Tag: ABC The Drum

WorkChoices Demon Used To Fire Up The Labor Base

Nothing scares the pigeons more than WorkChoices.

Anyway, that’s the theory. Just a hint of industrial relations reform (no matter how vague) by anybody remotely associated with the Coalition (no matter how obscure) brings out the WorkChoices demon. Ministers pound out tweets. Hawker Britton squawks. WorkChoices is back!

It’s like a verbal tic – it’s what you say when you’re not sure what to say. WorkChoices is for Labor Party strategy what “umms” and “errs” are for impromptu speeches.

One day in February 2010 the ACTU said it would campaign against Kevin Rudd’s industrial changes – they did not believe Fair Work was fair enough for workers. The next day Julia Gillard put out a press release: “Abbott must come clean on WorkChoices”.

“Australians can’t trust Tony Abbott on WorkChoices”, the ALP told Australia citizens during the 2010 election. The next day Abbott promised that WorkChoices is dead, buried, and cremated. Undeterred, two days later Simon Crean sent out a press release: WorkChoices “has been dug up, dusted off, and is ready to be rolled out should the Coalition be elected.” Labor’s divining rod finds WorkChoices everywhere.

So no wonder the Labor Party went into convulsions when this week the Australian Financial Review reported that John Howard wants revive the industrial relations debate. It’s the perfect storm. The guy they defeated, calling for the policy they campaigned to destroy. Wayne Swan rushed out a press conference. Abbott-to-bring-back-WorkChoices was again the message of the day.

But Howard wasn’t even talking about WorkChoices. The former prime minister wanted Abbott to adopt the Peter Reith model, which predated WorkChoices by nearly a decade. As he said, “There is no reason why this country should not go back to the workplace system we had between 1996 and 2005 where you had individual contracts.” This line was widely cited in articles which nonetheless claimed Howard was calling for the return his post-2005 policy.

At most – at most – Howard suggested the Fair Work Act’s loose unfair dismissal provisions be tightened. His words: “you have got to do something about unfair dismissals.”

This is a reasonable view, even if you don’t agree with it. Under WorkChoices, one exception to an unfair dismissal finding was if an employee was made redundant for ‘genuine operational reasons’. That exception has been replaced by a vaguer ‘genuine redundancy’ standard, which (for instance) only allows dismissals if workers cannot be given another job elsewhere. This new standard turns industrial judges into human resource managers. Questioning the new standard isn’t revolutionary. Howard’s view is modest; almost shy.

Anyway, Howard’s views are moot. He’s no longer prime minister. There is no reason to believe Abbott is thinking about touching this hot potato. Dead, buried, and cremated, remember? Given his campaign against the carbon tax, there’s nothing a first term Abbott government will be more sensitive to than charges that the Coalition has broken an election promise, or didn’t tell the voters about its plans. The firmest guarantee an Abbott government will do what it says is how brutally they’ve attacked Labor for doing the opposite.

WorkChoices is an apparition. When it is mentioned, it rarely has anything to do with the specifics of what the 2005 reforms actually were. Four years after it was abolished, WorkChoices is now less a policy than a freelance stand-in for anything that might fire up the Labor base. That is, anything that might bring back the old magic of the 2007 election campaign. In those happy days, Labor campaigned as if WorkChoices was the culmination of a century of Tory attacks on the Australian settlement.

But for the right, WorkChoices is an emblem as well: emblematic of an aging government willing to trample Australia’s institutions to get what it wanted. The right wasn’t much more sympathetic to Howard’s last industrial relations reform than the left.

WorkChoices took industrial relations forever out of state hands, eliminating any principle of federalism in workplace policy. And it was an extraordinarily complicated piece of law. It increased, rather than decreased, government involvement over labour markets.

It is mostly forgotten that the great workplace bogeyman, the HR Nicholls Society – the fortress of managers’ rights, the unions’ bête noire – was opposed to WorkChoices. In 2006 ACTU boss Greg Combet described WorkChoices as “Kremlin-like”. The president of the HR Nicholls Society, Ray Evans, agreed. “It’s rather like going back to the old Soviet system of command and control, where every economic decision has to go to some central authority and get ticked off.” He went on: “I don’t believe the Howard Government is that keen on freedom.”

This makes recent claims that the rebirth of the HR Nicholls Society is a harbinger of WorkChoices comically ludicrous.

But then, what does it matter? The point of talking about WorkChoices isn’t to warn Australian workers. It is to find anything that might restore Labor’s support. WorkChoices is a scare campaign, sure. It’s also very tired and probably futile.

The Legacy And Abuse Of Ayn Rand

Paul Ryan told an audience in 2005 that “the reason I got into public service” was the novelist Ayn Rand.

That makes no sense at all.

Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential candidate may be fond of Rand but Rand would not have been fond of him. She hated the idea of “public service”.

No, her ideal pursuits were industry and science and art. By Rand’s death in 1982, she had elaborated this view over two best-selling novels (Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead) and numerous essays and treatises.

Rand admired people who produced things; people who created value. The people opposed to producers are “looters” and “moochers”. They take that value and redistribute it to rent-seeking businesses and the welfare state. They are at home with the government and the tax system; they live in a world of subsidies and congressional hearings … and bailouts.

Paul Ryan supported the bank and automotive bailouts, among the most obscene examples of looting in American history. He now says he regrets those votes, and claims to oppose “corporate welfare” passionately.

His remorse would have done little for Rand. There was nothing she disliked more than inconsistency in the name of politics.

Bailouts and inconsistency are not the only differences between the novelist and the candidate. Ryan claimed his budget plan was based on his Catholic faith. Rand despised religion. Ryan is a fan of Ronald Reagan. Rand thought the Gipper was “trying to take us back to the Middle Ages”.

The war on drugs, civil liberties, abortion, take your pick: Rand and Ryan part more often than they converge. She described the modern conservative movement as the “God-family-country swamp”.
So it’s hard to understand the hyperventilating that has greeted the announcement that Ryan will join Romney on the presidential ticket. In the New Yorker, Jane Meyer suggested that by picking such a dedicated Ayn Rand fan, Romney had “added at least the imprint of an extra woman”.

MSNBC host Chris Matthews went further – Ryan actually “is Ayn Rand”, and he wants to “screw” the poor. One Huffington Post writer described him as a Rand “devotee”. Social media, of course, went bananas.

Ryan is a common type. He apparently insists interns read Atlas Shrugged when they join his staff. Politicians like to think they are in the business of ideas, but that’s nonsense. Politics is the business of power. Ideas are an optional extra, more useful for appealing to already committed supporters than formulating policy.

All those horrified progressives trying to draw a direct line from Rand to Ryan are playing his game, suggesting this senior politician is driven by ornate principle rather than base politics.

Ayn Rand’s books are abused in this way more than most. Her novels may not be great literary works, but are rich and readable (something you could not say about Friedrich Hayek’s dense prose, for instance). More than any other iconic free market writer, she creates a world with its own specific – that is, strict – moral code. And moral codes developed through fiction are seductive in a way that economic treatises are not.

We are so used to popular culture praising public service that the story of a heroic industrialist is highly subversive. If progressive thinkers want to hunt down the source of Rand’s peculiar appeal, it will be found there – radicalism is always appealing. Right now there are few more truly radical notions than private success as noble, or of capitalism as admirable.

Rand has a reputation. But she did not believe virtue was a reflection of wealth. She was careful to draw portraits not only of industrialists but of workers and artisans. One small passage in Atlas Shrugged is more suggestive of Rand’s world view than any of her later claims about altruism and Aristotle: she describes a train engineer as having “the ease of an expert, so confident that it seemed casual, but [his] was the ease of a tremendous concentration, the concentration on one’s task that has the ruthlessness of an absolute”.

Simply put, her novels are about human excellence, small and large. The plot of The Fountainhead pivots on an architect refusing to compromise his unique artistic vision. You can imagine the appeal. And, of course, opposed to such achievement are the predatory looters with powers to tax and regulate it all away.

Does it all seem a bit cartoonish? Surely no more cartoonish than those stories about evil industrialists and heartless capitalists defeated by noble truth seekers and crusaders for the underclass. Rand was working in a popular fiction genre full of heavy-handed socialist tracts like Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists or the novels of Upton Sinclair.

The difference is that most of those socialist works have been forgotten and Rand’s writing endures. The themes of Tressell and Sinclair have collapsed into cliché. Rand’s remain subversive.
Rand’s books have not penetrated Australia as they did the United States. She is not part of our national consciousness. Yes, she has her fans. Malcolm Fraser was one. But as John Singleton wrote, “Malcolm Fraser admires Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand admires Malcolm Fraser. All this shows is that neither knows what the other is talking about.”

Rand was part of a distinctly American tradition. The libertarian writer Charles Murray rightly notes Rand’s idea of freedom is particularly Jeffersonian. In her lifetime, she was supported by the anti-Roosevelt, anti-New Deal movement that died out with Robert Taft’s loss to Dwight D Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952. That movement was reprised, in a very different form, by the presidential run a decade later by Barry Goldwater – one of the few politicians Rand liked.

Australia has none of that rich history. Our free market tradition owes more to nineteenth century British liberalism than the American Old Right. Rand is an import. When Singleton helped form the libertarian Workers Party in Australia in the 1970s, he admitted he’d given up on Atlas Shrugged 80 pages in.

There’s a reason one of the great histories of the American libertarian movement was titled It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand. But it rarely ends there.

Sent To Prison For Making An Ebook

In 2003, a man made an ebook. It was not a complex task.

Belal Khazaal downloaded some articles from the internet, excerpted his favourite bits, threw them all together, and wrote a 155 word introduction. In those brief comments, he prayed the ebook “would be of benefit to everyone working to support” Islam.

Khazaal called the book Provision in the Rules of Jihad. He uploaded it to a website that is either (depending on whose expert witnesses you prefer) a repository of texts on Islamic philosophy, or a repository of texts on Islamic philosophy including some written by terrorists.

For his efforts, Australian courts sentenced Khazaal to 12 years in prison. Late last week, the High Court affirmed Khazaal’s conviction.

Described like that, Khazaal’s actions are comically banal and his punishment bizarrely disproportionate.

Does that comic banality disappear if we add that according to the Australian law his ebook had “an obvious and direct connection with assistance” for terrorism? This form of written work was made illegal in 2002.

Or that one chapter was titled “Reasons for assassination”? It included recommended targets (“diplomats, ambassadors” and “holders of key positions” in “atheistic countries” like Australia) and recommended techniques (“wireless detonation, letter bombing, booby trapping”, “cake throwing” and “hitting with a hammer”).

Yes, “hitting with a hammer”.

Even with these extra details, Khazaal’s editing job doesn’t come across as a great threat to the Commonwealth. He took things he found on the internet and packaged them up as his own.
Khazaal complains and apologises throughout his short introduction, saying the ebook would be better if he had more time, if he was fully settled in his residence (sure it would be, Belal). No question, his professed beliefs about violent jihad are distasteful and hateful. But more than anything, he comes across as a bit pathetic.

The courts may have been correct to say that compiling this ebook constituted an offence under the Commonwealth’s Criminal Code. That does not mean these offences are good law.

Between September 11, 2001 and September 11, 2011 the federal government passed 54 new pieces of anti-terror law. The legislative output was extraordinary.

As George Williams notes, during the Howard years, the government was passing one new anti-terror law every 6.7 weeks. As soon as one bill was through the Parliament, it was onto the next.
Another commentator has called this “hyper-legislation”. By volume and impact, the new Australian anti-terror laws greatly exceeded those passed in the United Kingdom, Canada and even the United States.

The 2002 changes to the Criminal Code are, in fact, some of the more benign changes made in that decade of frenzied activity. More aggressive reforms in 2005 even reintroduced the long-dormant concept of sedition. (To its credit, the Rudd government relaxed those sedition laws in 2010.)

Yet that decade of hyper-activity has damaged our legal system. The boundaries between legal and illegal activity have dangerously faded.

And with all that new law, it has still taken nine years of police work, anti-terror intelligence, and legal argument to get to the Khazaal High Court decision last week. Are we safer? Khazaal’s source material is still online.

In a long and important paper from 2005, the American constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh asked whether “crime-facilitating” speech should be considered free speech. That category includes everything from the Anarchist Cookbook, which describes in detail how to make drugs and bombs, to a lookout yelling “run!” when police arrive to arrest his criminal friend.

Volokh concluded that much crime-facilitating speech is “dual-use”. Speech which can facilitate crime can also inform non-criminals about risks, about issues of public importance (such as the vulnerability of key Australians to hammers), or even just entertain.

A government should not ban speech that has a lawful and valuable use simply because it may also be used by criminals. Volokh argued that to the extent crime-facilitating speech has such value, it should be considered to be within the bounds of free speech.

Khazaal’s ebook would fall easily within those bounds. Does Islamic theology demand violent jihad, and against whom? Khazaal has published his view. Know your enemy.

And it’s hard to say there has been any great, compelling harm caused by his compilation. Words are cheap. The Anarchist Cookbook provides more technical detail than Khazaal offered, and is free to read across the internet.

Belal Khazaal may be a bad guy. He may deserve to be in prison. Australian courts decided he could not be regarded as “a person of good character” at sentencing because of convictions in Lebanon for donating to alleged terrorist organisations.

But if he deserves to be in prison in Australia, he deserves to be there for a greater crime than making an ebook.

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.

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.

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.

Abbott Should Focus On His Second Day As PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what Tony Abbott needs to be thinking about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another year, another failed climate summit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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