there’s something symbolic in the way the NHMRC has offered different menus for men and women. Sharing a meal with the opposite sex is getting in the way of kilojoule management.

Our new health guidelines are more utopian than honest. They may be theoretically ideal – nutritionists can argue the details – but they’re also unrealistic, implausible, and unappealing.

Maybe culinary abstinence is the healthy choice. But replacing the joys of cooking and eating with a tightly engineered formula of self-denial is unlikely to be the happy choice.

Protectionism, Symbolism And Gillard’s Jobs Plan

Timing is everything. On Sunday, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced her “plan for Australian jobs” at the Boeing factory in Melbourne: $1 billion “to make sure that we are a manufacturing nation”.

The next day, the nation’s largest manufacturing union assembled for its national conference on the Gold Coast. Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) chief Paul Howes announced he backed her leadership “110 per cent”.

This is as good a way to measure public policy success as any.

Gillard’s jobs plan (formally titled the Industry and Innovation Statement) is an obvious sop to the protectionist wing of the union movement.

You can read the plan yourself here. But it’s actually pretty uninspiring; a grab-bag of miscellaneous policies trying to form a cohesive whole.

Some of the policies are new. The 10 “Industry Innovation Precincts” are an attempt to cluster industries à la Silicon Valley. We’re throwing $238 million at this little idea.

Industry Innovation Precincts are no more likely to be successful than a similar Howard and Kennett joint venture: the Commonwealth Technology Port, sited in the Melbourne Docklands.
ComTechPort failed to attract digital entrepreneurs and was instead colonised by government departments. Now it’s been rebranded as an “inner urban community”. Let’s see what the Gillard precincts look like in a decade’s time.

Others policies in the jobs plan have already been announced. Legislation for the Anti-Dumping Authority is already squirrelling through parliament.

All up, the jobs plan is not really a new “$1 billion” package. It’s a $791 million one.

But the plan’s big ticket items are the worst of both worlds: they’re both administratively complex and completely unable to achieve their purported goals.

In other words, Julia Gillard’s jobs plan is protectionism as symbolism. It’s a “victory” that the old industrial unions can bring back to their members.

All large projects with a capital expenditure cost above $500 million will be required to submit Australian Industry Participation plans that detail how they intend to involve local firms in their project. Australian Industry Participation plans started back in the early 2000s but only applied to government-funded projects. The Gillard Government is extending them to independent private projects.

In practice, Australian Industry Participation plans end up being pointless red tape. Only the most reckless project manager would deliberately exclude cheaper local suppliers. The plans are mainly there to make local firms feel like they’re in with a chance.

Really large projects ($2 billion and above) that are receiving concessions to import goods tariff-free will have to “embed Australian Industry Opportunity officers within their procurement teams”. It’s not clear exactly what that means. It sounds like embedded public servants.

Now, embedding public servants in private enterprise sounds a bit creepy.

But plus a few increases to existing programs (the Government’s venture capital fund gets an extra $350 million) that’s all there is to the Government’s “jobs plan”. It’s a couple of tokenistic, bureaucratic measures presented as a great win for Aussie jobs and Labor values and the Asian Century.

The fact that union bosses have taken this thin gruel back to their members with such enthusiasm is revealing. They are as much in on the game as the politicians.

No doubt there are many in the AWU’s rank-and-file who want the Government to protect manufacturing and blue-collar jobs by major government intervention – protectionism and planning and government investment. If so, then they’ve been completely sold down the river by their union representatives.

Gillard’s Labor Party faces the same dilemma as many other labour parties around the world. The ALP has become entirely technocratic, as Tim Soutphommasane lamented in the Age recently. Managerialism has replaced ideology. Quite rightly, they’ve learned that open markets and free trade deliver higher living standards for the whole country. But this is hard on their old base. The winds of international competition have been tough on manufacturing unions.

So the protectionism we do get is tokenistic – little regulatory rules and futile programs. Nobody seriously believes these policies will have a substantial effect on the viability of manufacturing in Australia. If the Government really believed that the secret to national economic success was clustering firms geographically or forcing big projects to buy local, these policies would be 10 times as large.

In the case of anti-dumping law (which prohibits foreign manufacturers from selling products in Australia below their “normal” price) the Productivity Commission has explicitly said it exists for psychological reasons rather than economic ones.

We can see the same dynamic in the United States. The political scientist Dan Drezner noted the mercantilist theme running through Barack Obama’s recent State of the Union speech. Obama needs to signal to blue-collar manufacturing workers that he wants to protect them but at the same time the administration can’t abandon the free trade necessary for its long-term economic growth.

There was a great worry at the start of the global financial crisis that the world might take a turn towards protectionism. Politicians often respond to economic downturns by attacking trade.

But rather than demonstrating a lack of faith in free trade, symbolic protectionism does the opposite. Protectionism and state economic planning hasn’t just lost the intellectual debate. It’s completely lost the political one as well.

Forget Drugs – There’s Nothing Natural About Modern Athletes

When the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) brought down its report into performance enhancing drugs in Australian sport, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced she was “sickened” by the revelations. Justice Minister Jason Clare used the word “disgust”.

Sickened and disgusted. Visceral reactions. It’s easy to dismiss the Government’s extreme response to the ACC report as mere political expediency. But the reaction – not just the Government’s, but across the press and public – suggests something deeper. We have elevated the anti-doping crusade into a quasi-religious battle between good and evil. It’s ideological.

Spectators and publicists have always wrapped sport up with notions of purity. The people who revived the Olympics believed that nakedness of Ancient Greek athletics was an expression of that purity. In the early 20th century purity and sport took a creepy, racialised form.

Our modern ideals of purity are more benign. We extol natural fitness, health, and sportsmanship.

Doping feels like a direct attack on these ideals. It is artificial, seems dangerous and it is kept secret.

But that attitude is only recent. Until the 1960s, drug enhancement was integral to sport. It had been that way for nearly a century. The first experiments with doping – the use of coca in long distance walking – date from the 1870s. Early drug use was optimistic. Science had the potential to increase strength and stamina. Scientific progress and athletic achievement went hand in hand.

There’s a great story about an early effort at doping by the Arsenal football club. In 1925, Arsenal’s manager, Leslie Knighton, was visited by a “distinguished West End doctor” who offered “courage-pills” (probably amphetamines) for an upcoming game against West Ham United. Having been reassured the pills were safe, Knighton accepted.

Just before the match began, Knighton’s team took their pills. The problems began when the referee postponed the game due to thick fog.

Getting the boys back to Highbury that afternoon was like trying to drive a flock of lively young lions.

The entire team was violently restless and impossibly thirsty. The next week, the team dutifully swallowed the pills again. The match was again postponed. Once more came edginess and thirst. When they finally played West Ham, the energetic, drugged up team managed a nil-all draw. In the rematch, the poor old Arsenal players rebelled. No more drugs.

The only reason we know about the episode is because Knighton included it in his 1948 memoir, under the chapter title “I Dope Arsenal for a Cup Tie”. At no time did Knighton have any ethical qualms. Neither, it seems, did the team. They had no sense that this was cheating. But they wanted to keep it secret nonetheless.

Knighton saw the pills as a variation on normal practice. Doping was like any other psychological or medical inducement – another way to give his team “hearts as big as bullocks”.

Bertolt Brecht said that “Great sport begins where good health ends”. Athletes subject themselves to brutal fitness and exercise regimes. We isolate talented children from a very young age, direct their life towards training and competition, control what they eat and how they exercise, and send them to specialist academies where we deny them the usual pleasures of growing up. It is ludicrous to claim that the highly-engineered extremes of modern competition are in any way “natural”.

Indeed, one of the most pernicious myths in the anti-doping crusade is that drug use destroys the level playing field of competitive sport. In his book A History of Drug Use in Sport: 1876-1976 the sports academic Paul Dimeo pointed out the entire purpose of training and preparation is to make that playing field uneven.

When does a natural substance such as oxygen, altitude or even testosterone become cheating? How is taking a chemical substance that much different from using specialised equipment, psychological counselling or team tactics?

As Leslie Knighton understood, an advantage gained by doping is a question of degree, not kind. It’s just another way to get an edge.

The tide turned in the 1960s. “Doping is an evil,” proclaimed the anti-doper Sir Arthur Porritt, “it is morally wrong, physically dangerous, socially degenerate and legally indefensible”.

The campaign against drug use was a campaign to raise the status of sport to something impossibly noble and moral. Drugs weren’t the only thing these anti-dopers believed had corrupted the sporting ideal: commercialism, professionalism, and an obsession with personal glory were also undermining sport’s essential purity. The anti-dopers wanted sport to be a reflection of an ideal world of health, morality and virtue. One of the charges against female athletes using drugs was that doping denied their femininity.

Dimeo argues the anti-doping ideology is deeply hypocritical. On the one hand we want athletes to sacrifice their lives in the pursuit of victory and record-breaking. Elite competition is destructive, all-consuming. But then we demand they know exactly when to stop, that they know what risks they should not take with their body. The old fantasies about purity and sport have been turned into systems of control. The crusade against artificial stimulants has been imposed from above by sports bureaucrats who want to regulate the moral choices of athletes.

One legendary Belgian cyclist of the 1950s, Rik van Steenbergen, said after his career that “there are no such things as supermen. Doping is necessary in cycling.”

Throughout the 20th century many riders have argued that professional cycling is so punishing it would be virtually impossible without performance enhancement.

Any sport can make whatever rules it likes about drug use. But let’s get off the high horse. We insist that athletes stop at nothing for our entertainment. Why the horror when they do exactly that?

Lincoln Sheds Little Light On Some Of History’s Dark Deeds

Sometimes the reaction to a movie is more interesting than the movie itself. In Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow controversially suggests torture played a necessary role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Given that this suggestion is both untrue and politically provocative, Zero Dark Thirty has been widely condemned. Bigelow’s film seems to implicitly approve of human rights abuses in the name of the ‘War on Terror’.

Another recent film is similarly coy about civil liberties and human rights. Yet there has been no outcry about Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, released in Australia last week.

Spielberg’s tale of the constitutional amendment to end slavery shrouds Abraham Lincoln’s legacy in myth. The Civil War is the ultimate “just” war. It was fought to end the vile institution of slavery. Hard to think of a more noble cause than that.

But Spielberg whitewashes some of the great stains on the Lincoln presidency. The film obscures, even ridicules, any suggestion Lincoln reduced American liberties during the Civil War.
Take one memorable scene. In Congress, a fiery New York Democrat, Fernando Wood, accuses the president of being a tyrant. Lincoln, Wood shouts, is a “violator of habeas corpus and freedom of the press, abuser of states’ rights, radical republican autocrat ruling by fiat and martial law”.

The film skates quickly over the accusation. Wood seems ridiculous. He describes the president as “our Great Usurping Caesar”. He supports slavery, a much greater tyranny. But many of his claims were correct.

The Lincoln administration declared martial law. It suspended the writ of habeas corpus, allowing the government to detain civilians without charge and without trial. And Lincoln didn’t ask permission from Congress first – a major increase in the power of the executive branch of government.

At first the administration simply wanted to enforce military conscription. But very quickly people were being jailed for doing perfectly legal things. Many civilians were locked up for selling alcohol to soldiers, even though there was no law against it. Others were locked up for “disloyalty” or using “treasonable language”. Local authorities found that incarceration without charge was convenient. They could arrest first and ask questions later.

At least 14,000 people were locked up as political prisoners during the war, according to the historian Mark E. Neely, jnr. The real figure could be twice that.

The suspension of habeas corpus was controversial. The Republican Party was supposed to be the party of individual liberty. Many Republicans were uncomfortable with Lincoln’s heavy hand. Democrats filled the gap and restyled themselves as the ”habeas-corpus party” – obvious hypocrisy from supporters of slavery.

For a long time historians believed there was a militant underground within the North that justified a clampdown on civil liberties. It is now clear that there was no such mass resistance. There is no reason to believe the elimination of legal rights helped win the war.

Lincoln’s administration suppressed at least 300 newspapers. Most of the suppressed papers were Democrat ones. Nineteenth-century journalism was proudly partisan.

Lincoln authorised torture, too. The technique, also used against civilians, is eerily familiar. It is described in historical record as a “violent cold water shower bath”. Essentially, a high-powered hose was sprayed against a person’s body until skin broke. This “shower” could last for hours. There was no attempt to cover up this torture. The president didn’t seem fazed by it at all. We only know it happened because of formal protests made by the British ambassador when British citizens were victims.

Certainly, in the American Civil War the North were the good guys. There can be no question about that. The country had been torn apart. Many of those whose liberties were eliminated supported the slave trade. They’re not sympathetic characters.

But that’s the thing about legal rights. Even bad people deserve the protection of the law. There’s no question that modern Islamic terrorists are bad. But their sheer badness doesn’t make indefinite detention or torture justified. The justice of a war says nothing about whether rights should be protected.

Lincoln’s choices during the Civil War had long-term consequences. Memory of Lincoln helped justify Woodrow Wilson’s even more considerable rights abuses during the First World War. And Lincoln’s legacy has been regularly used to defend depravities in the War on Terror – if the greatest president did it, then surely so can George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Lincoln’s memory should be a sensitive issue.

Both Zero Dark Thirty and Lincoln are up for best picture Oscars in a few weeks. The storm over torture makes Bigelow’s chances small. Lincoln is just the sort of film the academy likes. It is pure Americana, at times cloyingly so. Yes, Daniel Day-Lewis deserves every Oscar he can get. But Spielberg grants little room for moral ambiguity in his hero-president.

Some people have seen the Zero Dark Thirty debate as America starting to deal with the civil liberties incidents of the last decade. The silence on Lincoln suggests there is a long way to go.

If It Looks And Smells Like A Campaign, Then It’s A Campaign

When Prime Minister Julia Gillard told the National Press Club that she did not want to start “the nation’s longest election campaign”, the whole room laughed.

Because that’s what she had just done. She knew it, the press gallery knew it, and the public knows it.

The announcement only happened on Wednesday but the intervening six days have been an eternity. One MP has been arrested, two senior ministers have resigned, we have a new Attorney-General and a new Minister for Immigration (the Commonwealth’s two most contentious jobs) and now the Prime Minister is reprimanding Labor MPs for leaking against her Government.

But let’s stick with the election announcement for a bit. It exposed pretty much everything that’s wrong with Australian politics today. The obsession with minor media idiosyncrasies. Our parliamentarians’ ridiculously self-important attitude. Most of all, the drifting aimlessness of the parties. Julie Gillard didn’t just reveal a date – September 14. She opened a little window into our current malaise.

There are three public explanations for why Gillard announced the election now.

The first two are briefly plausible. In her speech, the Prime Minister said it would give the business community “certainty”, and spike the inevitable press speculations about the date.

The former claim inflates the importance of politics. It’s easy for the political class to imagine the whole country lives on their every word. It flatters the politicians, who want desperately to believe when the government changes the country changes. It flatters the pundits, who imagine their interpretation of the momentous events of Canberra are of great significance. It patronises everybody else.

The latter claim ridiculously, hilariously exaggerates the importance of opinion columns. Are we really so obsessed with the media we think the occasional, harmless speculation about an election date hurts our democracy? That spiking the future column ideas of press gallery reporters is somehow a brilliant political manoeuvre?

If Julia Gillard’s office genuinely believes so, Labor is in more trouble than even the polls suggest. For the last few years anti-media hysteria has grown out of control. Now all that marginal bleating about the “MSM” is starting to subsume the functions of government itself.

Gillard’s third and final explanation for announcing the election date isn’t even coherent, let alone convincing. Why would announcing an upcoming election date make it “clear to all which are the days of governing and which are the days of campaigning”? It does exactly the opposite. It blurs the boundaries.

The announcement has left everybody confused. Her parliamentary colleagues seem to have gone into a strange, half-hearted campaign mode, not sure where they are in the political cycle. Wayne Swan went on 7.30 the night of Gillard’s Press Club speech for no obvious reason except to demonstrate he exists. If the Treasurer had something to announce, some new question to answer, it never came out in the interview. Was Swan campaigning or governing? Did he even know?

A “campaign” is not a strictly defined thing. It exists in the mind of the beholder. It’s an attitude. That some state parliaments have fixed terms is irrelevant. In federal politics the campaign starts when the Prime Minister reveals the polling day. If something looks like a campaign, smells like a campaign, then it’s a campaign.

Indeed, the launch of a campaign is the only way Gillard’s Press Club speech makes sense. Labor has long hoped voters would eventually be so revolted by Tony Abbott they would turn against the Coalition. The Press Club address was one final ploy to up the stakes; a last attempt to try to shift the burden of proof onto the Opposition.

The Government needs the election to seem imminent enough that voters start really questioning Abbott’s preparedness for government. But electoral attitudes don’t change overnight, so there needs to be time to turn the public around.

Certainly, Gillard didn’t just announce the election date at the Press Club. She gave a 3,500 word speech. The rest of it was a serious discussion with a few important arguments about the state of the Australian economy. Unsurprisingly people have criticised the media for ignoring all that heavy stuff.

But whose fault is that? Julia Gillard didn’t come down with the last shower. She must have known people would focus more on the surprise election date reveal than her thoughts about long-term trends in superannuation returns. The Prime Minister couldn’t have diverted more attention from the body of her speech if she tried.

Yes, we’ve got to the stage that people are blaming the press for what politicians do.

Labor people want Tony Abbott’s Coalition to be subjected to more scrutiny. That’s fair enough. The Coalition has been calling for an early election for years, and we’ve a right to see more of what they’ll do in government, not just how much they think Julia Gillard is a bad prime minister.

So for all its flaws Gillard’s early announcement gambit could work. Even if it doesn’t, what has the Government got to lose?

But let’s not pretend it isn’t an explicitly political gesture, only made possible by our sickly and dissatisfied national political culture.

The Orwell Cult Is Way Out Of Hand

Last Monday the left-wing magazine New Statesman declared it was “Orwell Week”.

How utterly shameless.

George Orwell is no longer a journalist. He is an all-purpose, all-terrain vehicle for the vanities of other writers.

This is particularly obvious in the case of the New Statesman. In 1937, the magazine’s editor, Kingsley Martin, rejected two of George Orwell’s pieces on the Spanish Civil War for being excessively critical of communism. His articles would “cause trouble”, Martin claimed, because Orwell had described fascism and communism as two sides of the same totalitarian coin.
The New Statesman was a bastion of sympathy for the Soviet Union. Orwell later said its typical reader “worships Stalin”.

Now the New Statesman wants to wear George Orwell as a political badge.

Orwell has an outsized reputation. It goes something like this: he brilliantly captured the essence of socialist totalitarianism, and did so against the political fashion of the time. Other intellectuals had been seduced by the Soviet experiment. He was a lonely apostate. This required great moral courage.

There is less to these claims than the Orwell idolisers will admit. He was a good writer – and a great journalist – but the Orwell cult has gotten way out of hand.

People imagine if they talk about their heroes they will imbibe their qualities. Politicians make speeches about Winston Churchill hoping his reputation for leadership and grit will rub off on them. Journalists use Orwell for independence and integrity. Christopher Hitchens – usually such an iconoclast – did more to inflate the Orwell cult than anybody in recent decades, and did so transparently to make himself Orwell’s political heir.

But Orwell got one big thing wrong, and it goes to the heart of his political thought. He misunderstood the basic nature of totalitarianism. He rightly believed the all-powerful state was terrifying. He wrongly thought it could function.

The state in Nineteen Eighty-Four has complete control over society. The Thought Police sees all. The four great ministries of government (Peace, Plenty, Truth, and Love) command all. It was totalitarian in the most fundamental sense – state power was total.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was nothing like this. Konstantin Simis’ great book USSR: The Corrupt Society makes clear how broken the Soviet system was. It was held up by networks of patronage and bribery and an underground economy and interpersonal politics. The USSR didn’t have high-tech telescreens feeding a central authority. Soviet control came from informants and petty betrayals. Totalitarianism was anything but complete.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s protagonist fantasises that the state might be rotten under the surface.

Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope.

It’s a telling difference, that between Orwellian fantasy and crooked reality. In 1944 Orwell wrote a downbeat review of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. He accepted Hayek’s political critique of socialism. A state that tried to control an economy would eventually control a society.

But Orwell does not seem to have taken in Hayek’s more crucial message: communism did not function as well as communists imagined.

No matter how unconstrained and all-powerful a central planner was, they would never be able to marshal enough information about the economy to plan it effectively. Big Brother could never see everything. Orwell did not accept this. He remained a socialist, albeit a democratic one.

That, ultimately, is what makes Orwell interesting. He succeeded where so many of the pre-war left failed. Rather than wilfully defending and promoting the Soviet dictatorship, he attacked it. His fame is tied to their infamy. This is why the New Statesman’s appropriation of his name so obscene. It was the moral bankruptcy of Kingsley Martin that makes Orwell important.

Orwell was not the only intellectual to identify the totalitarian impulse in Marxism, and certainly not the first. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1948. Eugene Richter’s Pictures of the Socialistic Future was published nearly 60 years earlier, in 1891. Richters’ book is also a dystopian imagining of a communist state. But Richter was a German liberal, and was as interested in discrediting how socialism worked as exposing its dictatorial tendencies.

Another “Orwellian” vision, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, was published in 1921. We is on the other side of the spectrum – it is even more fantastical than Nineteen Eighty-Four, and even more extreme. Zamyatin had personal experience of Soviet communism. (His book was the first to be censored by the Soviet literary board.) The totalitarian state in We has even stripped citizens of their names. Zamyatin’s protagonist is referred to as D-503. Where Orwell explored how a state used language for control, Zamyatin’s state used mathematics, giving the book a surreal feeling that Nineteen Eighty-Four lacks.

Jack London also wrote a dystopian novel in 1908, The Iron Heel, which Orwell is known to have admired.

Neither was Orwell uniquely clear-headed about the nature of the Soviet Union. From 1917 onwards there were credible reports from émigrés, Christian missionaries and even the occasional tourist revealing all was not well in the USSR.

Details were sketchy but as this newspaper search demonstrates Soviet persecution was no secret. Western Marxists who discounted these reports were being wilfully ignorant. Those that ignored them are morally culpable.

Orwell did neither. But surely this is the bare minimum we ask of an intellectual – to not completely sell out, to not outright lie, to not distort known truths in service of an ideology. Once again the idea of Orwell as a truth-seeking hero only makes sense when we account for the intellectual depravities of his comrades.

A writer does not have to be ground-breaking to be valuable and insightful. And it isn’t fair to heap the egos of half a century of jealous polemicists on to Orwell.

One of the charms of Orwell’s journalism is his modesty. And a person cannot be held responsible for what others do with their reputation. But, no doubt, George Orwell would be amazed at what his has become.

This Doomsday Endgame Could Last A Long Time

Earlier this month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists counselled the leader of the free world about the apocalypse.

“Dear President Obama,” the journal’s science and security board wrote in an open letter, “2012 was a year in which the problems of the world pressed forward, but too many of its citizens stood back.” They darkly warned of nuclear proliferation, bioterrorism, climate change, and “cyber technologies” which “could trigger a new kind of self-inflicted Doomsday”.

Yes, doomsday. The bulletin scientists are the keepers of the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic clock face that shows how close the world is to global catastrophe. The clock is now at five to midnight. Their letter announced it is unchanged since last year – the scientists are not budging. According to this well-credentialled hive mind, we’re still teetering on the edge of annihilation. Indeed, we have been for 65 years.

But perhaps the scientists would be better described as the clock’s guardians, a word which has a more mystical, Star Trek quality. That’s the thing about prophets of the apocalypse. They’re always so confident; so impressed by their own insight.

When the clock was first set in 1947, it was seven minutes to midnight. The furthest it has ever gone back is 17 minutes, at the end of the Cold War. The bulletin first threw climate change into the mix in 2007; a transparent bid for relevancy, just as using the word “cyber” is now.

The clock has some particular political views. When Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office they pushed it closer to midnight. When Obama became president they eased the clock back. Reagan had said that to end the Cold War, the free world would have to win it. This was a lot more prescient than Obama’s Nobel peace prize.

Of course, we’re nowhere near five to midnight. It’s sometime in the afternoon. The world is safer and more free than ever in history. We got through the entire Soviet-American contest without a nuclear shot fired. And even the most extreme models of global warming don’t predict catastrophic destruction but gradual change.

To paraphrase Adam Smith, there is a great deal of ruin in a civilisation. But to believe that problems threaten the civilisation itself is a triumph of fear over experience. We should not be complacent. But we should be sober. Judgment Day keeps being postponed.

The Doomsday scientists are a secular variation on an old type – apocalyptic preachers in modern garb. They’re not talking about science, they’re preying on anxiety. Why would anybody really believe “cyber technology” would bring us closer to Armageddon? No reason, unless they were convinced mankind is inherently suicidal. The bulletin’s open letter to Obama must be the first time software has been described as an omen of the end of days.

Still, a prophet who prophesied modest challenges to be overcome in the fullness of time would be ignored. The end needs to be nigh.

An American preacher Harold Camping predicted the rapture would occur in May 2011. He’d only made this prediction a few years earlier. Just as he predicted in 1992 the world would end in 1994. In other words, he gave enough time to persuade sympathisers it was going to happen, and not too long for them to lose interest.

Once again, poor old Camping had to explain why his prophecy didn’t occur. Secular millennialists don’t embarrass so easily.

This was a lesson environmental fearmongers learnt early. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) is a famous book in the green tradition but few care to remember Ehrlich included specific scenarios of starvation and nuclear winter set in the 1970s. The most fretful now simply say we’ve reached the climate ”endgame”. Here’s a prediction – that endgame will last for a very long time.

Armageddon sells. We like drama, and nothing is more dramatic than global catastrophe. The human brain isn’t very good at dealing with risk. We overestimate the likelihood of major, conspicuous events like nuclear war and terrorism, and underestimate more pedestrian dangers, like drowning in a bathtub.

And doomsday flatters those who fear it. It’s an in-group thing. While the rest of the population naively goes about their business, insiders are worrying about events to come. This is as true for the Christian kids who devoured the Left Behind books about the rapture – they are the saved ones who understand the secrets of the world – as it is for the Whitehaven hoaxer Jonathan Moylan. Defrauding the sharemarket only seems ethical if you believe coal is an existential threat to civilisation. And if you do, well, securities law is for mere mortals.

In a speech in 1903, an optimistic H. G. Wells conceded: “One must admit that it is impossible to show why certain things should not utterly destroy and end the entire human race and story.” Hypothetical catastrophe has sustained apocalyptic preachers for thousands of years.

Wells is right: we can’t absolutely guarantee the worst won’t happen. But we should ignore the people desperate to assume it will.

Opening statement to Commonwealth Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee inquiry into the Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill 2012

With Simon Breheny and Tim Wilson

We thank the committee for inviting us to give evidence this afternoon. The exposure draft Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill 2012 is an attack on our fundamental freedoms. The draft bill is not simply a consolidation of existing Commonwealth acts, as the government has claimed; it is a radical overhaul of anti-discrimination law. There are many problems with the draft bill. The most concerning aspect of the draft bill is the significant threat it poses to freedom of speech. The definition of discrimination has been expanded to include conduct that offends or insults. Given this new definition of discrimination, the inclusion of political opinion as a ground on which a claim can be made is absurd and dangerous. Under the draft bill, you could be taken to court for saying something that offended someone because of a political opinion they hold.

The freedom to express political opinions in all areas of public life, even those that offend and insult others, is central to the functioning of our system of government, as the High Court has found. By undermining the freedom of speech, the draft poses a grave threat to the health of Australian democracy. It is wrong to say that the draft bill could be amended to a point where it is acceptable. Simply removing the words ‘offend’ and ‘insult’ from the new definition of discrimination will not save the draft bill. The real problem is the whole project itself. The draft bill is not about antidiscrimination; instead, the consolidation project has resulted in a draft bill that undermines liberty and places the state at the centre of our interpersonal relationships. Rather than making the law clearer and simpler, the draft bill adds significant complexities to this area of law.

The draft bill also reverses the burden of proof for claims of discrimination. This is completely unacceptable. The person bringing a legal claim should always bear the burden of proving their case. This principle—the idea that a person is innocent until proven guilty—is the centrepiece of a just legal system. Reversing the burden of proof creates an unjust system.

The draft bill will erode civil society by encouraging reliance on apparatus of the state for the resolution of private disputes. It threatens to lead Australia towards a US-style culture of litigation. The constant erosion of our freedoms must end. This draft bill is a disturbing example of the ever-increasing power of the state. It shows that it is now time to swing the pendulum back towards liberty rather than away from it and to take back control of our own lives. The draft bill is a threat to freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of religion. The Institute of Public Affairs calls on the committee to recommend the outright rejection of this dangerous draft bill.

Anti-Discrimination Laws: An Act Of Confusion

Even when discussing complex pieces of legislation, it’s worth trying to get basic concepts right.

The Gillard Government’s proposed anti-discrimination changes fail this test. They artlessly try to blend two concepts together – discrimination and harassment.

But to harass someone and to discriminate against someone are different things.

If a person misses out on a job in favour of a less-qualified person because of their skin colour, then that’s discrimination. Harassment is different. You harass someone when you intentionally disturb or upset another person.

They’re both bad, certainly. But they’re conceptually distinct, and have been that way since the first federal anti-discrimination law was passed in Australia in 1975.

The Government wants to “consolidate” a whole bunch of bills concerning discrimination – including the Racial Discrimination Act and the Sex Discrimination Act – into a grand Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill.

Simplifying law is a usually good idea. Yet what comes out is an incoherent mess. And it’s hard for citizens to obey an incoherent mess.

For example, if the bill goes through the Parliament, it will be unlawful to treat someone unfavourably by offending or insulting them because of their political opinions, industrial history, or social origin in any work-related area.

The concepts of “offend or insult” come from existing harassment law. Unfavourable treatment is the mainstay of discrimination law. Fusing the two together may superficially seem like a good idea, but read the previous paragraph again. What wouldn’t be captured by this new omnibus bill?

All political opinions are offensive in some fashion – politics is about controversy. Almost everywhere is “work-related” for someone. Offence is in the eye of the receiver, not the giver. And what on earth is “social origin”?

These anti-discrimination changes have a long and sad history.

Way back in 2008, Kevin Rudd and his Attorney-General Robert McClelland announced a broad inquiry into Australian human rights protection.

They put Father Frank Brennan in charge of this National Human Rights Consultation. That year was the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights – a document which Labor’s HV Evatt helped draft. McClelland used the Evatt Foundation as his platform to kick it all off. There was a big song and dance about the whole thing. The committee received tens of thousands of submissions.

But the ambitions of 2008 disappeared. Kevin Rudd’s hyperactivity became nervousness and uncertainty. In 2010 the government rejected the committee’s major proposal – to implement a national charter of rights.

Rudd was dumped. McClelland was jettisoned from the Attorney-General position in 2011.

But one minor government response to the consultation was a promise to consolidate all existing anti-discrimination laws to reduce “uncertainty”. And once started bureaucratic process does not stop.

This is one reason the anti-discrimination bill has “human rights” in the title. It’s a grand phrase for something that is purportedly only designed to merge a few acts together. It’s good public relations as well. Who could oppose human rights?

Yet the consolidation of anti-discrimination law was barely mentioned in the final report of the Rudd-era consultation. And the report did not explain why it was necessary. Last year, a discussion paper about the potential consolidation took the need for legislative consolidation as a given. We seem to have skipped a step. Why is this all so urgent?

In The Australian earlier this month Roxon suggested we need consolidation because “the community at large, including lawyers, is unsure or confused about what might already be discriminatory”.

No doubt many people are confused. That’s what happens when governments pass a lot of laws.

But rather than clarifying existing prohibitions, Roxon’s department have chosen a brute-force approach – they plan to make everything discrimination. They haven’t just consolidated existing law. By mixing harassment and hurt feelings with discrimination they’ve dramatically expanded it, opening up vast new opportunities for litigation. The draft bill eliminates confusion, sure, but replaces it with chaos.

Lost in all this is any recognition of the importance of freedom of association.

Free association is one of our least defended liberties. It is just as much a human right as any protection against discrimination. It appears in both the American Bill of Rights and HV Evatt’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But anti-discrimination law – a passion of the human rights lobby – has steadily eroded it.

Now organisations have freedom of association only if they meet one of the exemptions specified in law. It is the responsibility of religious organisations to justify why they should be allowed to choose employees according to religious doctrine, rather than the government to justify why those organisations should be prevented from doing so.

We have had anti-discrimination laws for nearly 40 years. They’ve taken on a life of their own. The Government is now putting more effort into specifying what is permitted, rather than what is prohibited.

It’s hard to think of anything more contrary to the principle of human rights than that.