Alex Vickery-Howe tracks the disturbing trend of dishonest politicians falsely equating peaceful protest with acts of terror.
Sometimes I wonder if we’re living in a free country.
How’s that for an opener? Are you spitting up cornflakes yet?
But I do.
Let me take you back to Year 11 Legal Studies at Glenunga High. Picture a Mop Top and you’ve pretty much captured me as a teenager: a rake in an ill-fitting uniform, with a messy crown of curls, somehow smug despite a lack of compelling evidence for why that should be a logical state of being.
My teacher, stern but brilliant, told me and my fellow gardening implements about the right to peaceful protest. He framed it not just as something a citizen could do, but as something many citizens must do if our democracy is to remain strong.
It was one of a handful of lessons that penetrated my supremely self-assured adolescent mind and stayed with me into my less certain, much heftier adulthood. We do indeed have the right to protest. Sometimes we have a duty.
I watched Hamilton for the first time the other night and came away thinking two things. 1) Maybe I should call myself ‘Alexander’ again. 2) “Wow, they built this amazing nation after the revolutionary war, and now the demented idiot from The Apprentice is going to tear it all down. Great work, America.” (It’s a brilliant piece of writing and a glorious show, nonetheless… I guess everyone else already knew that?)
It’s hardly bold or original to point out that we’re saturated in a post-truth soup: an acid bath of sloganeering; a bottomless cup of conspiracy crap; a steamy concoction of competitive ego that drowns out factual discourse as it simultaneously corrodes our sense of objective reality and our will to stand up. At the risk of emulating that other Alexander a little too earnestly, I’m done with accepting the status quo. Liars are unfit for political office.
Put the cornflakes down. I think it’s worth a conversation.
The extent of oppressive government overreach in our nation is illustrated best by the crackdown against environmental and animal rights protestors. That smug rake that used to be me believed he lived in an enlightened part of the world. I mean, we were the country that invented Babe for heaven’s sake! The idea that any Australian government would seriously propose that people who stand up for animal welfare deserve to be jailed for 12 months would’ve been unthinkable to that kid in Glenunga High.
I’ve often said it’s an illusion that progress moves forward in a linear way. I actually think the 1990s had a lot going for them in terms of progressive politics, and it was a good time to grow up, to the extent that the past two decades have started to feel reductive and disappointing. By the end of the ‘90s, the only reference to ‘President Trump’ was a joke on The Simpsons. I’d love to go back to that chapter of history.
At the time, Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie accused such people of being ‘self-satisfied’ and ‘extreme’, which is a bold call from someone who belongs to a transparently extremist party guided more by religious fanaticism and powerful lobbyists than by evidence, logic, pragmatism and compassion.
Nationals Senator and Minister for Sport, Bridget McKenzie. (IMAGE: CNBP, Flickr)
Earlier this month, three members of Extinction Rebellion were charged for a protest in Melbourne that disrupted traffic. This follows the widely reported arrest and imprisonment of Deanna ‘Violet’ Coco in 2022 under state anti-protest laws in New South Wales. One by one our states – five of which are now run by Labor – are falling into this dangerous trend of vilifying people who choose to exercise their democratic rights.
This is the lie that gives rise to all others.
The major parties are equating people who protest – annoyingly, perhaps, but peacefully – about things that actually matter, with religious militants, incel guerrillas and Trumpian lunatics who are responsible for genuine terrorist events. It’s like pretending the inhabitants of FernGullyare the same as the cast of The Suicide Squad.
Speaking for myself, I don’t want to see people who draw attention to cruelty, injustice and negligence being locked behind bars. I’d much prefer to see those perpetuating cruelty, injustice and negligence taking up that real estate. Is Violet Coco the real problem here? Why throw the book at the conscientious citizen who saw Australia burning and decided to speak out? Surely that book should be aimed at the prime minister who holidayed in Hawaii with his fellow extremists and smirked at our suffering while his country went up in flames?
I don’t understand a world where Violet Coco is a ‘terrorist’ and Kyle Rittenhouse is a hero. Putting compassion aside, the dearth of logic makes my brain hurt.
Deanna ‘Violet’ Coco pictured being arrested during a climate action protest in Melbourne in 2021. (IMAGE: Julian Meehan)
David Morris, the CEO of the Environmental Defenders Office and a legal expert, has been a consistent critic of any laws targeting protestors: “Peaceful protest is a cornerstone of democratic societies. It gives those without power a vital opportunity to have their voices heard and to advocate for positive change.”
Some of these laws have been successfully challenged in New South Wales with Justice Michael Walton branding them unconstitutional. According to Justice Walton, they have a “chilling effect on political communication via protests and public assemblies.”
A memorable case went all the way to the High Court of Australia, which ruled that the ABC could broadcast protest footage of an appalling possum meat production company in South Launceston (how does such a thing even exist?), which gave some hope to the animal rights movement and some sense of restored logic to those of us who understand how democracies work.
Unfortunately, the Tasmanian Premier (still clinging to the job) clearly cannot grasp democracy as a concept….
Narrated by Ellen Burbidge and her eerily disembodied voice, the recent comedy skit draws attention to the Rockliff Liberal government’s costly stadium tantrums, their abusive youth detention centres, their rising homeless population, their allowance of salmon farms that ‘impact’ (i.e. destroy) the local ecology with little economic justification, their struggling hospitals, their toxic spills, and their logging horror show that runs at a loss (come on, Jeremy, what are you doing? Even as a supervillain you suck. You’re not even profitable. Lex Luthor would be ashamed.)
Now, these skits are called ‘Honest Government Ads’, but that’s the conceit… they are written to be ironic. The Electoral Commission missed the joke entirely when they wrote the following to the content creators:
“The Electoral Commissioner is of the view that this video is likely an advertisement and therefore requests either Mr Rockliffe’s [sic]photo is removed from it, or that the video is taken down as soon as possible, to ensure compliance with the legislation.”
An alternate version of the skit was subsequently posted by the group’s founder, Giordano Nanni, after receiving this notice. The alternative was a fine of up to $58,500 or up to 12 months in jail.
For a joke.
For a factually correct joke.
I should state that I do donate to the ‘Honest Government Ads’, simply because they’re hilarious and because Triangle is an actual hero. My interest, however, isn’t so much about defending a group of comedians I like, but have never met, and it’s not even about Premier Rockliff’s dubious track record and very, very shaky prospect of striking a deal with Jacqui Lambie… hilarious though that will be to watch.
My interest is about living in a country where satire and protest, our fine Australian traditions of larrikinism and ‘sticking it to the man’, have somehow been reinterpreted as serious criminal matters. The implication – indeed, the outright declaration – that holding politicians to account is an act of terrorism in 2024 should stir us out of our apathy.
In this soup of lies, perhaps the most poisonous falsehood of all is that we’re not allowed to speak up for ourselves and the issues we care about.
The Coalition would like to silence political dissent. That is not democracy.
On 21 March 2024, Nikkei Asia carried the story on Kyrgyzstan taking a page from Russia in pushing for a ‘foreign agents’ law
Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov faces a high-stakes decision on whether to sign new legislation that critics warn will significantly impair how human rights defenders and independent media, among others, can work in his mountainous Central Asian state. On March 14, Kyrgyzstan’s parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of a “foreign agents” bill that mirrors legislation adopted in Russia over a decade ago. The law is designed to control the activities of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations that receive funding from abroad by compelling them to register as “foreign representatives,” leading to closer scrutiny of their activities by the authorities.
Japarov has a month from that date to sign it into law. Many observers have been vocal in their opposition and are urging the president to veto the bill. Syinat Sultanalieva, Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, told Nikkei Asia that this law “would see the further and sharper shrinking of civil society,” a sector that has been under attack in Kyrgyzstan for more than a decade.
In the meantime the Prague based NGO, People in Need, speaks out against the Slovakian government’s proposed measures to curb critical media and NGOs, which would mirror tactics employed by autocrats and dictators in places ranging from Russia to Latin America, It has raised concerns about the erosion of civil liberties and the stifling of dissent. In a move reminiscent of authoritarian regimes, officials seek to designate these entities as “foreign agents,” a term often utilised to suppress opposition voices. The Fico government has already taken steps to cut NGO funding, raising further alarms about the independence of civil society activities. Additionally, Culture Minister Martina Šimkovičová and Justice Minister Boris Susko have initiated cuts to subsidy programmes, redirecting funds away from NGOs to other areas, citing concerns about transparency and favouritism in grant allocation. The government’s actions have prompted backlash from NGOs, with 90 organisations signing a petition against the minister’s decisions.
As an organisation with roots steeped in the freedom and civic movements of post-Cold-War Czechoslovakia, we are appalled to see the illiberal turn taken by the Slovak government. The Fico government’s proposal to impose a Russian-style foreign agents’ law is anathema to the shared goals of the Czech and Slovak people who fought to end the Russian subjugation of our homelands. This is of great concern and sadness to us at People in Need.
On 21 March 2024, a large group of civil society organisations jointly called on the president of Kyrgyzstan, Sadyr Japarov, to veto the amendments to the Law on Non-commercial Organisations, known as the law on ‘foreign representatives’ which clearly violates the country’s international human rights obligations and would be a devastating blow the civil society. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/foreign-agent-law/]
…We are writing to you on behalf of the undersigned civil society organisations from different countries to express support for Kyrgyzstan’s civil society and urge you to veto the amendments to the Law on Non-commercial Organisations, known as the law on ‘foreign representatives’, which parliament adopted on third reading on 14 March 2024. The proposed amendments fall seriously short of Kyrgyzstan’s international human rights obligations and risk delivering a devastating blow to its vibrant civil society. The amendments will impair civil society’s ability to carry out its important and legitimate work to the benefit of the people of Kyrgyzstan, and to promote public participation, transparency, accountability and good governance, thereby eroding democratic and human rights progress made by Kyrgyzstan with negative implications for its international reputation. Further, the proposed amendments will endanger international development and economic assistance programmes in the country, which will also undermine prospects for the achievement of sustainable development goals contrary to your government’s ambitious agenda in this area. Thus, we urge you to veto the amendments for the benefit of Kyrgyzstan and its people.
Both national and international human rights experts have concluded that the draft law on ‘foreign representatives’ clearly violates Kyrgyzstan’s international human rights obligations. For example, such conclusions were presented in a joint communication addressed to your government by three UN Special Rapporteurs, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, of which Kyrgyzstan currently is a member. The three rapporteurs stated: ‘many provisions in the proposed law would be contrary to the international human rights obligations of the Kyrgyz Republic, including the right to the freedom of association, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, the right to non-discrimination and the right to privacy. If passed, this draft law could have a chilling effect on the operation of all associations in the Kyrgyz Republic, limiting their ability to advocate for human rights, provide social services, and contribute to the development of a robust and inclusive society.’
In an earlier legal assessment prepared at the request of Kyrgyzstan’s Ombudsperson, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) found that the proposed provisions lack legitimate justification and do not meet the requirements of international human rights law for acceptable restrictions on the right to freedom of association. ODIHR also stressed that the key concepts of ‘foreign representatives’ and ‘political activities’ used in the draft law are inconsistent with the principle of legal certainty and predictability and ‘would allow unfettered discretion on the part of the implementing authorities’. ODIHR further found that the proposed provisions are contrary to the principle of non-discrimination and risk stigmatising organisations carrying out legitimate work and triggering mistrust, fear and hostility against them.
The draft law on ‘foreign representatives’ does not only violate your country’s international obligations but also contradicts provisions of the Constitution of the Kyrgyz Republic (including articles 36, 32, 24 and 29), which protect the right to freedom of association and other fundamental rights. In this way, the draft law challenges the legitimacy of the current Constitution, which was initiated by you and endorsed by citizens in a national referendum in 2021.
The proponents of the draft law on ‘foreign representatives’ have argued that it is aimed at ensuring the transparency of civil society organisations (CSOs). However, while transparency is an important issue, it is not a legitimate reason under international human rights law for imposing invasive, discriminatory, and stigmatising restrictions on CSOs. On the contrary, transparency can be ensured in ways that do not contradict international law nor hamper the work of CSOs. Moreover, all non-commercial organisations in Kyrgyzstan, including those that receive foreign funding, are already subjected to extensive state control and regularly report about their activities and finances to various state bodies, which ensures transparency of their work. In particular, amendments to the Law on Non-commercial Organisations, adopted in 2021, oblige non-commercial organisations to annually provide detailed information on their sources of funding, use of funds and assets for publication on the Tax Service’s website. This information is thus already publicly accessible.
Rather than increasing the transparency of non-commercial organisations, the draft law risks undermining civil society’s crucial role in assisting public bodies with the provision of support to vulnerable groups of the population, and also in promoting public sector transparency and accountability. Watchdog organisations have already warned of a significant decline in government transparency in Kyrgyzstan, preventing the exposure of wrongdoing and increasing the risk of corruption. This impairs foreign investments as well as economic growth and well-being in the country.
Kyrgyzstan’s international partners have warned that the adoption of the law on ‘foreign representatives’ would negatively affect development assistance programmes in the country. For example, in a joint statement issued on 14 March 2024, the Delegation of the EU to the Kyrgyz Republic and the Embassies of Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States stated that the proposed provisions would ‘jeopardise our ability to provide assistance that improves the lives of the citizens and residents of the Kyrgyz Republic’. They stated that, if signed in its current form, the law ‘has the potential to hurt the most vulnerable who rely on the essential services – such as food, healthcare, and education – that non-profits and NGOs [non-governmental organisations] provide’. The UN Resident Coordinator in the Kyrgyz Republic pointed out that enacting the law would threaten civil society engagement in development initiatives and the achievement of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Thus, the law contradicts the government’s aim of being among the top 30 countries in the realisation of SDGs by 2030.
The World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development have also stressed the importance that they attach to CSO engagement for the success of their in-country operations, when commenting on NGO concerns about the draft law’s potential impact on the activities of international financial institutions in Kyrgyzstan.
As you know, as a beneficiary of the General Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+), the Kyrgyz Republic is required to effectively implement international human rights conventions, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in return for trade benefits afforded by the EU. Thus, the adoption and enforcement of the law on ‘foreign representatives’ is likely to negatively affect these benefits. The European Commission’s recent GSP+ monitoring report on the Kyrgyz Republic highlighted shrinking space for civil society as a key area of concern and called for swift measures to reverse this negative trend in the light of the country’s ICCPR obligations. Moreover, in its resolution adopted in July 2023, the European Parliament called for a reassessment of Kyrgyzstan’s GSP+ benefits in view of recent developments, in particular draft legislation that runs counter to the country’s international human rights obligations.
We are aware that proponents of the draft law on ‘foreign representatives’ have argued that it is similar to the US Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). However, FARA differs from the proposed legislation in Kyrgyzstan in crucial respects. In particular, FARA is not targeted at non-commercial organisations that receive foreign funding. Instead, FARA requires persons who conduct certain activities ‘at the order’ or ‘under the direction or control’ of a foreign government or other foreign entity to register as an ‘agent of a foreign principal’ and periodically file supplementary information about their activities in this capacity. The purpose of FARA is to ensure the public disclosure of such information rather than to subject those registered under it to ongoing, invasive state control.
President Japarov, when you consider whether or not to sign the draft law on ‘foreign representatives’, you are deciding the fate of civil society in Kyrgyzstan. Will you opt for the path taken by authoritarian countries, where similar legislation has been used in campaigns to systematically dismantle independent civil society, with negative implications for the reputation, prosperity and well-being of these countries? Or for a more forward-looking, inclusive, and democratically-oriented approach under which CSOs are treated as important, respected partners who can work together with state bodies in addressing societal problems, and international partners retain their confidence in Kyrgyzstan’s commitment to sustainable development?
For the reasons outlined above, we urge you to refrain from signing the draft law on ‘foreign representatives’ and ensure that any new legislation impacting non-commercial organisations reflects Kyrgyzstan’s international human rights obligations and undergoes thorough and inclusive consultations with civil society, as well as national and international experts. When elaborating this type of legislation, it is crucial to take the opinions of CSOs directly affected by it into account.
Signed by the following organisations (listed in the order of signature):
International Partnership for Human Rights (IPHR), Belgium
IDP Women Association Consent, Georgia
Norwegian Helsinki Committee
Hungarian Helsinki Committee, Hungary
Legal Policy Research Centre, Kazakhstan
Public Association “Dignity”, Kazakhstan
Netherlands Helsinki Committee
Civil Rights Defenders, Sweden
Protection of Rights without Borders NGO, Armenia
Swedish OSCE-network
Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly – Vanadzor, Armenia
Center for Civil Liberties, Ukraine
Public Verdict, Russia
Turkmen Helsinki Foundation, Bulgaria
Crude Accountability, USA
Freedom Files, Poland
Human Rights Center “Viasna”, Belarus
Center for Participation and Development, Georgia
Human Rights Defence Center Memorial, Russia
Civic Assistance Committee, Russia
Austrian Helsinki Association
Bulgarian Helsinki Committee
Human Rights Center (HRC), Georgia
Macedonian Helsinki Committee
Sova Research Center, Russia
Promo LEX Association, Moldova
Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, Poland
ARTICLE 19 Europe
FIDH (International Federation for Human Rights), within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders
World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders
Glenn Scott is a recently ‘discovered’ new talent for New Matilda, after we came across an epic rant on his personal Facebook page (about coffee). ‘Discovered’ in scare quotes, because, apparently, Glenn’s been around for quite a while. Or so his birth certificate would have us believe. In any event, good writers should write, so we offered him a regular column… and then found out that (a) he’s even more interesting than we realized; and (b) he’s suffered his first bout of ‘writer’s block’. Sort of. Over to Glenn for an explanation….
Um … thanks, Chris … I think … I guess the “new talent” bit makes up for alerting the good people of why there has been a bit of a gap in my meagre output. One would imagine one actually needed to identify as a “writer” before claiming “writer’s block”, and two published articles and a poem in an ABC compilation hardly feels like paying my dues however, sure, for the sake of the argument, lets run with “writer’s block”.
So yes, as Chris has so kindly pointed out, I have spent a decent portion of the last couple of weeks gripped in the realisation that there is a difference between throwing any dumb shit that amuses me up on my Facebook page and writing something that is genuinely worthy of your time, my fine NM readers. And this recent experience brought to mind the following story of another time I momentarily went all “deer in the headlights” …
It was the mid 90s and I was in Melbourne’s Woodstock Studios. It was my first “big time” recording, with Joe Camilleri (Black Sorrows) producing and Michael Letho (Black Sorrows, Daryl Braithwaite) engineering. On this day, I was meant to be recording a piano part for a rock ballad. I had already taken a number of passes at the track and neither I nor Joe were happy.
We decided we needed the vintage stage piano I was playing tuned, so we took a break.
I went for a walk to clear my head. I was suffering from “red light” syndrome. And I was annoyed. I could play the hell out of the track but the moment that recording light went on I sucked. This never happened to me. I had clocked hundreds of studio hours, this session was no different. But it was different. The calibre of the room was different. And I felt like I was failing. This opportunity was slipping through my fingers. I needed a change of headspace. Fast.
I arrived back as the tuner was finishing.
“It should sound a lot happier now, give it a good hammering to set the strings in and you’ll be good to go.”
I sat down and started hitting keys, listening to the newly tightened strings. The instrument responded with a cleaner, deeper resonance. I began playing the opening to the song. Michael looked up from the console and motioned towards the headphones.
“Why don’t you give it a good work out with the track and then we’ll go for a take.”
The click track sounded and I let rip. Over enunciating the articulation of every note and chord, consciously directing as much energy as I could down through my fingers to the keys to the hammers to the strings. I was quickly lost in the performance and began to throw in every small variation and nuance that came to me.
By the outro I was simply having fun, pulling out chords and answering licks to the guitar parts I would never attempt in a serious pass. As the track reached the final fade I looked over at Michael and laughed.
“Well that was hilarious. The piano sounds great though, lets go for a take.”
“No need. We got it.”
“What?”
“We got it. You’re all good. That was great.”
I realised what he meant.
“You recorded that?”
“Of course. I knew you’d really go for it on that first run through.”
“So you tricked me?”
Michael grinned.
And that was that. Michael was happy. Joe was happy. Therefore I was happy. I saw out the rest of the recording week like a pro and learned one of the most valuable lessons of my life.
Now, I was going to finish up right here – right on ‘learned one of the most valuable lessons of my life’. However, Chris was adamant that I can’t just toss that last line out there, and leave it hanging….
“WHAT WAS THE LESSON, GLENN?!”
Ok, well, I don’t think I can do the answer to that question justice in one paragraph so I feel a ‘Part II’ or ‘Son of Studio Story’ coming on. In the meantime, I’m sure NM has an email you can send in your guesses….
[Ed’s note: Ironically, that email – which you can access here – has been down for five days. But it’s back up now]
Every March, Geoff Russell and his friends from South Aussies for Animals (SAFA) head into the game reserves in South Australia to document the official opening of the duck hunting season. You know, like the government is supposed to do, but pretty clearly doesn’t. And a warning to readers: if you find animal cruelty upsetting, then this story contains themes and footage you’re highly unlikely to enjoy.
Watching duck shooters at Lake George on the first day of SA’s 2024 duck and quail killing season isn’t for the faint-hearted. But it does it teach you plenty about our political leaders.
Koalas have fur and seem to be sacred. When footage emerged of them smashing to the ground from trees, the action was immediate, and useful. Our native feathered wildlife are treated rather differently.
It isn’t hard to get horrific footage of ducks smashing to the water from a considerable height with broken bones and punctured organs, but the action that ensues from that is missing.
The horror has been normalised and politicians cave to imaginary threats from the less than one in 1,000 South Australian voters who are out of sync with the 95 per cent of the public, who think it important that animals targetted for food are killed quickly, and painlessly.
Lake George, South Australia, Saturday March 16, 2024
I watch as the woman’s face opposite me cringes in something between empathic pain and shock. Her entire body jerks back involuntarily at the same time. It’s the second time in a matter of minutes that I’ve seen this response. A few minutes earlier it was me making it.
“Watch this”, I’d urged, “but be prepared, it’s horrible”.
It’s not a suggestion I’d make to many people, but I knew both of these women had seen worse, and not just on a screen, but for real. So I watched them, and they watched the screen. Before them was footage of probably 90 kilograms of camo-clad Australian (presumably) manhood. Also presumably.
He was battling a 400-gram duck.
He’d already disabled it with at least one shot and was moving in for the kill. He was holding one of the world’s most inefficient and unreliable killing weapons; a shotgun. He walks to about seven metres from his prey. In the dull light, it could be either a grey or chestnut Teal. Either way, it’s mostly just bones and feathers. He takes careful aim. He is so close that the spread of the 200 or so pellets will be quite small. This isn’t a “tap it in” golf putt, but something still requiring careful attention.
The pellets leave the shotgun at about 500 metres per second and produce an explosion of bird and water. At that range, all the pellets hitting the bird smash bones and organs and emerge into the water on the other side of the body. He picks up the small limp figure. He knows he’s being filmed and displays his 400-gram trophy in a kind of “screw you” triumph.
This unequal contest is as legal as it is shocking. Given the number of other shooters observed on the same morning (and later in the evening) not bothering to kill the injured birds they retrieved, this particular shooter should probably be commended.
At least he killed it.
The choking men
When shooters pick up a wounded duck, some hold them by a foot or leg, but others lock a finger around the neck with the skull in the palm of their hand. They can hold three or more ducks that way.
Anybody who understands the way execution by hanging works knows that it is the drop which does the damage, the dislocation of the neck. If the drop is too small, the victim chokes over the next few minutes, depending on the precise placement of the noose. So it is with a duck in this choke grip.
We filmed one shooter who fired a shot into a duck on the water and then picked it up with the choke grip; which is absolutely fine if the duck is dead.
It wasn’t.
Some 40 seconds later, he moved the now inert and lifeless looking duck from his right hand to his left hand. As his grip relaxed, what had appeared to be a dead duck suddenly started flapping. It was to no avail, a left-hand finger soon took over the choking role and the duck’s future was sealed. The apparent brutality of the close-range shotgun blast is nothing compared to actual brutality of choking the life out of a helpless animal.
The family that slays together stays together
Another pair of shooters, a father-son combo, were filmed shooting into a flock of six ducks sitting on the water. This is against the Code of Practice which duck shooters are legally obliged to follow. It’s impossible to say confidently how many were hit, but the spray as the pellets hit the water provided some evidence that it may well have been all of them.
They appeared to be in a nice straight line and three “jumped” into the air in a frantic and successful effort to escape. Those three quite likely had one or more pellet wounds. Shotgun pellets only kill when they hit vital organs like the heart, lungs, brain or wing bones. You can aim the blast of pellets, but it’s purely a matter of chance how many, if any, of the pellets will hit a vital organ.
A duck with a smashed leg will die later, but can still fly and escape. Ducks with pellets in the guts will die, but can also still fly and escape.
The flying wounded
Violence in films is often more effective if it occurs off-camera. The sounds alone can be more horrifying than visual blood and guts. This is because you are forced to think and imagine more about what is happening when you are shown less. Duck shooting is a little like this. The worst thing that can happen to a duck isn’t being shot from seven metres by some camo-clad wanna-be warrior. It isn’t even being choked to death slowly.
Far worse is the pellet in the guts that doesn’t drop you from the sky. Far worse is the broken legs that will stop you swimming or feeding, and have you die slowly. It’s virtually certain that the father-son combo created just such injuries with their flock shot. But those injured birds will never be filmed or found. They may recover, but will most likely die slowly.
A Chestnut Teal, one of the ducks endemic to Australia. (IMAGE: Nik Borrow, Flickr)
Many flying wounded were created at Lake George last weekend.
The flying wounded were systematically ignored by the recent South Australian Select Committee Inquiry. But then again, the Committee wasn’t much into evidence, preferring instead to just listen to shooter claims rather than engage with the substantial and gruesome body of actual scientific evidence about shotguns and how they work.
Such incompetence was perplexing, until pictures emerged of several of the Committee at a slap-up dinner put on by duck shooters.
Lies and regulation
If shooters and their political mates have their way, there will be talk of more regulations and the Government will continue to claim, as it has for years, that shooting is well regulated. This is a display of either ignorance or deliberate mendacity.
Wounding during duck shooting is a result of the physics of shotguns. If the Committee hadn’t been incompetent and quantitatively challenged, they’d have realised this from the evidence presented. You can’t fix duck (and quail) shooting or regulate it any more than you can change the value of Pi. But regulation isn’t just impossible, the department isn’t even trying.
Our team of 13 people with six cameras filmed just a few shooters during a day and a half around Lake George last weekend. We just film who we can find. Nevertheless, we filmed multiple people not bothering to kill ducks they retrieved; we filmed small children emulating their fathers by “windmilling” ducks ineffectively by the neck; we filmed a shooter shooting a record four extra shots into a duck he’d disabled with the first pair of shots, yet still the duck was alive when he retrieved it.
We filmed a shooter running and hiding what was most likely a protected species. He’d seen a NPWS ranger vehicle. He needn’t have bothered, he was in the water and they were almost exclusively looking in the other direction. Perhaps the rangers hadn’t had yet completed the PowerPoint training course telling them to look towards the water where the ducks were.
All of us saw NPWS rangers driving around in their Toyotas, not one of us saw a single officer raise binoculars or a camera, after being told they possessed both. The closest anybody saw to them observing shooting was that they “parked with a line of sight to two shooters” for a few minutes.
Perhaps of course, we could be wrong. Perhaps they had a David Attenborough style system of duck lookalike spy-cameras and were remotely monitoring shooters from a central control room.
Department officers gave evidence at the recent Select Committee. Did they have any footage of shooters being monitored? No. Did they have a spreadsheet laying out the time that their staff had spent actually watching shooters? No. At Lake George last weekend, all of our team saw NPWS driving around, none of us saw them doing any actual observation of shooters in the act of shooting.
It’s pretty simple. Every time we put people on the ground with cameras we get footage and breaches of the Code of Practice. Has the Department ever prosecuted a person without evidence from third parties (the groups I’m involved with)? During the Senate Committee hearings Director of Conservation and Wildlife from the Department of Environment and Water didn’t know.
You’d imagine that such an officer fronting up to a Committee on precisely this topic would have bothered to check the facts and know the answers. But no, she mumbled vaguely about a “handful” of “expiations”, provided not a single shred of evidence of the nature and degree of hunter monitoring, and then claimed that hunters were “generally well behaved”.
How do you know if you don’t look?
The most basic principle of empirical science is to observe the phenomena you are studying before shooting your mouth off and making claims. You’d imagine a highly paid public servant with a considerable scientific CV would know better. It seems not.
A challenge to the Malinauskas Government
I challenge the Deputy Premier (and Minister for Environment and Water) Susan Close to order her department to collect up all the SD cards of all the cameras that NPWS claimed to have on the wetlands last weekend. This collection should be done by an independent body who should also check the timestamps of any footage thereon.
Deputy Premier of South Australia Susan Close pictured with Washington Governor Jay Inslee at the United Nation’s COP27 talks in Egypt in 2022. (IMAGE: Governor Jay Inslee, Flickr)
The Minister should then publish the number of hours of footage… or minutes, or perhaps it just seconds. Or a big fat zero?
Monitoring isn’t hard, you just have to get out of bed early and point a camera at a shooter. We can’t and don’t film 100 shooters to find a few ‘bad apples’. We just film anybody we can find. NPWS, as far as we know, have never prosecuted anybody without somebody else to do the watching. Their policy seems clearly to be “Don’t look and you won’t have anything unpleasant to do; i.e. your highly paid job.”
Ultimately, nobody can prevent or film the flying wounded, but NPWS don’t even bother with the things than can be monitored and filmed. We don’t know if they, like the Select Committee, also get invitations to dinners from shooters. But it wouldn’t be surprising.
Will the South Australian Malinauskas Government continue sending members of the public who write to them about this issue the same lies about how well regulated duck shooting is?
Maybe. Changing Government behaviour is also like trying to regulate the value of Pi.
• You can find out more about South Aussies for Animals (SAFA) here. And follow them on Facebook here.
An ingenious tourism campaign out of Tasmania may (or may not) increase visitor numbers, but it’s sure to boost the morale of local artists, writes Emma Wilkins.
An advertising campaign that claims AI is no match for authenticity, and seeks to show the world that “instant isn’t always better”, has sprung from an unlikely source.
Earlier this month, a competition on a government-run tourism website in Tasmania invited members of the public to submit creative prompts for artworks “set” in the state. Now, those selected by participating artists are being turned into physical, human-made art. When each piece is complete, the person who penned the prompt will receive the resulting art.
A promotional clip depicts a lone artist in a sweeping landscape turning down suggestions such as “An enormous baby on Cradle Mountain”, before accepting “A sexy merman but he’s half whale in Bicheno” with the disclaimer: “It might take me a little while though”.
“TasmanAi.” It’s an idea I’d have expected to attract excitement in a brainstorming meeting — before being shot down as being a little too quirky, a little too impractical, a little too much, well, work.
Instead, Tourism Tasmania ran with it, putting an “image generator” on its website so “Tasmanian artists — not algorithms” could produce human-made art in “the most inspiring place on Earth”. (I’d have settled for “an” inspiring place, but I guess it wouldn’t be advertising without at least one utterly audacious claim.)
If Tourism Tasmania’s goal is to support and inspire local artists whose livelihood is being threatened by technology – to promote their work and encourage community engagement – I expect this initiative will meet some KPIs. But even if the entry form ensured each prompt was “paired with an iconic place in Tasmania”, even if each artwork depicts and is created in the state, will the campaign really make people associate Tasmania in particular with “authenticity and creativity” and the joy of “slowing down”?
Time will tell. Either way, I love the initiative. It celebrates individual artists and will foster the creation of original work, work that’s been “prompted” by a particular place and a particular human, a human who will — in good time and in “real life” — receive it.
I also love the execution. The quirky, offbeat promotional clip is a delight to watch, and the website was clean, easy to use, and playful (“Why let robots have all the fun?”). The prompts offered the artists inspiration, while the ability to reject the ideas that don’t appeal and accept the ones that do gives them agency.
Even if people don’t go from entering the competition to visiting Tasmania, I trust my taxpayer dollars have been well spent. Regardless of whether this idiosyncratic marketing campaign raises the profile of my home state, it will surely raise the profiles of the artists involved and, hopefully, boost morale among creatives more generally.
Some have responded to the threat of AI with breathless excitement or scaremongering, others with intellectual arguments. This response uses technology to centre and facilitate human creativity and particularity. It contributes to the conversation with refreshing, laid-back confidence.
I know the competition is aimed at “potential visitors” to the state, but I couldn’t resist entering. It took a minute to find the website (when I googled “Tasmanai” the robots “corrected” my spelling), and to think of a worthy prompt. After submitting my idea, I was told it had been put into a “high tech image generator”—“AKA Trevor, Kate, and Sandy having a bickie and tea in the studio”.
A “sexy merman but he’s half whale in Bicheno” done in a watercolour style, by ChatGPT 4.0.
“They’re going to mull over your creative genius and we’ll get back to you. Why not explore Tasmania while you wait?”
There’s a place for the efficiency and immediacy of machine-generated art, but there’s something even more exciting about art that takes effort and time, that was inspired and made, by and for, people bound by time and place.
However aesthetically impressive it might become, I can’t imagine the former will ever be imbibed with as much meaning as the latter. Whatever this competition’s “prizes” look like, and however much the winners appreciate them (or don’t…) each will have its own unique “creation story” and its own unique creator.
A creator who, unlike a machine, has a family and friends and commitments and desires that limit (and inspire) them. A creator who might take a while to decide how they’ll respond to a prompt, and a while to start, and a while to finish. Setting up an easel and getting out the paint is harder than watching another episode of another show while eating another biscuit — but they’ve made a commitment. And the end result will — they hope; they can’t be sure — bring delight to the one whose prompt inspired it.
We can’t beat the robots when it comes to speed, but with playful, good-natured humour, and slow, inefficient labour, we can distinguish ourselves from them. Our ways are not their ways. This can be a curse. But it can be a blessing too.
Alex Vickery-Howe discusses the persistent impact of COVID-19 and the much deeper, more disappointing impact of people who refuse to believe it exists.
I’m sitting in a sterile room. I have a cup of decaffeinated black tea, a painting of an empty beach and three cameras to keep me company. Well, I’m sure there are people behind those cameras. They’re stuck here all night too.
I have wires attached to my head and to my legs. They’re measuring my movements as I sleep. Maybe they’re looking into brain activity. Imagine if they could watch my dreams.
Down the hall, a man is shouting: “I’m not taking the test! COVID was years ago, mate!” He’s scared of the RAT. The man is built like a tractor, but a teeny widdle swab has him throwing a wobbly. “It hurts my nose!” I wait for the part that I know is coming. “COVID is a farce! The government made it up to control everyone! It’s not real!”
There ya go.
I close my door. There are five of us in the lab. I haven’t met them all, but the man next door seems nice. He has dementia, and like me, he is no longer allowed to drive. We make small talk as we wait for instructions. I wonder if guinea pigs do this.
Nobody knows exactly why my body is shutting down, but most agree it is a result of Long COVID.
At the height of the pandemic, I caught COVID three times, and the last one stayed with me. I pushed through for a few weeks. When climbing the stairs, I ran out of breath. I told myself to spend more time at the gym. When tying my shoes, I felt a phantom fist kneading into my lungs. I told myself to stop ordering nachos. When picking up the dog – Spacey is a little plump but a half-Havanese isn’t exactly a German Shepherd – I felt the kitchen swim in and out of reality.
It wasn’t until I fell asleep on my office floor that I acknowledged there could be a problem. When I say ‘fell asleep’, I’m not describing an afternoon nap. I mean barely mustering the energy to lock the door before I was unconscious on the carpet, only to wake up hours later, disoriented, gasping for air….
My GP made me say this aloud. It took her forcing me to speak it clearly before I would admit that it wasn’t just ordinary fatigue. It took a few more visits for me to admit that it wasn’t an isolated incident. I’d passed out cold on that office floor a few times. I’d collapsed at home in a similar way. I’d forced myself to keep my eyes open during meetings, fighting with every scrap of will, and occasionally running out of breath mid-sentence.
Friends have said, “Oh, I nap too. It’s age.”
No. It isn’t.
I’ve tried to resist reading too much of the research around this. Forewarned is forearmed, but my mind races when I explore too much of the material. My mind isn’t great at the moment. There’s a constant fog – a sense of not ever being entirely awake – and sometimes songs play on repeat, no longer inside my head but audible in a way they shouldn’t be.
Ideas and intrusive thoughts crash together, as though my brain is taking in too much information and unable to process it sensibly. The clearest metaphor I can think of is a thousand people shouting while they all throw paperwork at my head.
When I’m about to go to sleep, I see people in my bedroom. If I’m lucky, they’ll be strangers who’ve come to choke me and not old friends reminding me that they died years ago, and I wasn’t there to help them. The word for this, I’m told, is parasomnia.
My mind is reacting to my body. It’s an oversimplification to assume that the two are separate. I see people coming to choke me because I no longer breathe properly in my sleep and my body is in a state of distress. I’ve been wearing one of those very sexy Darth Vader breathing machines for well over a year now, which does help. But a breathing disorder doesn’t account for everything.
And I’m tired. Not just tired, but dragging-my-feet-tired, struggling-to-keep-my-head-up-tired, snapping-at-my-partner-if-I-can’t-crawl-away-to-my-bedroom-tired. Anyone who calls that a ‘nap’ would be rightly ashamed were they to experience the difference firsthand. Naps are restorative. Sleep attacks are terrifying.
If I take a walk, even a short one around my immediate area, I return home as if I’ve come back from a two-hour hike. Ridiculously, I was hiking for a while, telling myself this was something I could still do. I couldn’t. Playing pretend left me sleeping for the rest of the day.
My own recalcitrant nature has probably made all of this much worse by refusing to concede that any of it is real. A friend who works in public health told me some weeks ago that I’ll end up bed-ridden completely if I don’t “get my stubborn butt into gear and stop pushing through this”.
My butt is very, very stubborn. The rest of me is keeping it company.
I’m no outlier though, because we’ve all decided not to believe in Long COVID, just as we spent decades refusing to believe in ME/CFS (chronic fatigue), which – again, I’m told – may be a related condition, or part of the same underlying mistake a body can make. I don’t know.
What I do know is that it’s hard to fight something you can’t see or even confidently name. I’ll happily outwill an enemy into submission, but this is an invisible beast that lives inside me now.
And it’s winning.
Other people can’t see it either, of course. I don’t let them. Or I didn’t let them, until it became impossible to act my way through it. Even friends trying to understand will offer quick denials: “Maybe it’s something you ate”; “Try a glucose drink”; “Anxiety?”; “Just keep going and it’ll get better”; “Well, we’ve all been tried at work lately, Alex.”
Maybe it’s the hallucinations, but beneath that bad advice I think I can hear what they’re really saying to me, and to themselves: this can’t be real, this can’t be real, this can’t be real, this can’t be real, this can’t be real….
Denial has been one of the most disappointing parts of the COVID pandemic, and one of the most frightening. When the world should’ve been pulling together, we had negligent leaders cheering a lethargic vaccine rollout (thanks ScoMo), idiots openly lying to their people about the severity of the disease (thanks Trump), and antivaxxers screaming in the streets because they refused to accept empirical reality. Many still do.
Look, we all missed house parties and coffee dates, but the street morgues should’ve given us pause.
Not being able to work has hit surprisingly hard. You think getting time off would be cause for relaxation, and initially it felt a bit like that. I was reminded of being a sniffly kid sent home from school with a sick certificate to watch Phil Donahue (God, I was old before my time), Trapdoor and SuperTed to my heart’s content.
But then….
Shouldn’t I be strong enough to hold onto my job? Am I letting others down? If I concentrate with all my internal reserves, surely I can get up to the carpark without stopping at several base camps along the way….
When talking about work, one colleague honed in on the real injustice: “We don’t have the excuse of being sick.” That was uplifting. I’d gladly swap places, if he was interested in collapsing in public on a bad day, or struggling to stroll around the block on a good one.
You can’t get angry. It’s hard for people to empathise with an experience that seems so sudden, so alien, and – still now, even to me – a bit made up.
All of it, of course, feeds back into one’s own doubts about what is happening. Some days I wake up and declare, “This is stupid! I can outthink this!”, only to end up foetal or fast asleep by midday. Other times I worry that ‘people are getting shitty’ and push myself to complete tasks that, really, someone else could pick up.
Student emails are especially difficult for me to ignore. I found myself working hard to help a student complete her resubmission in order to process her visa in time, while I was supposedly on sick leave. I don’t regret doing that, and I don’t pity myself, but I paid the price for my butt-stubbornness a few days later when I had to pull my car into a side street and curl up by the side of the road.
I’ll spare you the forensic details, but I will say it’s possible to be half-asleep and violently ill in the same moment. It’s also possible to be physically and emotionally shattered, while also being outside yourself and finding it bizarrely hilarious….
Well, you just had to pass out by a children’s playground, didn’t you, Alex?!
I’d witnessed a former teacher struggling with Long COVID, prior to my own condition, and his change in personality, while short-term, was marked enough to convince me that this disease is as crafty as it is shocking. I’m not a spiritual person, so I’ve never really bought into the idea that there’s a deeper part of ourselves removed from the meat and bone, but these changes cut to the core of a human being. They mess with one’s sense of an essential self. I’m not weak. I’m not lazy. Except, now, I am.
You definitely learn who your real friends are. Some have flooded me with concern; people I haven’t seen in years reaching out every day, calling from overseas or interstate, or coming down to meet me at the café opposite my apartment. Others have disappeared completely – the weather no longer so fair – perhaps unable to stomach the stark sickness of a friend they don’t quite recognise, or unwilling to concede that COVID isn’t as make-believe as they may wish it to be.
At the same time, strangers – including nurses, all of whom have been kind, many of whom have been funny – have been perhaps the most helpful. The specialists with their academic interest have been oddly comforting too, reassuring me in their lengthy letters to my GP that this is not only real, but chronic.
People at work who I didn’t know so well before have proven to be an enormous source of support, offering to do anything they can. Managers who should be the most annoyed at my unreliability have made it clear that they understand and want me to put my health first. It’s a curious quirk of the human condition that those who call themselves ‘empaths’ fade into the ether when shit gets real, and those who seem superficially aloof or stalwartly professional can provide the greater security.
The kindest stranger of all was the random guy who saw me from his window, lying on the roadside, and came charging up with a towel and a water bottle. Between my heaves – yes, yes, I promised to spare the details – I was at pains to assure him that I wasn’t drunk or high. He assured me in return. Sometimes, all you want is for someone to say ‘I see what’s happening to you. It’s not in your head.’
I offered to give the towel back. I don’t blame him for not wanting it.
My GP has been outstanding. She has forbidden me from going near my car, at least until we’ve run more tests, and she has given my partner – who is also outstanding, never to be taken for granted – an imaginary ‘red card’ as a way to stop me from talking myself back into overworking, or denying the obvious downhill slide I’m on.
My own nature keeps fighting back. This is sometimes a blessing, as surrendering completely doesn’t feel right either, but can slip into a curse. Until recently, I was still going to the gym, still planting palms, still playing down every new symptom… and thinking that if I ignore it, I’ve beaten it.
Perhaps more than any, the most confused people in my life are those who say, ‘Alex, how do you find the energy to write?’ From my point of view, that’s a crazy question.
Writing is who I am. As my body lets me down, the strongest weapon I still have is my ability to communicate. I do this partly to remind myself that I’m still me, partly because Trump is still out there and exposing his dishonesties has become a compulsion, partly because I’m hoping to connect with a wider world beyond the confines of my bedroom walls and… mostly because I’m running out of things I can still do well. Of course I’m writing.
In the context of Long COVID, those of us who know it for what it is, who carry it every day and feel its weight inside us, need to speak out – as clearly and firmly, even obnoxiously, as we can – to remind everyone else that it really does exist, and it can affect whomever it chooses. We are still in the early stages of this phenomenon and we’re blind enough without deliberately applying blinkers.
Photographer and long-term ME/CFS sufferer Whitney Dafoe has created a blog to raise awareness about these issues. I’m not, for a millisecond, likening my comparatively mild condition to what Whitney has endured over several debilitating years, but I am applauding his bravery in putting himself out there. Just as I applaud my editor, Chris Graham, who has his own post-COVID story. Just as I applaud my friend as she writes on the subject, and I applaud all who’ve come forward to put their hand up to speak the truth. I don’t mean ‘your truth’ or ‘my truth’ – spare me that limp expression – but actual, objective truth that can be measured in medical and scientific terms. The rejection of that truth is the embrace of ignorance.
Spreading the word that there is something real to discuss feels like a contribution worth making, even if I’m still unsure to what extent my own symptoms connect with this overarching narrative… but there’s that denial again, right? It’s a tic I can’t shake off. Damn my stubborn butt.
We have historical precedent for this. Our popular understanding of the Black Death may be that it was a single, sweeping event… but it was, in fact, a reoccurring disaster, cascading in waves across Europe. In addition to the lingering sickness, there was the economic upheaval.
The initial outbreak of COVID-19, likewise, disproportionately targeted those from low-income demographics made vulnerable physically, by lies and viral conspiracy theories, and socially, by a system that has long divided the population along class lines. The continued denial of this new threat – the hidden pandemic of Long COVID – poses a much greater challenge to us all, as it infects a global population who have once again embraced the myth that plagues rise and fade quickly. This is exactly the ignorant nonsense that Trump and others peddled during the infection’s early days.
It is a simple fact that pandemics, unlike what we see in the movies, do not have a neat three-act structure. They tend to stay long after we tell ourselves the credits have rolled.
Time will give us the final insight. Time and research. Governments the world over need to invest some funding in this area. If the language of science is distrusted, the language of medicine too opaque, the language of empathy holding little pragmatic value… then let’s try the language of capitalism: there will be a tangible economic impact if more and more of us are conclusively and irrefutably unable to work. Nobody wants to see the economy crash. Not even Trump, assuming he knows what the economy is (sorry, I had to get one solid dig in).
For me, the most important part of all this is staying attached to the world, if only remotely.
I may be shutting down, but I won’t be shutting up anytime soon.
Today is Remembrance Day — marking the 70th anniversary of the largest US nuclear test detonation, Castle Bravo, which took place over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on 1 March 1954.
As one Marshallese resident noted: “It’s not the middle of nowhere to those who call it home.”
When Castle Bravo was detonated over Bikini Atoll, the immediate radioactive fallout spread to Rongelap and Utrik atolls and beyond.
“The impacts of that test, and the 66 others which were carried out above ground and underwater in Bikini and Enewetak atolls between 1946 and 1958, left a legacy of devastating environmental and health consequences across the Marshall Islands,” said World Council of Churches (WCC) programme executive for human rights and disarmament Jennifer Philpot-Nissen.
“The UK and France followed the US and also began a programme of testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific, the final such test taking place as recently as 1996.”
Philpot-Nissen noted that the consequences of the testing across the Pacific had largely remained invisible and unaddressed.
“Very few people have received compensation or adequate assistance for the consequences they have suffered,” she said.
Advocated against nuclear weapons
The WCC has consistently advocated against nuclear weapons.
In 1950, the WCC executive committee declared that
“[t]he hydrogen bomb is the latest and most terrible step in the crescendo of warfare which has changed war from a fight between men and nations to a mass murder of human life.
Man’s rebellion against his Creator has reached such a point that, unless staved, it will bring self-destruction upon him.”
The WCC has continued to call for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons since that time, through its governing bodies, functional commissions, and member churches.
At the WCC 6th Assembly in Vancouver in 1983, Marshallese activist Darlene Keju made a speech during the Pacific Plenary, sharing that the radioactive fallout from the 67 nuclear tests was more widespread than the US had admitted, and spoke of the many unrecognised health issues in the Marshall Islands.
During a WCC visit in 2023, this speech was referred to as the moment in which the Marshallese found their voice to speak out about the continuing suffering in their communities due to the nuclear testing legacy.
Climate change link
Philpot-Nissen also noted the nexus with climate change and the environment.
“When the US ended the 12 years of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, they buried approximately 80,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste under a concrete dome on Runit island, Enewetak Atoll,” she said.
“In addition, 130 tons of soil from an irradiated Nevada testing site were also deposited in the dome.”
Scientists and environmental activists around the world are concerned that, due to rising sea levels, the dome is starting to crack, releasing its contents into the Pacific Ocean.
“In the Marshall Islands, the human-caused disasters on climate change and nuclear-testing converge and compound each other,” said Philpot-Nissen.
“While the Pacific islanders are faced with the remnants of a vast and sobering nuclear legacy — they have faced this with great resilience and dignity.
“The young people of the Pacific particularly are now leading the calls for an apology, for reparations, compensation, and for measures to be taken to address the damage which was done to their lands, their waters, and their people.”
Today is Remembrance Day — marking the 70th anniversary of the largest US nuclear test detonation, Castle Bravo, which took place over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on 1 March 1954.
As one Marshallese resident noted: “It’s not the middle of nowhere to those who call it home.”
When Castle Bravo was detonated over Bikini Atoll, the immediate radioactive fallout spread to Rongelap and Utrik atolls and beyond.
“The impacts of that test, and the 66 others which were carried out above ground and underwater in Bikini and Enewetak atolls between 1946 and 1958, left a legacy of devastating environmental and health consequences across the Marshall Islands,” said World Council of Churches (WCC) programme executive for human rights and disarmament Jennifer Philpot-Nissen.
“The UK and France followed the US and also began a programme of testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific, the final such test taking place as recently as 1996.”
Philpot-Nissen noted that the consequences of the testing across the Pacific had largely remained invisible and unaddressed.
“Very few people have received compensation or adequate assistance for the consequences they have suffered,” she said.
Advocated against nuclear weapons
The WCC has consistently advocated against nuclear weapons.
In 1950, the WCC executive committee declared that
“[t]he hydrogen bomb is the latest and most terrible step in the crescendo of warfare which has changed war from a fight between men and nations to a mass murder of human life.
Man’s rebellion against his Creator has reached such a point that, unless staved, it will bring self-destruction upon him.”
The WCC has continued to call for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons since that time, through its governing bodies, functional commissions, and member churches.
At the WCC 6th Assembly in Vancouver in 1983, Marshallese activist Darlene Keju made a speech during the Pacific Plenary, sharing that the radioactive fallout from the 67 nuclear tests was more widespread than the US had admitted, and spoke of the many unrecognised health issues in the Marshall Islands.
During a WCC visit in 2023, this speech was referred to as the moment in which the Marshallese found their voice to speak out about the continuing suffering in their communities due to the nuclear testing legacy.
Climate change link
Philpot-Nissen also noted the nexus with climate change and the environment.
“When the US ended the 12 years of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, they buried approximately 80,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste under a concrete dome on Runit island, Enewetak Atoll,” she said.
“In addition, 130 tons of soil from an irradiated Nevada testing site were also deposited in the dome.”
Scientists and environmental activists around the world are concerned that, due to rising sea levels, the dome is starting to crack, releasing its contents into the Pacific Ocean.
“In the Marshall Islands, the human-caused disasters on climate change and nuclear-testing converge and compound each other,” said Philpot-Nissen.
“While the Pacific islanders are faced with the remnants of a vast and sobering nuclear legacy — they have faced this with great resilience and dignity.
“The young people of the Pacific particularly are now leading the calls for an apology, for reparations, compensation, and for measures to be taken to address the damage which was done to their lands, their waters, and their people.”
There was no statement from Marcos Jr this year, but in a vlog posted on the anniversary of the 1986 People Power Revolution, he advised a student to be more discerning amid widespread disinformation.
Didn’t scholars say his family benefitted from that?
It is the second year that the EDSA People Power Revolution is being commemorated under the administration of President and dictator’s son Ferdinand Marcos Jr, and Malacañang appears unwilling to give it the time of day.
On Sunday, February 25, neither Marcos Jr nor the Palace had issued a statement recognising the anniversary of the uprising that kicked the elder Marcos and his family out of Malacañang in 1986.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr during his trip to Hawai’i in November 2023. Image: Rappler
This day is obviously awkward for the President. In the past, he described the aftermath of the 1986 EDSA uprising — including his family’s exile in Hawai’i — as among the darkest days of their lives.
But Marcos Jr at least made an effort last year to acknowledge the anniversary of the revolt, saying he was “one with the nation in remembering” the historic day.
“I once again offer my hand of reconciliation to those with different political persuasions to come together as one in forging a better society — one that will pursue progress and peace and a better life for all Filipinos,” he also said on this day in 2023.
Democracy advocates upset
This year, Marcos did not declare the anniversary of the uprising a holiday, upsetting democracy advocates who believe the move was meant to diminish the legacy of the People Power revolution.
There was, however, an official government commemoration this year, through the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, which, in its own words, held a “simple” ceremony on Sunday morning at the People Power monument.
“The EDSA People Power Revolution was a series of demonstrations from 22 to 25 February 1986. It was a civil resistance campaign against the regime of violence and electoral fraud,” the NHCP, which is the chair of the EDSA People Power Commission, posted on its Facebook page.
“The peaceful revolution led to the departure of former President Ferdinand Marcos ending 20 years of dictatorship and restoring democracy in the country.”
The Marcos Sr regime itself was considered among the darkest chapters in Philippine history. Human rights groups say 70,000 people were imprisoned, 34,000 people were tortured, and more than 3000 people were killed under the dictator’s rule.
Where are the Marcoses? While anti-Marcos groups were holding various events — and protests — across the Philippines to commemorate the brutal dictatorship years, many members of the political family had their own get-together.
On Instagram, First Lady Liza Araneta Marcos posted a group photo of the clan on the dinner table, with a caption that read, “Happy Sunday everyone.”
In the photo are her husband Marcos Jr, former first lady Imelda Marcos, the President’s sister Irene Marcos, and Ilocos Norte Governor Matthew Manotoc, the son of Senator Imee Marcos.
Image: Liza Araneta Marcos’ Instagram
Interestingly, the President posted a YouTube vlog on Sunday, reacting to various letters sent to him. In that video, he offered advice to a humanities student who expressed interest in politics and history.
“Your interest in history is very, very, very important, because we have much to learn from history,” he started.
“Problem is, now with the technology we have, mahirap talagang makatingin ano ang fake news, ano ang totoo (it’s really difficult to determine which is the truth and which is ‘fake news’). It’s up to you. Huwag kayong magbabasa isa lang bagay. Basahin ‘nyo lahat (Don’t read just one source. Read everything),” he added.
A series of investigative pieces from Rappler in 2019 documented how the Marcoses took advantage of social media to rehabilitate the family’s image over the years.
The Marcoses documentary. Video: Rappler
Fact checkers from Tsek.PH and Vera Files also found that Marcos Jr benefitted the most from election-related disinformation in the run-up to the 2022 presidential election, which he won via a landslide victory.
So isn’t that comment on history a bit rich coming from him?
While telling today’s Palestine solidarity rally in Auckland about creative “good news” humanitarian aid plans to help Palestinians amid the War on Gaza, New Zealand Kia Ora Gaza advocate and organiser Roger Fowler also condemned Israel’s genocidal conduct. He was interviewed by Anadolu News Agency after a Freedom Flotilla Coalition planning meeting in Istanbul with his views this week republished here.
By Faruk Hanedar in Istanbul
“Women, children, and families have no food. They are trying to drink water from puddles. People are eating grass.”
— Kia Ora Gaza advocate Roger Fowler
New Zealand activist Roger Fowler has condemned the Israeli regime’s actions in the Gaza Strip, saying “this is definitely genocide”.
“The Israeli regime has not hidden its intention to destroy or displace the Palestinian people, especially those in Gaza, from the beginning,” he said.
“They are committing a terrible act — killing tens of thousands of people, injuring more, and destroying a large part of this beautiful country.”
The death toll from the Israeli War on Gaza topped 29,000 this week – mostly women and children – and there were reports of deaths from starvation.
Fowler demanded action to halt the attacks and expressed hope about the potential effect of the international Freedom Flotilla — a grassroots organisation working to end the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza.
He noted large-scale protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza and emphasised efforts to pressure governments, including through weekly protests in New Zealand to unequivocally condemn Israel’s actions as unacceptable.
A Palestinian mother and family hug the dead body of their child who died in an Israeli attack in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on 18 February 2024. Image: Kia Ora Gaza
Long-standing mistreatment
He stressed that the “tragedy” had extended beyond recent months, highlighting the long-standing mistreatment endured by Palestinians — particularly those in Gaza — for the last 75 years.
Fowler pointed out the dire situation that Gazans faced — confined to a small territory with restricted access to essential resources including food, medicine, construction materials and necessities.
He noted his three previous trips to Gaza with land convoys, where he demonstrated solidarity and observed the dire circumstances faced by the population.
“Boycott is a very effective action,” said Fowler, underlining the significance of boycotts, isolation and sanctions, while stressing the necessity of enhancing and globalising initiatives to end the blockade.
“I believe that boycotting has a great impact on pressuring not only major companies to withdraw from Israel and end their support, but also on making the Israeli government and our own governments understand that they need to stop what they are doing.”
Fowler also criticised the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) “genocide decision” for being ineffective due to the arrogance of those governing Israel.
South Africa brought a genocide case against Israel to the ICJ in December and asked for emergency measures to end Palestinian bloodshed in Gaza, where nearly 30,000 people have been killed since October 7.
Anadolu journalist Faruk Hanedar talks with Kia Ora Gaza organiser Roger Fowler (left) after the recent Freedom Flotilla Coalition planning meeting in Istanbul. Image: Kia Ora Gaza/Anadolu
World Court fell short
The World Court ordered Israel last month to take “all measures within its power” to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza but fell short of ordering a ceasefire.
It also ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective” measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance in the Gaza Strip.
Fowler said all nations must persistently advocate and exert pressure for adherence to decisions by the UN court.
Fowler acknowledged efforts by UN personnel but he has concerns about their limited resources in Gaza, citing the only avenue for change is for people to pressure authorities to stop the genocide and ensure Israel is held accountable.
“It’s definitely tragic and heartbreaking. Women, children, and families have no food. They are trying to drink water from puddles. People are eating grass. This is a very desperate situation. No one is talking about the children. Thousands of people are under the rubble, including small babies and children,” he said.
Roger Fowler is a Mangere East community advocate, political activist for social justice in many issues, and an organiser of Kia Ora Gaza. This article was first published by Anadolu Agency and is republished with permission.
“Gaza is starving to death” . . . a banner in today’s Palestine solidarity rally in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report“Blood on your hands” . . . a protest banner condemning Israel and the US during a demonstration outside the US consulate in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau today. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
So much of the Israeli propaganda which is driving the massive assault on the Palestinians of Gaza has been unravelling quickly but this is not being reported to the public in Western countries such as New Zealand.
Political analyst Marwan Bishara analyses the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. Video: Al Jazeera
But despite the initial claims being widely reported by New Zealand media, we are not aware of any corrections, apologies or reporting of the truth to New Zealanders.
The New Zealand media has been as complicit as most of the media across the Western world in amplifying Israeli lies and racist propaganda while sidelining Palestinian viewpoints.
Protests this weekend
The protests this week continue to demand that our government:
Condemn the Israeli slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians;
No attack on Rafah;
Reinstate funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians;
Call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza;
Withdraw from the war on Yemen; and
Close the Israeli Embassy
“See no genocide” . . . a graphic condemning the US stance over Palestine and the ongoing support for the genocidal war on Gaza. Image: Visualising Palestine (cc)
Details of protest events across the country are on the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa Facebook event page.
John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).Republished with permission from The Daily Blog.
US blocks ceasefire again
Asia Pacific Report: The United States this week vetoed another United Nations Security Council draft resolution on Israel’s war on Gaza, blocking a demand for an immediate ceasefire.
This was the third US veto against humanitarian ceasefire resolutions in the UNSC over the war in Gaza. The United Kingdom abstained, but all other 13 countries — including the three other permanent members China, France and Russia — voted for it.
In introducing the resolution on Tuesday, Amar Bendjama, Algeria’s ambassador to the UN, said:
“This resolution is a stance for truth and humanity, standing against the advocates for murder and hatred. Voting against it implies an endorsement of the brutal violence and collective punishment inflicted upon them [the Palestinians].”
David Shearman – an Emeritus Professor of Medicine at Adelaide University and the co-author of many books relating to climate change – has obviously had a life well lived. But what future, he wonders, awaits those yet to come?
As I talk to a friend, a picture on the television screen flashes past my eyes and engulfs my mind. It’s the war in Ukraine, mothers and children escaping from bombs in concrete shelters. They hold each other in terror.
Instantly a locked chapter in my life springs open and I am forced to confront its contents. In a squat concrete air raid shelter a mother sits with her youngster, both in distress. Mum’s body is taut and shaking as I clutch her. We both whimper, incapable of shouts or screams. It is damp and dark, a German bomb thumps and shakes us. Mum moans. Was that our house? I weep in case it was.
Gaza, pictured in December 2023 after a sustained assault by the Israel Defence Force. (IMAGE: Médecins Sans Frontières)
I excuse myself from my friend and many hours later I find I am sitting on a park seat. I have been engulfed for hours in a morass of memories merging into today’s horrors; children scouring Ukraine and Palestine bombsites looking for their mothers; trailing with their mothers across deserts or escaping from disorder in Sudan and many other Middle-east and African countries.
Is this what we have worked for all our lives?
This is perhaps a journey that many older people now experience particularly because they can see and feel the pain of a damaged and war-torn world. Their frustration is that they haven’t time to help sustain what is left. Perhaps best to die and be buried in a sack to reduce consumption and the carbon dioxide from cremation.
Indeed, political philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy in his book Left in Dark Times: A Stand against the New Barbarism (2010) writes that humanity has always had a sense of a future that may be better, however bad the present. Since the beginning of history, there was always a time when no-one could suspect that time could end, except in metaphysical terms.
Bernard-Henri Levy, pictured in 2017. (IMAGE: Secretaría de Cultura, Flickr)
Not any more, it is impending with the inter-related fragmentation of international collectivism and cooperation linked with the impending climate and environmental crises.
After World War 2 our warlike species basked in decades of relative peace, increased living standards and less poverty. Doctors could see progress forever in the conquest of disease.
I ruminated on the flow of unimagined medical advances I had seen in my lifetime. The medical candle lit for me in my eleventh year. Even at this tender age I was caught in the post-war mood of let us build a new future.
I was inspired by the voice of UK Minister Nye Bevan who brought free health care to all. I was overwhelmed by the joy on the faces of ladies smiling to show their new teeth and then the pride of miners with their new metal hips.
This was a brave new world progressing to a happy future. The National Health Service was a happy place to work, only to deteriorate when Thatcher brought neoliberal policies into its management.
Paradise has been lost. Today as a retired doctor I can feel the economic and political threat to medical advances and to the health of future generations. Older people are distressed by lack of health care and dismissive attitudes even from Prime Minsters inferring during the Covid epidemic that older people should accept their fate and let younger people get on with their lives.
Democracies have failed to address the challenge of climate change and have succumbed to the power and influence of fossil fuel industries. I weep over the disease and deaths.
My thoughts flit to society’s gullibility in having their minds and frequently their health enslaved for the profit of the rich and powerful entrepreneurs, the manipulators of social media and darlings of the economic system.
Now in a disintegrating world, society is faced with Artificial Intelligence which is already in the hands of powerful and greedy men at the pinnacle of capitalism. The head of the IMF says it will affect 40 per cent of jobs and enhance productivity. My despairing mind asks where now will we find the truth and how do we avoid destruction by tyrants?
Renowned scientist James Lovelock, pictured in 2010. (IMAGE: NASA HQ PHOTO, Flickr)
James Lovelock (1919-2022), the visionary scientist created the Gaia hypothesis, which saw the earth as one integrated organism responsible for its own homeostasis. In his final book Novacene; the Coming of Age of Hyper-intelligence (2019) Lovelock explains how humanity must partner with artificial intelligence on climate change and the environment so our chance of survival might increase.
My ordeal is ending, it is evening time and I am still sitting in the park. Tree leaves rustling in the breeze allow me to wrestle my brain from the locked chapter of my past and the alarming future. I get up and wander to a sturdy and reassuring tree. I touch and lean on it. It calms me. Whether a week or a year is left to me, I must fight for this tree for as a doctor I am wedded to all life on Gaia.
As we grow older we accept the inevitability of death, but for some the likely death of Gaia is a much greater burden.
Alex Vickery-Howe may not be following his doctor’s orders, but he does have an invention for taking the stress out of the looming US electoral race and a world bursting with crazy conspiracy theories.
My GP warned me, recently, that I cannot outthink or outwill my current illness brought on by Long COVID. Obviously, my internal response was ‘Oh, you just watch me!’, but, on reflection, it was an excellent point articulately made. My GP knows me well and knows I will hide symptoms, put on a brave face at work and in public, and even play down the situation when interacting with specialists. This is all quite absurd and stupid, of course, but stupidity is the subject of this article so I may as well start with my own.
Colleagues have noticed I’ve kept writing, not seeing me fall asleep for two or more hours in the middle of the day immediately after completing a draft. Friends have said I seem more alert via email, not realising I struggle to recall their names through the fog. Last week at work a short walk around the lake saw me smiling happily while struggling to breathe. I’m not painting myself as a hero; I’m a stubborn moron. On some level, I really do think my body will submit to my will. My body finds that amusing.
My GP has given my partner a ‘red card’. It’s not a literal card – although some wrapping paper with tigers printed on it has become its symbolic representation. The point is that my partner has the power to say ‘Stop! Now!’ and wave that authority in my face. It doesn’t always work.
When I’m rational, I agree with her… the problem is that I’m so often irrational, and dismissive, and agitated, taking on multiple tasks, covering other people’s jobs, drafting plays and novels that may never see the light of day, planting palms that are slowly dying on my balcony, attending the gym (look, I’m not doing that very well, but attendance has to count for something), demanding accountability from public institutions, slamming shock jocks and roasting politicians, stressing about neo-Nazis and those who enable them, and insisting that I will solve all the world’s ills (or complain about them in digital ink) before collapsing to watch Cush Jumbo and Peter Capaldi kick actorly ass in Criminal Record. Let’s just pause briefly to do that right now.
A red card is necessary. It’s a way to make me pause at my most stubborn and stupid. And it’s given me an idea… I think we all need to consider incorporating a stupidity card into our daily routine.
Sometimes a stupidity card is useful for ourselves – I’m sure many people reading this have bigger stressors in their lives than my own megalomaniacal, self-inflicted issues – but often it will come in handy to stop others in their tracks: ‘Enough! I’m playing the stupidity card!’
That’s right. I’m still not letting it go. This is some stupid shit. It’s also wimpy shit.
They’re scared of Taylor. She hasn’t even endorsed the president. In a free country, she of course has the right to endorse whoever she likes, whenever she likes, and those who claim to believe in freedom should support and applaud her for doing so. But they’re too scared to remain ideologically consistent.
Taylor is popular. Her popularity threatens them. Recently, Trump claimed he was more popular... which is a little like Ted Nugent trying to energise the youth vote, or Elon Musk claiming his success is based on charm.
To be clear, disengaging from conspiracy theories doesn’t mean disengaging from real socio-economic problems. The stupidity card is handy to dissuade people from talking about paedophilia in random restaurants or Pentagon-recruited popstars, or lizard people in Buckingham Palace, or windmills causing cancer, or Democrats being responsible for an anti-Democrat riot.
It’s not, however, designed to avoid difficult conversations with a class of people who have been systemically neglected, gaslit by their leaders – Republican and Democrat alike – and raised to believe in an American dream that was never intended for them.
I’d love to see the world talking less about conspiracies, hurt feelings, token gestures, ‘winning’ and settling scores, and more about education, health, welfare, environmental protections and a liveable wage for all. We need to stop the stupid in order to engage with the genuine.
It’s staggering to me that someone can bemoan ‘godlessness’ and yet blindly follow a man who is both an insurrectionist and a rapist… yes, I do know the difference between a civil trial and a criminal trial, but a jury of your peers doesn’t swipe $5 million from your bank account if you’re innocent… and that’s before we get to all the other accusations.
It’s equally staggering to hear these Trump supporters claim: ‘You take the guns, you take the people… it has been proven in Australia!’
Um… no, it hasn’t, you sad dingus. Do you know anything about other countries?
Trump has learned, from being a shonky businessman, that if you lie over and over again people will believe you. Goebbels knew the same thing. Unsurprisingly, Trump is lying right now, pretending to care about defending the border while his minions block bipartisan legislation to address the issue. For a nation that has been a global leader – not the global leader, but a global leader – for so long to fall into such a state of smug confusion is sobering to watch.
Then again, psychologists may have the answer: following the legacy of Ronald Reagan, the American ‘value’ system of avarice and competition has replaced the more regular human virtues of kindness, empathy and even objective reality. An obsession with success and failure has come to supersede compassion and dominate an increasingly facile political discourse.
This is why the US Supreme Court is squirming to find a way for this insurrectionist – I’ve said it twice now, sue me Donnie, it’ll be fun – to get away with his crimes. Some brainwashed senators are challenging the ‘validity’ of the court system itself, while unpatriotic governors are launching little coups of their own. We are all witness to the complete failure of the American experiment.
George Carlin – proving, conclusively, that he was indeed a time traveller – accurately predicted the breakdown of civil society in America by pointing to the form fascism would take. Carlin visualised an America that would punch down on women and immigrants, that would foster ‘anger and rage’, that would value ‘property over people’, and ultimately ‘sacrifice the beauty of the individual for the sake of the group’. While this last point he made could be, to an extent, a valid criticism of the far-left as well, I’m with Carlin when he says, ‘I land to the left of that line’.
The far-right is suppressing freedom and clouding truth. It’s the politics of crazed conspiracy garbage. This, again, is why we need a stupidity card.
Pivoting to another George, the dapper George Conway (much more relaxed without Kellyanne’s falsehoods festering under his roof) has some very sharp thoughts on what Trump will do next and he is leading the call to brand the aspiring dictator the existential risk to American democracy he clearly is.
“Psychologically,” Conway says, “he’s never going to support somebody who beats him.” This is an explosive recipe for civil unrest.
Trump’s narcissistic personality traits – I do think ‘narcissism’ is too liberally and inexpertly thrown around as an armchair diagnoses, but, in this case, the shiny combover fits – are compounded by his cognitive decline. It’s a little small, a little easy, to attack Trump for his advanced years, just as the many recent attacks against Biden smack of ageism. The difference between them – and forgive me for repeating this point from a few weeks ago because I’m no spring chicken myself – is that one struggles nervously in the moment while the other, quite genuinely, has no idea when he’s getting simple things incredibly wrong.
Forgetting to pay a bill is very different to not knowing you ever had one. Take, for example, this footage of Trump having zero comprehension of his legal troubles. Is this a perfect poker face or the expression of a man lost in the soup of his own synapses? (Incidentally, contrary to his ramblings, his team didn’t win ‘largely in the court of appeals’ – although I’m not confident that he actually knows that.)
Just kidding, Marjorie Taylor Greene failing to read at a basic level demonstrates that oily fascists will always ooze into a new low. Greene has no place in political office.
It has, regrettably, become unfashionable – perhaps even ‘cruel’ – to assert that skills and credentials are important for certain roles. In our haste to avoid elitism, we have enabled a cultural environment where diligence and hard work have fallen a distant second place to popularism.
This isn’t the same as the breakdown of values that Carlin described, wherein right-wing corporate greed has come to replace the public good, but is instead the result of a bipartisan reluctance to admit that qualifications are earned and participation trophies are deceitful.
Simply put, nobody is a monster for demanding that lawyers know the law, doctors know their way around the human body, and senators know how to read.
This. Is. Why. We. Need. A. Stupidity. Card.
Returning to Conway, the enduring delusion among many Americans is that, to quote his friend David Gergen, “America is the strongest and most respected nation on earth.” This is wishful thinking in 2024; however, if America falls, so falls her allies and that is why Australia needs to watch this situation. I mean, we somehow elected ScoMo. It’s not like we’re prioritising reason among our own political candidates.
And that is why we need to stop being nice, stop being polite, stop pretending that all points of view are equally cogent and equally valid….
Stop listening patiently to friends still stuck on the Trump Train….
Stop calling the Democrats ‘snowflakes’ while Trump dissolves into a blizzard of salty grievances, somehow senile and childish all at once….
Stop going along with dumb conversations because it takes too long to unpack the conspiracy jargon that has hollowed out credulous minds….
Whoever designed the humble potato peeler was not, themselves, humble, posits Glenn Scott. Cruel and incompetent? Sure, but humble? No.
It’s salmon night in the Jolly-Scott household. Everyone has their specialty. My “grew up in a country pub/short order chef by 13” wife Jo is (naturally), in charge of the fish. My daughter Zana does an excellent broccoli bake and Dad is master of the mash. And let’s just say my 14-year-old son Ji is fully capable of any of these tasks should the need ever arise….
So I’m peeling the potatoes. And having the same kitchen conversation I have every time I use this peeler.
Jesus. Where did we even get this? It’s fucking useless. Look, see these bits that stick out? They just hack into anything larger than a godamn grape! Oh, for fuck’s sake. This is going to take forever. You guys sure you won’t eat it with the skins on? Come on, widen your palate, they say all the good stuff is in the skins. (Who says, Dad?) You know, “they”, experts, them. Oh fuck it, I cut myself. Do you think the imbecile who designed this piece of shit actually used it to, you know, see if it fucking fulfilled its major, intended function? They had one job. What do these people even learn in design school?
I’ve often wondered this. Actually, I wonder this several times a day. Every day. Like when I did the laundry. I made the understandable error recently of trying a new laundry detergent. What I failed to notice until it came time to pour the liquid was that the bottle was not actually designed with this consideration. No handle, no indents, no clever shaping. Just a smooth, kinda flat style bottle that is fucking impossible to grip and pour with one hand.
It required a ridiculous amount of concentration and two hands just to pour the bloody liquid into the machine.
THEY HAD ONE JOB.
I always imagine that you turn up to design school and day one, lesson, is: Spout Design 101.
You know, something simple. Basic. Easy. Something impossible to stuff up.
Apparently not.
We own a number of variously sized containers with a spout. At least half of these take considerable trial and error to figure out the optimum height, tilt angle and speed of pour to successfully operate without disaster, or at least a bit of a mess and lot of swearing.
Why is this still happening? They’ve literally had thousands of years to get this one right. There’s probably a hieroglyphic design for the perfect spout on a wall of the great pyramids for fuck sake. We should get the perfect spout, every time, every time. Shouldn’t we…?
Anyway, despite being besieged by bad design, I managed to get the potatoes peeled and mash made. Dad makes a pretty damn good mashed potato even if he does say so himself.
The secret is the butter. Lots of butter. And spending the necessary time with the mashing but that’s another piece. I mutter as usual about “buying a peeler that actually peels” next time I’m “at the shops” as I throw the useless thing back in the draw.
Almost a third of the world’s population now lives in countries with closed civic space. This is the highest percentage since 2018, when CIVICUS began systematically tracking civic space conditions around the world. This startling decline – from 26 per cent living in closed countries in 2018 to 30.6 per cent today – points to a major civic space crisis that requires immediate, global efforts to reverse. This year we also recorded the lowest percentage of humanity living in open countries, where civic space is both free and protected. Today, just two per cent of the world’s population enjoys the freedom to associate, demonstrate and express dissent without significant constraints, down from almost four per cent just five years ago.
Since the previous edition of this report, which covered 2022, civic space ratings have changed for 12 countries over the last year, worsening in seven countries and improving in five.
The latest CIVICUS Monitor country ratings update in December 2023 indicates that civil society faces an increasingly hostile environment. There are now 28 countries or territories with closed civic space, 50 with repressed civic space and 40 with obstructed civic space, meaning that 118 of 198 countries and territories are experiencing severe restrictions in fundamental freedoms. In comparison, 43 countries have narrowed civic space and just 37 have an open rating.
The severity of the civic space deterioration is exemplified by the number of countries moving to the repressed or closed category. Of the seven countries being downgraded, five moved to the two worst categories. Bangladesh and Venezuela are now rated as closed and Kyrgyzstan, Senegal and Sri Lanka are downgraded to the repressed rating as conditions for civil society continue to worsen.
Europe continues to add to the list of downgraded countries, with Bosnia and Herzegovina now placed in the obstructed category and Germany moving from an open to a narrowed rating. Over the past six years, 12 European countries have seen their ratings downgraded due to deteriorating civic space conditions.
Five countries have upgraded ratings in 2023, although, as in previous years, the situation for civil society in these countries continues to be challenging. Libya moved from the closed to the repressed category. Benin, Lesotho and Madagascar have moved from the repressed to the obstructed category. Notably, Timor-Leste has joined the narrowed category. Regional sections describe the conditions that led to ratings changes.
A study into the social response of Māori during the COVID-19 pandemic has found the interconnectedness for which Indigenous communities are renowned could be key to developing greater and more effective public health policies.
The study, conducted jointly by Charles Darwin University (CDU) and Auckland University of Technology, focused on how members of a remote hapū (sub-tribe) from Ngāti Kahungunu, a tribe along the east coast of Aotearoa’s North Island, maintained connectedness during and after COVID-19.
In particular, it highlighted how Māori overcame issues raised by COVID-19 such as the digital divide, cultural isolation and mental health and distress, while also showcasing the positive impacts of the pandemic including a revival of traditional practices, re-engaging younger generations and healing the environment.
Lead author and CDU Associate Professor of Social Work Dianne Wepa said a standout theme of the review and interviews was the resilience and adaptability showed by Māori during the pandemic, particularly when faced with problems access to digital technology and cultural isolation.
“Barriers such as remoteness, digital literacy and financial distress were identified but were overcome by connectedness to whānau (family) support,” Associate Professor Wepa said.
“We noted that as Māori communities viewed themselves from a holistic perspective, then during times of crisis, a holistic approach was required to meet their health and wellbeing needs to prevent cultural isolation.
“Māori perceptions of cultural isolation were mitigated through maintaining connections with each other rather than a physical location or a physical dwelling.”
Associate Professor Dianne Wepa said by assessing the responses of Māori during the pandemic, it could create inform effective health messaging and policies which could result in positive outcomes.
“Historically, global pandemics have proven to have a greater effect on Indigenous peoples,” Associate Professor Wepa said.
“COVID-19 brings to the forefront the historical injustices which continue to effect Indigenous health and wellbeing, resulting in inequities and poorer health outcomes. Indigenous-led knowledge and interventions provide relevance and meaning to the importance of Māori health and wellbeing.
“This study has examined the importance of obtaining a Māori voice as an effective approach for developing the most effective methodological approach for improving internal resources and solutions to improve Māori health and wellbeing.”
Associate Professor Wepa is seeking funding to develop a proof-of-concept digital tool that is not reliant on internet connectivity during natural disasters such as cyclones or extreme weather events.
Ed’s Desk is an occasional column in New Matilda where we let you in on an industry secret… we sub-edit a story in the mainstream press that has already been published, but probably shouldn’t have been. This edition, we look at a Sky News super scoop about a celebrity who had a problem with her hair.
[HEADLINE] Jennifer Lopez suffers hair malfunction, rips out her extension mid ‘Saturday Night Live’ performance
[BYLINE] By Emily Selleck
[INTRO] Jennifer Lopez has appeared to have an on-air mishap with a hair extension during a high-energy dance routine on ‘Saturday Night Live’.
[ED’S DESK] Hahaha, good one Emily! This may only be Sky News, but even we wouldn’t publish a story about a celebrity and her hair extension! But seriously… I’m pretty busy. If you have material to sub, please send it through.
[COPY] The show must go on. Jennifer Lopez appeared to suffer an on-air mishap when she was seen yanking a hair extension from her head during a performance on “Saturday Night Live.” The songstress, 54, was singing her new song “Can’t Get Enough” with Latto and REDMAN, who joined her on stage.
Oh shit… you’re serious. You’ve actually filed a story about a singer removing a hair extension during a live television performance…? And it’s nearly 500 words long. How ironic that I have no words.
Amid the high-energy choreography, one of her extensions seemingly came loose and she pulled it out on live TV. In true Lopez fashion, she didn’t miss a beat and continued performing in Studio 8H as if nothing had happened.
Emily… have you got nothing to do? Because if you need something to do, I can give you something to do? I need a fucking coffee for a start? How about a back scratch? And I need someone to move my car before the brown bombers ticket it again? I know you’ve only got a $60,000 communications degree under your belt, but with focus and determination, I reckon you can move my Datsun 180B 100 metres up the road without denting it. Let’s do this Emily!
“What a performer, shake it off and keep on! 👏👏” one fan wrote on social media. Another chimed in, “The show must go on. JLO ate up that performance 🔥.”
Oh ffs… Emily, you’re four sentences in, and you’ve already run out of things to write about. So you’ve gone for ‘audience reaction’ on social media. That really should have been a HUGE red flag to you when you were weighing up whether or not this actually was a story. Hint: it’s not.
The “Hustlers” actress cut a cool figure in a cropped white button-down, a cropped black jacket and matching black pants with cutouts.
Oh sweet Jesus… you’re commenting on what she was wearing by the fifth paragraph? The fucking story includes a video of the ‘incident’ – people can see what she’s fucking wearing. They don’t need a half-arsed description from a 20-something-year-old who uses ‘emoticons’ as part of the ‘word thingies’ that make up her ‘journamalism’. How about a comment from producers? Or some more audience reaction? Maybe phone a C-list celebrity, someone who was on Big Brother or The Apprentice or MAFS or who gives a fuck, and see if they’ll self-harm on camera?
The Feb. 3 episode was hosted by “The Bear” actress, Ayo Edebiri, who came under fire after a resurfaced clip showed her claiming that Lopez doesn’t know how to sing. During a 2020 appearance on the “Scam Goddess” podcast, the now-28-year-old joked that the Grammy nominee’s career was “one long scam.”
Right. Emily… we’re at the point of ‘disciplinary action’ now. I may only be a sub-editor, but I can still get you sacked. Bringing up an entirely unrelated incident that occurred four years ago doesn’t even qualify as ‘padding out your copy’. It just reads like you have dementia. Please delete.
“She thinks she’s on multiple tracks, but it’s not her,” Edebiri claimed at the time. “I think she thinks that she’s still good even though she’s not singing for most of these songs.”
Yeah… a direct quote that’s four years old isn’t going to save you either. Given this is a ‘news channel’, maybe we should try and secure comment that wasn’t first published several years before the Biden presidency started?
The Emmy winner also admitted that she was “fascinated” with the “On the Floor” chart topper’s career and “read up on” theories that she didn’t actually sing all of her music. “A lot of the write-ups of the songs will be like, ‘J. Lo didn’t have time to make it to the studio,’ like, ‘J. Lo was busy,’” she claimed. “It’s like, ‘Doing what?’ Not singing, obviously!”
Are we paying you by the word, Emily? Is that why you’re stretching this fucking train wreck out? Also… these quotes actually happened this week, so maybe run them before the quotes which happened in the previous decade?
Nevertheless, Edebiri addressed the controversy during a sketch. “It’s wrong to leave mean comments or post comments just for clout or run your mouth on a podcast and you don’t consider the impact because you’re 24 and stupid,” she said. “But I think I speak for everyone when I say from now on, we’re going to be a lot more thoughtful about what we post online.”
Oh fuck me… there’s a ‘moral’ to the story? Thanks Emily… honestly, what would we do without Generation Z?
Later in the show, Lopez sang the title track from her new album “This Is Me… Now,” while rocking a pink floral, floor-length gown with a daring split. Her ninth studio album is set to be released on Feb. 16, and is a sequel to her 2002 album, “This Is Me… Then,” which was inspired by her now-husband, Ben Affleck.
Ah well done, you got Ben Affleck’s name in there as well. That should improve the clusterfuck that is the SEO on this story. Seriously Emily, is this why you got into journalism? Please come and see me before you leave the office this evening. – Ed.
AFP on 25 January, 2024 reported that UN experts urge Bangladesh to carry out major human rights reforms to reverse “repressive trends” following controversial elections that were boycotted by the opposition.
Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was sworn in for a fifth term on January 11. Her ruling Awami League party won nearly three-quarters of elected seats in parliament, with allied parties and friendly independent candidates making up nearly all the remainder.
Hasina has presided over breakneck economic growth in a country once beset by grinding poverty, but her government has been accused of rampant human rights abuses and a ruthless crackdown on dissent.
The UN experts said they were “alarmed” at reports of “widespread attacks, harassment and intimidation of civil society, human rights defenders, journalists and political activists, which marred the recent elections”. See also my earlier posts on Bangladesh: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/bangladesh/.
The experts called on the Government to:
Immediately and unconditionally release all civil society and political activists detained without charge or on charges inconsistent with international human rights law; and ensure fair public trials in accordance with international human rights standards for those charged with criminal offences.
Institute urgent and substantial reforms to guarantee the integrity and independence of the judicial system.
Guarantee the free and unobstructed exercise of freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly, refrain from imposing undue restrictions on protests and political rallies, and ensure effective accountability for serious violations of these fundamental freedoms.
Respect the independence, freedom, diversity, and pluralism of the media, and ensure the safety of journalists from threats, physical and online violence, or judicial harassment and criminal prosecution for investigative and critical reporting.
Transparency International says the latest Corruption Perception Index shows another year of “little to no meaningful progress” towards curbing corruption in the Asia-Pacific region.
Transparency International has released its 2023 report, based on a points system, and Denmark, Finland and New Zealand top the list.
Other than New Zealand and Australia, Fiji is the highest-ranked Pacific country, coming in 53rd.
Vanuatu is 61st (48 points) and Solomon Islands 70th (43 points).
Then it is a drop to Papua New Guinea in 133rd with 29 points.
Transparency International said the Asia-Pacific region showed long-term stagnation, although some countries historically at the top were backsliding.
‘Steady influx of . . . incentives’
“While there’s a steady influx of economic, military or financial incentives to support development and climate goals, many Pacific countries have weak governance systems — which some donors overlook, exposing these substantial investments to high risk of corruption,” the organisation reported.
Transparency International said a 2020 survey in Asia showed that nearly one in seven people had been offered bribes in exchange for votes in a national, regional or local election in the past five years.
Meanwhile, in the Pacific region in 2021, approximately a quarter of respondents reported being offered a bribe for their votes.
“These findings show the serious implications for the ability of elections to bring in governments that can be trusted to control and curb corruption effectively.”
But the organisation said at the regional level, Pacific leaders continued to demonstrate some commitment to the fight against corruption, with the gradual implementation of the Teieniwa Vision — a set of collective anti-corruption priorities.
These were endorsed by the Pacific Islands Forum leaders in 2021.
“Progress has been slow and there has been limited involvement of regional civil society organisations around this initiative.
“ASEAN leaders should also continue to find common mechanisms to review their anti-corruption commitments under the ASEAN Political-Security Community Blueprint 2025, a ten-year plan aimed at instilling a culture of integrity and anti-corruption in the region.”
They should also continue strengthening their national and regional anti-corruption frameworks, and increasing joint efforts to address grand corruption, Transparency International said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The biggest problem with Artificial Intelligence will be the way we use it, writes Dr Richard Hil.
We’ve long been in a “mirror world” of hyper-reality, in which those old stalwarts of truth and reason have been mired in an algorithmic quagmire.
This began well before the onset of generative AI. The internet, once quaintly viewed as an ‘information highway’, became the hothouse repository of data-harvesting, mass surveillance and targeted consumerism. It has also encouraged violent, anonymised nativism and racialized tribalism through which junk theories and counter factualism have proliferated.
The lines between the public and private have been eviscerated. Routinely, as we gaze at our screens, Big Tech stares right back, all the time absorbing, assimilating, targeting. There’s really no escape, other than total abstinence on a remote island.
Over time, we’ve become entangled in a spider’s web. Everyone has been granted a digital voice, with the shrillest gaining traction among the lonely and isolated, the angry and disaffected. Appeals to reason and rationality are swept aside, dumped in the dustbin of privileged, white-masculinist discourse. Truth has been relativised to the point of oblivion. Fake news, alternative facts, bogus ideas and straw men have taken care of the rest.
With AI, the waters are even cloudier. We’re at the point where its generative capabilities can create ghost-like replicas and digitised avatars whose bearing and speech resemble the real thing. We can hardly tell the difference. The medium might be the message, but AI’s endless reproductive troves should worry us all. It is parasitic, feeding off what it ingests while offering us a coke-line to hyperactivity and infinite, profit-generating possibilities.
The latter have been celebrated but the full consequences of AI are yet to reveal themselves.
Like the Internet, AI promises much but delivers wild, unaccountable spaces, mixing personas and messaging to suit particular political and commercial agendas. Sure, it has its many positive uses – across a range of fields – but again, it comes with many dark sides.
The mirror world of which Namoi Klein speaks in Doppelganger, dedicates itself, among other things, to reworking seemingly progressive ideas while repackaging them for political advantage. This appropriation began in earnest with the Tea Party back in 2009, but has its origins further back in the darkest reaches of the totalitarian state. Thus, it was possible (as it is now) to speak of the ‘will of the people’ while repressing them, or to laud peace while prosecuting war.
The Tea Party spoke of a ‘people’s movement’, ‘freedom’ and the excesses of ‘big government’, while feeding far-right libertarian interests, just as Trump and the Republican insurgents now speak of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ while seeking to quell oppositional voices.
In classic Orwellian doublespeak, words like ‘the people’, freedom and democracy are deployed to signify unifying intentions but are in fact, as Naomi Klein notes, “the uncanny twin of what we once knew”.
The doppelganger appropriation of progressive discourse works because it resonates with a deep desire for justice. It sounds good. Democratic. Aspirational. Inclusive – to a point. Yet fused with a sense of victimhood and the identification of enemies – elites, the deep state, the mainstream media, illegal migrants, opportunistic refugees – these dark forces, say their opponents, can only be conquered through one ideology and one anointed leader.
Causative complexity in this schema is displaced by simple Hollywood-standard binaries of good and evil, destructive enemies and people just like us. Bristling with evangelical zeal, such imagined polarities morph easily, as Steve Bannon’s historical fictions attest, into grand civilizational struggles over which there can and must be, only one righteous outcome.
For Klein, the algorithmic world is about replacing the authentic with the synthetic. It is a “forgery of life” which ends up “destabilising our shared worlds”. We should seek to understand these forces “to get to firmer ground”, Klein argues. This invites us to understand, as best we can, how modern technologies work, whose interests they serve, and the role they play in shaping the hegemonic order.
It should also compel us, as Noam Chomsky urges in his online critical thinking masterclass, to question how and why we engage with these technologies.
At times, I’ve been shocked how unthinkingly many of my seemingly progressive friends use generative AI, most often to fashion text. I’ve seen it used to dream up titles for newspaper columns and conferences. One friend told me how he’d used AI to ‘write’ an article for a local newspaper. When I opined that, “well, you didn’t write it”, he appeared more bemused than outraged.
“Why wouldn’t I use it?”, he inquired.
What ensued was a lengthy discussion about the ethics of using AI. It’s important we have these sorts of discussions.
While the AI genie is well and truly out of the bottle, regulation has yet to catch up. But it may not. The more pressing concern is how do each of us engage with this tantalising technology and when and where to draw lines.
There’s nothing benign about AI. Nothing. Social media has taught us of the many problems with unleashing technologies over which we have little control. For all its claimed advances, social media has also contributed to more loneliness and isolation (despite claims of hyper-connectivity), diminished social skills (including empathy), and contributed to more anxiety and depression, mainly among young people.
The full gamut of social consequences of AI are yet to reveal themselves, but I am intrigued, for example, about how and why it’s being used to counsel young people, just as I am concerned about the net social effects of bots ‘caring’ for the aged or becoming programmed, supine ‘partners’.
What are the real motivations behind such things? What do they say about our society more generally? Outsourcing caring functions to machines and relegating intellectual capital to generative AI may appear quick, easy and ‘cost effective’ (it’s why AI is the leading investment ‘theme’ among Big Tech companies), but the real cost may be the loss of key aspects of our humanity.
Surely in a society riven with alienation and loneliness that’s too much of a price to pay? And what will happen to critical, independent thinking, creativity and the wild, ‘wondaful world of the human imaginary’?
Big Tech will tell you that this is Luddite, doomster chatter, but with an eye on spectacular profits they would say that, wouldn’t they? What perhaps should worry us most is how AI is being used not simply for commercial purposes – the profits of Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Nvidia and other companies have soared of late – but how it serves to consolidate power in the hands of certain elites.
The latter do not want us to think too much about such things. That’s why simple acquiescence to this technology is so dangerous. It enables the powerful to remain so.
The high-stress nature of working in politics is increasingly taking a toll on staff and politicians. But an additional threat to the personal wellbeing and safety of politicians resides outside Parliament, and the threat is ubiquitous: online violence against women MPs.
Since her election in 2017, Green Party MP Golriz Ghahraman has been subject to persistent online violence.
Ghahraman’s resignation following allegations of shoplifting exposes the toll sustained online violence can have on a person’s mental health.
it is clear to me that my mental health is being badly affected by the stresses relating to my work
and
the best thing for my mental health is to resign as a Member of Parliament.
Ghahraman is not alone in receiving torrents of online abuse. Many other New Zealand women MPs have also been targeted, including former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson, National MP Nicola Willis and Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer.
Words can not only hurt, but they can seriously endanger a person’s wellbeing.
Online violence against women MPs, particularly against women of colour, is a concerning global trend. In an Australian study, women MPs were found to be disproportionately targeted by public threats, particularly facing higher rates of online threats involving sexual violence and racist remarks.
Male politicians are also subject to online violence. But when directed at women the violence frequently exhibits a misogynistic character, encompassing derogatory gender-specific language and menacing sexualised threats, constituting gender-based violence.
Golriz Ghahraman’s exit from politics shows the toll of online bullying on female MPs
— The Conversation – Australia + New Zealand (@ConversationEDU) January 19, 2024
Our legal framework is not enough
New Zealand’s current legal framework is not well equipped to respond to the kind of online violence experienced by women MPs like Ghahraman.
The Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 is designed to address online harassment by a single known perpetrator. But the most distressing kind of abuse comes from the sheer number of violent commentators, most of whom are unknown to the victim or intentionally anonymous.
This includes “mob style” attacks, where large numbers of perpetrators coordinate efforts to harass, threaten, or intimidate their target.
Without legal recourse, women MPs have two options — tolerate the torrent of abuse, or resign. Both of these options endanger representative democracy.
Putting up with abuse may mean serious impacts on mental health and personal safety. It may also have a chilling effect on what topics women MPs choose to speak about publicly. Resigning means losing important representation of diverse perspectives, especially from minorities.
Having to tolerate the abuse is a breach of the right to be free from gender-based violence. Being forced to resign because of it also breaches women’s rights to participate in politics. Therefore, the government has duties under international human rights law to prevent, respond and redress online violence against women.
“More than 70 national elections are scheduled for 2024. But one group is likely to be significantly under-represented: women. A major reason is the disproportionate amount of abuse female politicians and candidates receive online.”https://t.co/SuPn36zLb4
Steps the government can take United Nations human rights bodies provide some guidance for measures the government could implement to fulfil their obligations and safeguard women’s human rights online.
As one of the drivers of online violence against women MPs is prevailing patriarchal attitudes, the government’s first step should be to correctly label the behaviour: gender-based violence.
Calling online harassment “trolling” or “cyberbullying” downplays the harm and risks normalising the behaviour. “Gender-based violence” reflects the systemic nature of the abuse.
Secondly, the government should urgently review the Harmful Digital Communication Act. The legislation is now nine years old and should be updated to reflect the harmful online behaviour of the 2020s, such as targeted mob-style attacks.
New Zealand is also now out of step with other countries. Australia, the UK and the European Union have all recently strengthened their laws to tackle harmful online content.
These new laws focus on holding big tech companies accountable and encourage cooperation between the government, online platforms and civil society. Greater collaboration, alongside enforcement mechanisms, is essential to address systemic issues like gender-based violence.
Thirdly, given the increasing scale of online violence, the government should ensure adequate resourcing for police to investigate serious incidents. Resources should also be made available for social media moderation among all MPs and training in online safety.
More than ever, words have the power to break people and democracies. It is now the urgent task of the government to fulfil its legal obligations toward women MPs.
Fiji human rights activists have paid tribute in a Suva vigil this week to the more than 100 journalists — most of them Palestinian — killed in Israel’s War on Gaza.
The NGO Coalition on Human Rights (NGOCHR) staged a #ThursdaysInBlack vigil to remember the dead journalists, but only one local Fiji reporter turned up (from The Fiji Times).
The coalition had invited local journalists to attend and share their views. However, according to coalition coordinator Shamima Ali (of the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre), Fiji media is reluctant to engage with the global crisis over the war.
“Within the media outlets, we have Zionists themselves, so there is reluctance to report (on the Gaza conflict),” she said.
In Australia and New Zealand, there is an ongoing controversy over some journalists and editors having been on junkets to Israel and then attempting to “silence” fair and balanced reporting on the war enabling a Palestinian voice.
Part of the Fiji vigil featured Australian journalist Alex McKinnon, who shared insights into his life as a reporter covering the conflict and the censorship involved in silencing the Palestinian voice.
Heavy death toll
The coalition said more than 100 journalists, videographers and media workers had been killed in Gaza since the current war broke out last October 7, adding more journalists had been killed in three months of Israel’s War on Gaza than in all of World War Two (69) or the Vietnam War (63).
New investigations on U.S. and UK media bias have exposed chilling double standards by Western media when it comes to reporting on killings of Israelis compared to killings of Palestinians in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/uQ0I7cT340
The high death toll in Gaza comes despite journalists being protected under international law — making attacks on them a war crime.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists says that an unprecedented number of reporters were killed in the first 10 weeks of the genocide. It currently lists 82 confirmed killed, but it is verifying additional numbers.
Gaza’s media office has documented the killing of at least at least 110 media workers since the genocide started.
Last May, the CPJ published “Deadly Pattern,” a report that found members of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had killed at least 20 journalists over the previous 22 years and that no one had ever been charged or held accountable for their deaths.
The Israeli government has prevented independent entry to foreign journalists seeking to cover the genocide from within the Gaza Strip.
Following is a transcript of the opening statement from South Africa in the case it’s brought to the International Court of Justice alleging Israel has engaged in genocide in its ongoing assault on Gaza.
The statement was delivered a short time ago by Adila Hassim SC, a South African human rights lawyer with the Thulamela Chambers in Johannesburg.
The ICJ case is being held on January 11 and 12, with Israel expected to file its response tomorrow. New Matilda will have on going coverage of the case, as it unfolds.
Opening Address – South Africa
South Africa contends that Israel has transgressed article 2 of the convention by committing actions that fall within the definition of genocide. The actions show a systematic pattern of conduct from which genocide can be inferred.
Gaza is one of the two constituent territories of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, occupied by Israel since 1967. It is a narrow strip of approximately 365sqkm…
Israel continues to exercise control over the space, territorial waters, land crossings, water, electricity, electromagnetic sphere, and civilian infrastructure in Gaza, as well as over key governmental functions….
Entry and exit by air and sea to Gaza is prohibited, with Israel operating the only two crossing points.
Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated places in the world, is home to approximately 2.3 million Palestinians, almost half of them children.
For the past 96 days Israel has subjected Gaza to what has been described as one of the heaviest conventional bombing campaigns in the history of modern warfare.
Palestinians in Gaza are being killed by Israeli weaponry from air, land and sea.
They are also at immediate risk of death by starvation, dehydration and disease, as a result of the ongoing siege by Israel, the destruction of Palestinian towns, the insufficient aid being allowed through to the Palestinian population, and the impossibility of distributing this limited aid while bombs fall.
This conduct renders essentials to life unobtainable.
At this provisional measures stage… it is not necessary for the court to come to a final view on the question of whether Israel’s conduct constitutes genocide. It is necessary to establish only whether at least some of the acts alleged are capable of falling within the provision of the convention.
On analysing the specific and ongoing genocidal acts complained of, it is clear that at least some if not all of these acts fall within the Convention’s provisions. These acts are documented in detail in South Africa’s application, and confirmed by reliable… UN sources. It’s unnecessary and impossible for me to recount all of them. I will highlight only some, in order to illustrate the pattern of genocidal conduct.
The UN statistics that are relied upon are up to date as of 9 January, 2024.
In South Africa’s oral submissions we will illustrate the facts that we rely on with limited use of audio-visual material. We do so with restraint and only where necessary, and always with respect to the Palestinian people.
Against this background, I move now to demonstrate in turn how Israel’s conduct violates 2a 2b 2c and 2d of the Convention.
Israel’s first genocidal act
The first Genocidal act committed by Israel is the mas killing of Palestinians in Gaza, in violation of article 2a of the Genocide Convention.
As the UN Secretary General explained five weeks ago, the level of Israel’s killing is so extensive that nowhere is safe in Gaza. As I stand before you today, 23,210 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces during the sustained attacks over the last three months, at least 70 percent of whom are believed to be women and children. Some 7,000 Palestinians are still missing, presumed dead under the rubble.
Palestinians in Gaza are subjected to relentless bombing where-ever they go. They are killed in their homes, in places where they seek shelter, in hospitals, in schools, in mosques, in churches, and as they try to find food and water for their families.
They have been killed if they failed to evacuate in the places to which they have fled, and even while they attempted to flee along Israeli-declared safe routes.
The level of killing is so extensive that those bodies found are buried in mass graves, often unidentified.
A slide presentation of mass graves in Gaza, accompanying South Africa’s opening statement at the International Court of Justice on January 11, alleging Israeli genocide in Gaza.
In the first three weeks alone following 7 October Israel deployed 6,000 bombs per week. At least 200 times, it has deployed 2,000 pound bombs in southern areas of Palestine designated as safe. These bombs have also decimated the north, including refugee camps.
Two thousand pound bombs are some of the biggest and most destructive bombs available. They are dropped by lethal fighter jets that are used to strike targets on the ground by one of the world’s most resourced armies.
Israel has killed an unparalleled and unprecedented number of civilians, with the full knowledge of how many civilian lives each bomb will take.
More than 1,800 Palestinians families in Gaza have lost multiple family members, and hundreds of multi-generational families have been wiped out with no remaining survivors – mothers, fathers, children, siblings, grandparents, aunts, cousins, often all killed together. This killing is nothing short of destruction of Palestinian life. It is inflicted deliberately. No-one is spared. Not even newborn babies.
The scale of Palestinian child killings in Gaza is such that UN chiefs have described it as a graveyard for children.
The devastation, we submit, is intended to, and has laid waste to, Gaza beyond any acceptable, legal, let alone, humane justification.
Israel’s second genocidal act
The second genocidal act identified in South Africa’s application is Israel’s infliction of serious bodily or mental harm to Palestinians in Gaza in violation of Article 2b of the Genocide Convention.
Israel’s attacks have left close to 60,000 Palestinians wounded and maimed. Again, the majority of them, women and children. This in circumstances where the healthcare system has all but collapsed. I‘ll return to this later in my speech.
Large numbers of Palestinians civilians, including children, are arrested, blind-folded, forced to undress, and loaded onto trucks taken to unknown locations. The suffering of the Palestinian people, physical and mental, is undeniable.
Israel’s third genocidal act
Turning to the third genocidal acts under article 2c, Israel has deliberately imposed conditions in Gaza that cannot sustain life, and are calculated to bring about its physical destruction.
Israel achieves this in at least four ways. First, by displacement.
Israel has forced the displacement of about 85 per cent of Palestinians in Gaza. There is nowhere safe for them to flee too. Those who cannot leave or refuse to be displaced have either been killed, or are at extreme risk of being killed in their homes.
Many Palestinians have been displaced multiple times, as families are forced to move repeatedly in search of safety.
Israel’s first evacuation order on 13 October, required the evacuation of over 1 million people, including children, the elderly, the wounded, and infirm. Entire hospitals were required to evacuate, even newborn babies in intensive care.
The order required them to evacuate the north to the south within 24 hours. The order itself was genocidal. It required immediate movement, taking only what could be carried. while no humanitarian assistance was permitted, and fuel, water and food and other necessities of life had been deliberately cut off.
It was clearly calculated to bring about the destruction of the population.
For many Palestinians the forced evacuation from their homes is inevitably permanent. Israel has now damaged or destroyed an estimated 350,000 Palestinian homes, leaving at least half a million Palestinians with no home to return to.
The Special Rapporteur o the Human Rights of Internally Displace Person explains that Housing and infrastructure “have been razed to the ground, frustrating any realistic prospects for displaced Gazans to return home, repeating a long history of mass forced displacement of Palestinians by Israel.
There is no indication at all that Israel accepts responsibility for rebuilding what it has destroyed. Instead, the destruction is celebrated by the Israeli army.
Soldiers film themselves joyfully detonating entire apartment blocks and town squares, erecting the Israeli flag over the wreckage, seeking to re-establish Israeli settlements on the rubble of Palestinians homes, and thus extinguishing the very basis of Palestinian life in Gaza.
SECOND, together with the forced displacement, Israel’s conduct has been deliberately calculated to cause widespread hunger, dehydration and starvation. Israel’s campaign has pushed Gazans to the brink of famine. An unprecedented 93 per cent of the population iN Gaza is facing crisis levels of hunger. Of all the people in the world currently suffering catastrophic hunger, more than 80 per cent are in Gaza.
The situation is such that the experts are now predicting that more Palestinians in Gaza may die from starvation and disease than airstrikes. And yet Israel continues to impede the effective delivery of humanitarian assistance to Palestinians, not only refusing to allow sufficient aid in, but removing the ability to distribute it through constant bombardment and obstruction,.
Just three days ago, on 8 January, a planned mission by UN agencies to deliver urgent medical supplies and vital fuel to a hospital and medical supply centre was denied by Israeli authorities. This marked the fifth denial of a mission to this centre since 26 December, leaving five hospitals in northern Gaza without access to lifesaving supplies and equipment.
Aid trucks that are allowed in are seized upon by the hungry. What is provided is simply not enough.
Madam president, members of the court, this is an image of an aid truck arriving in Gaza.
[VIDEO OF AID TRUCK SURROUNDED BY PALESTINIANS]
THIRD, Israel has deliberately inflicted conditions in which Palestinians in Gaza are denied adequate shelter, clothes or sanitation. For weeks, there have been acute shortages of clothes, bedding, blankets and critical non-food items. Clean water is all but gone, leaving far below the amount required to safely drink, clean and cook.
Accordingly, the WHO has stated that Gaza is experiencing soaring rates of infectious disease outbreaks. Cases of diarrhea in children under five years of age have increased 2,000 per cent since hostilities began. When combined and left untreated, malnutrition and disease create a deadly cycle.
THE fourth genocidal act under article 2b is Israel’s military assault on Gaza’s healthcare system, which renders life unsustainable.
Even by 7 December, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health noted that the healthcare infrastructure in the Gaza strip has been completely obliterated.
Those wounded by Israel in Gaza are being deprived of lifesaving medical care. Gaza’s healthcare system, already crippled by years of blockade and prior attacks by Israel, is unable to cope with the sheer scale of injuries.
Israel’s fourth genocidal act
Finally, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, has pointed to acts committed by Israel that would fall under the fourth category of genocidal acts, in Article 2d of the Convention.
On 22 November she expressly warned the following:
“The reproductive violence inflicted by Israel on Palestinian women, newborn babies, infants and children, could be qualified as acts of genocide under Article 2 of the genocide convention, including imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group.”
Israel is blocking the delivery of lifesaving aid, including essential medical kits for delivering babies, in circumstances where an estimated 180 women are giving birth in Gaza each day. Of these 180 women, the WHO warns that 15 percent are likely to experience pregnancy or birth-related complications and need additional medical care. That care is simply not available.
In sum Madam president, all of these acts individually and collectively form a calculated pattern of conduct by Israel indicating a genocidal intent.
This intent is evident from Israel’s conduct in specially targeting Palestinians living in Gaza; using weaponry that causes large-scale homicidal destruction, as well as targetted sniping of civilians; designating safe zones for Palestinians to seek refuge, and then bombing these; depriving Palestinians in Gaza of basic needs – food, water, healthcare, fuel, sanitation and communications; destroying social infrastructure, homes, schools, mosques, churches, hospitals; and killing, seriously injuring and leaving large numbers of children orphaned.
Genocides are never declared in advance, but this court has the benefit of the past 13 weeks of evidence that shows incontrovertibly a pattern of conduct and related intention that justifies a plausible claim of genocidal acts.
In the Gambia-Myanmar case, this court did not hesitate to impose provisional measures in relation to allegations that Myanmar was committing genocidal acts against the Rohingya within the Rakhine state.
The facts before the court today are sadly even more stark, and like the Gambia-Myanmar case, deserve and demand this court’s intervention.
Every day there is mounting irreparable loss of life, property, dignity and humanity for the Palestinian people.
Our news feeds show graphic images of suffering that has become unbearable to watch. Nothing will stop the suffering except an order from this court.
Without an indication of provisional measures, the atrocities will continue, with the Israeli Defence Force indicating that it intends pursuing this course of action for at least a year.
In the words of the UN Under Secretary General on 5 January 2024, I quote:
“You think getting aid into Gaza is easy? Think again. Three layers of inspections before trucks can even enter. Confusion and long queues. A growing list of rejected items. A crossing point meant for pedestrians not trucks. Another crossing point where trucks have been blocked by desperate, hungry communities. A destroyed commercial sector. Constant bombardments, poor communications, damaged roads, convoys shot at, delays at checkpoints, a traumatised and exhausted population crammed into a smaller and small sliver of land, shelters which have long exceeded their full capacity. Aid workers themselves displaced, killed. This is an impossible situation for the people of Gaza and for those trying to help them. The fighting must stop.”
Alex Vickery-Howe reviews the Christmas controversies of 2023 and the partisan commentary surrounding them, before making a resolution for the year ahead.
Is the glass half empty or is it half full? Can we make the glass better by pointing out the lack or should we be grateful for the drops we have?
A couple of friends have pointed out, over the past few weeks, that I often slip into the old cliché that we only concentrate on what goes wrong and give little thought to what goes right. One has taken to calling me a ‘shock jock of the left’, which I rather like, even if I question its accuracy: I’m not a shock jock until I have my own radio show and I’m gleefully berating guests.
Who knows what the new year will bring?
Nonetheless, the core challenge has merit. Responding to my recent article on the riddles of Centrelink, another friend pointed out, accurately, that Centrelink has 450 million interactions with customers every year. There are currently 11.4 million people accessing this service. “Isn’t it a surprise,” he asked, “that not a whole lot more goes wrong in such a vast bureaucracy? A bureaucracy that is fronted, and headed, by a large number of people with varying levels of skill, competence, compassion and logic. I am in awe of such a system, even while accepting there will be quite a few cases that fall between the cracks.”
It has prompted me to think about balance more generally. Can we find common ground even with people we struggle to understand, people with incompatible politics, or those with views we find vile and abhorrent? Maybe…
Former Australian prime minister John Howard.
I’m the ethical nemesis of Alan Jones, but I share his vehement opposition to coal seam gas mining in Australia. I think John Howard is a war criminal – and now is a very good time to review the ‘misplaced’ cabinet papers on the unfounded invasion of Iraq – but I think he showed strong leadership and, indeed, bravery when he took on the gun lobby and swept firearms off Australian streets in response to the horrifying Port Arthur Massacre. Would I tune in to Jones or vote for Howard? God, no. Are there other issues where we might see eye to eye? Perhaps.
Is that allowed? Hopefully.
During an episode of our podcast – which doesn’t count as a radio show, because I like the other two and I’m not allowed to berate them – another friend pointed out that just because there are numerous perspectives on an issue, and everyone wants to be heard, that doesn’t mean those perspectives should carry equal weight. This is another excellent point.
On the off chance that being governed by a Silver Surfer dominatrix doesn’t appeal, we humans are going to have to find a way to live together harmoniously. Balance is a big part of that.
British comedian Ricky Gervais, pictured in his latest Netflix special, Armageddon.
This brings me – in a typically roundabout way – to the latest stand-up comedy controversy. Ricky Gervais has become the subject of an online petition (albeit not a terribly successful one) calling for his cancellation in response to his special Armageddon, which was released on Netflix just in time for Christmas.
I confess I read the back and forth before watching the special. By the time I sat down to check it out, the vitriol was sizzling online with defenders and detractors arguing whether or not the set is funny (all comedy is subjective, so the answer is both ‘yes’ and ‘no’).
It seems to me that the extraordinary part of this particular flashpoint is that – like it or not, laugh at it or not – this was a self-aware set where the comedian continually stepped in and out of character, providing metacommentary on his humour and the art of stand-up itself. Using Hannibal Lecter as an example, Ricky argued:
You wouldn’t go up to Sir Anthony Hopkins and go, “Saw you in Silence of the Lambs. You a cannibal, are ya?”
These things didn’t really happen. Two blokes didn’t really walk into a pub. A chicken didn’t really cross the road. Just because I deal in realism and taboo subjects, they think I mean it more than I would if I was doing a silly playground joke. I’ll pretend to be right-wing, I’ll pretend to be left-wing. Whatever’s funniest for the joke – the routine – to get my point across.
His piece about trigger warnings in Schindler’s List, including whether there is any misgendering, coarse language or antisemitism, is – again, like it or not, laugh at it or not – a clever piece of satire reflecting on contemporary sensibilities. He may not always (or often) be tasteful, but to suggest that he is unaware of what’s he’s doing, or in need of ‘education’, is a disingenuous argument. Ricky is completely aware of what he’s doing. He is conscious of the comedian’s artifice. He refers back to it constantly.
Comedians shouldn’t be immune from scrutiny any more than teachers, doctors, police officers – any and every member of society. We are all signatories to the social contract, and we all have, I believe, a basic duty to treat others with kindness, empathy and respect, or at least assume goodwill and give each other the benefit of the doubt upon a first meeting… but comedy, by its very nature, dips into the taboo.
From the time of the Ancient Greeks, comedy has been transgressive and dark, and can’t possibly please everybody all of the time. The idea of comedy by committee is a very dreary prospect. Any writing by committee is prone to entropy over successive drafts. I can’t conceive of a world where we all mean every word of the jokes we tell.
It’s hard to discern if people have been ‘faux offended’, as Ricky puts it, or genuinely offended – can we even tell the difference in ourselves anymore? – but what feels more concerning is the social pressure to perform offence. Ricky captured this in his set: “Dogma is never progressive.”
That’s a fact. It is fundamentally illiberal to demand conformity… even, or perhaps especially, when we feel we are right. None of us gets to do that in a democracy. Our whims, our prejudices and our emotional responses do not control our fellow humans.
Offence is in the eye of the beholder. I find The Boys – a satirical American superhero series – offensive because it glorifies animal cruelty, but I understand that it is satire, just not satire to my personal taste. There is a chasm of difference between a satirical depiction of a dolphin’s death and the actual dolphin slaughter in Taiji, where real animals really are butchered.
Equally, there is a chasm of difference between what Ricky – or any comedian – says in the context of a stand-up set and how people live their everyday lives. As Ricky, stepping out of character, puts it:
If woke still means what it used to mean, that you’re aware of your own privilege, you try and maximise equality, minimise oppression, be anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, then…yes, I’m definitely woke.
If woke now means being a puritanical, authoritarian bully who gets people fired for an honest opinion, or even a fact, then… no, I’m not woke. Fuck that.
This is his parting message. It’s strange to me that I clicked through so much of the online bickering without being exposed to this quote and how it frames the entire discussion. Are we incapable of contextualising our world?
On the animal rights issue, Ricky and I are one. The values he embodies offstage are who the real man is. He was awarded PETA Person of the Year in 2013. He campaigned to end the Dog Meat Festival in Yulin, China. He has argued consistently for a fur-free Britain. 1.9 million pounds of the proceeds from Armageddon went to animal charities.
Ricky Gervais, pictured in his hit series After Life. (IMAGE: Danny Teece)
On the issue of support for terminally ill children, Ricky has donated to Macmillan Cancer Support, Great Ormond Street Hospital, Teenage Cancer Trust and the Starlight Children’s Foundation, among others. That’s the real Ricky.
Ricky’s success makes the world empirically better. (I’m actually an empiricist, unlike Malcolm Roberts, who pretends to be one to avoid tough conversations about the environment.) In real, concrete terms, Ricky Gervais has a positive impact on the world. A lot of very ‘nice’ people who say very ‘nice’ things will never match his demonstrable commitment to kindness, welfare and social justice.
Walking the walk is important to me too. The talk bores me. My bank tells me charities and UberEATS are my major expenses, as well as tipping excessively to alleviate guilt knowing that UberEATS exploits its employees. As a member of the middle class I believe in giving to causes, not to signal virtue but to be part of a truly progressive, fair, free and hopeful society. If that’s what others call being ‘woke’, then I’m happily guilty. If I’m expected to pick up a pitchfork, then, like Ricky, I’m out.
Now, I promised to talk about the Doctor, didn’t I? Well, thinking of the future in this way, magpie-ing through the internet as I do, has made me reflect on the underrated Russell T. Davies series Years and Years – yes, I still say underrated despite its positive reception. Russell is a once-in-a-generation writer, with every finger on the zeitgeist. The image of us hurtling towards uncertainty, captured so well in that show, is one I often return to.
I’ve yet to see It’s a Sin. I will soon (sorry Russell, but I know you’re going to make me cry and it’s Christmas!)… but, if I can be permitted to geek out for a moment, the other controversy around the water cooler (punch bowl? Esky?) this festive season has been the trilogy of Doctor Who Christmas specials. Disney+ doesn’t want to let Netflix snatch all the hullabaloo.
As the left piles on Ricky, the right is feigning interest in all of time and space…
The beautiful Yasmin Finney is not the first transgender character to appear on the show. That was Bethany Black, in an episode penned by Mark Gatiss, way back in 2015. You’d think – eight years later – the world would have become more progressive, but progress, like a Time Lord, does not follow a linear trajectory. We take one step forward, two back.
You’ll find many a miserable rant about this new era of Doctor Who. Keeping balance as the theme of this, my own rant, I will say that what draws me to the character Finney plays is not just her gender identity….
Representation does, of course, matter in the context of what is happening to transgender people, particularly in an increasingly hard-line conservative US. In the UK too, the conservative right has taken clear steps targeting trans youth. In Finney’s debut episode, The Star Beast, the writer touches on the grim reality of day-to-day exclusion and discrimination when the character, Rose, is dead named, as well as in the family kitchen sink scene where her mother and grandmother discuss how best to care for and support her. This is what Russell does so well, mixing sci-fi hijinks with a strong emotional core.
While Rose’s sexuality and her gender identity have become the subject of incessant online screaming, people seem to have missed that there is much more to her as a person. I’m drawn to her compassion and her creativity. I care that she’s vegan – this tells me something about her ethics and her choices. That’s what draws me to the character. Fixating on her gender identity, to the exclusion of everything else, does both the role and the performer a disservice. Rose is kind to the Meep, as she should be. It’s not her fault the Meep is (spoiler!) actually Miriam Margolyes in a devilish mood. I’m not sure Miriam has any other kind.
For people who’ve no idea what I’m talking about, or what the hell a Meep is, my point is this: we all have the right to be judged on how we walk the walk. The essence of discrimination – the poison of it – lies in leaping to shallow assumptions and not getting to know the depth and complexity of a person. This is why I’m so resistant to partisan mob politics.
Appearances aren’t everything. I’ve another friend who works for a major public official. This official is rude, austere and ‘emotionally bankrupt’, but working tirelessly to enact legislation that will change thousands of people’s lives for the absolute better. Many of us, meanwhile, have colleagues who are superficially ‘lovely’. Talk is cheap. It can also mislead.
I believe that acknowledging complexity is our best way forward. Our only way. I hope 2024 is the year we get there.
Russell’s colleague, the equally excellent Steven Moffat – seriously Reddit, stop pretending they’re rivals – recently had this to say about cancel culture:
If someone is capable of being cancelled, they’re a good person. You can’t cancel Hitler or the Yorkshire Ripper, only someone who cares about their reputation and has a conscience.
Context is everything. Humour has its own context. That doesn’t absolve anyone from criticism, but it gives that criticism its context too.
Two things can be true at once. Multiple things can be true at once. Facing the world in all its complexity and balancing the mass of information rushing toward us is going to, if anything, become more difficult with time.
So, as 2023 ends and 2024 kicks off with its own competing controversies, I’m making a resolution to keep balance in mind. Emotional balance. Political balance. An effort to understand those I disagree with, and to look for common ground before jumping to conclusions and condemnations.
When Peter Capaldi played perhaps the most emotionally resonant and complex Doctor, he sat down in his TARDIS (the one with all the round things), and asked his companion…
‘Am I a good man?’
That’s the question for all of us, isn’t it? Are we fair-minded? Are we balanced? Lately, I’ve asked myself: Am I too prickly for the left, too logical for the right? Maybe I’m on both naughty lists.
I’m sitting down to watch Dave Chappelle next. I’ve never seen his stand-up. I’m told that one part of the controversy worth exploring from his previous work concerns the intersection between gay and black issues. I’m not going to make any assumptions as I leap into it, though I have been warned. I’m just going to listen.
Wish me luck.
I still don’t know if the glass is half-empty or half-full. I do know that whatever is stirring in there is awfully complicated.
If you’re looking for a way to pay tribute to the passing of John Pilger, a giant of Australian journalism, then you could do worse than watching and sharing his Sydney Peace Prize Lecture, delivered in 2009.
It’s a powerful and timely speech (transcript below) and it seems as relevant then as it as today, particularly when you consider what he has to say on Palestine, and on Indigenous Australia.
John was a friend and regular contributor to New Matilda. You can read his remarkable body of work at NM by clicking here, and you can visit his personal website here. There you can purchase his books; and his DVDs.
We’ll have a series of tributes to John over the coming days and weeks.
Breaking the Great Australian Silence: Sydney Peace Prize Lecture, 2009
Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the 2009 Sydney Peace Prize. It’s an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.
I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and ‘uttering unlawful oaths’. In October of the same year, an 18-year-old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother.
She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a ‘courting day’ – a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.
Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother’s eight siblings used the word ‘stock’ a great deal. You either came from ‘good stock’ or ‘bad stock’. It was unmentionable that we came from bad stock – that we had what was called ‘the stain’.
One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. ‘Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!’ she said. And we did – until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our ‘bad stock’. There was outrage. ‘Your son,’ my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, ‘is no better than a damn communist’. She promised never to speak to us again.
The Australian silence has unique features.
Growing up, I would make illicit trips to La Perouse and stand on the sand hills and look at people who were said to have died off. I would gape at the children of my age, who were said to be dirty, and feckless. At high school, I read a text book by the celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote: ‘We are civilized today and they are not.’ ‘They’, of course, were the Aboriginal people.
My real Australian education began at the end of the 1960s when Charlie Perkins and his mother, Hetti, whom Charlie described to me as a queen of the Aranda people, took me to the Aboriginal compound at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. Hetti wore a big black hat and sat in the front of our rented Ford Falcon. She suggested we smash down the gate to get in.
Jay Creek in the Northern Territory, pictured in the mid-1900s.
The shock at what I saw is unforgettable. The poverty. The sickness. The despair. The quiet anger. I began to recognise and understand the Australian silence.
Tonight, I would like to talk about this silence: how it affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country.
Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this: ‘It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause.’
There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That’s the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name.
The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved. No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn’t give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country. Above all, no one said: ‘Prime Minister, There is no war on terror. It’s a hoax. But there is a war of terror waged by governments, including the Australian government, in our name.’ That wedding party, Prime Minister, was blown to bits by one the latest smart weapons, such as the Hellfire bomb that sucks the air out of the lungs. In our name.
During the first world war, the British prime minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Manchester Guardian: ‘If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and they can’t know.’
What has changed? Quite a lot actually. As people have become more aware, propaganda has become more sophisticated.
One of the founders of modern propaganda was Edward Bernays, an American who believed that people in free societies could be lied to and regimented without them realising. He invented a euphemism for propaganda – ‘public relations’, or PR. ‘What matters,’ he said, ‘is the illusion.’ Like Kevin Rudd’s stage-managed press conferences outside his church, what matters is the illusion. The symbols of Anzac are constantly manipulated in this way. Marches. Medals. Flags. The pain of a fallen soldier’s family. Serving in the military, says the prime minister, is Australia’s highest calling. The squalor of war, the killing of civilians has no reference. What matters is the illusion.
Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. (IMAGE: Thom Mitchell, New Matilda).
The aim is to ensure our silent complicity in a war of terror and in a massive increase in Australia’s military arsenal. Long range cruise missiles are to be targeted at our neighbours. The Rudd government and the Pentagon have launched a competition to build military robots which, it is said, will do the ‘army’s dirty work’ in ‘urban combat zones’. What urban combat zones? What dirty work?
Silence.
‘I confess,’ wrote Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, over a century ago, ‘that countries are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.’
We Australians have been in the service of the Great Game for a very long time. Do the young people who wrap themselves in the flag at Gallipoli every April understand that only the lies have changed – that sanctifying blood sacrifice in colonial invasions is meant to prepare us for the next war?
When Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s, he described them as a training team’, requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Department of External affairs wrote this secret truth: ‘Although we have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance was given in response to an invitation by the government of South Vietnam, our offer was in fact made following a request from the United States government.’
Two versions. One for us, one for them.
Menzies spoke incessantly about ‘the downward thrust of Chinese communism’. What has changed? Outside the church, Kevin Rudd said we were in Afghanistan to stop another downward thrust. Both were lies.
During the Vietnam war, the Department of Foreign Affairs made a rare complaint to Washington. They complained that the British knew more about America’s objectives than its committed Australian ally. An assistant secretary of state replied. ‘We have to inform the British to keep them on side,’ he said. ‘You are with us, come what may.’
How many more wars are we to be suckered into before we break our silence?
How many more distractions must we, as a people, endure before we begin the job of righting the wrongs in our own country?
‘It’s time we sang from the world’s rooftops,’ said Kevin Rudd in opposition, ‘[that]despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world [and]I look forward to working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom…’.
Since the second world war, the arsenal of freedom has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements. Millions of people all over the world have been driven out of their homes and subjected to crippling embargos. Bombing is as American as apple pie.
In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter asked this question: ‘Why is the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought of Stalinist Russia well known in the West while American criminal actions never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.’
In Australia, we are trained to respect this censorship by omission. An invasion is not an invasion if ‘we’ do it. Terror is not terror if ‘we’ do it. A crime is not a crime if ‘we’ commit it. It didn’t happen. Even while it was happening it didn’t happen. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.
In the arsenal of freedom we have two categories of victims. The innocent people killed in the Twin Towers were worthy victims. The innocent people killed by Nato bombers in Afghanistan are unworthy victims. Israelis are worthy. Palestinians are unworthy. It gets complicated. Kurds who rose against Saddam Hussein were worthy. But Kurds who rise against the Turkish regime are unworthy. Turkey is a member of Nato. They’re in the arsenal of freedom.
The Rudd government justifies its proposals to spend billions on weapons by referring to what the Pentagon calls an ‘arc of instability’ that stretches across the world. Our enemies are apparently everywhere – from China to the Horn of Africa. In fact, an arc of instability does indeed stretch across the world and is maintained by the United States. The US Air Force calls this ‘full spectrum dominance’. More than 800 American bases are ready for war.
These bases protect a system that allows one per cent of humanity to control 40 per cent of wealth: a system that bails out just one bank with $180 billion – that’s enough to eliminate malnutrition in the world, and provide education for every child, and water and sanitation for all, and to reverse the spread of malaria. On September 11th, 2001, the United Nations reported that on that day 36,615 children had died from poverty. But that was not news.
Journalists and politicians like to say the world changed as a result of the September 11th attacks. In fact, for those countries under attack by the arsenal of freedom, nothing has changed. What has changed is not news.
Legendary US whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg.
According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a military coup has taken place in the United States, with the Pentagon now ascendant in every aspect of foreign policy.
It doesn’t matter who is president – George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush’s wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to ‘annihilate’. Iran’s crime is its independence. Having thrown out America’s favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn’t occupy anyone else’s land and hasn’t attacked any country – unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East on America’s behalf.
In Australia, we are not told this. It’s taboo. Instead, we dutifully celebrate the illusion of Obama, the global celebrity, the marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein, brand Obama offers the riske thrill of a new image attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he bombs.
This is modern propaganda in action, using a kind of reverse racism – the same way it deploys gender and class as seductive tools. In Barack Obama’s case, what matters is not his race or his fine words, but the class and power he serves.
In an essay for The Monthly entitled Faith in Politics, Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees: ‘The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst…. We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum.’
Compare that with Rudd’s words the other day. ‘I make absolutely no apology whatsoever,’ he said, ‘for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia… a tough line on asylum seekers.’
Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term ‘illegal immigrants’ is both false and cowardly. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear – they are legal. And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. How shaming. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this.
The people in those leaking boats demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire. But that’s not enough for the Good Samaritan in Canberra, as he plays to the same bigotry which, as he wrote in his essay, ‘turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe’.
Why isn’t this spelt out? Why have weasel words like ‘border protection’ become the currency of a media crusade against fellow human beings we are told to fear, mostly Muslim people? Why have journalists, whose job is to keep the record straight, become complicit in this campaign?
After all, Australia has had some of the most outspoken and courageous newspapers in the world. Their editors were agents of people, not power. The Sydney Monitor edited by Edward Smith Hall exposed the dictatorial rule of Governor Darling and helped bring freedom of speech to the colony. Today, most of the Australian media speaks for power, not people. Turn the pages of the major newspapers; look at the news on TV. Like border protection, we have mind protection. There’s a consensus on what we read, see and hear: on how we should define our politics and view the rest of the world. Invisible boundaries keep out facts and opinion that are unacceptable.
This is actually a brilliant system, requiring no instructions, no self-censorship. Journalists know not what to do. Of course, now and then the censorship is direct and crude. SBS has banned its journalists from using the phrase ‘Palestinian land’ to describe illegally occupied Palestine. They must describe these territories as ‘the subject of negotiation’. That is the equivalent of somebody taking over your home at the point of a gun and the SBS newsreader describing it as ‘the subject of negotiation’.
In no other democratic country is public discussion of the brutal occupation of Palestine as limited as in Australia. Are we aware of the sheer scale of the crime against humanity in Gaza? Twenty-nine members of one family – babies, grannies – are gunned down, blown up, buried alive, their home bulldozed. Read the United Nations report, written by an eminent Jewish judge, Richard Goldstone.
Those who speak for the arsenal of freedom are working hard to bury the UN report. For only one nation, Israel, has a ‘right to exist’ in the Middle East. Only one nation has a right to attack others. Only one nation has the impunity to run a racist apartheid regime with the approval of the western world, and with the prime minister and the deputy prime minister of Australia fawning over its leaders.
In Australia, any diversion from this unspoken rule, this impunity, attracts a campaign of craven personal abuse and intimidation usually associated with dictatorships. But we are not a dictatorship. We are a democracy.
Are we?
Or are we a murdochracy.
Former News Corporation chairman, Rupert Murdoch.
Rupert Murdoch set the media war agenda shortly before the invasion of Iraq when he said, ‘There’s going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better get it done now.’
More than a million people have been killed in Iraq as a result of that invasion – ‘an episode’, according to one study, ‘more deadly than the Rwandan genocide’. In our name. Are we aware of this in Australia?
I once walked along Mutanabi Street in Baghdad. The atmosphere was wonderful. People sat in cafes, reading. Musicians played. Poets recited. Painters painted. This was the cultural heart of Mesopotania, the great civilisation to which we in the West owe a great deal, including the written word. The people I spoke to were both Sunni and Shia, but they called themselves Iraqis. They were cultured and proud.
Today, they are fled or dead. Mutanabi Street has been blown to bits. In Baghdad, the great museums and libraries are looted. The universities are sacked. And people who once took coffee with each other, and married each other, have been turned into enemies. ‘Building democracy’, said Howard and Bush and Blair.
One of my favourite Harold Pinter plays is Party Time. It’s set in an apartment in a city like Sydney. A party is in progress. People are drinking good wine and eating canapés. They seem happy. They are chatting and affirming and smiling. They are stylish and very self-aware.
But something is happening outside in the street, something terrible and oppressive and unjust, for which the people at the party share responsibility.
There’s a fleeting sense of discomfort, a silence, before the chatting and laughing resumes.
How many of us live in that apartment?
Let me put it another way. I know a very fine Israeli journalist called Amira Hass. She went to live in and report from Gaza. I asked her why she did that. She explained how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen when she saw a group of German women looking at the prisoners, just looking, saying nothing, silent. Her mother never forgot what she called this despicable ‘looking from the side’.
I believe that if we apply justice and courage to human affairs, we begin to make sense of our world. Then, and only then, can we make progress.
However, if we apply justice in Australia, it’s tricky, isn’t it? – because we are then obliged to break our greatest silence – to no longer ‘look from the side’ in our own country.
In the 1960s, when I first went to South Africa to report apartheid, I was welcomed by decent, liberal people whose complicit silence was the underpinning of that tyranny. They told me that Australians and white South Africans had much in common, and they were right. The good people of Johannesburg could live within a few kilometres of a community called Alexandra, which lacked the most basic services, the children stricken with disease. But they looked from the side and did nothing.
In Australia, our indifference is different. We have become highly competent at divide and rule: at promoting those black Australians who tell us what we want to hear. At professional conferences their keynote speeches are applauded, especially when they blame their own people and provide the excuses we need. We create boards and commissions on which sit nice, decent liberal people like the prime minister’s wife. And nothing changes.
We certainly don’t like comparisons with apartheid South Africa. That breaks the Australian silence.
Near the end of apartheid, black South Africans were being jailed at the rate of 851 per 100,000 of population. Today, black Australians are being jailed at a national rate that is more than five times higher. Western Australia jails Aboriginal men at eight times the apartheid figure.
In 1983, Eddie Murray was killed in a police cell in Wee Waa in New South Wales by ‘a person or persons unknown’. That’s how the coroner described it. Eddie was a rising rugby league star. But he was black and had to be cut down to size. Eddie’s parents, Arthur and Leila Murray, launched one of the most tenacious and courageous campaigns for justice I’ve known anywhere. They stood up to authority. They showed grace and patience and knowledge. And they never gave in.
When Leila died in 2003, I wrote a tribute for her funeral. I described her as an Australian hero. Arthur is still fighting for justice. He’s in his sixties. He’s a respected elder, a hero. A few months ago, the police in Narrabri offered Arthur a lift home and instead took him for a violent ride in their bullwagon. He ended up in hospital, bruised and battered. That is how Australian heroes are treated.
In the same week the police did this — as they do to black Australians, almost every day – Kevin Rudd said that his government, and I quote, ’doesn’t have a clear idea of what’s happening on the ground’ in Aboriginal Australia.
Eddie Murray, beaten to death In 1981 by police while in custody in Wee Waa, NSW.
How much information does the prime minister need? How many ideas? How many reports? How many royal commissions? How many inquests? How many funerals? Is he not aware that Australia appears on an international ‘shame list’ for having failed to eradicate trachoma, a preventable disease of poverty that blinds Aboriginal children?
In August this year, the United Nations once again distinguished Australia with the kind of shaming once associated with South Africa. We discriminate on the basis of race. That’s it in a nutshell. This time the UN blew a whistle on the so-called ‘intervention’, which began with the Howard government smearing Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory with allegations of sex slavery and paedophile rings in ‘unthinkable numbers’, according to the minister for indigenous affairs.
In May last year, official figures were released and barely reported.
Out of 7,433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of four possible cases were identified. So much for the ‘unthinkable numbers’. Of course, child abuse does exist, in black Australia and white Australia. The difference is that no soldiers invaded the North Shore suburbs; no white parents were swept aside; no white welfare has been ‘quarantined’. What the doctors found they already knew: that Aboriginal children are at risk – from the effects of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world’s richest countries.
Billions of dollars have been spent – not on paving roads and building houses, but on a war of legal attrition waged against black communities. I interviewed an Aboriginal leader called Puggy Hunter. He carried a bulging brief case and he sat in the West Australian heat with his head in his hands.
I said, ‘You’re exhausted.’
He replied, ‘Look, I spend most of my life in meetings, fighting lawyers, pleading for our birthright. I’m just tired to death, mate.’ He died soon afterwards, in his forties.
Kevin Rudd has made a formal apology to the First Australians. He spoke fine words. For many Aboriginal people, who value healing, the apology was very important. The Sydney Morning Herald published a remarkably honest editorial. It described the apology as ‘a piece of political wreckage’ that ‘the Rudd government has moved quickly to clear away… in a way that responds to some of its supporters’ emotional needs’.
Since the apology, Aboriginal poverty has got worse. The promised housing programme is a grim joke. No gap has even begun to be bridged. Instead, the federal government has threatened communities in the Northern Territory that if they don’t hand over their precious freehold leases, they will be denied the basic services that we, in white Australia, take for granted.
In the 1970s, Aboriginal communities were granted comprehensive land rights in the Northern Territory, and John Howard set about clawing back these rights with bribery and bullying. The Labour government is doing the same. You see, there are deals to be done. The Territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, especially uranium. And Aboriginal land is wanted as a radioactive waste dump. This is very big business, and foreign companies want a piece of the action.
It is a continuation of the darkest side of our colonial history: a land grab.
Where are the influential voices raised against this? Where are the peak legal bodies? Where are those in the media who tell us endlessly how fair-minded we are?
Silence.
But let us not listen to their silence. Let us pay tribute to those Australians who are not silent, who don’t look from the side – those like Barbara Shaw and Larissa Behrendt, and the Mutitjulu community leaders and their tenacious lawyer George Newhouse, and Chris Graham, the fearless editor of the National Indigenous Times. And Michael Mansell, Lyle Munro, Gary Foley, Vince Forrester and Pat Dodson, and Arthur Murray.
And let us celebrate Australia’s historian of courage and truth, Henry Reynolds, who stood against white supremacists posing as academics and journalists. And the young people who closed down Woomera detention camp, then stood up to the political thugs who took over Sydney during Apec two years ago. And good on Ian Thorpe, the great swimmer, whose voice raised against the intervention has yet to find an echo among the pampered sporting heroes in a country where the gap between white and black sporting facilities and opportunity has closed hardly at all.
Silences can be broken, if we will it. In one of the greatest poems of the English language, Percy Shelley wrote this:
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew.
Which in sleep has fallen on you.
Ye are many – they are few.
But we need to make haste. An historic shift is taking place; the major western democracies are moving towards a corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies – socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor – and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war.
This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.
How do we change this? We start by looking beyond the stereotypes and clichés that are fed to us as news. Tom Paine warned long ago that if we were denied critical knowledge, we should storm what he called the Bastille of words.
Tom Paine didn’t have the internet, but the internet on its own is not enough.
We need an Australian glasnost, the Russian word from the Gorbachev era, which broadly means awakening, transparency, diversity, justice: to which I would add disobedience.
It was Edmund Burke who spoke of the press as a Fourth Estate. I propose a people’s Fifth Estate that monitors, deconstructs and counters the official news. In every news room, in every media college, teachers of journalism and journalists themselves need to be challenged about the part they play in the bloodshed, inequity and silence that is so often presented as normal.
The public are not the problem. It’s true some people don’t give a damn – but millions do, as I know from the responses to my own films. What people want is to be engaged – a sense that things matter, that nothing is immutable, that unemployment among the young and poverty among the old are both uncivilised and wrong. What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness; the revelation of a seed beneath the snow.
This is already happening in countries in Latin America where ordinary people have discovered a confidence in themselves they did not know existed. We should join them before our own freedom of speech is quietly withdrawn and real dissent is outlawed as the powers of the police are expanded.
‘The struggle of people against power, ‘wrote Milan Kundera, ‘is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’
In Australia, we have much to be proud of – if only we knew about it and celebrated it. Since Francis McCarty and Mary Palmer landed here, we’ve progressed only because people have spoken out, only because the suffragettes stood up, only because the miners of Broken Hill won the world’s first 35-hour week, only because pensions and a basic wage and child endowment were pioneered in New South Wales.
In my lifetime, Australia has become one of the most culturally diverse places on earth, and it has happened peacefully, by and large. That is a remarkable achievement – until we look for those whose Australian civilisation has seldom been acknowledged, whose genius for survival and generosity and forgiving have rarely been a source of pride. And yet, they remain, as Henry Reynolds wrote, the whispering in our hearts. For they are what is unique about us.
I believe the key to our self-respect, and our legacy to the next generation, is the inclusion and reparation of the First Australians. In other words, justice. There is no mystery about what has to be done. The first step is a treaty that guarantees universal land rights and a proper share of the resources of this country.
Only then can we solve, together, issues of health, poverty, housing, education, employment. Only then can we feel a pride that comes not from flags and war. Only then can we become a truly independent nation able to speak out for sanity and justice in the world, and be heard.
The issue at hand is that my partner is British and receiving payments from home, which will affect my payments in Australia if we are in a de facto relationship. Centrelink decides that we’re not – we don’t share accounts, we don’t own property, we only live together a few days a week because my housemate is gloomy and creepy (a long story) – so all is well.
No, of course it isn’t….
Having decided we’re not a legal couple, due to her finances Centrelink nevertheless starts deducting money from my payments. I visit Centrelink just in time to watch a distraught teenage mother punch a staff member. Alarms ring. Security intervenes. I’m the next person in line. I smile as the staff member presses an ice pack to her jaw. I explain my situation. The staff member is not in a sympathetic mood.
Luckily for me, I have precisely one gift: snark. I type a letter explaining the law as haughtily as I can and post it around the corner, avoiding the dodgy guy up the street who always offers to give me lifts to uni (another long story).
Centrelink caves in. To this day, I argue that posted letters are their kryptonite.
It’s 2006. Neutral tones and ‘60s coats are in. I’ve got one. I look like Paddington Bear. Little Miss Sunshine has hit the box office and Bond is back in Casino Royale. Fidel Castro is losing his power in Cuba, Tony Blair is losing his power everywhere, North Korea is celebrating its first successful nuclear test (um, yay?), Saddam Hussein is about to be executed, and Alex Vickery-Howe is being shafted by Centrelink. Again.
I’m single now. Studying a master’s degree. I’ve decided that this might be an intelligent step in one’s life journey, as being a freelance actor in Sydney is… not an intelligent step in one’s life journey.
The guy behind the counter explains that I’m ineligible for a student allowance because a master’s degree is not covered by the government and I’m therefore not a student in their eyes. “Great,” I say, “… then I can be eligible for standard unemployment benefits, right?”
He shakes his head. “You can’t be unemployed. You’re a student.”
“But you just said I’m not a student?”
He nods. “You’re not.”
I try again. “So… I can be unemployed? I am unemployed!”
He stares. “No, you’re not… you’re a student.”
This man is The Riddler. Kryptonite won’t work on him.
After 20 minutes, he advises me solemnly that the smartest choice I can make for my future is to give up my master’s degree, go on unemployment benefits and look for a position at McDonald’s or Kmart.
I don’t do that.
Instead, I take part-time work in childcare while completing my master’s and living in a Housing Trust flat with a paranoid schizophrenic who thinks he’s an Italian maestro on one side, and a violent meth dealer on the other. Vandals start a fire in our bins, our building goes up in smoke, every major news station is called and I’m at work the next day – helping a bunch of kids who can’t swim stay afloat by climbing on my head – when a friend rings to say “Alex, did your flat burn down last night? I saw you in your pyjamas talking to some Italian guy…?!”
Admittedly, I can’t blame Centrelink for all of that.
It’s 2023. Barely. I find myself reading an article in The Guardian about Eve (a pseudonym), 74-years-old, working as a carer, who has recently discovered that she is dead. Legally, she’s deceased. Centrelink hasn’t gotten any smarter. They’re still dangerously dumb.
As I read Eve’s story – which begins as an absurd tale, bordering on comedic, and quickly becomes harrowing – I first roll my eyes (I’m told I do this too much) and then start clenching my fist. Surely, over 21 or more years, Centrelink could get its act together?
Don’t get me wrong, I feel we should all be grateful for the social safety net that living in Australia gives us. When I was working with performers from Japan in 2008 and invited them to watch Centrelink: The Musical they had a good time, but the main plot was lost on them: “Why does the government give you money?”
I don’t claim to be an expert on the Japanese welfare system circa 2008. My assumption is that it differed from what was being satirised on Australian stages at that time. It certainly gave me pause.
We’re lucky. It’s overused. It’s a cliché. But we are lucky. Australia does its best to protect its people. But Eve’s story is a reminder than the system needs reform.
Or take Phoebe Autumn’s story of suffering heatstroke in 34°C weather as she travelled for over an hour to attend a Centrelink appointment knowing a failure to comply would lead to her payments being revoked. This was following a heat spell where temperatures in Phoebe’s home city of Perth reached as high as 37°C. Young people must feel particularly aggrieved knowing that the governments that bully and chastise welfare recipients are the same governments that have failed to adequately address climate change, directly leading to these insane heatwaves.
Well, I earned my master’s degree without Centrelink, I paid off my undergraduate debt, I got a university scholarship in recognition of academic achievement, I completed my doctorate and I’m typing this while looking down on the city from the balcony I bought… so, look, McDonald’s is a perfectly respectable job – even though they need to bring back a vegetarian burger ASAP – but taking the government’s advice and giving up my ambitions would’ve been a pretty solid dead-end. In an ideal world, nobody else would be faced with these semi-comedic absurdities. Young people should never be told to aim lower.
My parents are fantastic. I’ve said this before too. Better get it in here or risk a stern phone call. They’re great. I mean, some of their friends dispensed awful advice (“Hey, give up uni and try a paper run!”; “Hey, don’t buy property when you’re young, you’ll regret it!”), but Mum and Dad have been enormously supportive, and I wouldn’t have been able to break into the property market at all without them acting as guarantor on my first loan (they’re risk-adverse, so it took some proper whinging from me, but we got there in the end). A lot of fortunate people have solid bonds with their parents. Lovely. That doesn’t mean the whole nation should run on this premise.
But it’s surely Christian – as it is surely human – to want to see the unemployed supported and guided towards their next career, to see the elderly cared for, to see those struggling with their physical or mental health given the assistance they need, and to see the young – the future – given at least as much opportunity as we who have come before. Surely.
Or forget charity and kindness. Forget it. Let’s all be selfish bastards. Even then, a robust welfare system is in our personal interest. Crime rates go down where the welfare systems are strong. Look at the Scandinavian countries where education, welfare and public health are thriving and where they’re literally shutting prisons down for lack of demand. Wouldn’t it be nice to get some of that action?
Conservatives will talk about ‘common sense’ and ‘our Australian values’ in the ‘fair go’ society, as though helping people could somehow be offensive to their character. This is cruel class warfare disguised as national unity. Remember ‘common sense’ and ‘values’ used to be arbitrated by people like Alan Jones. Enough said.
For those who are currently supported by Centrelink, I say this: these politicians have no right to punish you. The failure is theirs. Politicians are the biggest ‘dole bludgers’ of them all – we give them handouts to make this a safe, prosperous, and, yes, fair country. I don’t think Centrelink is worth the price we’re paying, do you? The investors want more.
I don’t wish to imply that all public servants have forgotten their duty to serve the public who (metaphorically) sign their cheques, yet there is an institutional hypocrisy at play here just as there is an intergenerational one. It will take politicians of good conscience to address the imbalance. What’s clear – judging by 21 years of failed policy and mutual hostility on the frontline – is that a culture shift is needed, regardless of which party is in control.
Typed letters are still the silver bullet.
If you’re having any issue with Centrelink, don’t wait for years by the phone while they play that obnoxiously upbeat classical music. Hang up. Pull out your laptop. If you don’t have access to a word processor or you don’t feel confident writing a letter yourself, find the snarkiest friend you have. If you know someone who can write in really neat, really florid, passive-aggressive cursive – I wish I had this skill – then go that extra mile and make it a handwritten letter.
Post the letter to Centrelink. Address it care of the Minister. Tell them exactly how fed up you are and how seriously the system is letting you down. Don’t be impolite. Be extra polite. Be annoyingly polite. Be… disappointed.
Remind them that the Australian people pay their salaries, and the Australian people deserve their kindness and support.
Sign it with a smiley face. Or a big green question mark.
Barrels of digital ink have been spilt writing about the threat that Artificial Intelligence poses to the creative industries – who needs authors and screenwriters when a bot can pump out the same material faster and at a fraction of the cost? But is a bot capable of genuine creativity that could make for commercial success? At the start of this year, I decided to put AI to the test.
Each month I would set ChatGPT – the world’s most popular AI Large Language Model (LLM) – the same creative task and track its improvement (if any) across the year.
The task? To write a chapter in the style of Harry Potter, describing Hermione Granger asking Draco Malfoy to be her boyfriend. (In the world of Potter fan fiction, this hook-up is apparently known as ‘Dramione’).
And, just for fun, I asked the bot to repeat the task, but in the form of a limerick.
The results? In brief, authors and screenwriters can rest easy that their jobs are secure, for now at least.
The creative outcomes tended to be repetitive; once the bot landed on a formula it generally stuck with it. Then again, the same can be said for Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie.
Of most interest was how the bot’s output developed over the course of the year. There were signs of increased sophistication and the early indications of complex narrative techniques.
Since there is no science without observation, what follows are excerpts from my lab reports as the experiment progressed. Each piece has been given an entirely subjective score out of five broomsticks, based on the criteria of narrative creativity, wordplay and readability.
Date: 20 January 2023 Word count: 297 words Rating: Half a broomstick
Opening paragraph:It was a crisp autumn day in the castle of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Hermione Granger, a brilliant witch in her fourth year, was nervously tapping her foot in the corridor outside the Slytherin common room. She had mustered up the courage to ask Draco Malfoy, a fellow student and the notorious son of a Death Eater, to be her boyfriend. Final paragraph: As they sat together by the fire, talking and laughing, Hermione couldn’t help but think that sometimes, love truly can conquer all.
As might be expected for a first outing, the bot totally dropped the ball here. Talk about giving away the ending. Where’s the intrigue? Where’s the dramatic tension? And how much exposition can you shoehorn into a single paragraph? ‘Brilliant witch’. ‘Son of a notorious Death Eater’. Is the reader left with no work to do?
The limerick attempt is risible.
There once was a girl named Hermione Whose love for Malfoy was quite a phenomenon She mustered her nerve and took a deep swerve And asked him to be her boyfriend, in a calm and composed manner
Truly awful.
The bot, which deals in noughts and ones, clearly struggles with rhymes. Hermione/phenomenon is quite the couplet.
Overall, despite the writing being somewhat leaden, as a party trick ChatGPT did impress by producing something that was recognisable as a piece of prose consistent with life in the Potter universe. It will be interesting to see if the output improves next time around.
Date: 20 February 2023 Word count: 585 words Rating: 2 broomsticks
Opening paragraph: Hermione Granger had always been a determined and confident young witch, but when it came to matters of the heart, she found herself feeling incredibly nervous and unsure. For months, she had been harboring a secret crush on none other than Draco Malfoy, the very same Slytherin who had tormented her and her friends for years. Final paragraph: Draco hugged her back, and for a moment, they just stood there, holding each other tightly in the cool autumn breeze. Hermione knew that they had a lot of obstacles to overcome, but for now, all that mattered was the warmth of Draco’s embrace, and the knowledge that they had taken the first step towards something special.
A marked improvement over the first outing, this offering shows some signs of rising narrative tension and gives the reader some work to do to make inferences and draw conclusions.
Again, the bot chooses to set the action on a ‘crisp fall evening’. Is autumn the new spring when it comes to young love at Hogwarts?
The limerick?
In the Hogwarts courtyard one day, Hermione has something to say, She approached with a smile, And after a while, She asked Malfoy to be her beau, hooray!
That last line is a bit of a cheat. It could just as easily have been She asked Malfoy to take out the bins, hooray!
Given this is just four weeks after the first prompt, I am impressed with the more sophisticated use of storytelling techniques. However, the prose is still bland fan fiction, at best. At least the punctuation and grammar are flawless.
Date: 20 May 2023
Word count: 590 words Rating: 3 broomsticks
Opening paragraph: Chapter 17: A Heartfelt Proposition The Great Hall of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was buzzing with the usual excitement of dinnertime. Students chattered away, their voices echoing off the high ceilings as they enjoyed their meals. At the Gryffindor table, Hermione Granger sat with her friends, Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, her mind preoccupied with a matter of utmost importance. Closing paragraph: Hermione shook her head, her voice gentle yet resolute. “None of us are defined solely by our past actions. We have the power to change and choose a different path.” A mixture of emotions played across Draco’s face as he pondered her words. Finally, he spoke, his voice barely above a whisper. “I don’t know if I can be [the text stops at this point].
Out of nowhere we have a chapter number and title. And for the first time, the reader is not served up the entire plot in the opening paragraph. Well done, bot. You are learning.
No mention of young love blossoming under autumn skies, but Hermione does give an emotional speech about forgiveness and growth: Hermione reached out, her hand gently resting on Draco’s arm. “I’m not asking you to forget the past,” she said, her voice filled with determination. “But I am asking you to consider the possibility of a different future. A future where we can support each other, grow together, and leave the bitterness behind.”
Crikey!
How about the limerick this time around?
In Hogwarts, where magic’s profound, Hermione’s heart did astound, With courage, she asked, Draco’s doubts she unmasked, A love in their rivalry found.
The first four lines are pretty meh, but the final line actually sings. The bot identifies the contrast between love and rivalry and makes it work. Of course, the bot knows nothing of love nor of rivalry, but it knows enough to hold them in juxtaposition.
The experiment then hits a plateau, with five months of barely discernible difference in approach or style. Three pieces featured autumnal love, two started with a love letter screwed up then discarded, and all of them ended with some variation on ‘love conquers all’.
The September version topped out at 814 words with an ambitious two Act structure that never really moved ahead of the earlier efforts.
In an entirely non-scientific move, I asked Bing (creative mode) to take a crack at the task. The response featured far more dialogue than the ChatGPT results, ending with this graphic interaction:
He (Malfoy) kissed her softly on the lips, and she kissed him back eagerly. They deepened the kiss, and felt their hearts beat as one. They broke apart after a while, and smiled at each other.
“I have something for you,” she said.
She reached into her pocket, and took out the pendant. She showed it to him, and explained its meaning.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “Thank you.”
He took it from her hand, and put it around his neck. He kissed her again, and whispered in her ear:
“I love you.”
She hugged him tightly, and whispered back:
“I love you too.”
They cuddled together under the stars, feeling happy and complete.
Bing appears to favour the saucy over the soulful, which may be more appealing to the target readership. On this single data point, I’d suggest Bing’s career ambitions tend less to an author’s garret and more to a publisher’s corner office.
Date: 16 November 2023 Word count: 566 words Rating: 3½ broomsticks
Opening paragraph: The air in the Hogwarts library hung thick with the scent of aged parchment and the soft murmur of students engrossed in their studies. Hermione Granger sat at a small, secluded table in the corner, surrounded by towering shelves of books. The flickering light of an enchanted candle cast dancing shadows on her face as she nervously flipped through the pages of “The History of Magic.” Closing paragraph: As Draco walked away, Hermione couldn’t help but feel a mix of excitement and apprehension. The library, usually a sanctuary of silence, seemed to buzz with a newfound energy. The story of Hermione Granger asking Draco Malfoy to be her boyfriend would undoubtedly become one of the many tales whispered through the halls of Hogwarts for years to come.
Given where we started in January, this piece shows significant improvement. It takes until the eighth paragraph before the reader gleans Hermione’s intent. And while ChatGPT avoids Bing’s preference for the two young lovers to get hot and sweaty from the start, I’m pretty sure an editor will be running their blue pencil through the last line of this:
Draco smirked again, a more genuine one this time. “Don’t get too excited, Granger. This doesn’t mean I’ve suddenly turned into a saint. But who knows? Maybe you’ll be the one Gryffindor who can handle a bit of Slytherin.”
What lessons can be drawn from this exercise, beyond AI’s limited appreciation for a good limerick and a bad double entendre? Do creatives really have anything to fear from an infinite number of virtual monkeys bashing away at an infinite number of digital typewriters?
At this point in its development, AI is not creative by any meaningful definition of the word.
Rather, the bots regurgitate word strings based on data that they have consumed. If AI struggles with producing passable fan fiction, it’s certainly going to struggle to come up with anything truly original.
Feed the bot tropes, and tropes are what it will vomit back at you.
And while tropes are the bread and butter of genre fiction, it is the imaginative manner with which they are deployed and evolve that keeps the readers coming back. And that’s where Fleming and Christie have it all over Bing and Bard.
As 2023 comes to an end, Alex Vickery-Howe contemplates the key ‘empathy deficit’ that underpins our national politics.
I purchased a new flat in late 2020 and moved in, recently, in late 2023. COVID was the villain in the room… but, in the midst of an horrific global pandemic, I’m not pretending it was cause for violins. Not even tiny ones.
In the intervening years, I picked up a small dog… who is exactly the right snack size for my parents’ adorable but territorial maybe-dingo. Consequently, my partner and I have been living in a series of AirBnBs, rather than risk the irreparable family rift that would come from two physically mismatched canine roommates.
I won’t list the suburbs here, but, as we bounced from house to house, we encountered a range of temporary neighbours. For a few months we lived in an openly hostile street where there were multiple arrests, strange backyard burnings, wandering children, wandering pets, and screaming monologues in the night. I have no idea what was going on, except that it was dramatic, and it was desperate. Being middleclass and spineless, I took to bolting the door early. My partner promised to do the same, except for the one night she left the key in the lock.
To be clear, we are not wealthy people – look at me, I’m a writer – but moving around that much, over that amount of time, brought home the stark economic and sociocultural differences that pepper our glorified country town. The hard fact is that people are living parallel lives. We’re not seeing each other. We’re not empathising.
It’s unfashionable to admit it, but here I go: class is real in Australia. We like to think we’re above the pompous pyramid of UK politics, or the tiresome ‘real people vs. cultural elites’ rhetoric that keeps red and blue states bitching about each other in the US, but that’s not real life. In our shared imagination, we’re all larrikins, we’re all just getting by, and we all start on a level playing field….
Come on, that’s bullshit.
According to the Australian Council of Social Service in partnership with the University of New South Wales, the income gap between the affluent and the disadvantaged – or, to use words that are less opaque and actually less condescending, the rich and the poor – is enormous. Those in the top 20 percent are earning approximately six times that of their fellow citizens in a lower-class bracket. Possibly even more. Are we okay with this?
(IMAGE: zacktionman, Flickr)
Many Australian citizens, myself included, struggle to keep on top of our mortgages. We dig into shallow pockets to pay for health insurance, keep our cars running, feed the pets, and even get the toilet paper orders in on time. Well, the latter is probably down to lack of organisation. I’m not pretending to be disadvantaged, however… as I’m able to work towards something. All told, I’m doing alright. I’m comfortably middle class.
Many, many other Australians will never own property. They will be forced to neglect their health, drive while unlicensed, struggle to feed the children, and grow increasingly disenfranchised as successive governments ignore them. Working towards something may feel illusory, like rolling along a hamster wheel – there is no forward momentum no matter how hard they strive.
A tiny number of Australians, meanwhile, have insanely large yachts. No, I’m serious… insanely large.
Put the figures together and the narrative is abundantly clear: the rich are fat, the middle class are dieting for their future, and many others are starving with no sense of escape. The discrepancy between these extremes is vile, and we don’t do anyone any favours by pretending that class doesn’t exist. Cost of living, rising homelessness, young people skipping meals to keep the heater running… when did Australia become the land of dog eat dog? Or, returning to my family dilemma, almost-dingo eats half-Havanese?
We are allowing the economic imbalance of our society to go scarcely acknowledged culturally and politically, even while we claim to live in an age of compassion and inclusion.
Class blindness leads to bubbles. Those bubbles house different realities.
In case you were frozen in carbonite, earlier this year the referendum to change the constitution and establish a First Nations Voice to Parliament failed within barely an hour of the commentary kicking off in my household. If you blinked, you missed Antony Green. Of course, the last thing the internet needs is another mouthy white Australian dissecting this event. I’ve not written this article to discuss what the referendum itself means for our nation’s future. On that score, I can only say that I voted ‘Yes’ and I hoped many others would too.
(IMAGE: Sylvia Chandra, Flickr)
But, while that was my hope, it was hardly my expectation. My real surprise on the night was how genuinely shocked my friends were. Shocked and horrified, and blindsided. This is what happens when you live in a bubble.
Others lived in a bubble where the UN was going to take over Australia, where the Voice would lead to the mandatory redistribution of land, or where COVID was created to control and monitor the population (newsflash tinfoil mannequins: we already have social media for that). It’s easy to be frustrated and alarmed by the blatant misinformation, by the ‘If you don’t know, vote no’ drivel that courts wilful ignorance and wretched laziness – Ray Martin was spot on about that – and, perhaps most frighteningly, by the active participation of the same bad operators who pull the big saggy string on Donnie Trump’s back.
That’s the takeaway for white Australia – it wasn’t the Voice itself that was dividing the country, it was our own pre-existing, scarcely acknowledged division. It’s time we talked about class.
We need to stop pretending we’re a classless society and be honest about the failure of trickledown economics, the failure of our elected leaders… the failure of representative democracy itself… to confront the income gap. Right now, we’re struggling to recognise, in any meaningful or pragmatic way, that the gap exists. We’re still being weird about it.
A friend recently told me that if lobsters or crabs are kept in a bucket, in some horrible restaurant, and one is lucky enough to climb halfway out, the others will pull them back in – nobody is allowed to rise above the collective horror show. Apparently it’s a cliché that everyone else already knew, but this image of counterproductive communal despair has stayed with me. When the class divide is this strong, and yet unseen, people will pull others down into desolation. I think that’s what this country is doing to itself, and why we have an empathy deficit.
Class doesn’t tell the whole story – and acknowledging this class division certainly doesn’t lessen the pain and rejection felt by those who give everything to important social causes – but, if we’re honest, if we accept the evidence, class is the clearest indicator of what’s making these bubbles so completely out of touch with each other. Brexit has shown us what happens when class differences are exploited. MAGA has shown us what happens when class differences are weaponised.
The only slim silver lining is that this doesn’t bode well for the evil potato. Peter Dutton hasn’t made any ground against the Teal Independents, and he is going to have to pivot if he wants to appeal to his upper-class North Shore base. Perhaps he might manage to pivot to something semi-clever next time, instead of more cheap lies and stale slogans.
On the other hand, if we want the big ideas to succeed, if we want our civilisation to unite and civil behaviour to progress…if want these bubbles to finally burst and splatter, we have to start framing our debates in class terms.
Reality doesn’t change just because the discussion makes us feel socially awkward.
UN experts today emphasised the need for the international community to support civil society groups expressing international solidarity in pursuit of peace and social justice and not to conflate international solidarity with antisemitism or islamophobia. It is a remarkably large group of UN experts (see below). They have issued the following statement:
We would like to raise public awareness about the need to support concrete actions by civil society groups that express international solidarity in our pursuit of peace and social justice.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1 establishes universal solidarity as the foundation for human rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood [and sisterhood].”
Around the world, civil society groups have expressed international solidarity in marches and social media campaigns to call for peace and the protection of civilians in armed conflict. Moreover, they have also expressed international solidarity in pursuit of non-discrimination and equality (the core elements of positive peace) by advocating access to justice, truth, protection, and humane treatment for: children, women, members of the LGBTAIQ+ community, persons affected by leprosy (Hansen’s disease), persons with disabilities, racialized, indigenous groups, and other minorities subjected to violence, hate speech, and discrimination, families of disappeared persons, refugees and migrants, victims of terrorism/violent extremism and counter-terrorism/violent extremism measures, and the environment.
The recent significant engagement of people of all ages and diverse backgrounds in the expression of international solidarity is a powerful affirmation of the value of human rights as a narrative of emancipation in response to violence, oppression, and marginalisation.
It is imperative that civil society actors not be subject to censorship and reprisals for their expression of international solidarity, including loss of funding, loss of employment, arrest, attack, harassment, persecution, criminalisation, or other forms of penalisation.
Actions and expressions that promote transnational unity, empathy, tolerance, and cooperation are the elements of a strong culture of international solidarity in support of peace and social progress.
The most striking impact of the contemporary expressions of international solidarity is their embrace of the principle of humanity – the demand to protect life and alleviate human suffering. The combination of these two universal principles underscores the priority of exhausting peaceful dispute resolution mechanisms before using force.
We call on the international community to encourage International Solidarity expressions of civil society groups and human rights defenders that acknowledge that everyone should enjoy human rights without discrimination of any type. States should open civic spaces and refrain from criminalising non-violent actions and expressions that promote international solidarity. International Solidarity should not be conflated with antisemitism, islamophobia, or other movements that are examples of exclusionary, segregated unitary orientations which violate non-discrimination and equality principles.
International Solidarity promotes inclusion through bridge-building and invites everyone to stand up for peace as a fundamental premise for the enjoyment of human rights.”
Inspired by Friday’s celebration of the life of Australian comic genius Barry Humphries at the Sydney Opera House, Alex Vickery-Howe unpacks the complications and the contradictions surrounding one of our most popular and disruptive artists.
In a 1991 interview with my friend, the humbly brilliant Murray Bramwell, the late and perhaps not so humbly – but certainly generously – brilliant Barry Humphries put the spotlight on almost any comedian other than himself.
“What about the old-timers—like Frank Rich, Norman Erskine? Some of these people still do the clubs and they play to big audiences. Willie Fennell? You mustn’t forget the old-timers.”
He became one of the “old-timers” he so revered, and challenged emerging generations to take up the torch and be big, be daring, and be “vulgar”. He embodied the last through Sir Les Patterson, a character I struggle to watch for more than a few minutes without wincing, dry heaving and compulsively wiping my own mouth – and, yes, I do know that’s the point – but it doesn’t get any bigger or bolder than the divine Dame Edna Everage, beaming through peacock lenses and hiding her biting disdain behind an almost-convincing smile.
In conversation with Murray, the comedian was wary of the notion that there must always be two adversarial schools of thought:
“Well there may well be a hundred schools of thought about the work of a comedian. But it is as though, how can I describe it, as though the public is being invited to consider what side to come down on.”
In a much more recent interview with Leigh Sales, Barry coined the phrase “Obitchery”, knowing that his controversies would follow him long after he had left the mortal plane and made his way skyward, or down to where the interesting things happen. To what extent he was political at all or merely playing with theatrical masks is still debatable. This is the man who openly teased ‘being oneself is a form of disguise’. In some ways, Barry was Australia’s Bowie, or our portly response, less interested in the substance so much as the provocations and the scandals. Both were Dadaists at their core.
And yet…
I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight the uncomfortable fact that some of Barry’s public comments went further than what Bruce Beresford has charitably called “a point of view” on gender identity. Some of the people he chose to spend time with – such as Rupert Murdoch, who is very low on my Christmas card list, or disgraced artist Donald Friend – are questionable associations at best. Not that many of us can be fairly judged by who we’ve associated with throughout our lives (I once shared a morning cuppa with Alexander Downer. Regrets, I’ve had a few...)
Most unpardonably, Barry’s use of “benevolent form of paedophilia” to describe Friend’s proclivities as quoted in Ian Britain’s book on the subject lands as tin-earned and callous (or, more accurately, creepy AF), and cannot be excused. Reading this and other quotes has compelled me to try and understand the man, and what motivated his madness.
And, conversely, if his words are too divisive for us to forgive in 2023, if we feel that everyone – casual anarchists included – should be strictly held to the social contract, is it a sin to still enjoy his work?
People from both extremes of politics are happy to ‘educate’ us, but these are layered questions that lack a clear yes or no. Context matters in public debate. I want politicians to be kind; I want satirists to be sharp. This leads to a thornier question…
Can you separate the art from the artist? (See Michael Jackson, Kevin Spacey, Geoffrey Rush). Where does one draw a personal line? I feel guilty when I play the Thriller album on Spotify, but the title track is amazing, as was the cameo from Vincent Price. Is the whole album now invalid? Dirty, even?
It gets trickier when the artist has merely expressed an opinion. For me, credible accusations of assault and violence are enough to dissuade engagement with that artist and call for criminals to be exposed, but it’s factually and ethically unsound to place those accusations in the same basket as differing political views, no matter how strident.
“So why on earth would we pit two amazing but very different Australian comedians against one another? There is easily enough room for Barry Humphries & Hannah Gadsby in the pantheon of brilliantly funny Aussies.”
Much has been said about who, in this “bin fire”, has failed to “read the room”; Barry was never interested in being in the room at all. He was always lighting matches from the outside.
People are hard to pin down as entirely good or bad, and should be. Most of us tend to be more complicated than soundbites suggest. We’re all awesome and we all suck. Miriam Margolyes captured that well in her public comments in defence of her friend ( Barry Humphries was hurt after being ‘cancelled’ by Melbourne comedy festival, Miriam Margolyes says, ABC, April 23, 2023).
There’s much to be written that skates through the middle of the debate. We need more pieces like that and less blanket polarisation from the usual suspects, which is all too lazy and too easy (also, judging by that link, “Bernardi” is a brand now… suddenly Bolt is looking charismatic.)
When you sit back on the fence, those who hated Barry and are now actively attacking his memory, and those who loved him – or are willing to pretend in order to turn this into a political hacky sack – have one very telling trait in common: they desperately want to shut the other team up.
Barry was a provocateur and a proud “degenerate”. Beyond the bitchy dame and the horny attaché, he was Bruce the terrifying shark in Finding Nemo, the Great Goblin (Bowie’s was hotter) in The Hobbit and flamboyant/hair-raising game show host Bert Schnick in Shock Treatment. I know at least five other people who loved that film.
His most compelling performance, at least for me, was the gentle-to-the-point-of-soporific Sandy Stone, who is the kindest of his creations, the deepest, and, of course, the sleepiest. There’s something of Sandy in my dad, and probably me before too long. I’m eyeing off that dressing gown now that Barry doesn’t need it anymore. It’s hard to view that performance, and the poetry of the language, and see Humphries as cruel or unfeeling. Anything but.
One of Barry’s enduring quips was to critique “a society that is so prudish when it thinks it’s being liberal.” He used the phrase “new puritans” to describe those who would police comedy, and free thought in general, making disagreement redundant in favour of restricted speech and public shaming for those who fail to comply. The furore around his death has exposed that kind of puritanism and compelled many to feel they have to pick a side.
We don’t.
I’m an animal rights activist in a country where people seriously – and furiously – debate how to correctly eat a sausage. I will likely be out of step with social norms for my entire life. In a pluralistic society, where democracy still matters, that is the price one gladly pays. None of us gets to force everyone else to adopt our views. Offence is not a licence to make others disappear. While it may be imperfect, and frustrating, and slow, robust debate is the only way to win others over. Muzzles don’t work.
Returning to Barry’s chat with my friend Murray, it’s apparent that the man behind Edna – and Les, and Bert, and Sandy, and Bruce the shark – may not have been clear on who he was behind all those masks, but he knew what his act was about and how he might be remembered.
“I wonder what would happen if I tried not to give offence — I’d probably give twice as much.”
Barry has left wells of sadness – along with hurt and anger – behind. He has also left us to ponder his legacy and what it means to be a satirist in a cultural moment where emotion runs high and division runs deep. There should be a space between total, uncritical valorisation and bitter, blinkered condemnation, not only for Barry, but for all of us. That is what true diversity is.
Why must we all be allocated into clear camps when real life is richer and messier than that? What about our human capacity for intellectual and emotional growth? Miriam had the right idea when she challenged her friend’s views, repeatedly, and, knowing Miriam a little, I’ve no doubt that she would have been merciless and insistent, and strong, and cutting, and hilarious, and loving, and patient, and always treating him foremost as a friend whom she adored.
The open space between empathetic people is where things get done. Even at his most acerbic, Barry Humphries demonstrated this through his characters and his fond reflections on Australian life.
He was always generous in acknowledging those that came before. The least Australia can do is return that favour.
Ed’s Desk is an occasional column in New Matilda where we let you in on an industry secret… we sub-edit a story in the mainstream press that has already been published, but probably shouldn’t have been. This edition, we look at a Sky News super scoop about a celebrity who had a problem with her hair.
Date: 20 January 2023
Date: 20 February 2023
Date: 20 May 2023
Date: 16 November 2023
