Chris Berg – Page 50 – Politics, economics, technology, and civil liberties

Critics’ Silence Adds To Walsh’s Cabinet Of Curiosities

David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art is an extraordinary achievement.

The art, distributed through an artificial cavern in a Hobart hillside, is surreal and otherworldly. We’ll get to it in a moment. But adding to MONA’s surrealism is the fact that the museum exists entirely outside Australia’s cultural bureaucracy.

MONA does not haggle for support from government budgets, and it is not curated by committee. Cabinet ministers cannot put their friends on the museum’s board.

Private museums are common globally but rare here. Australians expect their major cultural institutions to be wards of state and federal governments.

So the strangeness of the art is amplified when visitors realise they are not in a public building, but are instead guests on the private property of an eccentric billionaire. Before visitors even get to the artwork, they have already been treated to a vision of a different world – one where state and culture are not so perversely intertwined.

Hopefully Walsh’s dispute with the Australian Taxation Office does not put it all at an end. (As an aside, it has been great theatre to see Bob Brown stand up for an accused tax evader.)

All that said – MONA’s very existence being a triumph of private sector culture and free markets and capitalist patronage and so on – we ought to give Walsh the respect of taking his museum seriously. And MONA has some deep problems.

The clue is in the title. There is a broad range of new art in the Museum of Old and New Art. But the curators have a very particular idea of what constitutes “old” art. And their choices betray a strange sort of anti-intellectualism – as if modern art has nothing to do with history, or even its own heritage.

All curation decisions make implicit arguments. And most surveys of modern art are arranged chronologically and thematically. This has the advantage of showing those with only a casual interest the rough logic of modernism and post-modernism: how Paul Cézanne’s landscapes could have led to Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings, or how Dadist surrealism could have led to Tracey Emin’s soiled bed.

There is, no question, a big distance between the Mona Lisa and Damien Hirst’s shark, but it is a distance Western art has travelled, and the journey was intelligible.

MONA rejects such stodgy determinism, and tosses together art from all eras. The “Theatre of the World” exhibition, which opened in June, is the essence of MONA’s eclecticism. The pieces in this large show span 4,000 years of history. The curators jumble up everything from Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman to the vertebrae of a snake. The most striking room has its walls covered in Pacific Island bark-cloths, and features in the centre an Egyptian sarcophagus and one of the stretched human figures of the mid-century sculptor Alberto Giacometti. That is, ancient North Africa, the 19th century Pacific, and 20th century modernism, all in one hall.

But notably absent throughout the exhibition is any significant showing of Western art before 1850. The old art in the Theatre of the World is almost uniformly non-Western.

That observation may seem churlish (there are many outlets for European paintings, Walsh need not provide another one) but this curatorial decision suggests contemporary art arose from nothing; as if modernism and post-modernism exist entirely outside the Western tradition. Yet modern art is the direct heir of classical art.

Yes, many modern artists have been inspired by non-Western art. Picasso spent a lot of time looking at African tribal craft – a point the exhibition makes. But he also used to brag he was the best classically trained draughtsmen of the 20th century. Bluster or not, he and his contemporaries drew upon the artistic heritage of centuries.

When MONA pairs a modern work – more often than not from an artist living and working within the “West” – with a metal mask of a boar from India, the sole point is to disorientate. And the desired reaction is not much more than: art is weird. With this approach, MONA struggles to be more than a cabinet of curiosities.

That’s fine. Walsh does not have to make modern art comprehensible. He is under no statutory obligation to teach. He can alienate his visitors because he, not they, paid for the gallery in the first place.

But, still. One of the arguments made by radical critics of Western art is that it looks at the rest of the world with a patronising eye. In his famous book Orientalism, Edward Said claimed the West “colonised” the East through art before it did so with muskets. Said’s book was highly flawed but highly influential. It launched a thousand PhDs. Said argued European artists infantilised the Orient by imposing on it a sense of weirdness; that everything outside Europe was alien and inscrutable.

That critique has a strange parallel at MONA. The Theatre of the World typically shows a classic modern work – such as the video of an artist who cut a house in half – and contrasts it with, say, a collection of Fijian weapons. Cultural Studies majors would call those weapons representative of “the Other”. They conjure up archaic and condescending ideas about the Noble Savage. And the comparison suggests modern artists are discovering the sort of raw, violent purity that exists only in foreign lands.

So it’s curious to see our cultural critics unwilling to deploy their poison pens against Walsh’s museum. They’re usually proud to be iconoclasts.

But then, since MONA suggests modern art has little to do with the inheritance of Western Civilisation, perhaps it is not that curious.

Be like Gough: 75 Radical Ideas To Transform Australia

With James Paterson and John Roskam

If Tony Abbott wants to leave a lasting impact – and secure his place in history – he needs to take his inspiration from Australia’s most left-wing prime minister.

No prime minister changed Australia more than Gough Whitlam. The key is that he did it in less than three years. In a flurry of frantic activity, Whitlam established universal healthcare, effectively nationalised higher education with free tuition, and massively increased public sector salaries. He more than doubled the size of cabinet from 12 ministers to 27.

He enacted an ambitious cultural agenda that continues to shape Australia to this day. In just three years, Australia was given a new national anthem, ditched the British honours system, and abolished the death penalty and national service. He was the first Australian prime minister to visit communist China and he granted independence to Papua New Guinea. Whitlam also passed the Racial Discrimination Act. He introduced no-fault divorce.

Perhaps his most lasting legacy has been the increase in the size of government he bequeathed to Australia. When Whitlam took office in 1972, government spending as a percentage of GDP was just 19 per cent. When he left office it had soared to almost 24 per cent.

Virtually none of Whitlam’s signature reforms were repealed by the Fraser government. The size of the federal government never fell back to what it was before Whitlam. Medicare remains. TheRacial Discrimination Act – rightly described by the Liberal Senator Ivor Greenwood in 1975 as ‘repugnant to the rule of law and to freedom of speech’ – remains.

It wasn’t as if this was because they were uncontroversial. The Liberal opposition bitterly fought many of Whitlam’s proposals. And it wasn’t as if the Fraser government lacked a mandate or a majority to repeal them. After the 1975 election, in which he earned a 7.4 per cent two-party preferred swing, Fraser held 91 seats out of 127 in the House of Representatives and a Senate majority.

When Mark Steyn visited Australia recently he described political culture as a pendulum. Left-wing governments swing the pendulum to the left. Right of centre governments swing the pendulum to the right. But left-wing governments do so with greater force. The pendulum always pushes further left.

And the public’s bias towards the status quo has a habit of making even the most radical policy (like Medicare, or restrictions on freedom of speech) seem normal over time. Despite the many obvious problems of socialised health care, no government now would challenge the foundations of Medicare as the Coalition did before it was implemented.

Every single opinion poll says that Tony Abbott will be Australia’s next prime minister. He might not even have to wait until the current term of parliament expires in late 2013. The Gillard government threatens to collapse at any moment. Abbott could well be in the Lodge before Christmas this year.

Abbott could also have a Fraser-esque majority after the next election. Even if he doesn’t control the Senate, the new prime minister is likely to have an intimidating mandate from the Australian people. The conditions will suit a reformer: although Australia’s economy has proven remarkably resilient, global events demonstrate how fragile it is. The global financial crisis, far from proving to be a crisis of capitalism, has instead demonstrated the limits of the state. Europe’s bloated and debt-ridden governments provide ample evidence of the dangers of big government.

Australia’s ageing population means the generous welfare safety net provided to current generations will be simply unsustainable in the future. As the Intergenerational Report produced by the federal Treasury shows, there were 7.5 workers in the economy for every non-worker aged over 65 in 1970. In 2010 that figure was 5. In 2050 it will be 2.7. Government spending that might have made sense in 1970 would cripple the economy in 2050. Change is inevitable.

But if Abbott is going to lead that change he only has a tiny window of opportunity to do so. If he hasn’t changed Australia in his first year as prime minister, he probably never will.

Why just one year? Whitlam’s vigour in government came as a shock to Australian politics. The Coalition was adjusting to the opposition benches. Outside of parliament, the potential opponents of Whitlam reforms had yet to get organised. The general goodwill voters offer new governments gives more than enough cover for radical action. But that cover is only temporary. The support of voters drains. Oppositions organise. Scandals accumulate. The clear air for major reform becomes smoggy.

Worse, governments acclimatise to being in government. A government is full of energy in its first year. By the second year, even very promising ministers can get lazy. The business of government overtakes. MPs start thinking of the next election. But for the Coalition, the purpose of winning office cannot be merely to attain the status of being ‘in government’. It must be to make Australians freer and more prosperous. From his social democratic perspective, Whitlam understood this point well. Labor in the 1970s knew that it wanted to reshape the country and it began doing so immediately.

The time pressure on a new government – if it is to successfully implant its vision – is immense. The vast Commonwealth bureaucracies and the polished and politically-savvy senior public servants have their own agendas, their own list of priorities, and the skill to ensure those priorities become their ministers’ priorities. The recent experience of the state Coalition governments is instructive. Fresh-faced ministers who do not have a fixed idea of what they want to do with their new power are invariably captured by their departments.

Take, for instance, the Gillard government’s National Curriculum. Opposing this policy ought to be a matter of faith for state Liberals. The National Curriculum centralises education power in Canberra, and will push a distinctly left-wing view of the world onto all Australian students. But it has been met with acceptance – even support – by the Coalition’s state education ministers. This is because a single National Curriculum has been an article of faith within the education bureaucracy for decades; an obsession of education unions and academics, who want education to ‘shape’ Australia’s future. (No prize for guessing what that shape might look like.) A small-target election strategy has the unfortunate side-effect of allowing ministerial aspirants to avoid thinking too deeply about major areas in their portfolio. So when, in the first week as minister, they are presented with a list of policy priorities by their department, it is easier to accept what the bureaucracy considers important, rather than what is right. The only way to avoid such departmental capture is to have a clear idea of what to do with government once you have it.

Only radical change that shifts the entire political spectrum, like Gough Whitlam did, has any chance of effecting lasting change. Of course, you don’t have to be from the left of politics to leave lasting change on the political spectrum.

Both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan proved conservatives can leave a paradigm-shifting legacy. Though Thatcher’s own party strayed from her strongly free-market philosophy, one of the major reasons the British Labour Party finally removed socialism from their party platform under Tony Blair was because of Margaret Thatcher.

Ronald Reagan not only presided over pro-market deregulation and tax cuts during eight years in the White House, but also provided the ideological fuel for the 1994 Republican revolution in the House of Representatives, led by Newt Gingrich, which enacted far-reaching welfare reform.

Here we provide a list of 75 policies that would make Australia richer and more free. It’s a deliberately radical list. There’s no way Tony Abbott could implement all of them, or even a majority. But he doesn’t have to implement them all to dramatically change Australia. If he was able to implement just a handful of these recommendations, Abbott would be a transformative figure in Australian political history. He would do more to shift the political spectrum than any prime minister since Whitlam.

We do not mean for this list to be exhaustive, and in many ways no list could do justice to the challenges the Abbott government would face. Whitlam changed the political culture. We are still feeling the consequences of that change today. So the policies we suggest adopting, the bureaucracies we suggest abolishing, the laws we suggest revoking should be seen as symptoms, rather than the source, of the problem.

Conservative governments have a very narrow idea of what the ‘culture wars’ consists of. The culture of government that threatens our liberty is not just ensconced in the ABC studios, or among a group of well-connected and publicly funded academics. ABC bias is not the only problem. It is the spiralling expansion of bureaucracies and regulators that is the real problem.

We should be more concerned about the Australian National Preventive Health Agency – a new Commonwealth bureaucracy dedicated to lobbying other arms of government to introduce Nanny State measures – than about bias at the ABC. We should be more concerned about the cottage industry of consultancies and grants handed out by the public service to environmental groups. We should be more concerned that senior public servants shape policy more than elected politicians do. And conservative governments should be more concerned than they are at the growth of the state’s interest in every aspect of society.

If he wins government, Abbott faces a clear choice. He could simply overturn one or two symbolic Gillard-era policies like the carbon tax, and govern moderately. He would not offend any interest groups. In doing so, he’d probably secure a couple of terms in office for himself and the Liberal Party. But would this be a successful government? We don’t believe so. The remorseless drift to bigger government and less freedom would not halt, and it would resume with vigour when the Coalition eventually loses office. We hope he grasps the opportunity to fundamentally reshape the political culture and stem the assault on individual liberty.

Repeal the carbon tax, and don’t replace it. It will be one thing to remove the burden of the carbon tax from the Australian economy. But if it is just replaced by another costly scheme, most of the benefits will be undone.
Abolish the Department of Climate Change
Abolish the Clean Energy Fund
Repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act
Abandon Australia’s bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council
Repeal the renewable energy target
Return income taxing powers to the states
Abolish the Commonwealth Grants Commission
Abolish the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission
Withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol
Introduce fee competition to Australian universities
Repeal the National Curriculum
Introduce competing private secondary school curriculums
Abolish the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA)
Eliminate laws that require radio and television broadcasters to be ‘balanced’
Abolish television spectrum licensing and devolve spectrum management to the common law
End local content requirements for Australian television stations
Eliminate family tax benefits
Abandon the paid parental leave scheme
Means-test Medicare
End all corporate welfare and subsidies by closing the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education
Introduce voluntary voting
End mandatory disclosures on political donations
End media blackout in final days of election campaigns
End public funding to political parties
Remove anti-dumping laws
Eliminate media ownership restrictions
Abolish the Foreign Investment Review Board
Eliminate the National Preventative Health Agency
Cease subsidising the car industry
Formalise a one-in, one-out approach to regulatory reduction
Rule out federal funding for 2018 Commonwealth Games
Deregulate the parallel importation of books
End preferences for Industry Super Funds in workplace relations laws
Legislate a cap on government spending and tax as a percentage of GDP
Legislate a balanced budget amendment which strictly limits the size of budget deficits and the period the federal government can be in deficit
Force government agencies to put all of their spending online in a searchable database
Repeal plain packaging for cigarettes and rule it out for all other products, including alcohol and fast food
Reintroduce voluntary student unionism at universities
Introduce a voucher scheme for secondary schools
Repeal the alcopops tax
Introduce a special economic zone in the north of Australia including:
a) Lower personal income tax for residents
b) Significantly expanded 457 Visa programs for workers
c) Encourage the construction of dams
Repeal the mining tax
Devolve environmental approvals for major projects to the states
Introduce a single rate of income tax with a generous tax-free threshold
Cut company tax to an internationally competitive rate of 25 per cent
Cease funding the Australia Network
Privatise Australia Post
Privatise Medibank
Break up the ABC and put out to tender each individual function
Privatise SBS
Reduce the size of the public service from current levels of more than 260,000 to at least the 2001 low of 212,784
Repeal the Fair Work Act
Allow individuals and employers to negotiate directly terms of employment that suit them
Encourage independent contracting by overturning new regulations designed to punish contractors
Abolish the Baby Bonus
Abolish the First Home Owners’ Grant
Allow the Northern Territory to become a state
Halve the size of the Coalition front bench from 32 to 16
Remove all remaining tariff and non-tariff barriers to international trade
Slash top public servant salaries to much lower international standards, like in the United States
End all public subsidies to sport and the arts
Privatise the Australian Institute of Sport
End all hidden protectionist measures, such as preferences for local manufacturers in government tendering
Abolish the Office for Film and Literature Classification
Rule out any government-supported or mandated internet censorship
Means test tertiary student loans
Allow people to opt out of superannuation in exchange for promising to forgo any government income support in retirement
Immediately halt construction of the National Broadband Network and privatise any sections that have already been built
End all government funded Nanny State advertising
Reject proposals for compulsory food and alcohol labelling
Privatise the CSIRO
Defund Harmony Day
Close the Office for Youth
Privatise the Snowy-Hydro Scheme

Submission to Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security on ‘Equipping Australia against Emerging and Evolving Threats’

With Simon Breheny

Introduction: The Institute of Public Affairs believes many of the national security proposals contained in the Attorney-General’s Department’s Equipping Australia against Emerging and Evolving Threats Discussion Paper are unnecessary and excessive. Many of the proposals:

Curb civil liberties;
Systematically breach Australians’ right to privacy, and;
Breach basic rule of law principles.

The Discussion Paper offers at least 45 distinct proposals. This submission does not attempt to address each one. Instead, we focus on one particular proposal that the government is seeking views upon: the data retention policy that would require internet service providers to retain data on all users for up to two years.

The data retention proposal, along with a number of other proposals listed in the Discussion Paper,would be a significant increase in the power of security agencies and the Attorney-General’s Department.

Available in PDF here.

Media Diversity Fears Are Absurd And Obsolete

The twin themes of the media debate – new regulation and creative destruction – coexist awkwardly.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy told Channel Ten’s Meet the Press recently that his government’s proposed public interest test for media acquisitions was not aimed at Gina Rinehart’s investment in Fairfax. In fact, the mining magnate would pass the new test.

This revelation will disappoint many of his colleagues. But thank goodness. The Gillard Government is, happily, not so brazen as to write a new law to stop one particular critic from investing in the media. Doing so would be the essence of arbitrary government, and would be clearly in response to Gina Rinehart’s political views.

Not all media reform is a threat to free speech. But motives do matter. The Government’s hostility to News Limited damned the Finkelstein inquiry. Any new ownership regulation inspired by one specific proprietor would also be dodgy. Some in the government have suggested media purchases could be conditional on signing up to a charter of journalistic independence – which just happens to be the matter of dispute between Gina Rinehart and the Fairfax board. A coincidence, I’m sure.

So if the Labor government is backing away from such obviously political media laws, that’s good.

Yet Conroy’s defence on Meet the Press still struck a weird note. He argued that any suggestion the test was aimed at a specific person was false because the ALP has been campaigning for a public interest test for a long time.

That’s true. When the Howard government directed the Productivity Commission to look into media regulation in 1999, the Beazley opposition talked at length about public interest guidelines for ownership.

But that was a long time ago. Compare then and now. We had a very, very different media market in 1999. Google had only eight employees. Its news aggregation service was still three years away. And in the compressed history of the internet, Google is relatively old. MySpace didn’t launch until 2003. Most of what we think of as ‘new media’ didn’t exist. Facebook didn’t exist. YouTube didn’t exist. It wasn’t until mid-2000 that Apple starting thinking about music. The first iPod arrived in late 2001.

And when the Beazley-led opposition was first promoting a public interest test, Fairfax shares were trading at a price nearly 10 times greater than today. Indeed, the turn of the millennium seemed like a great time to get into newspapers.

In politics, consistency is usually admirable. Yet there is consistency and there is stubbornness. It’s bizarre hearing Conroy strike the exact same notes as Beazley did a dozen years ago. Everything has changed. Apparently the ideal policy has not.

For both Conroy and Beazley, the goal of extra media ownership restrictions would be to protect a diverse range of opinions and voices. But it is exactly the enormous choice of opinions and voices on the internet which is uprooting the media landscape.

Put it this way: budding moguls would not be able to buy press assets so easily if the newspaper business hadn’t been undercut by the very diversity Conroy claims is at risk. This is a weird recursive loop. Surely we do not believe the extraordinary growth of voices online is reducing the diversity of voices overall.

Yet that seems to be the logic behind the current push for a public interest test.

Policy proposals have use-by dates. Something that is arguable in one decade can be silly in the next. Press proprietors have never been less powerful than they are today. Newspapers and broadcasters do not have the monopoly on information they enjoyed in the past.

That Conroy’s views on this are about 10 years out of date shouldn’t be a surprise. Australia’s communications ministers are notorious for fighting the last war. They have a track record of either accidentally delaying or actively resisting the implications of technology. With motives good and bad, our ministers have held back the introduction of new radio stations, new television stations, pay television, and FM radio.

The Gillard Government’s Convergence Review was supposed to be a break with the past. Yet even it got caught up trying to impose anachronistic laws on new technologies. Local content requirements are one example of regulations which do not make sense in the internet age; ownership limits are another.

So the major policy outcome of the apparently forward-thinking Convergence and Finkelstein inquiries could be tackling obsolete fears of media moguls.

It is absurd to think that just as the newspaper industry is going through a once-in-a-century upheaval, the Government is devising ways to limit investment in the press. But in media regulation, absurd is not unusual.

The Terrifyingly Inscrutable Minds Behind Mass Murders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let The Cult Begin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be Sceptical Of Vague New ‘National Security’ Powers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom Of Association Lost In The Moral Panic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schools Might As Well Tell Students Who To Vote For

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abbott Should Focus On His Second Day As PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what Tony Abbott needs to be thinking about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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