Tag: Spectator Australia

Multi-sided market collapse in the newspaper industry

Originally a Medium post. Published in the Spectator Australia as on 9 July 2020 as ‘The death – and rebirth – of the newspaper?‘

Everybody, whatever side of politics they are on, generally agrees that the media is one of the reasons that politics is so polarised right now.

Agreeing on why the media has driven this is a little harder. Yes, the newspaper and print industry has been disrupted, thanks to the internet. And yes, it seems like newspapers are more desperate for readers.

But underlying these surface level observations is the fact that newspapers are undergoing a fundamental structural shift between two organisational types — from platforms to factories.

Let’s call what’s happened to the newspaper industry multi-sided market collapse. Understanding the industry this way clarifies how today’s media environment is so different from that of the twentieth century — and offers a warning for other platform industries that face disruption in the future.

(I’m going to focus here on the newspaper industry, because the dynamics are most obvious there. But we can use this framework to understand how media economics effects media content in everything from talk radio to cable television.)

The basics

The twentieth century newspaper was a particular type of economic organisation: a platform that serviced a multi-sided market.

The idea of a multi-sided market platform was first developed in detail by Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole in 2003. It’s intuitive: we want to make trades with each other, and a platform helps match us together.

Platform economics is interesting because market participants want to use the platform that everybody else is using. We want to buy the video game console that has the most games — and developers want to design for the console that has the most users. We want to use the ridesharing app that has the most drivers — and drivers want to drive for the app with the most riders.

This desire to go where the crowd already is leads to some curious pricing structures. Platforms typically feature complex cross-subsidies. One side of the multi-sided market might be given access to the platform for free, or given heavy discounts, while the other faces high charges.

For the traditional newspaper industry, the market participants are advertisers and readers. Readers want content, and advertisers want eyeballs. Revenue from advertising paid for the production of news content, which attracted readers, which attracted more advertisers, and so on.

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The newspaper as platform

The cross-subsidies were straightforward. Advertisers were charged relatively large fees for access (very large in the case of fullpage advertising, and relatively large in the case of classifieds). Readers were charged small fees (through either subscription or individual sales), or even no fees (such as the free newspaper model or free distribution locations like stadiums and railway stations).

The need to get as many readers as possible onto the platform didn’t just shape pricing — it shaped decisions about what content would be published.

Newspapers sought to cater for as wide an audience as possible. On the op-ed page newspapers would strive for a rough balance. They’d match one opinion piece from the ideological right with one opinion piece from the ideological left. Let’s call this liberal balancing theory — all voices get heard.

In the news pages they’d adopt a perspective that wouldn’t excessively upset any particular side of politics. Let’s call this median reader theory. The combination of these two approaches has given us the twentieth century model of journalistic objectivity, view-from-nowhere journalism, the idea of newspaper-as-public-square etc.

The collapse

The arrival of the internet disrupted the underlying newspaper business model.

Newspapers first sought to continue the existing model in an online world by offering their content for free supported by banner ads or cross subsidised by print sales.

However, much advertising — particularly but not only classified advertising — migrated to dedicated digital platforms. To be more specific, the advertising migrated to digital platforms that didn’t use journalism as a way to attract eyeballs.

Within the space of a decade, the cross-subsidies that sustained the newspaper business model evaporated. But the demand for journalism has not. Newspapers have responded to this reduction in revenue from advertising by increasing the cost to readers. Newspaper websites now charge for access. Newspaper subscription prices went up.

Journalism is now predominantly paid for by fees from the readers that demand that journalism, rather than indirectly through advertising. This shift represents a change from a platform servicing a multi-sided market to a something that looks more like a production process servicing a single sided market. Less an advertising platform, and more a journalism factory.

In other words, what we’ve seen in the newspaper industry is multi-sided market collapse. (I would prefer to call it deplatforming — but that word has already been taken.)

The adjustment

Now let’s think through what this means for newspaper content and journalism.

Higher subscription fees imply a smaller readership. This is less of a problem than it appears — newspapers no longer have the same need to deliver huge readership numbers to advertisers. Instead, newspapers need to convince readers to pay more for what a product they used to get cheaply or even free.

The strategy newspapers have pounced upon is specialisation. Newspapers now seek readers who have more emotionally invested in that particular newspaper brand. They’re the ones more likely to pay the higher subscription fees.

Ideology is a specialisation. Partisanship is a specialisation.

In other words, multi-sided market collapse explains the dominance of ideologically driven media outlets in the digital age.

It helps explain controversies like that which greeted the Tom Cotton opinion piece published in the New York Times in June 2020. Why should ideologically-motivated readers pay higher prices for content intended to appeal to their ideological opponents?

And if newspapers are no longer trying to appeal to the median reader, why should they continue producing bland ‘view-from-nowhere’ content? The news pages have become more passionate, more opinionated, more self-aware. Newspapers now focus on what their most dedicated readers actually want — not just what the median reader in the population will accept.

The future

Converting a business from a platform to a factory is hard. If, presented with this argument before the internet existed, you tried to make predictions about what would happen to the newspaper industry should its platform model collapse, you’d likely predict:

1. Lots of newspapers fail to make the transition and massive business failure.

2. Lots of new media organisations be established that are structured around the new factory model.

Which is of course exactly what we have seen.

There are lots of implications of the idea of multi-sided market collapse. Here are a few. For instance, it demonstrates clearly that lot of our current debate about platform ‘monopolies’ like Facebook and Google is deeply confused about platform economics.

The multi-sided market collapse model shows that there has been no ‘expropriation’ of advertising from newspapers to digital platforms. Rather, as platform businesses, newspapers have been outcompeted. “Readers” (in this case, social media users and webpage searchers) and advertisers want the platforms they use to be as big as possible. Advertisers were attracted to newspapers because they were big platforms. Now advertising has migrated to different (digital) platforms. Nothing nefarious has occurred.

What does this mean for future technological disruption? If the analysis here is correct, it’s not obvious that new platform technologies like blockchain pose a threat to the new business model of journalism. They’re just not platforms anymore.

If we’re looking for blockchain use cases in journalism we should be thinking of them more along the lines of the factory/production process/supply chain model (focusing on provenance, track and trace) rather than the matching service performed by platforms.

Platforms are one of the dominant organisational structures of the digital economy. They rely on their ability to cross-subsidise one side of a market with another. And society invested heavily in newspapers as platforms — not just investments in terms of capital, but in cultural and political significance.

But when you work for a platform company it is easy to be confused about what your company’s competitive advantage actually is. In truth that advantage was not journalism, but matching. Newspapers were outcompeted by competitors that were better at matching.

The partisanship and fervour we’re seeing in media content right now is just the most visible symptom of an entire industry trying to restructure itself in real-time.

Look at our history: protectionism doesn’t work

With Vijay Mohan

We rarely think about supply chains – those immensely complex networks of production and logistics that structure the economy. 

That has changed. Early in the COVID-19 crisis, we learned that Australia imports much of its basic medical equipment like facemasks and other protective gear. As borders were being closed importing this high-demand equipment got suddenly very hard.  

Now there is an unsurprising clamour for the government to take more of an interest in how our supply chains actually work, and to use the traditional tools of protectionism to encourage domestic production of medical equipment and pharmaceuticals.  

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in April that “we need to look very carefully at our domestic economic sovereignty”. 

But neo-protectionism to secure Australia’s supply chains would be a grave mistake – and it fundamentally gets the supply chain challenge wrong. 

First, the obvious but necessary point. We actually had a protectionist economy for most of the twentieth century. And we didn’t build facemasks. We built cars. We built cars because cars had a certain romance in the twentieth century and Labor and the union movement wanted to lock in prestigious manufacturing jobs for their supporters. 

This has always been one of the central planks of the case against protectionism. The choice of what industries to protect is not made by all-knowing and benevolent leaders, but by self-interested politicians. They get to the top of their profession not because they are skilled production managers or supply chain coordinators, but because they’re great at navigating political factions and going on television. 

Of course, our national leaders will come out of this crisis more focused on the risk of future pandemics, and more motivated to prepare our economy for this now-known risk. But as they say in the military, generals too often prepare for the last war, not the next one. We don’t need an economic system that is prepared for a crisis that looks exactly like COVID-19. We need an economic system that is prepared for an unexpected crisis – which, definitionally, could be anything. 

Indeed, it is the fact that the pandemic was unexpected to most in government that makes the strongest case for free trade. The crisis has caused a lot of market disruption. But global supply chains have adjusted remarkably well to new demands and routed around new constraints. For example, airlines have been doing temporary conversions of passenger planes to cargo planes – particularly important because medical equipment, which in normal times would be leisurely transported by ship, needs to get to new COVID-19 hot spots urgently. 

Protectionism invariably makes the industries it protects brittle and highly politicised, not agile and adaptable to sudden economic shocks. And it is a fantasy to suggest that a small, wealthy, highly-educated nation like Australia could or should ever be self-reliant in the production of all low-value goods that might be needed in unexpected crises. 

There are things the government can do to be prepared for the next crisis. Rather than making essential products, we can buy them and store them. This requires no more foresight than full-blown protectionism and is a lot cheaper. The idea of keeping extensive national stockpiles of equipment for emergencies is uncontroversial. By all accounts, the National Medical Stockpile has been an immensely valuable asset during COVID-19. 

With our RMIT colleague Marta Poblet, we have been looking at the problems consumers had getting reliable information on supply chain security in the first weeks of the crisis.  

Before the pandemic, Australian industry was interested in using new technologies (such as blockchain, 5G communication, and smart devices) to better combat food fraud in export markets or to how to prove to their customers that their products were organic or fair trade certified.  

But the pandemic revealed a more basic problem with about supply chain information. Consumers were not worried about quality or fraud. They were worried there were not enough goods available to meet demand at all – hence the panic buying of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and dried pasta.  

This panic buying looked a lot like the sort of panic withdrawals you see in a bank run. If depositors aren’t convinced their bank is solvent, they rush to be the first to get their money out. And as we saw, Scott Morrison was no better able to convince shoppers that there were adequate domestic supplies of toilet paper in March 2020 than South Australian premier Don Dunstan was able to convince the customers of the Hindmarsh Building Society that there were adequate funds to cover deposits October 1974 — despite standing in the street outside its headquarters with a megaphone.  

In moments of high-stress consumers just don’t trust the political assurances they are given. Do we really blame them? 

Ultimately within a few weeks supply chains adjusted. Coles and Woolworths lifted their toilet paper sale limits. 

But the toilet paper panic symbolises the choice we now face when it comes to supply chain resilience. To go protectionist would be to trust our supply chains to the same political class that we simultaneously accuse of being underprepared for COVID-19. Or we could lean into free trade and open markets. We should encourage entrepreneurs to adapt rapidly to new circumstances, to experiment with new technology, and let them figure out how to operate in a disrupted global economy. 

Australia has a long history of protectionism. Let’s try to remember what we learned. 

Not our ABC

With Sinclair Davidson

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is a $1.04 billion piece of public policy and we treat it as exactly that: a government intervention into the market for news, entertainment and communications. Policy interventions are financially costly. Policy interventions are also costly in a non-monetary sense. They can have unintended or counterproductive consequences. They can crowd out non-government activity, stifle entrepreneurship or technological innovation, distort the marketplace, systemically favour particular political interests and ideologies, and create fiefdoms of unaccountable bureaucrats.

The ABC was established in a moment of history significantly unlike our own, facing a cultural and political environment greatly different to our own, with technological and economic challenges completely opposite to those we now face. Over the course of eight decades the ABC has embedded itself in the Australian political system and public consciousness. But the original rationales for the ABC have long since expired. Technology has made the concerns of Australian policy makers in the 1930s – or even the 1990s, when the ABC was last subjected to a major review – redundant or anachronistic. Economic justifications for a state-owned media broadcaster simply do not fit the modern media landscape.

The arguments for public broadcasting in the twenty-first century are simply not compelling. It is certainly the case that the ABC has bound within it an enormous amount of cultural capital as a consequence of its eighty years of pre-eminence in the Australian media industry. But that should not be confused with either a claim that a publicly-funded broadcaster was necessary to build that cultural capital or that Australian culture would suffer in a world where the ABC had been reformed or privatised.

The ABC is an Australian ‘icon’ in the same sense that the Commonwealth Bank was an icon before its privatisation, and in the same anachronistic sense that Qantas, the ‘national carrier’, is imagined to be an essential part of the Australian psyche. We can celebrate the achievements of the ABC, its cultural significance, and its role in Australian history. But that should not prevent us from looking sceptically – as we should with all costly government interventions into the economy and society – at whether the ABC remains good public policy. Does it have a good reason to exist, now?

That question invites us to speculate as to the rationale for the ABC. The ABC itself denies that it is a market failure broadcaster, while the notion of it being independent is difficult to pin down. Independent of whom? It is publicly funded and its management are required to appear before parliament and answer questions posed by politicians. True, the ABC is independent of the demands of commercial reality, but it is not independent of its political paymaster. Of course that undermines the argument that the ABC is a bulwark of democracy. A free press may well be a necessary condition of democracy but that does not necessarily imply that the government should subsidise the press. To the contrary, many non-democratic nations have maintained very high levels of government ownership and subsidy in the media. A further argument undermining the ABC’s claim relates to the large and obvious political bias in its reporting and news coverage. A 2013 survey revealed that ABC journalists are almost five times more likely to be Greens voters than the average voter and twice more likely to vote Greens than the average journalist.

Other arguments for the ABC include quality programming, Australian content, and rural subsidy. What constitutes ‘quality’, however, is a value judgement. Australian content and rural subsidy can be provided for much less than $1 billion per annum. That is the challenge; the ABC is a massive government program with no clear objectives and no clear accountability.

Few Australians would realise that the ABC charter does not include the word ‘fair’ nor does it include the word ‘balanced’. The charter is at best only a loose guide to what the ABC does. Nor is it any constraint on ABC operations. While the charter is spelled out in legislation, section 6(4) explicitly states that ‘Nothing in this section shall be taken to impose on the Corporation a duty that is enforceable by proceedings in a court.’ Additionally, there is nothing in the charter that could be described as an enforcement mechanism, nor any penalties detailed for potential breaches. The charter is in law – insofar as it exists on the statute books – but it is not law that the ABC has to abide by.

What should be done about the ABC? It is certainly the case that doing nothing and muddling through is very much underrated as a government policy. Yet lower-cost alternative public policies are available and clear savings can be made. One possibility would be to refine the charter. In the first instance, the ABC could be redesignated to be a market-failure broadcaster. Alternatively, it could be required to be self-funding, i.e. commercialised. Here the ABC could be required to finance its activities through advertising revenue and then pay dividends to the government. A further option would be to reform the governance of the ABC.

Then there is privatisation. The ABC could be sold off to a single bidder or consortium. Or it could be listed on the stock exchange. Our preferred option would be for shares in the ABC to be given away, either to all Australians or to existing and previous staff. The staff are the best people to realise the value of the ABC – and they would pay for their shares over time through the capital gains tax as they sold their shares.

In this sense the privatisation of the ABC would proceed much like higher education is currently funded. ABC employees would receive their shares at zero-price and only pay for them when they disposed of the shares and only then if the shares had increased in value. The proceeds of the privatisation would be realised over time and would not constitute a ‘sugar-hit’ to the budget. Nor can the privatisation be characterised as a stunt to balance the Budget in the short term. Rather, it is a program to establish a newly-private ABC on a firm footing, vesting it with a cohort of new owners who have the most interest in making it a commercial success.

Sober liberal

A review of Sir Joseph Carruthers: Founder of the New South Wales Liberal Party by Zachary Gorman, Connor Court, Qld, pp.425, $59.95

Australia has a rich heritage of nineteenth century classical liberalism. But that history has been almost completely lost in the flood of historical work focusing on either federation or the labour movement. Zachary Gorman’s new biography of Sir Joseph Carruthers, the nineteenth century free trade liberal and founder of the Liberal party of New South Wales, helps balance the ledger – recovering the tradition of free market liberalism that has been so significant in Australian history.

In many ways, Joseph Carruthers embodies that tradition, with its strengths and flaws. In the colonial era liberal political thought was one of the dominant strands of public life, and Carruthers’ career reflected its dominance. Born in 1857, he entered NSW politics in 1887. Carruthers was a father of federation, a minister under Henry Parkes and George Reid, and after the establishment of the Commonwealth became premier of New South Wales. He only left politics when he died in 1932.

Like his university friend George Reid, Carruthers was a great admirer of William Gladstone. He believed in balanced budgets, individual liberty, and that ‘we should encourage commerce in its freest sense’ (as he once informed a branch meeting of the Labour Electoral League).

Carruthers was a liberal, but not a radical one by the standards of the time. Gorman positions him as a moderate, or pragmatic liberal within the free trade movement. On one side was Bernard Wise, whose support for free trade was matched with a pro-government intervention and regulation program. On the other side was the radical free market liberalism of Bruce Smith, whose 1887 book Liberty and Liberalism was a full-frontal attack on the left-liberalism advocated by people like Wise. A working politician has to satisfy multiple constituencies. Carruthers was no exception, balancing both liberal and conservative supporters, as well as managing coalitions with the progressives.

Histories of political life can sometimes be a little deadening. Much drama in politics consists of a stream of legislation and amendment, which can be both complex and (in the hands of poor biographers) dull. Gorman does not fall into this trap: he is able to very clearly explain the significance of each well-chosen controversy in a way that makes the relevance to liberalism and Carruthers’ life obvious.

Gorman is also sensitive to instances of where Carruthers’ thought deviated from classical liberal ideas. These are worth detailing, because classical liberals have not always lived up to their underlying belief in the inherent equality and political dignity of all people. One philosophically minor but historical significant example was temperance. His father had struggled with alcohol and was ultimately involved in the temperance movement. Likewise many of the Liberal party voters were motivated by temperance. Gorman writes that Carruthers believed ‘liberalism could bend on this issue’. Carruthers ended up supporting the so-called ‘local option’ which handed the regulation of liquor licences to electorates and municipalities – not always a win for liberty.

More serious to modern readers was Carruthers’ opposition to female suffrage, for which he believed the case had not yet been made. His was perhaps a half-hearted opposition, and he later supported the suffragette movement in Britain when he visited there in 1908. But his stance compares poorly with some contemporaries like Bruce Smith, who actively called for universal suffrage in Australia.

Carruthers’ attitude to immigration presents a similar story. While being supportive of high immigration levels, he also backed the white Australia policy on the grounds that a multiracial society could harbour ethnic tensions. This view changed when he began to visit Hawaii, as he did regularly late in life. He saw there a society in which Americans, native Hawaiians, Japanese and Filipinos coexisted prosperously, helped in no small part by American free trade relationships.

Carruthers’ views were more admirable when it came to the relationship between colonists and the Indigenous population. As a child growing up in Macleay he had spent much time playing with Aboriginal children, and he maintained a sympathy with Indigenous people his whole life. He wrote later of the ‘ruthless indifference [of] the whites, who have invaded their homelands, bringing with them new diseases and vile habits, and sometimes unspeakable cruelties that have unnecessarily wiped out millions of so-called inferior and backward peoples’. Carruthers’ language often betrayed a paternalistic or patronising mindset but he was more wide-eyed than most about who bore the costs of colonialism.

For the most part, Carruthers was a needed defender of liberal values. During the First World War he refused to get too caught up with the anti-liberal sentiment of wartime Australia, and opposed the NSW government’s sedition bill (which had been mainly targeted at the labour movement).

This is not the first full length biography of Carruthers. Beverly Earnshaw published One Flag, One Hope, One Destiny: Sir Joseph Carruthers and Australian Federation in 2000, which as its title suggests finds interest in Carruthers because of his federation role. (Carruthers’ own memoirs also received commercial publication in 2005.) But for Gorman, Carruthers’ greatest legacy is the New South Wales Liberal party, which he views as one of the crowning organisational achievements of nineteenth century liberalism. While it has repeatedly changed its name, the NSW Liberal Party is still, organisationally, the same entity today as the one Carruthers established as the Liberal and Reform Association in 1902.

For modern classical liberals the post-Federation decade has a somewhat melancholy tone. The rise of the Labor party led to an alliance, and then fusion, between the free traders and protectionists under the banner of anti-socialism. Gorman’s book both adeptly navigates this history, and, with his picture of nineteenth century liberalism, underlines just what we lost.

Adapt To Survive

The Labor party once made great fun of John Howard’s distinction between core and non-core promises. Julia Gillard has now added to that taxonomy: a promise so intolerably core it has to be explicitly denied during an election campaign.

It’s damned hard to reconcile August 2010’s ‘There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead’ with February 2011’s ‘The two-stage plan for a carbon price mechanism will start with a fixed price period for three to five years.’

Labor’s goal during the 2010 campaign was to get over the line and govern another term. Just like any political party. But where Labor broke new ground was by being happy to say anything or promote any idea to get there, no matter how divorced from its own philosophy or the wishes of its supporters.

Disavowing a carbon tax is what US political consultants told Gillard to do. So that’s what Gillard did, no matter what she or her party thought.

Of course, the Prime Minister’s reversal of what seemed a pretty explicit promise not to price carbon says nothing about the rightness or wrongness of that policy. But it says a heap about her approach to politics. She’s very, er, political.

Careful policymaking would be a distraction from the important business of political manoeuvring.

The Greens might bear this in mind as they negotiate with Gillard and her ministers. Any deal is one grumpy focus group or James Carville phone call away from being discarded.

Nevertheless, if all the government’s legislative cards fall in place, after July 2012 Australia will have a price on carbon. That’s almost exactly when poor old Brendan Nelson suggested the Coalition under his leadership would implement one.

Nelson’s policy had an important condition: international action on climate change. It was a more innocent, optimistic time. Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull also spent 2008 and 2009 rabbiting on about Copenhagen and international agreements.

Yet in 2011 the closest Gillard comes to mentioning the molasses-like movement to international agreement is a vague ‘the global economy is shifting’. Just vaguely shifting, in general.

This modified rhetoric places the government’s climate policy at one remove from its purpose: to combat global climate change.

For this government, a carbon price is no longer about stopping, reducing or slowing global warming – a task which would require concerted, co-ordinated global action. Now it’s just the season’s most fashionable economic reform.

Gillard has implicitly admitted the chances of international agreement on emissions action in the foreseeable future are near zero. The chances that the unco-ordinated and compromised carbon initiatives now being introduced in some countries will have a significant impact on the global climate are even lower.

Don’t underestimate the magnitude of a transition to carbon-free energy production. Or the economic and social change that transition would cause.

The Australian government’s carbon price will start small. But if it is to make any dent in our carbon emissions it will have to be steadily raised, year after year.

Even during the ‘fixed-price’ period which Julia Gillard announced would precede the full emissions trading scheme, the carbon tax will still increase ‘annually at a pre-determined rate’.

Any government facing complaints about the cost of living – justified or unjustified – will find that very challenging.

A Galaxy poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs last week showed that 66 per cent of Australians were unsure about the relationship between human-induced carbon emissions and global warming. This figure has remained steady for at least 12 months.

Combine this finding with survey data revealing that even people who fully accept the dangers of anthropogenic climate change are unwilling to pay the extra money a modest carbon price would demand, and you have quite a political pickle.

Gillard may initially win some political points for a courageous and aggressive stand on climate action. But those points will disappear when higher energy bills are mailed out. Especially since the Prime Minister has effectively taken personal, political responsibility for everybody’s electricity costs.

Hers is a pickle shared by every government which wants to act on climate.

The situation is even more serious in the developing world. Energy poverty is a serious development problem. Traditional home methods of producing energy (burning wood, agricultural residue and animal dung) are a major health hazard for the world’s poor. Economic growth is held back by unreliable or inaccessible electricity.

So no responsible developing world government would penalise large-scale energy production significantly enough to have an impact on the global climate.

The only policy position sensitive to these political realities is a focus on adaptation. Adapting to climate change – whether natural or anthropogenic – is the only approach which accommodates questions of political economy.

Sure, it’s easy to imagine an ideal world where a mechanism can be developed which prices the externalities of pollution efficiently, consistently and effectively – where the best legislators can team up with the best scientists and the best economists to write the best laws which take into account the best research, unimpeded by politics and democracy and the mendacities of self-interest.

But that’s not our world.

If you fully accept the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s dire scenarios, there’s still reason for optimism. The economist Indur Goklany, poring over the UK’s Stern Review, found that human and environmental wellbeing in the foreseeable future will be, on balance, higher in a ‘richest-but-warmest’ scenario. His argument should carry weight: Goklany has been a long-time delegate to the IPCC. He argues that tackling the consequences of climate change is far more efficient than trying to prevent it.

That is, a rich world is better able to cope with the adverse effects of any climate change than a poor one. When it comes to climate change, it is far more efficient, and far more practical, to treat the symptoms.

And it’s the only approach which takes into account the raw, unforgiving logic of political action.

Spurious notions of ‘national character’ aren’t helping

Are Australians racists? Well, yes. And no. Some are, some aren’t. It’s a mind-numbingly circular question, but just the sort of mind-numbingly circular question that those in the social commentary business love. (Six idiots dress up in blackface on Hey Hey it’s Saturday, and that’s the first half of Q&A over with, two weeks’ worth of columns in quality broadsheets, and a comfortably full switchboard on ABC radio talkback.)

Let’s try to wrap up this question now. It would be fair to assume that somewhere between one and 22 million people within Australia’s territorial borders are racist. It’s faintly ludicrous to attribute any sort of character to a collective group of people. Either the characterisations end up as utterly banal — Australians like barbecues! — or completely nonsensical.

A columnist trying to get to the bottom of the recent spate of attacks on Indian students in Melbourne writes that Australia ‘has a cultural tradition that in large part is underpinned by aggressive opportunism’. Michael Leunig reckons: ‘Our culture has thrived on the stabbing impulse.’ But on the other hand John Brumby has argued that ‘Victorians are committedto tolerance’ in an article condemning racially motivated attacks by some of those apparently tolerance-committed Victorians.

Maybe ‘we’ are racists, but ‘we’ also must be pretty cluey. A recent article discussing the Howard government’s environmental policies says that ‘the Coalition’s new-found eco-friendly initiatives were deemed greenwash by the electorate’. Very perceptive. Makes you wonder why a full 22 per cent of the electorate believe in witches, at least according to a Nielsen poll late last year. Headlines in the National Times declare that ‘we will forget Haiti’, that ‘we give our kids names fit for puppies’ and that ‘we love to click on’ Naomi Robson. I don’t plan on doing any of those things.

The idea that Australia has any sort of national character obscures our understanding much more than it facilitates it. Individuals, actions, and laws can be objectively racist. Nationalities cannot. After all, even the clearest example of racism in this nation’s history, the White Australia Policy, had its opponents, particularly among the free trade movement.

Of course, national circumstances — politics, history, geography, religious belief, sheer bloody luck — can influence the cultural attitudes of individuals within that nation. But you only have to watch our Prime Minister’s awkward attempts at Australianisms to see how artificial these national tropes can be.

Personalities do not change at national borders. How many times have you been told by recently returned overseas holidaymakers that ‘the people were just so friendly’? There are more than 3,000 hits for ‘the people are friendly’ on the Lonely Planet website. There is just one for ‘the people are unfriendly’ — you won’t want to go on holiday to Rome.

A 2005 study in Science sought to test views about national character against personality traits of individuals within that nation. The study found that ‘Perceptions of national character are not generalisations about personality traits based on accumulated observations of the people with whom one lives’; in other words, there was no correlation between a belief that Australians are extroverts, and the number of Australians you’ve met who are actually extroverts. And the study found that people vastly exaggerate what little differences do exist between countries. There is much greater variety of character within a nation than between nations. If you don’t believe that, compare Mark Latham with Kevin Rudd. Hard to believe they’re from the same party, let alone the same country.

It would be nice to believe all Australians recognise that democracy should be tempered by the common law, political power and judicial power should be in constant opposition, and human rights need constant and aggressive defence. But once again: 22 per cent of Australians believe in witches. This isn’t just a complaint about vapid rhetoric. When faced with reports of attacks on Indian students, it would probably be better to avoid all this empty navel-gazing about the possibility that racism is inherent in our national character, and focus on what concrete political failures may have tolerated those attacks.

Victoria has the lowest number of police per capita in any Australian state. That is surely more a factor in the state’s urban violence problem than any ‘cultural tradition [of] aggressive opportunism’. A psychological profile of Australia’s national character — if it’s even possible — is of absolutely no use when we can’t get basic policing right.