NSW school students apparently are not compelled to learn about the Holocaust. It says something that we are agonising over this fact. The Holocaust was a terrible chapter in human history, but in terms of essential information it isn’t top level for me, anymore than it appears to be for those who write curriculum in NSW.
What is more shocking for me is that my children, all of whom are good A and occasional B students, have no idea what significance years like 1066 and 1492 have.
I had my suspicions, but they only became confirmed when I was explaining about the trade winds. Vasco de Gama meant nothing to them. Neither did Magellan. Amerigo Vespuci? Huh?
It turns out that you can get a good pass in primary school and never have any understanding of European history, colonisation, or how so many French words got into the English language.
For me this is a much larger indictment of what is taught, than the absence of the Holocaust.
July 11, 2008 | Graham
What about 1066 and all that?
July 08, 2008 | Graham
In Defence of Online Opinion
Clive Hamilton and I had a vigorous exchange of views in On Line Opinion. We’re drawing the line on OLO at that. But we have been receiving some pieces that deserve consideration. This piece by Marko Beljac is worth publishing, and we’re giving it air here. There may be others, from all points of view. Marko’s most recent OLO piece (which I personally commissioned) is here.
As someone who characterises himself as being just about as Left as they come, and despite that someone who actually gets published here, it was only all too natural that my interest should have been piqued by Clive Hamilton’s strong critique of Online Opinion. Hamilton upbraids Online Opinion for increasingly airing the viewpoint of climate change sceptics.
Hamilton’s main charge is that Online Opinion has been captured by climate change denialists and that, in fact, it is actively promoting a denialist agenda. He points to the disproportionate number of denialist articles published in recent times and a possible connection between the Australian Environment Foundation, which he states was set up to disseminate dis-information on global warming. The implicit assumption is that a relationship, perhaps of a financial or personal nature, has developed between the two entities which accounts for the rise of denialist articles.
I believe that the conclusions Hamilton reaches are unwarranted, based on the evidence that is before us. To establish a case for bias Hamilton would need to establish that the discrepancy exists, if it indeed does exist, because denialist articles are published and climate change articles are thrown into the rubbish bin, but Hamilton does not provide any such evidence.
Based on the available evidence it would be possible to infer that denialist articles are published because denialists continually submit them. Hamilton strongly suggests that they are an organised movement. Continually submitting articles for publication is what such movements do. Many Green groups, in my view correctly, no longer engage in this debate moving on to the more important issue of solutions. However, there is a much bigger issue here and it is worth putting all this within a broader framework that goes to the very nature of the Australian media.
He states that Online Opinion does not meet the standards that one expects of a newspaper op-ed article. That is indeed the case.
Rare it is that Online Opinion would provide space for such frivolous garbage as “Sheila’s with wobbly bits”(,http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/05/17/1210765255167.html) a pathetic disquisition on the term “cunt” ( http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/02/18/1203190737637.html?page=fullpage)or pop- psychoanalysis on “rites of passage” and Brazilian bikini waxing (http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/01/07/1199554567704.html?page=fullpage). This type of hairhead nonsense is regular fare on the Op-Ed pages at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
Pathetic pop-cultural analysis of this nature is designed to generate hits so Fairfax can sell advertising space on its websites. They are invariably written by staff reporters, which lowers labour costs. These articles also provide a more pernicious purpose, which is to divert people from the issues and have us all concentrate on matters of no great moment.
The opinion articles published in Australia’s “quality newspapers”, if they do find space on their august opinion pages for topics of a serious nature, usually fit within a very narrow spectrum of opinion. You will have to try very hard to find an article that questions the corporate domination of Australian politics (save for Mark Latham’s pieces in the Australian Financial Review that dare use the term “socialism.”); that points out that business has a privileged role in policy planning; that politics is the shadow cast by big business over society; that the ALP and the Liberal Party are increasingly two factions of the same pro-business party; that the “free-market” is for the poor and powerless not the rich and privileged.
You won’t see that because, far from being neutral, Australia’s major media outlets are corporations and it would be difficult to imagine that Australia’s “quality media” should question the corporate domination of Australian politics, economics and society. We also need to consider that they generate a profit by selling audiences to other corporations and it is simply inconceivable that media outlets so financed would question the corporation’s privileged position in society on pretty much the same grounds that the official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union did not question the leading role of the Party in Soviet society. This is of no small moment given the corporation’s evolution from an institution chartered by the public sector for moral ends into a top-down tyranny dominated by the profit motive.
Hamilton points out that the institutional affiliation of authors, in contrast to the mainstream press, is not given at Online Opinion which has the affect of masking bias. This is, at best, a minor issue. One can expect every week multiple articles from John Roskam, from the slavishly pro-corporate Institute of Public Affairs agitprop unit, on Australia’s newspaper opinion pages, but you will struggle to find its Left equivalents. In other words, the affiliations are listed but the favourable bias toward minor servants of the rich and privileged obtains all the same.
Moreover, let us consider an article published by The Age in recent times by former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans on the need to implement the “doctrine” of “humanitarian intervention” in international relations(http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/time-for-an-aid-invasion/2008/05/18/1211049061508.html). This would have been considered an article of great gravitas but the appropriate response would be to crack up in ridicule at another example of the contrast between the much vaunted Evans intellect and reality. It would not have been of surprise to see Australia’s culturally connected intellectual classes node sagely at the power of the Evan’s thesis.
Nowhere would it have been explained, however, that Evans was one of the most important supporters of the “Jakarta Lobby” during Suharto’s reign, when the Indonesian Army was rampaging its way through East Timor. Nor would it have been pointed out by the editors that the Government in which Evans served provided De Jure recognition for Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor. It would have been inconceivable for the pompous intellect to cite Iraq as a case example of a humanitarian crisis requiring a “duty to protect;” protection from us that is.
This is not a mere academic point for it demonstrates the critical support provided by a biased media for imperial ventures. Let us consider Afghanistan. Rarely is the war in Afghanistan questioned on moral grounds in the Australian press. To the contrary, the war in Afghanistan is taken as a paradigm example of a just war. However, Afghan society is being systematically destroyed as a result of the conflict and the fact that no opinion to the contrary is allowed to appear in the mainstream media provides an important structural role in sustaining a conflict being waged by liberal democracies, such as Australia.
The point that Hamilton implies, that the mainstream media is objective (hence the statement on affiliation and bias in his article) whereas Online Opinion is not is fallacious. In fact, the systematic bias shown by the mainstream press provides the critical support needed by imperial power in places such as Afghanistan, where people are dying and living in misery because of the depredations unleashed by military power with the critical support provided by a biased media and an obedient intellectual class.
So, we wait with baited breath for Hamilton to cease reading The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. However, I predict it won’t be long before Hamilton submits an opinion piece for both publications despite their systematic bias in favour of power and privilege.
If consistent, we expect Hamilton to write an op-ed piece in these publications upbraiding them for their bias and announcing his desire to have nothing to do with them. I submit that such consistency is highly unlikely.
For the record, let me begin where I began. As I noted I consider myself to be as Left as they come. Yet, I have never encountered publication problems at Online Opinion on grounds of content. I have had articles that question US policy in Iran; that provide a moral critique, rather than a pragmatic one, of the Iraq War and yes I have even had one published on climate change emphasizing the link between climate change and human survival.
I believe that there is a good reason for this. It is quite evident, to me at least, that at Online Opinion one can read articles that are “outside the box” and which question received wisdom, including on climate change. I, for one, celebrate its diverse opinion and commitment to free thought, which means supporting the airing of views that one despises and that precisely appear “loopy”.Of all the people in the media that I have dealt with I have found the editor, Susan Prior, to be the most courteous and helpful.
We know that progress in the sciences occurs on the basis of the continual questioning of received wisdom even if that questioning appears loopy. The noted physicist C.P. Snow long ago observed that there are “two cultures” with the sciences on one side and the humanities on the other. In the humanities what matters is who you know rather than what you know, and how many people know you given the emphasis on academic celebrity (the reason why the Monash University School of Political and Social Inquiry provides a daily list of media commentary by staff members no matter how trivial). The most important quality that one can posses is “collegiality”. Yet, generally speaking, the “loopy” questioning of dominant “modes of discourse” by the cantankerous in the sciences is actively encouraged, as it should in any domain characterised by rich intellectual content.
In short, the systematic bias of the mainstream media is of greater human consequence than any alleged bias here. Hamilton would do well to ponder the human consequences of the mainstream media’s bias toward big business and imperial violence and his choice to continue supporting the corporate media at the expense of a smaller media outlet, albeit not perfect and not without flaws, that does show a greater propensity to air viewpoints outside of the spectrum of respectable opinion than generally appears elsewhere, certainly a greater propensity than appears in the corporate media.
July 08, 2008 | Graham
Traveston a greenhouse problem?
You know an issue has gone too far when it becomes a reason for everything. Greenhouse emissions have just about reached that place.
A report in today’s Courier Mail says that the Traveston Dam should not go ahead because it will produce 400,000 tonnes of CO2 per annum.
The University of Technology Sydney report said the Queensland Government had not accounted for thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions which would be produced each year by pumping up to 70 million tonnes of water from the dam to Brisbane.
The report by the Institute for Sustainable Futures doesn’t appear to be publicly available, but according to the CM it supports desalination rather than a dam.
Apparently the emissions are generated in transporting the water from Traveston to Brisbane, and also from the surface of the dam itself.
This is the sort of report where you wouldn’t want to rely on the cover page for your decision making. The first issue that comes to mind is why they would be pumping the Traveston water to Brisbane. There is plenty of growth due to occur north of Brisbane that will need this water.
You’d also want to be sure that they were comparing apples with apples. For example, the desalination plant that is being built at Tugun is 94 kilometres from where I live by road, and Traveston is 173. Assuming that I represent “Brisbane”, then what are the relative emissions between pumping water to me from one spot versus the other? What other sites have they considered for desal?
I’m not sure how the dam surface will create greenhouse emissions, but presumably it has something to do with organisms in the water releasing CO2 and with the decay of plants drowned by the dam releasing methane. But to make this claim stick, they would need to show that there would be a net increase in these emissions over the business as usual scenario. That is, that the dam would create more organisms to release CO2 than would live in the un-flooded dam catchment, and that decaying vegetation would release more methane decaying under water than it would decaying in the air.
The state government’s answer to the charge is to say that they are planting 2000 ha of timber to abate the emissions. Makes you wonder how many planets we will need for all the trees being planted to allow us to meet business as usual scenarios of greenhouse emissions.
I hope this forest isn’t being planted in the dam catchment. Trees need water too, and one of the issues with catchment management is the effect trees have on water inflows and hence the water available to human consumers.
July 07, 2008 | Graham
Problems with Garnaut
There is a fundamental problem with most carbon-trading schemes. They are fairly good at coping with emissions (at least in theory), but not so good at coping with natural abatement. One way of looking at the Greenhouse issue is to argue about whether we have an emissions problem or not. Another way of looking at it is to say it’s not an emissions problem, but a population problem.
If you look at Australia’s emissions you find that per capita we are one of the highest emitters. At 16.2 tonnes of CO2 per capita, we rank just under Norway (19.1), Canada (20) and the USA (20.6). There are reasons for this. One of them is that we are a large sparsely populated continent, so transport emissions are a bigger issue here than elsewhere. That sparesness also means that emissions are not an issue overall. As the Global Footprint Network spreadspread shows, Australia has a large enough share of the world compared to its population that all we emit is absorbed.
As we export more CO2 (embedded in products like Alumumium, which is very energy intensive to refine) than we consume, that means that we are providing abatement for our export markets as well.
By adopting a one size fits all approach which takes no account of the ecological footprint of each nation, the Garnaut approach actually rewards countries who have a population in excess of what their landmass can sustain, given current technologies, and assuming that the UN assessments of what are globally needed, are correct. That is a perverse way to organise a market.
We also simultaneously risk damaging our economy at a time when wealth is becoming war by other means. If resources are insufficient to global needs, then someone is going to miss out, and in extreme cases, die. This will be determined largely by who has the least wealth. Dollars become the new bullets.
Which is not to say that I’m opposed to energy taxes. I think we need to encourage alternative energy development, for reasons unconnected to Greenhouse. But we need to be careful how we apply them, and how drastically.
July 06, 2008 | Ronda Jambe
Have We Hit Peak People?
Something seems to have happened since I last did a stint in the public service, nearly 5 years ago. Back then, managerialism was still in vogue. There were silly obsessions about performance, and group gatherings to build morale that actually helped to break it. That’s because the highly paid facilitators always steered the team to abstract concepts of leadership, problem solving and effectiveness. The hierarchical veneer was carefully kept from puncture. No specific issues were ever raised, or solved. So all you could do was drift along, pretending. Lots of pretending, little accountability. What about that middle manager who didn’t really do any work? And what became of the guy who said bluntly, as he floated around chatting, ‘I’ve worked out that they pay me just to show up.’
But that agency vanished shortly after I left, and the other agency I worked at for so many years was also eventually down-scaled and quietly moved to a less prestigious department. There were no outcries from former stakeholders, who had learned to ignore them years before. When I took them to the Human Rights Commission many years ago, it might have marked their turning point and eventual decline.
But here, at another department that is important for the nation’s future, the mood is somewhat different. Or so it seems after a full two weeks of full time work and observation.
To begin with, the workforce seems younger. The stats about an ageing public service may still be true, but where are the over 50s, clinging desperately until they can take a defined benefit pension? Those are, by the way, second in value only to the pensions the pollies themselves get. Defined benefit + indexed for inflation is as good as it gets for retirement income. I wish mine was larger, but having been mostly part-time and then taking a redundancy slowed that stream to a gentle but reliable trickle.
These young people are well educated, on average. They are also well paid, well fed, well dressed, and presumably well housed if they have a decent income and are living in Canberra. Their working conditions are, I venture to propose, as good as any in the world. Perhaps the Nordic countries are even more generous, but believe me, public servants in Canberra have nothing to complain about.
They stroll at lunchtimes, bundled into their overcoats, with healthy faces. The women are conservatively fashionable, the men mostly clean shaven with short hair. It is a type I’ve long been part of, a sort of camouflage. I can’t help smiling when I see our Kevin on TV, every bit the former public servant, intelligent, capable, hard-working and highly motivated. The picture of the Minister for our Department looks very much like one of the young executive level staff, I can imagine them all coordinating a staff farewell on their Blueberries: should it be Thai? There’s a good Indonesian place….
This very benign environment does not mean management is perfect, or that politics and personalities have become irrelevant. I just haven’t noticed any lurking malignancies, and usually that sort of thing reveals itself pretty quickly. But I’m just trying to fit in, find my own level and make a contribution.
And I am happy to report that after a bit of settling in, there seems to be a place where I can have influence, use my background and skills in ways that are valued, and feel a modest sense of achievement. I am content, even cheerful, to be a productive cog. They have charged me with an executive summary, I know some of you will see this document, and I hope it is useful.
More I cannot say, as it would contravene the public sector core values. Of course, I’ve been around the traps long enough to know that these are often breached. Something came around about guidelines for lobbyists, and about fraud control, and about leaks. Attention to these matters is up front and serious.
Most of the young people take their jobs seriously, but they are not glum people. They are very Australian, they dress down on Casual Friday, and have morning teas together every day. They have i-pods, but get their work done. They seem to balance work and home, sport and family, education and deadlines. They are polite, and their smiles are kind. I will always be subject to my own naive and wishful thinking, but I think I know decency when I experience it. They are our Peak People, an achievment as important as the environmental accords that are now starting to gain consensus.
These are the people I think about when stories of child neglect and abuse, shootings and stabbings and binge drinking hit the media. Why can’t everyone be like these fine young people? Because it is from young people like these that the roots of tolerance and maturity and tough decision making will have to come. And partly because my own children are nothing like them, and have disappointed me so deeply, in a quiet way I am barracking for these new style public servants. I hope they feel my respect.
And do not think that these Peak People are flighty, or shallow, or even that their work is trivial. Three things strike me as characteristic of the work. First, the policies involved are very complex. They thread between market and social forces, cost-benefits and nation building. It changes quickly, there’s a lot to understand.
Second, the internal software of communications is also complex, often irritatingly so. Documents are saved and then can vanish, version control is a fine art, email and the intranet can turn into swamps, that you have to drag your mind through. There are no rubber boots for this quagmire.
Lastly, the processes are also complex. There are internal and external stakeholders, a range of documents to ‘feed in’ to the final report. There are new players, old players, people like me popping up and then fading away. Someone has to juggle all this. It can’t be easy.
And it isn’t going to be easy for Kevin, or Penny, or any of us. The poop is hitting the fan, in many ways and many places. They will need to be tough, as well as well intentioned. The well fed confident ones will have to persuade the lower orders that their sacrifices are for a good cause, and that they are evenly distributed.
Do our Peak People have a firm enough grasp on civilised discourse ? Is it just a fine coating over a more labile urge to survive? Or are most of us capable of the dignity we treasure so much in the national narrative – the fortunate life of Albert Facey, the Kokoda Trail, our Afghanistan sacrificies, the nurses, diggers and heros of our military shining? Let us hope so.